Cybernetics is the science of the polycrisis

Henry Farrell's article (the byline isn't in the text, so I won't attribute it) argues that management cybernetics, as developed by Stafford Beer, offers a useful alternative to neoclassical economics and a framework for thinking about the polycrisis. It praises Dan Davies's book The Unaccountability Machine for presenting Beer's ideas clearly. The central idea drawn from Ross Ashby is the Principle of Requisite Variety: a regulator needs at least as much variety as the system it manages, and otherwise control is not possible. The text contrasts this with Soviet and Chinese cybernetics and Silicon Valley, which assumed economic complexity could be reduced to optimization problems.