Hi, so two days ago @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net shared a paper about anarchist cybernetics, and it gave a brief outline of a response, before cutting it short.

But it's just so dang unsatisfied with that, so it wanted to write up something a bit more detailed lining up the theory provided in that post with successful anarchist practices in the past. Hopefully for even those who didn't read the paper, this will be instructive. Keep in mind it started reading about this last night starting with that paper, so it couldn't possibly claim to know very much about what this "anarchist cybernetics" is. But even so, a flat-footed response should still be elucidating.

The VSM

So yeah the paper was a bit opaque, but all you really need to know is that the paper is providing a model that aims to roughly describe the decision-making of any organization that survives with its purpose intact while also being effective at carrying out its purpose. This is a non-normative claim in that it's about what causes an organization to survive and be effective in our world, and a normative claim in that it's about how organizations should be. This combination of being disposed to survive and be effective is referred to as being 'viable.'

It's not really important what this has to do with what you typically think of as cybernetics.

Here is a diagram of this model, known as the Viable System Model (henceforth VSM).

You have:

• Big blob thingy: There's this big blob thingy and that's the overall world, or environment. That's what your organization is interacting with, trying to change.
• Tiny blob thingies inside the big blob thingy: The smaller ones inside are local parts of the world, or niches. Like your metroplex or something, rather than the global political situation or your world-historical context.
• System one: You have various units interacting with and changing these niches. These niches may in turn interact with and change the units of system one. These are basically local actions, tactical decisions about what to do in the here and now.
• System two: Then, all the various units interacting with and changing these niches need to make sure they have some means of coordination. So, local decisions are put through a process that puts them in alignment with each other.
• System three: Whatever the alignment between the local units of system one must also be in alignment with the overall organization. So this is a process that puts everything in alignment with the overall system.
• System four: All of the information is collected here. All of the information from the local actions and their niches, the processes by which they align with each other, the overall organization, are collected and/or synthesized here. As well is information about the overall environment or world, which changes this system. This system also acts on the world, so these are the long-term, general strategic decisions.
• System five: This is the system by which where the overall organization is going is decided. Think of it as housing the ultimate objective.

All of these systems need to be interacting with one another and changing one another. System one changes system two, which changes system one. System four changes system five, which changes system four. System four changes the environment, which changes system four. And so on.

Then a bunch of the paper is about how this seems hierarchical but it's not a structural hierarchy, which for the purposes of this post it'll assume everyone already agrees with since it's a sufficiently common theme in anarchist theory anyway.

Black Rose/Rosa Negra's Program

As it pointed out in a comment on that post, the VSM diagram will remind many anarchists of diagrams for the especifismo model of anarchist organizing. A popular one is BRRN's in Turning the Tide, a diagram you can view here. The especifismo program consists of:

• Structural analysis: Information and theory on the long-term structures of oppression of the world, which your organization is trying to change.
• Conjunctural analysis: Information and theory on the immediate crises of the world, which your organization is also trying to change.
• Tactical plans: The immediate local actions taken to change the immediate crises of the world.
• Limited term strategic plan: This is the strategy that, provided the conjunctural analysis, constrains the tactical plans.
• General strategy: This is the long-term strategy that, provided the structural analysis, constrains the limited term strategic plan.
• Ultimate objective: This is the end goal of the organization, which constrains the long-term strategy.

Much of this model, developed independently of anarchist cybernetics, corresponds to the VSM.

The conjunctural analysis is the information coming from the tiny blobs up to system three. The tactical plans are system one, the immediate, local actions to change parts of the world. The limited term strategic plan is system three.

The structural analysis is the information coming from the overall world into system four. The general strategy which constrains the limited term strategy and tactics is system four. The ultimate objective is system five.

And then, we can assume that system two is something like tendency groups, intermediate organizations, caucuses, fronts, and other forms of organization deployed by especifismo anarchists intervening within immediate social movements. They are not included in the image above, but they are included elsewhere.

Objections

This comparison between the VSM and especifismo helps us see the shortcomings of anarchist cybernetics. Here are three objections. First, the normativity of the VSM. Second, the lack of clarity in the VSM. And third, the bi-directionality of the VSM.

The normativity of anarchist cybernetics

The Viable Systems Model is meant to not just be a heuristic description, but a normative claim about how organizations ought to be (though the paper makes some difficult-to-decipher maneuvers to try to avoid this claim, while still trying to be normative?). Hence the thick concept of being invoked by the term 'viability,' even if they insist it's just a term of art here meant to refer to survival and effectiveness.

But there have been very viable--in the usual sense of the term--forms of organizing throughout history which failed to meet this standard. Contrary to popular belief, insurrectionist affinity groups have achieved a great deal that they wouldn't have if they'd been a part of a Viable System. There are some conditions that require a politics of attack without overhead systems. Anyone who has ever had to violently strike back, brutally and quickly, against their abuser has understood that there exist conditions where resistance via a general strategy is not always in the cards. Sometimes, rebellion in the here and now is necessary for liberation.

Affinity groups that aren't meant to survive long, only as long as their attack is ongoing before breaking up and starting another attack in a long string of relentless attacks, can be incredibly powerful. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the VSM.

Of course, you could try to fit this within the VSM. You could say that the pattern within a population to have this impulse to group up temporarily with strangers, brutally attack, and disperse is a system. But the more you try to include into the VSM, the less useful it is. At some point, it becomes no more useful than just saying "any viable resistance involves attacking a lot and not getting attacked too much," which is utterly trivial.

Sometimes stability isn't desirable, contrary to the VSM. Sometimes a culture which develops organically without any organized constraint still develops sufficiently resistant to liberal and colonial influence. There's a lot of viable shit out there that isn't "viable."

The lack of clarity of anarchist cybernetics

So, let's address the fact that despite having some similarities, there just aren't as many parts in the especifismo model as the VSM.

When specific anarchist organizations don't have intermediate organizations, there is no system two. Decisions go straight from the limited term strategy down to the tactics, system three to system one.

Furthermore, the way that the immediate situation informs the limited term strategy is left unstated. Just somehow, the limited term strategic plan needs to be informed.

But per the VSM, the immediate situation informs the equivalent system three only by interacting with system one, which impacts system two, which impacts system three. What this means, in practical terms, is that if the organization tries out a tactic, and gets certain feedback from that tactic, it is able to learn about what the current situation is.

The problem is that this very specific, narrow way of learning about the current situation is more or less effective in different situations. If an affinity group goes and tries to pull something off, and they fail, they may come to a lot of conclusions that are very sound given this limited experience. But the overall situation may introduce some worthwhile nuances, even while still validating their valuable experiences. These nuances can be lost if learning is done only by committing to a certain tactic and coming to conclusions afterwards.

Of course, the VSM can address both of these. Nothing about the VSM says that the system one units can't be information gathering units. Nothing about the VSM says the systems can't all be within the same body of decision-making and analysis.

But the most natural way to understand the VSM is to think of the systems as being fairly independent of one another, not as having decisions about limited term strategy and unity between tactics all at once. As well, system one units are most naturally read as local actions to impact the world, not simply receive information about the world (esp. with the bi-directional arrows).

So if we charitably assume that the VSM includes the especifismo model in this way, the VSM is at least very unclear. The paper even goes on to describe how the VSM can be applied to Occupy Wall Street, and genuinely it found that part incredibly difficult to penetrate.

The bi-directionality of anarchist cybernetics

If you look at the VSM diagram, there's two-way arrows everywhere. If you look at the especifismo model, some of the arrows are one-way.

This is probably the biggest problem with the VSM. Especifismo was developed to resolve a paradox within anarchism, that it needs to remain open enough to make use of the great pool of talent within social movements addressing immediate crises in the world. But they need to remain closed enough to avoid being eroded and co-opted by liberalism, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and so on.

Cybernetics is, similarly, addressing the problem of needing to remain stable but effective.

But apparently, the end goal of the system in the VSM can be changed by systems one through four. There is virtually no mechanism proposed by the VSM that it can find to prevent instability. it has no idea how the VSM resolves the problem it sets out to solve.

Especifismo addresses this problem in a multitude of ways, but one component is to make sure that all of the strategies and tactics are unified with the end goal, and the end goal does not compromise to make some strategic or tactical end more achievable. The arrow is not bi-directional.

Indeed, if you look into it, cybernetics is all about these cycles of input-output, and so anything inspired by cybernetics is going to have this problem. Everything is always encouraged to impact everything else. There is no way to make an organization whose end goals are stable enough to survive the overwhelming inputs of liberalism and white supremacy in our society if we're inspired by cybernetic methods.

There's other parts where the bi-directionality really doesn't make sense, like between system three and four, or between all of the system one units and the local niches (some information gathering apparatuses that don't act would be good).

Conclusion

Phew, okay. All done. So yeah, not sure if anyone upvoting the paper even read it so not sure if this will even capture anyone's interest. But it was so pent up after having read it it had to write its thoughts somewhere.

The VSM is a description of what an organization needs to be stable and effective. The biggest problem is it's not clear how it does this, since the thing that needs to remain stable can be changed. Especifismo addresses this by making it extremely difficult to change, but VSM doesn't do that. Anything can change anything.

The paper is also bizarre because it spends so much time giving a baby's explanation of what anarchism is, how the VSM isn't a structural hierarchy, etc. but no time explaining many other concepts that are extremely impenetrable and require a whole night of research to figure out. This paper really wasn't for anarchists, who would have already been familiar with those things. And even putting that aside, the way it's presented can be very misleading. Strange, for a paper about what cybernetics could contribute to anarchism.

Finally, the VSM more or less rules out entire strategies important in the history of anarchism for having achieved a great deal. Or it doesn't, in which case it's useless. Not a great dilemma for the model to have put itself in.

Hope this comparison between the cybernetics tradition and the especifismo tradition has been helpful.

This will be a bit of a hybrid review of both the digital edition of Scythe and the board game.

Scythe takes place in an alternate timeline known as 1920+, though much of its canon was changed by the release of the next game, Iron Harvest. The main appeal remains the same: mechs instead of tanks (and other alt-techs, like airships instead of planes). It made numbers on Kickstarter, but today people are ambivalent to it, and either love it or hate it.

The video game was created to be like the board game, and when it was released a simulated version of the board game on Tabletop Simulator was permanently deleted. The main differences, aside from the occasional bug that makes a legal move impossible, are the way the game is organized visually and, more importantly, the relationship between the player and the scoring.

Reviewing the video game is going to make more sense if we start with the board game. So, let's start with the board game.

Scythe: The Board Game

Scythe successfully compresses the 4X experience down to an hour or two. You're definitely still doing all of the four X's, and there are many different win conditions you can pick and choose from depending on your circumstances.

That alone puts the game above many others. It is truly an achievement.

The game has a lot in common with chess, and in many ways it felt like a sequel with more lore and without all its flaws. For all of chess's beauty (though any Go player can tell you it's overrated), it's a paintbrush that doesn't fit comfortably in its hand. Scythe does.

The game's beginning is more varied than chess, like chess960. Unlike it, the variation is just small enough that it's still practical for players to study specific opening lines for specific situations, and so Scythe fails to avoid the problem of needing to study boring opening lines in chess (though Scythe's opening lines are much more intuitive and don't feel as arbitrary as chess).

So it's a more varied, more colorful chess with more mechanics, more players, it's more intuitive, and it has more lore. It's pretty good.

The lore is really nothing to write home about beyond the surface. "Cool, mechs!" is about the highest praise you'll find yourself giving the lore. The actual historical writing is nauseating and could be a whole rant-post unto its own.

Sometimes it gets racist and victim-blaming. For example, Usonia, this world's version of the United States, abolishes slavery much earlier. Why? The slaves fought harder in war, and everyone was so moved they abolished slavery right away. Riiight. If only those slaves weren't such lazy soldiers, amirite everyone? There's all kinds of shit like this.

But hey! Cool, mechs! Oh right, and airships! Guess it was wrong about mechs being all there is to praise.

Scythe also tries to solve two problems in interesting ways. One is the problem of people taking forever in strategy games to calculate the totally optimal move. Scythe tries to capture that element of earlier Eurogames like Catan where games went by fast as fuck because there was so much you couldn't know, while being deterministic. To solve this, Scythe makes it illegal to calculate everyone's score on your turn, so you just have to get a feel for everyone's relative strength and act accordingly even if sub-optimally.

Another problem is the problem of having to keep track of what everything does. Scythe takes intense care, far more than most board games, to set everything up so that it's very intuitive what everything does. Pieces cover up things you don't need, and the game works where the moment those things become needed, other things need to be covered up. It's gorgeous and satisfying.

Scythe: The Digital Edition

Both of those solutions are thrown out the window in Scythe: The Digital Edition. Everything else remains the same.

Because there's no need for it, all of the beautiful ways in which Scythe communicates to the player with the way the board is arranged is gone in the game. Everything just becomes a button that does a certain thing, and which leads to you needing to push other buttons.

That's fine, although you miss the elegance of the board game.

More importantly however is that scoring is now instantly computed. This completely changes the game. Seeing everyone's score puts everyone back in the position of taking longass turns, although the game is overall faster now so it's not so bad. Playing on a computer just speeds things up for some reason.

Speed is the least of your problems. It's just that the two games are now incredibly different experiences. In the board game, you often play intuitively. You intuit how strong everyone is, how strong your position is, and you act on principles like "whoever achieves all of their objectives first with the most area tends to be the winner" and the like.

But now, everyone has access to their precise score. And near the endgame, games slow way down. You're call calculating precisely how many points you'll end up with if this happens, or if that happens, or, ooh, what if that happened? And that can be fun, it can be challenging, it can also be a headache. Sometimes it's in the mood for it, sometimes it isn't. Very frequently, not that it's enforceable, its friend group will ban looking at the score so we can play it like the board game, for old time's sake.

They're such small changes but the two games are now just such different experiences. One is elegant and flows, the other is clunky and slows (even if it is overall faster). Both have their merits. Gun to its head though, it prefers Scythe the board game over Scythe the video game.

Conclusion

Scythe is...alright. It's a fun time, but of course, there's better games. It's also pretty racist and chauvinistic and liberal and shallow in its lore? So there's that.

When it moved from being a board game to a video game, it definitely lost something meaningful. It's still a fun time, but if you've only ever played the video game, try the board game out some time. Used to be, you could've done that on Tabletop Simulator, but to prevent competition they removed it.

And that's a damned shame. Because they're not the same. And we lost something worthwhile when The Digital Edition became the way to play online. It's alright. But it could've been, um, alrighter.

Definitely worth trying out and taking in all there is to appreciate about it, but you're probably not going to walk away with a burning passion for it.

So after eight years since VI's release, it decided to get into Civilization VI. People were often talking about how innovative this game was, and it knew the Civilization Players League had a ton of cool balancing tools to make the game really engaging.

And obviously, the fact that there's a league for competing at all means a lot of people have found a lot of meaning in competing in the game.

The main worry it had was that 4X games are often all about knowledge checks, and you can often win with next to no experience against people who've played the game for years by just looking up strategies that dominate the meta if they haven't already done so. For those who are used to competing with strategy board games that throw you into a new, random situation every game and understanding principles is more important than knowing all the knowledge checks, it can be very frustrating to play strategy video games that add a ton of complexity just to make it hard to know all the things you're "supposed" to know.

Unfortunately, despite all the talk of innovations, Civilization VI was not much different. Just like how you had to know to Radio->Ideology in Civilization V, or that Great Scientists, Engineers, and Merchants are pooled together and so Merchants harm your science and production, you have to "just know" all kinds of things in Civilization VI and it makes for a very unpleasant experience with friends, competing over who knows more specific facts rather than whose intuition is better calibrated to the game's underlying patterns.

Not every game needs to be almost entirely principled like Spirit Island, Sidereal Confluence, or Go, but as an example, you can make up for a lack of knowledge in games like Twilight Imperium in all kinds of ways. It's just a very frustrating experience to know that to get to that point of making clever decisions, you and your friends are going to have to commit to like a year of doing homework so that you're not just one-upping one another on the basis of who happened to find the best resource for understanding the game.

And then if you want to play competitively, the main competitive leagues harbor tons of abusers who regularly try and drive vulnerable members in the league out, and refuse to do anything about harassment campaigns against minorities in their community because "this is just for gaming, we won't pick political sides" or whatever.

After playing with friends for about six months and feeling like any victories were awarded to whoever found the better tutorial for how to play the game, like it was rarely a matter of who found the insight necessary at a critical point to win, it was hard to keep going. The innovations of Civilization VI didn't make a meaningful difference between its experience of VI and V.

If you don't like dealing with abusers who face no consequences in CPL while those who call them out get punished, if you want to very quickly get up to date on all of the mechanics of a game and how they tie together and start just seeing who can outpace who in terms of decision-making, then Civilization VI is largely going to be a big waste of time. Obviously there are plenty of people outside of that demographic.

But for it and its friends, well, back to trying out new strategy board games. Been meaning to try out Brass: Birmingham from six years back.

---

One alternative strategy video game that's really fun is Red Alert 2 (Mental Omega mod) with a fairly low required APM much like 4X games, a thriving community and easy to get friends into, and a fairly low knowledge check barrier with a lot of room for experimenting and sharpening one's intuition.