As the previous chapter highlighted, the idea of participatory and democratic self-organisation is at the centre of how radical left politics has developed in recent years, as witnessed both in how the Occupy camps and the related mobilisations of 2011 were structured, and in the role social media and other digital platforms have played in these and other forms of organising. And as we have seen, this type of approach already has an established position in anarchism's prefigurative account of politics and of self-organisation. It is through the concept of selforganisation that I want to draw a connection between anarchism, on the one hand, and the field of organisational cybernetics, on the other. In the introductory chapter, I briefly discussed the meaning of the term cybernetics (importantly, including a discussion of what it does not mean), and outlined some of the core features that make cybernetics sit particularly well alongside anarchism, even if that might initially appear to be an odd relationship. In this chapter, I will attempt to draw out these common features in more detail and ultimately present an initial picture of anarchist cybernetics, as a concept central to animating the discussions that follow in the book. This is a task that involves exploring aspects of the technical side of cybernetics, hopefully in ways that make its relevance for questions of social and political organisation obvious. At the heart of this conversation between anarchism and cybernetics is the idea of the Viable Systems Model as articulated by Stafford Beer, one of the key figures in the history of cybernetics I draw on in this book.

One possible history of cybernetics

In a book of this length, where the focus is on extrapolating the connections between cybernetics and anarchism and exploring what these might mean for radical forms of organisation, recounting the history of cybernetics in any great depth is not going to be possible. There are other books that do just that, and I will point the reader towards them at various points, particularly in this chapter. It is worth emphasising that there is not one agreed upon history of cybernetics; rather, cybernetics is best understood through multiple histories, each in their own way influenced by the contexts in which they were written, including the various influences of the social and political cleavages of the post-World War Two era.

Before defining and exploring what a meeting of anarchism and cybernetics might mean for radical politics, I need to first elaborate on the two central areas of interest of this book: organisation and communication. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Norbert Wiener (1961) defined cybernetics as the science of control and communication. As Chapter 3 will make clear, control, in this context, does not refer to top-down command but to a more horizontal process of self-organisation. As such, in this chapter, I will explore the question of control in anarchism by discussing how anarchism has developed as a theory of organisation and what this means for participatory and democratic structures of decision making in practice. For anarchism, organisation entails creating effective political structures that preserve both the autonomy of individuals and that of the different parts that constitute the organisational whole. Importantly, this is an attempt to respond to an anarchist analysis of the ills of society, which are understood as resulting from capitalist economic exploitation and centralised, authoritarian domination. Communication comes into this picture in so far as organisation and decision making within it necessitates platforms by means of which individuals and groups can share information and collectively shape the world around them. As I will highlight, horizontal, networked forms of communication, in which everyone can communicate with everyone else, are considered a necessary condition for the effectiveness of anarchist organisation. Over the last three decades, internet and digital media, such as social media platforms, have been increasingly linked to this conception of organisation and communication and will play a key role in how they are examined in this chapter and throughout the rest of this book.

Anarchism as a theory of organisation

The vision of anarchism predominant in the public imagination is often one of disorder and chaos. In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, the anarchist is depicted as a bomb-throwing assassin, a provocateur acting in the name of terror and mayhem. Across the mainstream political spectrum, it is common to see individuals being labelled as anarchists if they are seen to be disregarding appropriate behaviour, perhaps with a view to personal gain above all else.

If Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model (VSM) is at the heart of how we might understand organisation from the perspective of an anarchist cybernetics, this has implications for some of the key themes of anarchist and radical left organising. Over the next two chapters, I want to explore these implications in more detail, focusing in this chapter on one possible way of elaborating on the idea of functional hierarchy and what that would then mean for different levels of thinking about anarchist organisation. A sticking point in anarchist theory and practice, at least since the alterglobalisation movement's prominence around the turn of the millennium, has been whether the concept of strategy can be applied to anarchism or whether anarchism is, or ought to be in principle, purely tactical. One of the insights that cybernetics, and specifically the VSM, can provide for us with respect to anarchist organising, I want to argue here, is that the relationship between strategy and tactics can be framed and articulated in such a way as to be wholly consistent with the ideals of self-organisation and participatory democracy that animate anarchism. Moreover, looking at anarchist organisation through the prism of the VSM, we can identify the potential efficacy of considering a further layer over and above tactics and strategy that I refer to in this chapter as ‘grand strategy’. For each of these functionally distinct levels – tactics, strategy and grand strategy – I will show how they both contribute to the effectiveness of organisation and at the same time adhere to what we commonly understand as the underlying principles of anarchist organising. Expanding on the concept of functional hierarchy, this chapter discusses how functionally distinct levels of decision making can operate in anarchist organisation.

System and metasystem in the VSM

In the previous chapter, I characterised Beer's VSM as broadly being constituted of two sections. One the one hand, there is the section of the model concerned with the operational parts of the system or organisation, that each possess a level of autonomy with respect to how they go about their business (Systems One and Two). On the other hand, there is the section that deals with bringing those autonomous parts into an overall coherence, in such a way that they can be considered parts of the same system or organisation (Systems Three, Four and Five).

2011 was supposed to be the year when everything changed. Protests erupted across the planet, largely as a response to the worsening economic situation that followed the 2007– 08 financial crash. These mobilisations, none of which seemed to have any real precedent in the years immediately prior to this post-crash emergence, were focused on challenging the political status quo. In more recent years, the tenets of these protest – rejecting the rule of governing elites, putting the concerns of the people at the forefront of politics and, of course, ‘taking back control’ – have become muddied by the rise of far-right populism. In 2011, however, the political challenge was not from the right but from a resurgent left, a left that had been positioned firmly on the sidelines of politics, at least since the peak of the alterglobalisation movement around the turn of the millennium if not since the fall of the Soviet Union a decade earlier. With respect to the economic realm, these movements brought class back into play, both as a defining feature of people's lives and of their dreams of a better future. ‘We are the 99%’ operated both as a slogan and as a framework that allowed people to express how common economic circumstances, like debt and precarity, impacted on their individual experiences. With respect to the political realm, this was echoed in scepticism, and at times outright rejection, of how societies were governed. In ostensibly democratic countries in North America and Europe, as much as in autocratic dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East, protestors resented elite forms of governance that at best limited participation to ticking a box once every few years. This lack of accountability, they argued persuasively, was central to the problems that led not only to the financial woes brought on by the crash but also broader political and environmental crises.

The solution to this democratic deficit, and one of the orientations that separates the 2011 movements from the kind of far-right populism exemplified by Trump and Brexit, was to (re)instate democracy where it was lacking even in name and to deepen and expand it where it apparently already existed.

The discussion, thus far in the book, has focused on the functions of self-organisation in anarchist cybernetics. These discussions cover one major aspect of how control is understood in cybernetics (and the anarchist cybernetics I outline in this book), not as domination but as a way of understanding how self-organisation facilitates effective responses to complexity. In Norbert Wiener's original framing of cybernetics, control was one side of understanding how selforganisation operates. The other side was communication. Beer put it similarly when he wrote (1974: 26) that there are three basic tools for coping with complexity and variety: ‘the computer, teleprocessing, and the techniques of the science of effective organization’. It is to the former of these, covered under Wiener's use of ‘communication’, that I turn to in both this and the following chapter.

Earlier, I characterised the nature of communication in the kind of networks that are central to anarchist forms of organisation as many-to-many communication. This refers to the type of networks in which anyone can share information with anyone else. Instead of communication being about two actors speaking to each other in relative isolation (one-to-one communication) or a single actor or small select group broadcasting a message to a larger audience (one-to-many communication), the communication processes of interest in this discussion of anarchist cybernetics are ones that maintain a level of horizontality and equality in terms of opening up both opportunities to speak and to be listened to (many-to-many communication). Understanding communication in this way, as a web or network with limited structural hierarchies, is something that is closely linked to cybernetics. It is an idea that, as I discussed in Chapter 2, does not necessitate the kind of radial, anarchist organisation this book is concerned with, but that has nonetheless become intimately connected to how communication is understood in such organisational contexts, largely as a result of the potential it has for minimising structural hierarchy. As that earlier discussion illustrated, the concept of many-to-many, networked communication has also shaped how we understand the ways in which social media platforms might be able to assist anarchist organising.

Communication is, of course, something we engage in all the time, both within and outwith organisational settings. For Beer, the kind of communication at work in self-organisation and viable systems ranges from informal conversation during tea breaks to that of formal communication systems and dedicated infrastructures. From a cybernetic perspective, communication is something functional to effective organisation. For anarchist cybernetics the same is true. While communication plays many roles in our day-to-day lives, when thinking about self-organisation, it is the functional value of specific forms of communication that are of interest. In Occupy Wall Street, the communication that allowed it to function in participatory and democratic ways included the highly structured processes of the general assembly and spokes-council, as well as the conversations that camp members were having with one another throughout the days and weeks that the camp was in place. In this chapter, I want to build on the previous discussion to explore how functional communication with respect to self-organisation might be supported by technology. Given the articulation of communication as conversation in Pask's cybernetics, it is social media, that is, communication technologies that privilege interaction over direct broadcasting, that I will discuss here. Rather than examining the potential of existing platforms, such as Facebook, for self-organisation, I want to consider how bespoke, alternative social media might support and reinforce collective selforganising processes. The aim here is to provide an outline of the organisational (rather than technical) functions that such a social media platform might need to include if it is to aid effective self-organisation, doing so by drawing on the discussions of control and communication throughout this book so far.

Alternative media

A useful place to begin thinking about the kind of alternative social media platforms that lend themselves to anarchist and radical organisation is the literature on alternative media in general. At least since the Levellers, the egalitarian populist movement of mid-17thcentury England, who pioneered the use of pamphlets as a means of communication, radical political groups have always valued the production of media.