Reflection of Tiqqun's views in the cybernetic hypothesis on current developments in MK&in the world

Here the article by Aleksandar Petrov from Eurocollege of Kumanovo (Macedonia), University partner of the Cultural Studies in Business project.

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Petrov Aleksandar - Reflection of Tiqqun

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Introduction

Cybernetic thinking can be used as an explanatory background for organizing complex phenomena in general and for society as a whole. In that case, are cybernetics and computer technologies "machines of communism", a potential path to emancipatory coordination capable of hyper-complexity? Or are they just the next management techniques for strengthening capitalist exploitation, surveillance and oppression?

The French radical collective Tiqqun analyzes modern power structures with a strong emphasis on technology and its logics. Today's power, as claimed by Tiqqun, is driven by the cybernetic hypothesis, which assumes that biological, physical, and social patterns are programmed. The basic assumptions and political ethics of the cybernetic hypothesis are aimed at control, forecasting and monitoring based on massive data collection, grounded in an extensive network infrastructure. For Tiqqun, 'cybernetics is the art of war' and the Internet is 'a war machine': everything produced, sold or spent, everything said and done is reduced to binary information in dense feedback information-patterns that trigger scattered management protocols. There is no head or absolute sole authority, no central navigator. Forms of politics, discourse, and oppression are analogous to modern structural network information, known as the ‘Internet’, and control successively bursts from central institutions into vast techno-human collections.

Tiqqun proposes a strategy to oppose and combat the policy of the cyber hypothesis: "Panic makes cybernetics panic" - because chaotic situations impose balances and limit prognostic thinking. Binary information processing machines should be avoided by creating noise (the old architecture of cybernetics and information theory). The practice of attacking, sabotaging or overloading infrastructure can be seen as a form of resistance. Tiqqun preaches a dual strategy of sabotage and stagnation; they propagate destructive machines and avoid the production of arable information. Both tactics should be part of a "rhythm policy", which means accelerating the technological standard of revolt and slowing down all kinds of information, personal and commodity movements. This should be accompanied by production of fog or interference because the unnaturalness of actions and motives is essential for rebels against the ideology of transparency. Tiqqun want to build "black blocks within the cyber power matrix", which are assembled from small groups that form a "cloud that spreads panic". For Tiqqun, cybernetics is a specific form of knowledge for power and management techniques. They identify cybernetics as an ideology of transparency and a specific form of information-based control.