The emergence of cybernetics in the 1940s declared the end of the opposition between mechanism and organism. The term “cybernetics,” coined by Norbert Wiener for his 1948 book of the same name, originated from the ancient Greek term κυβερνητικός, which is to signify the governance of people. It has multiple definitions but can be broadly understood as the study of control and communication through circular feedback, an applied science spanning diverse fields, which anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as “a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information.”

Cybernetic thinking is holistic, aiming to integrate others into it. Within cybernetics, there is no delineation of subject/object, instead, it forms a unified self-regulated system sustained by feedback loops through the circular causal mechanism. In first-order cybernetics, feedback serves as a mechanism for self-regulation operated in parallels between biological and mechanical systems. In second-order cybernetics, since the observer becomes an integral part of the system, the notion of "recursivity" extends beyond the operation of machines to encompass other domains. Recursivity is essential to automation and computation; while it appears to follow linear logic, it generates complexities that exceed mere iteration, as each operation is self-referential and produces new contingencies.

With the progress of modern science and technology, the world increasingly appears as a system viewed through a mirrored, mechanistic framework, one that can seemingly be reduced to observation, computation, and simulation. Underlying this epistemology, a world based on reductionist cybernetics has neither politics nor history, which is also the image of cybernetics as seen by technophobes. Are there any alternative cosmoses where contingencies introduce complexities that transcend deterministic logic? Such alternatives could offer a way to address the alienation wrought by technology, reconciling the divides between culture, nature, and technology by redistributing agency and allowing for the coexistence of multiple cosmologies.