What is the Cybernetic Assembly?

So some of you may be wondering where the idea for our cybernetic assembly came from.

(To view an updated copy of this post, click here)

I am a 6th year journalism and communications student at the University of Cincinnati. Over the past year my studies have focused on defining just what exactly "the 4th Estate" is to the democratic system, and the designs of our online assembly are the fruit of this research.

Using the language of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetic systems theory, the 4th Estate is the feedback mechanism of a functioning democracy. Without it, we would have no idea what was going on in the world, and it would be impossible for us to make informed decisions in the voting booth.

For hundreds of years, the biggest hindrance to this feedback mechanism has been the centralized control of the means of information production. For as long as anyone can remember, the voices of the major broadcast stations and newspapers have dominated the information network we know as the 4th Estate.

The online social media are changing everything, and the means of information production are becoming entirely decentralized. We are all becoming members of the 4th Estate’s feedback processes. On sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Reddit, everyone with a service provider has equal opportunity to be heard, and everyone’s voice is equally as insignificant when compared to the roar of the crowd.

Applying the principle of ‘one-person one-vote’ to this decentralized system allows an assembly of individuals to organize that roar into a direct cybernetic democracy, where everyone has equal say in deciding what information is most relevant to the group. People vote for whichever pieces of information or items of business are most relevant within a public Forum (our Reddit community), and the results are recorded in a public Journal (currently, the OccupyCincy IT blog).

The result of this organization is my model of the Social Reasoning Machine; a directly democratic system scalable to any size group of more than +2 individuals. With this system, we can quantitatively measure just how much of America is fed up with Wall St.

For more background on what information theory really means to the digital culture, Kevin Kelly (freakin’ genius of a man) has a few talks on TED.

- What is the ‘Machine’ (2007)?

- What does information theory have to do with ‘technology’ (2009)?

- How can we utilize technology to promote liberty ('hacking' the system)? (2005)