Cybernetics, from the Greek kybernētēs (steersman, governor), is the science of communication and control in systems. Norbert Wiener coined the term in its modern sense in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), drawing together insights from electrical engineering, neurophysiology, and mathematical logic to argue that the same formal principles — feedback, circular causality, information processing — govern regulation in machines, organisms, and societies.
The central concept is feedback: a system’s output is returned as input, allowing the system to adjust its behavior relative to a goal or reference state. Negative feedback reduces deviation (a thermostat maintaining temperature); positive feedback amplifies deviation (a microphone howl, a market bubble). The formal analysis of feedback loops, stability conditions, and information flow provides a vocabulary that applies across scales and substrates.
Cybernetics fractured into several lineages. The Macy Conferences (1946–1953) brought together Wiener, von Neumann, Bateson, Mead, McCulloch, and others, producing foundational work on computation, neural networks, and social systems. Gregory Bateson carried cybernetic thinking into anthropology, psychology, and ecology, developing the concept of information as “a difference which makes a difference.” Heinz von Foerster developed second-order cybernetics, turning the cybernetic lens on the observer itself. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed autopoiesis, the theory that living systems are self-producing.
The discipline fell out of institutional favor in the 1970s–1980s, partly because its insights were absorbed into control theory, systems engineering, cognitive science, and complexity theory without retaining the name. But cybernetics’ central insight — that the observer, the observed, and the process of observation are all systems subject to the same formal analysis — remains foundational for any framework that treats relations as constitutive rather than incidental.
Related terms
- Autopoiesis — self-producing systems
- Second-order cybernetics — the reflexive turn
- Feedback loops — the concept applied to climate systems
- Gregory Bateson — anthropological cybernetics
- Norbert Wiener — founder