"After the 1970s socialism was just another democratism anymore, now completely necessary for the progress of the cybernetic hypothesis. The ideal of direct democracy and participatory democracy must be seen as the desire for a general expropriation by the cybernetic system of all the information contained in its parts. The demand for transparency and traceability is but a demand for the perfect circulation of information, a progressivism in the logic of flux that rules cybernetic capitalism. Between 1965 and 1970, a young German philosopher, presumed to be the inheritor of “critical theory,” laid the foundations for the democratic paradigm of today’s contestation by entering noisily into a number of controversies with his elders. Habermas countered the socio-cybernetician Niklas Luhmann, hyper-functionalist systems theoretician, by counterposing the unpredictability of dialogue, arguments irreducible to simple information exchanges. But it was above all against Marcuse that this project of a generalized “ethics of discussion” which was to become radicalized in the critique of the democratic project of the Renaissance. Marcuse explained, commenting on Max Weber’s observations, that “rationalization” meant that technical reasoning, based on the principles of industrialization and capitalism, was indissolubly political reasoning; Habermas retorted that an ensemble of immediate intersubjective relations escaped technology-mediated subject-object relations, and that in the end it was the former that framed and guided the latter. In other words, in light of the development of the cybernetic hypothesis, politics should aim to become autonomous and to extend the sphere of discourse, to multiply democratic arenas, to build and research a consensus which in sum would be emancipatory by nature. Aside from the fact that he reduced the “lived world” and “everyday life” — the whole of what escaped the control machine, to social interactions and discourses, Habermas more profoundly ignored the fundamental heterogeneity of forms-of-life among themselves. In the same way as contracts, consensus is attached to the objective of unification and pacification via the management of differences. In the cybernetic framework, all faith in “communicational action,” all communication that does not assume the possibility of its impossibility, ends up serving control. This is why science and technology are not, as the idealist Habermas thought, simply ideologies which dress the concrete tissue of inter-subjective relations. They are “ideologies materialized,” a cascade of devices, a concrete government-mentality that passes through such relations. We do not want more transparency or more democracy. There’s already enough. On the contrary — we want more opacity and more intensity."

The Cybernetic Hypothesis by Tiqqun

"I have always been bothered by the din made about the theme of "science without conscience". This is foolish, since it is only because of this very same subjectivity and its ever-accelerating, irreversible degeneration that machinic systems are able to take off the way they do. And isn't it also kind of stupid to hope to improve the condition of the human, one of the most vulgar, mean and aggressive of all species? I am not afraid of machines as long as they enlarge the scope of perception and complexity of human behavior. What bothers me is when people try to bring them down to the level of human stupidity."
~F. Guattari

"It eludes programming, because of what i call the production of an endo-reference. Subjectivity is being produced before it is aware of itself. That is what happened in '68: a subjectivity was in the making before anyone had a change to realize what was going on.
I really like the image of the slumbering beast. A completely dormant mass, totally infantilized by the media. But when some singularity awakens it, it turns into an extremely receptive milieu. Politicians and intellectuals are the last to reach this receptiveness.
That stroke of singularity, that arbitrary conglomeration of signs and sounds, is immediately perceived and received by those who crave it. They are already so bored..."
~F. Guattari

Valparaiso; Chile