This is a RadicalxChange production. Hello, and welcome to Radicalxchanges. In this episode, Matt Pruitt is joined by Gary Zheishi Zhang to discuss his latest piece in combinations, titled The Critical Legacy of Chinese Cybernetics. They explore the origins of cybernetics, its adaptation in China, and the pivotal role of figures like Chen Shisheng. They discuss the unique cultural and political context that shape Chinese cybernetics, and examine its far reaching impact on various disciplines, including artificial intelligence, computer science, and the social sciences. Combinations is a new publication of Radical Exchange Foundation, exploring new ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power. Our aim is to illuminate new possible paths for present institutions, spotlighting the connections between ideas, technologies, and social and political organization. And now here's Matt Pruitt and Gary Zang.

Hi. Yeah. My name is Gary Zektizang. I'm an artist and writer on the outside of things. I'm mostly, make films, installations, various kind of more, like, site specific conceptual works and, also work quite a lot with technologists and then the kind of context of institution building and this kind of thing. And as a writer, I guess I guess I've covered a lot of things, but my own interests and my own research are mostly within, aspect of history of science and technology and including and kind of conceptual histories of, post twentieth century kind of ideas, systems ideas predominantly, such as ecology, such as cybernetics. These kind of spirits of what Adam Smith call, I think, the spirit of system. This idea that's like a certain ontological key could unlock, a whole set of currencies and a whole a whole universe, like a law of, like a scientific law or something would open up. I'm kind of both interested in how those systems come about and how they work and also just the the desire and the historical context and the personal psychological kind of context that, bring those about in certain individuals.

Yeah. I think the the short version of story is at some point, barely maybe a decade ago now, I kind of came into contact with, information theory as an idea and its own history. And, that kind of I spent quite a long time quite obsessed with this, conceptual shifts from, I guess, the thermodynamic to the informatic as kind of these different, almost, like, epistemic eras for thinking about scientific reality in some ways. And

I mean, I think from a from a cultural point of view, like, outside of the actual nature of, like, you know, like, Boltzmann and Shannon and these various speakers who came up with the formula that find these errors. From a cultural point of view, I was kind of more interested in how, let's say, in the nineteenth century with the likes of Freud and others, we had a very strong metaphor of the human and the mind and the brain as a kind of set of heat engines, like pumps and pressures and various kinds of dynamic, those kind of dynamic systems taking place. And then come into the kind of more, quote unquote, machinic era coming into, you know, there's a longer history, but obviously centering on global two in the forties, with the likes of Bell Labs, MIT, the kind of cybernetic crew that we're probably about to talk about. You you enter into this different kind of paradigm for as a currency for understanding various kind of systems. And to a point, I'm I'm I guess I'm quite interested in how those metaphors continue and linger and and to mix over periods of time. And we still think of psychiatry, let's say, as a sort of system of pressures to to some great extent. And, you know, people like, Miloski, for example, has done really interesting work on how, economics borrowed all of its ideas at the time from, physics of the nineteenth century. And when physics updated itself, economics didn't bother. It it just kept on its utility functions mapped to, like, the energy, like, formula or, like, nineteenth century thermodynamics, for instance. And so, yeah, I I'm kind of interested in how these things become socially operative since remain scientifically operative and also, you know, come into how we design and build systems. That and the fact that this kind of slippage between, thermodynamic and informational entropy has always kind of intrigued and alluded me a little bit. I mean, it's kind of, a direct reappropriation of an entropy formula by by Shannon of, like, Boltzmann and so on, but at the same time, it's kind of a a metaphor. You go into I feel like you go into a crazy headspace when you try to actually form that kind of direct, continuity between those two act styles of entropy, but it's it's kind of fascinating to me. Yeah.

I feel like I'm I'm gonna try. I don't think I'm strong enough on the history here, but I feel like this hinges on how we thought about control as part of a system, between these two paradigms. I feel like in the kind of post information, it's a paradigm we have an idea of control, which is almost self evidence and automatic. Like, if there is system, there is control. Mhmm. Whereas in the kind of priosynthetic style, you had us something that was, like, all systems are fundamentally dissipative. And, like, you you kind of, you're you're you're trying to, like, retain and hold on to and it's, like, take, like, a tie to kinda marshal that that kind of heat energy how you can. But, but I I feel like you don't have this kind of idea of the feedback loop as as strongly at least. I'm sure someone's gonna correct me on this, but, like, I feel like it in when you come into it's when you come into cybernetri, like, 19 nineteenth century French. It was a it was a hydrologist or something. So 17 eighteenth century French. So the idea of steering as, like, how to marshal a system, yes, but I think it's only a bit later into the kind of mathematic paradigm, and you get this idea of control as a kind of self automating. It's like self correcting feedback loop that if you have a system like a cell or a or a, a homeostats or something, it is fundamentally already doing control by virtue of existing and not stopping to ceasing to exist, if that makes sense. Interesting.

does that does that make sense? So No. That's actually sorry. No. No. I I I actually haven't seen that that that is a really great image. No. I I think I think you're right. And I think once we look back, like, if we keep going back to the history of, like, water clocks and all sorts of other mechanisms, we see, like, kind of written maybe very different paradigms of, like, control that are happening. I'm trying to think what the difference is. I feel like it's the difference between, like, it went into the information theory is that you have an idea of a system that's totally contained within a set of possibilities, like, binary code or something. Or, like, like, with within, with the probability space, your entropy is contained within the probability space that that is kind of already, to some extent, like, contained on this little bit or defined by by whatever system you whatever language you're you're in. Like, like, all those ideas about the entropy of English language, for example, like, the Right. Shannon has a great paper on crosswords about how, like, English is really good for crosswords because they have about a 50% redundancy rate, which means that you can actually do a crossword to a satisfying degree, and it's not just like swimming in noise or something. Already obvious.

That Yeah. It's almost like a distinction people like to make between information and knowledge or something. Like, what is Yeah. That's usable and understood and something that's just there for you in a neutral way.

Yeah. No. That's a really big one. I mean, which is interesting, like, just to follow your thing, in the original paper, like, of a, a mathematical theory of communication, the the model of communication is pure control. It's not about our communication as such. The point of communication is for, person a to compel person b to do the thing that they're trying to make them do. Right? It's not even about, like, can we pass on this message as such? The the message has a purpose if the if if your communication does not not, like, change behavior, I think I think Warren Weaver's introduction actually maybe talks about behavioral change in, like, the the the other party. So it's kind of neatly at the heart of all of these these things as well. Yeah.

Apple ad or something. Right? I was thinking exactly what I mean. The the I feel like the other classic kind of a b is like the IBM man and the Apple. Like, a 1984 ad. Yeah. Like, one is like a total drone and the other is like a whole similar, like, sexual and sort of personal liberation.

I mean, I I don't know if anyone could, in a on some sense, not be a fan of, you know, I mean, I I was, I was fortunate to spend some time at MIT. And when I was there, I did spend some time in his archives. And I have these pictures on my phone of his, his drawings of tortoise brains when he was 12. Like, he he was a fastidious self archiver who I think was such a child prodigy that he realized that he was important by the time he was about 14 and started, like, you know, he he did his first, I think, biology or something degree when he was about 14 at times. And, yeah, I mean, he's he's a he's a thoroughly well, weird, sympathetic, very moral, and quite ultimately quite likable figure. I think it and, obviously, a complete, like, genius in every sense of that. Although in a slightly smug self aware sense, but nonetheless, I guess he gets he gets the kind of genius card. Yeah. I mean I mean, that that stuff is, I think, is the fact that he came from, is that, like, I think research in Brownian motion and, like, where the kind of functions and stuff come from and is, like, ended up in cybernetics is is kind of fascinating to me the way he went from a kind of mathematical space to, this much, much broader, sort of postwar, very kind of nuanced sort of liberal imagination through, and and quite, you know, he was quite anxious as well, I suppose. You know, in in even in, like, the 1960 book, I think he you know, he's he's ultimately, like, very anxious about the state of the world, and he's very he he stopped seeking fund funding from the DOD, I think, at some point during the Cold War. Yeah. I think he's a part thoroughly sympathetic figure. And but to the extent that he is the founder of cybernetics, it's also kind of interesting to, like, whether they are the first cyberneticists, if that's meaningful or not. He certainly he certainly was a great figurehead who gave it the term. I think there's, like, some debate also around his, like, adjacent his works kind of parallelness with Komarov, I think. And there was, like, interesting stuff happening with control systems theory and at least in Russia at the same time. And what's kind of interesting about someone like Chen Chisholm, the Chinese hypnosis that ends up writing about, is that it's not very clear how how directly inspired by Wina he was. He was certainly he was certainly, took Wina's time and, like, really went with it and was highly inspired by him. But by that point, by the nineteen fifties, he had also spent about, what, twenty odd years at least, maybe thirty years as a as a kind of a control system engineer, rocket scientist person. So he was really, in a way, writing, a textbook kind of at that point, for some people, the textbook on how to make ICBMs not wobble under various conditions and how to, like, you know, control, mostly projectiles in very, like, turbulent and, like, unpredictable conditions and how to, like, correct various forms of, like, physical forces and so on. So there's a kind of I've there's a kind of mishmash going, I think, in those early years. But then if you follow the kind of, novel arena cybernetic trajectory, which is by far the richest and the most interesting, there are lots of these alter cybernetics, but none is as as kind of, you know, well covered and also as as, like, deep as the the Western one ultimately. You do get into this fascinating area where some it became, applicable to almost everything was, you know, inspiring to anthropologists. Like, Bateson and Mead was the center of these kind of moments of grand interdisciplinary dialogue that we often still look back to now, like the Macy conferences, which in themselves are mostly just people not seeing right eye and kind of really disagreeing with each other and probably coming out kind of furious. Like, these were I feel like we tend to, like, lionize these kind of past meetings where often they were just, like, academic spickering. But there was none that's important and and and, like, was was, like, significant meetings of, like, different fields at the time. And these were these

Exactly. Yes. Sorry. The so you have, like, people like Warren McCulloch coming from neuroscience, people like, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead coming from anthropologies, cultural anthropology, and various engineers. I think people like Shannon, who was very against any all of this, to be honest. I think he wrote a book called article called the called The Bandwagon, basically saying, everyone stop joining the bandwagon of information theory. This is, you know, a pure theory about, the noise and information on communication lines and not a metaphor for absolutely everything else. But then, of course, that kind of did rapidly diffuse into hippie culture, into various kinds of liberal ideologies. And I guess at at some points, it sort of also traded places with AI. I think someone else might I don't know this history well enough, but I believe there was a kind of actual moments of kind of a branding, branding thing with, like, with the likes of Minsky, where they basically chose to go with artificial intelligence as the the name for, how to create, essentially, neural networks that were initially pioneered by Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch of the METI conferences, to to think about kind of artificial minds rather than cybernetics, which was this much baggier term at the time. And then by the '19, I think, eighties and nineties, you basically don't have it anymore. Like, there's no one is really talking about cybernetics, and there's, like, one department in England that's still somehow pushing it as a as a real field. Yeah. I think that I mean, it's it's a fascinating story.

Yeah. So this guy is called Zheng Chisen. He was, I think, born at the very end of the nineteenth century, if we're not mistaken, and was came from quite an aristocratic family in in Shanghai. And in China, his name is well known, because he is pretty much the father of modern Chinese science in some ways. Like, the kind of only sort of heroic scientific figure going for certainly of the post nineteen fifty periods in China, the one that, like, has, like, a museum dedicated to him and this kind of thing. He's not he's less well known outside of China, perhaps, and maybe mostly known as the progenitor of Chinese cybernetics. Or if you're in, if you're kind of nerdy about the history of NASA and this kind of thing, he was one of the founding, members one one of the founders of, the Jet Propulsion Lab, the JPL, which, preceded NASA itself as an organization as a place to do kind of, rocketry research. So I guess just to give a little bit of background on him, he was, from an elite family and born into, it well, had his formative years in Shanghai, I think, after the revolution, like, in in the kind of republican period. And after the Boxer Rebellion in the nineteen tens, I believe, or maybe a little earlier, the American government gave a lot of scholarships, as a kind of, I guess, cultural diplomacy deal, to China to Chinese students to go and study in The US. And this actually produced quite a number of significant figures who later came back to China. And, And, Chen was one of the ones who went to, I think initially initially went to MIT and ended up under the usage of, Theodore Von Karman, who's a Hungarian rocket scientist, like, one of the sort of founding figures in that field in the twentieth century. And then Wilbon, as kind of one of our current top students, went with him over to Caltech and, later became very much part of this kind of Californian, world. I mean, I think he was actually he he was, like, attending the parties of, Robert Oppenheimer's younger brother, who also briefly appears in the movie as the the kind of main, Marxist communist link. Ironically, Chen in this time, while not unsympathetic to Chinese communism or to the kind of, like, whatever would be the fate of China. He was ultimately kind of patriotic, but, he wasn't political by any account. He's kind of a quiet figure lingered at the back of these parties. But then there was this, he gets kind of loosely linked early on to, these kind of more, like, at the time, communists, agitators, in the nineteen thirties who would then get, like, screwed over by the Red Scare with Longboat himself.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, okay. So this is I mean, there are lots of fun legacies here as a kind of sidebar, kind of. It's part of Jen's story. So Jen becomes when he's in this kinda cozy academic, scientist, Caltech crowds, he's mostly, I think, just being a a kind of expat American scientist, basically, at this point. And he becomes part of the small crew on the Von Karman in of, like, rocketry researchers that have become known as the Suicide Squad. And each of them are quite interesting. I'm trying to remember all of them now. The most famous one is Jack Parsons because he was long and short, he was a sort of Satanist. He was a follower of Crowley or another kind of school of this, and he did various other rituals. And I think no one's quite sure what happened to his wife. He had a he had a very kind of colorful life. And, and another one closest to the Exploratorium side of things is, Frank Molina, who I think is actually the founder of Leonardo Journal, which is a very well known journal if you're in a kind of, like, legacy art and tech kind of worlds, the kind of as a electronic, kind of, art science and technology kind of, space. And there is another member, but I suddenly can't remember their name. But they yeah. But the Suicide Squad are kinda well known for basically going into the deserts in Pasadena and, like, blowing stuff up as part of their experiments and becoming, yeah, becoming the kind of top rocket scientists in in the country and therefore probably in the world at that time. And so what's notable about this kind of, you know, early I can't remember exactly what age he was, but I guess he was in his thirties and forties. Before the war, He he became one of the top scientists of America, really, I think, in terms in terms of, this particular field of rocketry ballistics, which then became extremely important during the war. And then I think just after the war in 1945, it's kind of extraordinary to consider this given what happens to him after and then what China American relations since. But after the war, he is given, like, top military clearance and gives a temporary or is made a kernel of the US army so that he can go to Germany and inspect, German science. And, yeah, I took I think I wrote about it briefly, but there's this picture there from his European visits where okay. A 33 year old Chen so he's actually born in about 1910 or so. A 33 year old Chen is sitting with Von Karman and the teacher of Von Karman, Ludwig Prandtl, who's a Czech, fluid dynamicist. And the three and Prandtl having, I guess, been in German territory, had had worked with the Nazis. And the three of them, this kind of Hungarian American expat, this kind of young Chinese scientist, and this, Czech Nazi food dynamicist who are all kind of basically leading figures in the very narrow niche fields, altogether on, like, sort of just appreciating each other for a moment, but on this kind of totally mile like, poles apart geopolitical, narrative that's about one fault. And so, yeah, Chen's like a a leading scientific figure at this time. It's also interesting to I guess, for me that, like, it's a reminder that pre 1945 at least, like, science was or scientists, that's a community, were much more seemingly much more political, much more ideologically, forthright in various ways, than at least I I tend to imagine the scientific kind of profession now mostly. And so after the war in, I think, around 1948, I definitely have it more accurately in my piece. He starts to be, looked into by the FBI, and shortly after that is, taken as, into house arrest. This is, like, naturally after, I think, writing quite an import co writing with uncommon really important post war reports. Similar to I think this is under the era of, like, the guy who wrote as we may think, you know, the the the the post war science administrator. Okay. Anyway, this is, so he's taken under house arrest. Shortly after, he publishes, like, quite an important report about American air supremacy with with with Von Common, which becomes, like, a a leading kind of priority during the the kind of post war period. And this is a period where The US is kind of thinking about, like, what to do with all of our all of our science, all of our kind of, like, investments in, this, period of of war and also what to do with all of this technological supremacy that we're we seem to have gained and this power that we seem to be kind of, like, accumulating over a world order, really. And then Cenk is taken to house arrest under the red scare, and he basically, is in that condition for, I think, at least four or five years. He was detained in 1950, and he published Engineering Cybernetics, his textbook on, ballistics and systems control in 1954. I think it's only shortly after that that he actually returns to China. So he was under house arrest for basically five years. And in this time, I think he was asked whether, he was a communist. And there are the FBI files you can still download on him. And he basically remains sort of neutral. He never he never forget, he never gives up his, love, I suppose, for China nor his kind of, out home ness in America. Like, he isn't particularly politically, aligned in any way. But he is a he is a kind of patriot to his home country, and he is obviously someone who adopted America in a very positive way. So as a result, this was kind of has sometimes been considered maybe right. It's hard to judge these things for me, but, like, one of the most major strategic crack ups of The US in, like, in the twentieth century, really, to kind of, like, give up one of your top scientific assets to a communist nation that you consider to be one of your top adversaries and historically will turn out to be your top adversary. So in 1955, he is allowed to return to China along with a couple of other, Chinese scientists in a similar kind of condition. And he never looks back. He he goes to China and is recognized by the Chinese leadership. You know, this to put a bit more context around this, 1955 people People's Republic Of China is about five years and two months old. The after the revolution or the the victory of the communist in 1949, it is a basically dirt poor, agrarian country that has, like, decades of civil war and conflicts with the Japanese. They kind of, you know, did civil war, were invaded from Japan. So they quit civil war for a while and just kind of tried to get their shit together. And then that was over, and they did civil war again in the communist one. So, this is in quite a, deep brow kind of period to say the least. And then we're also shortly before these kind of, like, dramatic, mega projects that, Mao undertook in the nineteen fifties, the late nineteen fifties, and the famously in the Great Leap Forwards, which was this gigantic agricultural reform project, which did result in famines, which killed millions and millions of people. But they recognized that Chen was an asset, and they brought him and a number of other scientists. Well, welcome them with open arms, really. And then, well, the short version of the story in a way is that he goes on to build the the fastest nuclear program and the fastest satellite and rocketry and, generally kind of, Cold War defense, technology program, I think, in in world history and as far as it's in twentieth century history of, like, the this this Cold War kind of, dynamic. Yeah. So so he he returns, and he immediately starts build gets put in important positions where he immediately starts assembling different kind of ministries and centers and kind of, working groups for, amongst other things, cybernetics as well. It's what cyber he starts an institute of, operations research, which is this kind of adjacent field, which I wonder if you might actually know more about than I do, which emerges in the war as a kind of combination between, managements and statistics to kind of, like, understand how to best, most, like basically optimize production systems and those bureaucratic systems, I believe. I think operations research mostly ends up going down into the kind of business school road. But I think initially, it was used to to kind of, like, optimize, you know, like, arms production during global two.

Yeah. He did have a role. It's a little bit hard for me to judge exactly, because he he had a role in the sense that in that period, in the late fifties and early sixties, he wrote a number of articles, and there was some public articles. He'd already become, I think, this kind of, like, very significant scientific fig scientific figure and also a figure part of very much part of the state. And he did, like, publish this one diagram along with a, accompanying article about basically, you know, reimagining the whole production system of China, this kind of extraordinary diagram that kind of starts with, like, coal and energy and grain and so on and ends with, like, you know, the the making of clothing and everyday life. And and in the middle is all these kind of different, like, units and production processes and stuff. So he has this kind of, grand vision kind of approach. And, by accounts the number of accounts I read, which are mostly secondary sources to be fair, he had he he's involved, but it's hard to to tell just how influential these ideas were. And if they were influential, they did seem extremely ham fisted and, like, extremely abstract, like, really governing from the center of this huge and we all be complicated country and imagining it could just be kind of, like, wired up like this, a bunch of different units in a in a control system or something. So it's yeah. I I guess, like, I I I really don't know how to well, how much to hold them responsible for the disastrous, of the great leap forward. And I think they are considered, like, you know, even the most ardent kind of believers in in the party would accept that there were mistakes made during that period. And, yeah, I he he was part of the imagination of it, or at least he he seemed to contribute to the imagination of it, but it's, not clear how much actual influence he had over that kind of thing. Gotcha.

So very loosely, I guess, you have the the mainstream of cybernetics in The US. You have, Soviet cybernetics, which to be fair, was Soviet control systems theory, which to be heard is also also where a number of the people in China, who end up in China in the fifties and sixties, who they're they're trained by because, you know, was fortunate to be, one of the kind of, like, more privileged elite in China in the early twentieth century who received a boxer in scholarship and stay in America. But most, sort of people who went out to study would have gone to the The USSR until the kind of Sino Soviets, late in the late fifties. The Chinese line, I guess, the way I think about it, I have to say this part of this is in interpretive, is, that The US cybernetics emerges with a a alongside a superpower in a kind of relatively, bourgeois kind of condition. Like, it's it's a it's already a highly developed nation about to reach its real swing into the kind of postwar baby boom era and to kind of, like, going into the kind of height American hegemony. And it takes a lot of very, philosophical kind of turns. At least the parts of it I've been I've looked more into, perhaps the kind of there's also a lot to say about its influence on engineering. But, certainly, people like Bina Bateson, they were they they they understood cybernetics as part of a a kind of a worldview. And that was taken much further with, like and there was a cybernetics magazine, which, you know, they're kind of, like, all watched over by machines of love and grace, this kind of imaginary of nineteen sixties and seventies, which people like Fred Tanner have covered really well. That was part of this kind of whole picture, which did also influence, let's say, American computer culture and cyber culture and all of that stuff. In China, you've got a very, very different picture because while they might come from some similar roots in terms of engineering and control system design, this kind of thing, in China, you're talking about, like, really just nation building as, like, that's the only game in town for for people working with the states for for elites and so on. So you're not I mean, my sense of it is that at least in the beginning, in the fifties and sixties, you're really not interested in, this kind of more moral philosophical imagination that, people like, you know, are kind of interested in. You're really much more interested in building a defense program, understanding how to maximize production systems, how to, like, you know, this organize foods, bringing people out of poverty, like, recon construct a nation that is breaking up with the Soviets, that is seeing threats from all over, that's just been invaded by Japan, and is facing, you know, American Red Scare era threats as well. You're kind of on, I guess, red alert all the time. And so the technological side of that is really about, a, development, of course, like, growth, economic growth, and, well, actually, that's that's not quite right. It's economic growth really takes the back seats to to the kind of production as such, until the eighties. And so yeah. So I think the the the distinction the strong distinction I I make, at least, I I came to in writing this piece is that on one side, you have this somewhat more kind of philosophical approach. And on the other side, you have this deeply pragmatic approach, which is how do we construct a modern nation from a kind of the ravages of, like, civil war and from a recently feudal imperial kind of, country in into the kind of, mid twentieth century. And, I mean, if the the kind of, I guess, historical anomaly of modern China is anything to go by, then, like, that that project, in in some ways continues and and and was, kind of a if I was gonna say a remarkable success. That's kind of probably have to should qualify that. It was it was a remarkable achievements of nation building that, people like Chen made a huge contribution to in the form of basically building up the entire defense program, building up, the the rocketry satellites and burst sticks and communications program, and building up the kind of state scientific infrastructure, in the form of various institutes and so on.

Yeah. I that's really interesting and appeals quite naughty to me because I I think on one hand, yeah, we can think about as infrastructures that we live in and amongst and maybe subordinated to and maybe identify more or less with the state and and so on as kind of cybernetic technologies, if you like. On the other hand, the, you know, the on the other hand, there's a kind of, I guess, liberalism versus, in this case, socialism kind of split Yeah. Where liberalism might identify the individual, like, individual, against the states, against the kind of, the kind of, administration organization society, and think about kind of this system of different nodes in a kind of relatively free economy to and how they interrelate. And I suppose, you know, you can make a link from that to the way in which Western cybernetics was perhaps more psychologizing, more kind of, sort of, sculpture anthropological in the sense of, like, thinking about, like, relative ways in which, different kind of social systems might relate to each other and different individuals, even to the point of the cybernetics of conversation with things like people like Golden Pasc. I mean, it was really applied very much to, experience, I guess. Whereas the flip side of that is where you identify control systems, society, and the states together. Because society is parts of society is, you know, the state is in, the kind of, administration of society, which is a a sort of reproduction system for itself, I guess. And so that part that way, you would kind of think of nation, I. E. The landmass of China in the case of, states, the administration of the social and people as part of society as part of one big control system. So whether you have a picture of someone being subordinated or not is kind of, more of a philosophical question about whether you when you value the individual over the social, I guess, in this kind of classic dichotomy. Right. And in this case, in Chen's case, I think what's what becomes kind of interesting and is it sort of fits as part of this idea of how to if you like, how to design a nation, how to design, the administration of a a a number of people who live on a geographic landmass such as China. And those things really link together, like, how to announce the different forms of production in different parts of the nation, how to, like, move energy from the energy rich regions to the kind of, like, economic productive economically productive areas, how to defend, like, defense, and how to kind of bring infrastructure into the easier to defend center versus the kind of, like, vulnerable to Japan outside. All all of these things oh, and also how to, control demography. Because one of Chen's students, most famously, perhaps as, of his legacy of the Chinese mathematics person, is that his student, Song Jian, becomes, an important scientist and administrator who is responsible for one child policy. He was one of the early architects of that. So how how to administer, a demographic and, and how to kind of, like, think of society itself as a control system. And all of these things come with massive qualifications to, like, whether they were, you know, good, successful, achieve their goals, etcetera. But, nonetheless, the way of thinking is for all of those things to be collapsed, I think, together, to to to to think of that whole thing out of the control system rather than a bunch of different individual people being subject to subjected to different kinds of control.

Yeah. I mean, no. That's that's really interesting. I'm just gonna work out if I'm if it's, at this hour, whether I can quite formulate well enough, a a kind of response to that. I think it's it's really interesting because I'm not quite saying that this all is Chinese cybernetics, because I don't think there is a kind of, like, as as clear a discipline or a kind of, like, narrative of Chinese cybernetics. It's, been written about by myself and a number of other people, and there's about to be a book actually with, about China and AI, which has will have a number of good pieces on it. But this where you can draw a line around the kind of number of people and ideas and, like, phenomena that could be classified under Chinese cybernetics, I think you find a much more heterogeneous set of ideas. Not like heterogeneous from each other, but, like, a much more kind of mixed, amalgamation of different ideas than you do with maybe what you're describing with, kind of Silicon Valley idea, like, kind of a totalization of cybernetic kind of feedback loops, free free informatic feedback loops or something, and somehow has the kind of, like, the the the apotheosis of what is good and true of, of all systems. I think this is maybe, again, it's where this kind of pragmatism comes in. Like, for someone at least since, you know, for some of his ideas, someone like Chen, had I don't think he ever proposed that, like, let's say, governance or governance or various of those other of these systems should be run via cybernetics. He did come up with, like, expert systems and, like, kind of various imaginations for, like, new ministries or, like, kind of, decision making processes, which would rely on, like, you know, informatic processes being pulled at that speed here, like expert consult consultation here, political governors kind of taking all this. Yeah. These kind of much more mixed methods kind of, systems. And to the extent that, I think perhaps a a kind of cartoonish way to put it would be that if the kind of caricature of the Silicon Valley relationship makes sense like on cybernetics into a kind of, a kind of morality and a kind of ontology for how to how all complex systems work. In Chen's case, it was much, in in the Chinese case more broadly, it was much more of, a set of, like, different ways to apply mostly mathematical thinking to complex social issues. So in a way, it was like, how can we rather than how can we subject cybernetics to the political, it's like, how can we make the political scientific again? How can we make kind of, like, social policy scientific? And what do we mean by scientific? We mean, like, the application of various kind of, like, statistical kind of methods and, like, operations research kind of optimization methods and so on. And it I but it's not clear to me that's in the at the heart of all those were, like, automatic feedback loops that would, like, take, governance out of the picture, whether as a as a as a kind of a theological point or just simply as a as a practical one. A lot of it was really about optimization. And I think Chen, maybe at one point, I think he says something like, he defines himself not as an engineer, but like as a, like, a applied scientist, basically. And his science being the field of cybernetics, which he wants to apply to lots of other things. But I think if you look at one child policy and you look at, like, Chinese, infrastructure policies and, like, the ways in which the kind of, movements of energy and movements of kind of technological, like, production centers are organized as part of a kind of overall national system, geographically and spatially. What you see is, like, a a kind of, a sort of systems logic being applied at quite a macro scale in in just quite practical kind of ways of, like, almost someone kinda drawing a diagram of the country or something, to to solve mostly quite practical problems, such as Yeah. Fear of invasion and, like, producing more power or something.

Yeah. Thanks, Matt.

Thanks again to Matt Pruitt and Gary Zhang. If you'd like to delve deeper into the fascinating world of Chinese cybernetics, be sure to check out Gary's insightful piece in Combinations Magazine. Combinations is a new publication exploring the intersection of technology, power and society. This issue features pieces by Ranadask Gupta, Glenn Weil, Joseph Wyler, Christina Lou and more. It's a must read for anyone interested

in the future of technology and culture. You can find it online at combinationsmag.com.

The Radical Exchanges podcast is produced by G. Angelo Corpuz, co produced and audio engineered by Aaron Benavides, and executive produced by G. E. Angela Corpus and Matt Pruitt. It's hosted by Matt Pruitt with additional audio provided by me, Combinations editor Guy and McKinley Little. If you want to learn more about RadicalxChange, please follow us on x at RadExchange or check out our website at radicalexchange.org. Have a great day and stay radical.