The Road to a Social Cybernetics - by Milton L Mueller
Digitization: Who's in Control?
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The Road to a Social Cybernetics<br>Is Society a Machine or an Animal?
Milton L Mueller<br>Jun 11, 2026
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Society as machine?<br>In post #2, “Control,” I raised the question of how cybernetic thinking applied to the governance of society. Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener as the study of communication and control in the animal and machine. I asked: what about social systems? Are they animals or machines?<br>This is a serious question. As digitization spreads and the role of AI-driven automation in social organizations advances, we will be asking variants of that question for the next 20-30 years.<br>In post #4, “The Progress of Digitization,” we saw that digital technology was founded on the ability to automate calculations using a specific technology (digital electronics running on semiconductors). As digital information systems spread into more areas, the number and type of activities susceptible to being controlled or governed by automated calculations increases.<br>Anyone making a rational, historically grounded assessment of this problem would not panic about it. It sounds scary until you realize that humans have been reducing social operations to procedures and rules for centuries. It is an essential part of what human societies do. There is a protocol for getting married. There are required procedures to follow when you are born (you are even assigned a number). We have been automating industrial production processes for three centuries. What’s different now is the comprehensiveness of the digital transformation. The automation capabilities are more powerful, more globally integrated technologically, than any ICT infrastructure human society has ever known.<br>I asserted in #2 that society is not a machine; and I still believe that. No one has argued with me about it, either. That may be because the normative implications of the opposite position are repulsive to most of us. If society is really a machine, then the machine has a designer (which is not us) and controller (also not us) who built the machine, defined its purposes and operates it to optimize them. The rest of us are just inputs or resources to be employed in the pursuit of those objectives – if there is any place for us at all. That “society as machine” sounds undesirable does not, of course, mean that it isn’t true; it could be a correct description, however undesirable. But we have too much firsthand knowledge of how society operates to believe that. Social cooperation and institutions are not designed; they evolve. Even the most oppressive regimes must contend with the entropic autonomy of human beings, individually and in groups, who either don’t follow the program or actively resist it.1
Society as animal?<br>We can also agree that society is not an animal; that is, it is not a biological organism. Biologists, I am pretty sure, would agree with me about that. Humans are biological organisms, for sure, but their social systems are not. They are complex communicative, production, and authority relationships that replicate themselves, in some sense, but we don’t give birth to them or harvest them from farms. (Though one might, with Laurie Anderson, believe that language is a virus from outer space. We will set aside that issue for another day).<br>So, if human society is neither animal nor machine, does that mean that cybernetics has nothing to contribute to social science? I think not. It just means that the application of cybernetic principles to social systems is incomplete. They have not been applied in ways that fully understand and respect the distinctive features of humans in social systems. The solution to this shortfall, in my view, is political economy. By that I mean the infusion of cybernetics into institutional theory (though there is a surprising amount of it already there), and the use of political economy to analyze the digitization of society.<br>Political Economy
The term political economy is clumsy and has a somewhat antiquated ring to it. That’s because it is, in fact, a very old term; 401 years, to be exact. The origin is credited to a book published in 1615 by the French writer Antoine de Montchrétien. The term he is credited with creating – political economy – became the accepted name for a new social science for the next 300 years.<br>All the scholars that we now associate with the origins of Economics did not call themselves economists. They called themselves political economists. Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, Ricardo and Marx in the 19th century, all referred to their field as political economy, not economics. Carl Menger, Alfred Marshall, William Jevons and other early neoclassicals also positioned themselves as political economists, but marginalism paved the way for dropping the ‘political’ part.<br>Montchrétien framed his new term (political economy) as a challenge to Aristotle, whose discussions...