cybernetic anthropology concept

... cybernetic anthropology by Martin Wilhelm Doehring ...

**Cybernetic anthropology, as outlined in the draft I present here, is a speculative, utopian vision of a post-state social order.** It combines classical cybernetics (self-regulation through feedback and information), a radical anthropology of the human being as a “resonant being,” and Marxist critique of alienation into a model in which the human is no longer a subject or citizen of a hierarchical state, but a node in a global, self-organizing communication network.

The accompanying painting (abstract expressionism with chained, intertwined pinkish-flesh-colored figures connected by luminous white lines, beneath heavy dark chains and blocks) visualizes precisely this tension: the chains and massive structures at the top stand for the old top-down constraints (state, hierarchy, alienation), while the chaotic, energetic tangle below represents emergent, rhizomatic self-organization — a living, self-steering mycelium or neural network.

### 1. Cybernetics: Steering through communication instead of command

Classical cybernetics (Norbert Wiener, the Macy Conferences, Karl Steinbuch) describes systems that regulate themselves through feedback loops and information exchange. In this model, the state as a rigid top-down corset (laws, hierarchies, representation) is replaced by a bottom-up network. Decisions do not arise through representatives or officials, but through real-time coordination and resonance among participants — comparable to a neural network or a mycelium. The system “thinks,” “feels,” and corrects itself.

### 2. Anthropology: From *homo oeconomicus* to *homo resonans*

The anthropological point is radical: identity arises not from status, property, or citizenship, but from contributions and resonance. Competence clusters (energy, education, medicine, art) form spontaneously wherever people are active. Reputation and trust become the new “currency”; power capital loses significance. The human exists as a cybernetic subject — a vibrational node in the social field. This stands in the tradition of cybernetic anthropology (Steinbuch’s *Automat und Mensch*, Stefan Rieger’s work on virtuality and self-steering), but goes beyond academic media and cognitive science into a political utopia.

### 3. Marxist perspective: Dissolving alienation through self-organization

Marx’s analysis of alienation (from labor, the product, the community, and species-being) is here practically overcome: labor becomes an end in itself again, production and administration merge, society organizes itself organically and develops a kind of “immunological” defense against the concentration of power. Instead of party or state, a “synarchic network society” or a rhizomatic Marxist International emerges — global, decentralized, steered by communication. Historical points of reference exist in experiments such as the Chilean Project Cybersyn (Stafford Beer) or current debates on cyber-socialism and cybernetic planning, which often fail on the question of real power and class autonomy.

### 4. Transition: Democracy as a training phase

The metaphor of “training wheels” is apt: the nation-state and representative democracy are necessary intermediate stages that order through laws and majority decisions. The network ultimately orders through permanent feedback and resonance. The transition is evolutionary-rhizomatic (in the sense of Deleuze/Guattari), not revolutionary-centralist.

### 5. Conclusion and critical assessment

Cybernetics supplies the structure (feedback, self-regulation), anthropology the meaning (human as resonant being), Marxism the emancipatory direction (liberation from domination and alienation). The result would be a self-aware, self-steering humanity.

**Important limitations from real theory and practice:**

Historical cybernetic anthropology (Steinbuch, Rieger) was primarily an epistemic and media-scientific project — an attempt to reconcile the natural and human sciences and to redefine the human being through regulation, virtuality, and image-ness. It was not primarily a political model of world order.

Network utopias encounter well-known problems: power asymmetries in digital infrastructures, algorithmic bias, surveillance, the tendency toward new forms of concentration (platform capitalism / “technofeudalism”), and the question of how “resonance” can be protected against manipulation and exclusion. Without concrete institutional and material-technical foundations, the draft remains fascinatingly speculative.

The painting captures the ambivalence perfectly: the network is alive, chaotic, and connected — but the chains and dark masses remind us that old power structures do not simply disappear; they must be transformed or overcome.