Jacob Ward
speaker
135 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Jacob Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
come up with all of these cybernetic utopian theories of kind of self-stabilizing planetary systems.
And he publishes about Gaia in a countercultural journal called Co-Evolution Quarterly, which is read by many other cyberneticians, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, for example, also popular amongst the counterculture.
And these countercultural cyberneticians who are reading about Gaia theory really use themselves as a platform to elevate Gaia into this
new ecological theory.
But at the same time, it becomes tinged with this countercultural kind of vibe that begins to sap its kind of scientific legitimacy amongst the self-perceived serious scientists who want cybernetics to become a serious field.
And I think that just also points to, again, one of the reasons cybernetics begins to fracture a little bit.
You know, for example, when it comes to information, right, one of the key debates in cybernetics is, do we think of information as purely kind of something that can be mathematically calculated?
Or are we thinking about semantics, how much meaning information has, which
It's very interesting to linguists, for example, but people like Claude Shannon don't want it to go in that direction.
And so when you have characters like McLuhan or in another direction, Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, for example, who really wants to push cybernetics into a completely kind of different direction, thinking about the relationship between the human mind and nature and ecology, that again, these figures like McLuhan, like Bateson, who are pushing cybernetics further and further, then the center cannot hold.
I mean, that's one element, certainly, that, you know, you have biologists and social scientists who are involved in this cybernetic milieu in the 1950s.
And eventually the kind of common ground disappears and they just go back to their own disciplines and integrate cybernetic concepts into their work without explicitly calling it cybernetics.
But there are still people who try to champion the cause of cybernetics and kind of reinvent it for new applications.
And that continues in things like systems science.
You know, there's societies for systems research that still talk about cybernetics.
And that's been called first order cybernetics.
So the cybernetics of the closed system where you're trying to engineer and optimize a system.
And then there's people who talk about second order cybernetics or second order science.
And that's this idea that you have to be aware of your own role as a scientist, as a researcher, as an observer in a cybernetic system.
So it's not just the system is closed with its own feedback loops, there's feedback loops between you and the system.
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