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Chapter Three provides a historical and conceptual overview of both anarchism and cybernetics, focusing on recent developments in anarchist social movement practice and Stafford Beer’s organisational cybernetics respectively. The chapter argues that the core cybernetic principles of complexity, control and autonomy, understood through the overarching idea of self-organisation, can help elaborate a detailed understanding of anarchist organisation. To do so, the chapter develops Beer’s Viable System Model for anarchist social movement organising and uses the example of Occupy to show how the functional hierarchy of Beer’s model can be applied to forms of organisation that are typically understood as rejecting hierarchy. The chapter builds on an important article written by John D. McEwan to show how functional roles in an organisation can be realised on structurally non-hierarchical ways that reinforce the radically democratic and participatory practices of anarchism.

This chapter tells the story of how in the early 1970s the Allende administration in Chile engaged Stafford Beer (1926–2002) to design and develop a revolutionary electronic communication system in which voters, workplaces, and the government were to be linked together by a kind of “socialist internet.” This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.

In conclusion the author asks whether the relationship between religion and science—often seen as either incompatible or else as categorically distinct—might be reframed as an effect of discourse. In reviewing the preponderance of evidence that the distinction between the religious and the scientific is blurry at best and quite possibly untenable, the author then concludes that the proclivities of the neuromatic sciences have, themselves, assumed characteristics that cognitive scientists would define as religious. Indeed, the neuromatic brain invites reasonable speculation about the presence of agents that are not human such as in Stafford Beer’s claim that computers were the culmination of a kind of providential history and that God was simply the most meta of all systems—an agency above that made all the subsystems below compatible with one another. Brains, machines, factories, a swarm of bees, selves, and collectives of selves all communicate, that is, they all communicate inward and outward according to the same formula, more or less. Each operates, optimally, as a self-organizing system. Each resembles the other because of their shared relationality to a neural network. Each is legible in terms of their correspondence with the logic of neurons, nets, dendrites, and synapses.