New Books in Systems and Cybernetics

Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international interventions.In States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan (Oxford University Press, 2022) Dr. Adam Day addresses the question, 'Why has UN state-building so consistently failed to meet its objectives?'. He proposes an explanation based on the application of complexity theory to UN interventions in South Sudan and DRC, where the UN has been tasked to implement massive stabilization and state-building missions. Far from being ''ungoverned spaces," these settings present complex, dynamical systems of governance with emergent properties that allow them to adapt and resist attempts to change them. UN interventions, based upon assumptions that gradual increases in institutional capacity will lead to improved governance, fail to reflect how change occurs in these systems and may in fact contribute to underlying patterns of exclusion and violence.Based on more than a decade of the author's work in peacekeeping, this book offers a systemic mapping of how governance systems work, and indeed work against, UN interventions. Pursuing a complexity-driven approach instead helps to avoid unintentional consequences, identifies meaningful points of leverage, and opens the possibility of transforming societies from within.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Is a tree nothing but its material makeup, or does reality include trees above and beyond what they are made of? How about consciousness – nothing but neural activity, or something over and above it? Metaphysical emergence is a leading nonreductive theory of how we can be committed to a fully material world without accepting that everything reduces to fundamental physics. In Metaphysical Emergence (OUP 2021), Jessica Wilson synthesizes scholarship on the idea of emergence and divides the existing proposals into two basic schemas: Strong Emergence and Weak Emergence. Wilson, a professor of philosophy at University of Toronto and leading theorist of emergence, elaborates the differences between the forms and the main objections to each form. She also stakes out controversial positions regarding the existence of phenomena that satisfy each form: for example, on her view current evidence does not support the ideas that dynamically self-organizing complex systems or consciousness are Strongly emergent. Wilson’s book promises to be a landmark in the theoretical literature on emergence and its applications.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Everything is breaking down. Chaos is increasing. Entropy is not just a metaphor, although it also that. In Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), Shannon M. Mussett argues that while denial and nihilism are common and world-shaping responses to entropy, they are not our only options. By revaluing order and stability, chaos and decay, we can turn to entropy with care and see the possibilities for creation in destruction. Mussett makes these arguments attentive to suffering, loss, and oppression, offering a philosophy of thriving even as the whole universe inexorably moves towards heat death.Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies (Verso, 2022) moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging book The Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors of Deep Deception).Content warning: between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work.Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his influential work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

So what is metamodernity you may ask, and what does it have to do with systems thinking and cybernetics? Well, I recently had a chance to find out for myself during my conversation with Lene Rachel Andersen about her book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (Nordic Bildung, 2019). The short answer is metamodernity is a systems perspective; "it is about seeing the world as a process and not as fixed circumstances, a world in which there are not isolated phenomena but where everything is interconnected and interdependent..." (p. 94). The book's premise is that as our old understandings and the answers we get from them are insufficient, the ways we are used to reacting and behaving do not work well anymore either. Our cultural compass cannot contain and judge the world properly because the challenges we are facing were not a part of our world when we came of age and learned what the world was like.More than a cultural trend (or 'ism'), metamodernity is a meaning-making code—one that encompasses cultural codes from every epoch of the human experience. Andersen argues that "we need metamodern minds that can relate to the intimate indigenous, the existential premodern, the democratic & scientific modern, and the deconstructing postmodern simultaneously" (p. 128). It is only through this synthesis and adoption of the metamodern code, she stresses, that we'll have the capacity to make good decisions to guide the necessary changes to our current systems and institutions. The 'hyper-modern' alternative is not a good one; think: much an exaggerated version of what will turn out to be mere glimpses of what we're seeing right now—such as rise in authoritarianism, surveillance society, extreme inequality, and of course, climate change.Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a more complex way. Metamodernity is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all. It thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one's culture as the global economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World is thought-provoking and a wonderful complement to many of the books I've covered in previous episodes. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Lene, and I invite you to check out the rest of her work at https://www.lenerachelandersen.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating (MIT Press, 2021) is a laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.Florian Jaton is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the STS Lab, a research unit of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Florian studied Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature, and Political Sciences before receiving his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. He also worked at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine and at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris. His research interests are the sociology of algorithms, the philosophy of mathematics, and the history of computing. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evolution of consciousness, integral ecologies, and transpersonal and integral theory. In Becoming Gaia, he draws upon an impressive range of scholarship from such fields as Big History, comparative religion, transpersonal psychology, and integral philosophies. Regular listeners may find Kelly’s work a wonderful complement to some of the other authors and topics we’ve shared on this channel. I found the book—and our chat—fascinating.Kelly is not alone in suggesting we are living in end times. With climate chaos, an accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse, the Earth community is being drawn into a planetary near-death experience! These end times, however, also mark the threshold of new planetary identity in the making. Kelly reveals the features of this new identity and invites us to consciously participate in its making. Guided by the ideal of Gaia as "concrete universal," Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age—on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era, and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism.The book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropocene as our new geological epoch. It is an epoch where, even and especially as we face the fires of planetary initiation, we can awaken to our deeper nature as living members of Gaia, the living Earth in and through whom we have our being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Welcome to the first Systems and Cybernetics episode of 2022! After a short break over the holidays to rest and spend time with family (and, of course, read!), it’s time to jump back into conversations with authors of exciting new works in systems thinking. We have a great lineup, and to kick things off I am thrilled to share my recent conversation with Fritjof Capra. Capra is a scientist, educator and activist. He has also been a best-selling author since his first book, The Tao of Physics, encouraged—rather captivated—the world to explore the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophies nearly 50 years ago.Many listeners will recall the one Capra book that challenged their worldview and got them asking new questions. For me, The Turning Point (1982) was that turning point. Capra’s new book Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades (High Road Books, 2021) presents the evolution of his thought over five decades, inviting the reader to go back to the beginning of the author’s inquiry and join him in his journey—to experience those milestone moments that represented a new development in his theory.A systems thinker from his youth, Capra’s scientific training combined with a spiritual awakening in the late 1960s/early 1970s, led him to notice inherent connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. This led to a systemic questioning that compelled him to seek out and collaborate with—even build bridges between—thinkers across many realms. The result is a synthesis—or “systems view”—of life that serves as a “systemic framework for the understanding of biological and social phenomena” and informs “the design principles of our future social institutions… consistent with the principles of organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life”.This conversation made me want to go back and (re)immerse myself in Capra’s previous works and I have a feeling it might make you want to do the same. If you’re new to Capra, Patterns of Connection is a great place to start. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021).One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science (SIAM, 2019). Their book organizing an extensive collection of episodes into eight chapters that expand on an array of flavors of failures, increasing in intricacy from precision and rounding errors to the software–hardware interface and problems that emerge from complexity.As I see it, this book serves three audiences: Instructors of computer engineering or numerical methods will find an educational text uniquely suited to a focus on software failures; software engineers will find an equally unique reference text; and students of the practice or the history of computational science will find a fully blazed trail through these complicated stories. Dr. Huckle joined me to discuss his and his coauthor's motivations for assembling the book, a sampler of the chapter headliners, and some of his thoughts on new and evolving computational tools with their own attendant opportunities for failure.Technical readers will appreciate the mathematical excursions that rigorously introduce topics essential to understanding each chapter's headlining episodes, the exercises and MATLAB code provided at the book's website, and links to sources at Dr. Huckle's website. I found value in the recurring lesson that real-world failures arise from the coincidence of multiple, often multitudinous errors, as well as in the authors' consistent emphasis on the real human toll that the study of these errors is driven to prevent. That said, all readers may appreciate the fanciful taxonomy given in the introduction and the amusing (though sometimes apocryphal) idiosyncratic failures surveyed in the appendix.Suggested companion works: Peter G. Neumann, Illustrative Risks to the Public in the Use of Computer Systems and Related Technology Nancy G. Leveson, Safeware: System Safety and Computers Glenford J. Myers, Software Reliability: Principles and Practices Lauren Ruth Wiener, Digital Woes: Why We Should Not Depend On Software Ivars Peterson, Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs Thomas Huckle completed a degree program in mathematics and physics education and in pure mathematics, received a doctorate in 1985, and acquired his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habiliation) in 1991 at the University of Würzburg. A German research Foundation (DFG) grant enabled him to spend time performing research at Stanford University (1993–1994). In 1995 Professor Huckle joined TUM as professor of scientific computing. He has also been a member of the Mathematics Faculty since 1997. His primary research area is numerical linear algebra and its application in fields such as informatics and physics. His work focuses on solving linear problems on parallel computers, image processing and reconstruction, partial differential equations, and structured matrices.Tobias Neckel has studied applied mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and received a doctorate in Computer Science at TUM in 2009. He is currently senior researcher in scientific computing at TUM and has conducted research at the École Polytechnique, France (2003), the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2008), and the Australian National University (2017). His research interests include the numerical solution of differential equations, hierarchic and adaptive methods, uncertainty quantification, and various aspects of high-performance computing. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics