︎ ‘Simple Rules, Complex Behavior’: Paradoxes of Cybernetic Rationalization

June 17, 2021

In the 1990s, the Santa Fe Institute ran an artificial life program by the name of ‘Tierra’. Its slogan, ’Simple Rules, Complex Behavior’, captures the program’s strange logic in which the design of a few parameters sets off an unpredictable evolution. This paradoxical logic, I argue in this talk, closely resembles that of the labor process and political economy of post-Fordist capitalism. In an attempt to understand the present, I work out this resemblance by developing the concept of ‘cybernetic rationalization’. It signifies, I conclude, a manner of governing the paradox between simple rules and complex behavior, or between communicability and the incommunicable.

(Jan Overwijk)