Noise from Below: Cybernetics, Socialism, and the Strange History of Self-Organization

A lively and rigorous historical exploration of how a scientific idea from the cybernetic prehistory of AI has informed radical politics—and vice versa.

Politically, “self-organization” is all about bottom-up, spontaneously democratic processes. It’s the term we reach for to describe massive social movements that seem to erupt out of nowhere, everywhere and all at once. Meanwhile, in the sciences, “self-organization” names the way living organisms, emergent systems like hurricanes, and computerized models of neural processing — including today’s massive AI systems — seem to be able to create structure and order by themselves, without any source of centralized direction or explicit programming.

If these two senses for “self-organization” seem to resonate with each other, that’s no accident. Noise from Below traces a surprising hidden history of encounters between radical politics and the leading edges of science and technology, from the birth of modern biology through the cybernetic revolution, from revolutionary politics at the turn of the last century through midcentury Detroit marxists, and to the digitally networked social movements of today. Along the way, we’ll learn about robot turtles, left-wing management consultants, experimental media-making, mutual aid, intentionally useless machines, and so much more.