margrz via nettime-l on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:17:59 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> EXCELLENT! Re: Interview with German Media Theorist Anna-Verena Nosthoff on Cybernetics and Criticism

I rarely post, but as an aficionado of Nettime, with which I grew up, I simply want to say: Geert, this is an excellent interview. Nosthoff is brilliant, both in her elaborations and in her political message, and the questions are to the point. In a sea of impotence, this offers the possibility of an insurgent strategic rethinking of where we are at this moment. Marina 

13.06.2026 13:00, je Geert Lovink via nettime-l napisal

There’s an affective affinity between my internet criticism efforts
and the work of German media theorist Anna-Verena Nosthoff, her
partner Felix Maschewski, and their Berlin Critical Data Lab. After
years in the making, Anna-Verena’s PhD (written in German) was
published in early 2026 by Suhrkamp Verlag in their infamous stw
series. Its release prompted the following email interview, in
English, to introduce this majestic 660-page study that covers eight
decades of theory on the “art of digital governance”. Her PhD degree
at the University of Freiburg coincided with the birth of their son
Bruno, and her appointment as junior professor at the Carl von
Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. Time to celebrate, discuss ideas,
and steer next steps. Will there be a long-awaited renaissance of
cybernetics, provoked by Europe’s ‘digital sovereignty’ wake-up call?
Is there a need for a meta-theory that brings together digital media,
networks, platforms, and AI? And how many of these ambitions are
holding up in the face of techno-fascism?

Feedback does not equal criticism. Time is necessary to process
thoughts, reflect, and question the existing, then verbalize them in
our minds before standing up to voice criticism. Critique starts with
feedback, the central category of cybernetics. Yet, it is not the case 
that the other way around. The philosophical response to the rise of
cybernetics as a general theory of computing in the late 1940s took
some years but unfolded steadily in the following decade—the topic of
the first part of Nosthoff’s thesis. After the initial speculative
phase ended, cybernetics as a distinct discipline vanished precisely
as the democratization of personal computing was taking off. Instead
of establishing itself, cybernetics staged its own disappearance, to
say it with Baudrillard. No meta-theory has since taken its place.
What replaced the initial thinking of technical fundamentals was a
desperate attempt to administer its impact. Techno-solutionism is
still dominant. While the reductionism of operational thinking has
been unmasked here and there, no overall alternatives are in place.
Nosthoff’s German attempt (including mine) to reintroduce the
‘criticism’ category should be read as an attempt to uphold the lack
of reflection and regain lost territory.

The aim of Nosthoff is a “genealogical reconstruction of cybernetics
criticism.” The study is divided into two periods: the first deals
with the origins and first- and second-order cybernetics, always with
a view to the role of criticism. In part two, we move from the
mid-1980s toward Silicon Valley, the explosive growth of the Internet, and the dominance of digital technologies in the present day, when the 
research no longer revolves around reflections on ‘cybernetics’, but
shifts towards a critique of cybernetization (even though this term is 
rarely used). This distinction is important because in the 1970s,
cybernetics as a separate discipline slowly disappeared, precisely at
the moment when its impact was truly beginning to materialize and
unfold.

Nosthoff describes the historical legacy of cybernetics as a
non-disciplinary meta-approach. Neither a method nor a school,
cybernetics refused to establish itself as a universal science. In the 
end, it was unable (or unwilling?) to assert itself. During the
post-war decades, criticism still had an object to relate to in the
form of books, journals, conferences, and meetings, when cybernetics
was still reasonably well embedded in the academic milieu; this was no longer the case later on. From the moment computers became ‘personal,’ 
the only thing critics could deal with was the impact, a force so
strong and omnipresent that it disguised its original principles (and
the earlier debates about its premises). In the phase after the
mid-1970s, cybernetics criticism lost its object and was forced to
reorient itself. It is remarkable that there is no clear transition
phase—with the exception of the Stafford Beer/Chilean Cybersyn episode 
in the early 1970s, so brilliantly brought back to life in Eugene
Morozov’s podcast series.

Since the sweet revenge. How can today’s digital regime be
fundamentally criticized when its founding discipline disappeared
fifty years ago? Should its withdrawal be read as a genius act or even 
a conspiracy? Regardless, the institutional poverty re: tech is
planetary in scope, with the powerless ‘AI ethics’ funding wave as a
recent example. The digital behemoth cannot be allocated. As venture
capital is the financial motor driving exponential hyper-growth, it is 
a mystery how Big Tech creates monopolies overnight that become both
invisible and untouchable when venture capital is left out of the
equation.

The back cover quote of Nosthoff’s book is crisp and clear:
“Cybernetics is everywhere, like air.” The goal of critical theory is
then to make this invisible ubiquity of the digital visible again. The 
crisis the Trump 2 administration has thrown the European liberal
establishment into will be a test case if this challenge is taken up,
yes or no. Despite calls for ‘digital sovereignty’, the dominant
regressive conservatism is neither pointing in the direction of
critique nor that of alternatives. Understanding stagnation is what’s
on the agenda. This means we need to add this new insight to the
definition: cybernetics as the science of communication, control, and
stabilization in complex systems. Entropy is not just a warning for a
possible collapse; it should be seen as a key part of the cybernetic
process.

Nosthoff is critical of Baudrillard’s cynical attitude, yet keeps
coming back to him. This is interesting because Baudrillard cannot be
called a critic of cybernetics. Nonetheless, she brings his basic
motif of disappearance into play (also present in Paul Virilio’s
work). She convincingly links these two Parisians with Günther Anders’ 
concept of antiquity. The thesis is that notions such as cybernetic
feedback loops only intervene deeply in the hardware, software, and
everyday lives of billions of users after their disappearance. This is 
where the decisive effect of cybernetic principles—including their
criticism—lies. According to Anders, humans are beings who must always 
first appropriate their world technically. The task is then, in the
words of Günther Anders, “to uncover the fact of concealment itself.”
This is the project of the present critique of ‘cybernetization’—and
the core of this large-scale study.

Nosthoff’s goal is neither to save nor to reconstruct cybernetics.
She is concerned with accurately describing the effects of power. This 
might be why she did not call for the establishment of ‘Cybernetics
2.0’, as Geneviève Bell did in 2021 when she founded the School of
Cybernetics at the Australian National University. A few weeks before
his untimely death in August 2020, French philosopher of technology
Bernard Stiegler made a similar call for an informatique théorique (a
new theory of computer science). Landed in Rotterdam, Yuk Hui is
working in the same direction. However, the work done here could
certainly be read as the historical and contemporary basis for such an 
institute. So far, most of the research conducted in Berlin has been
in journalism, law, and the social sciences. Digital theory and
criticism from a humanities perspective remains small. Her ambitions
are clearly different from the slow bureaucratic politics that solely
aim at regulation after the fact. It is in this void that her “art of
digital governance” can come into play. That’s the visionary note:
without a set of critical notions, Nosthoff will not issue any control 
instructions. No control without critique. Prisms need to be built
into the design of information systems from the start. This is the
right moment to switch to the interview.

GL: Tell me if I am wrong, but I got a strong sense that your work
embodies a strong will to continue and update the work of Günther
Anders. He’s perhaps not so well known in the Anglo world, but still
respected in philosophy-of-technology circles. Where do you situate
the beginnings of this phenomenal work that you’ve delivered?

AVN: Philosophically, I am indebted to Anders’ work in many respects.
Fortunately, the long-awaited English translation of Anders’s magnum
opus, The Obsolescence of Man, has just been published by the
University of Minnesota Press, thanks to the brilliant efforts of the
translators and Anders scholars Chris Müller and Christian Dries. I
hope there’s growing interest in Anders’s work, and I am positive that 
interest will only grow given the increased availability of his work
in English. Anders’s thinking seems almost uncannily timely, which, in 
my opinion, has to do with his philosophical method of exaggeration,
combined with critical anticipation. Together with Felix, I have
interpreted this method as the intention to think through the
totalitarian potentials and tendencies of cybernetic technologies, and 
prolong their potentially destructive tendencies into the future;
Anders therefore referred to himself as a “vorwärts gekehrte
Historiker”; an inverted historicist. We once wrote an article about
this aspect and Anders’s contemporary relevance for Thesis Eleven.

Reading Anders today, I see many observations he already made at the
beginning of the process of cybernetisation regarding the
non-neutrality of technologies when they are no longer conceived as
mere means. Or those regarding the difficulty that moral problems are
often posed, and discussed only after the (technological) fact, i.e.,
when a technological normalization and standardization process has
already, as it were, colonized the life worlds of subjects, to borrow
Habermas’s expression. Anders is probably best known for his concept
of “Promethean shame”, by which he means the chasm between the perfect 
machine and the subject who feels ashamed when confronted with it
because of his or her felt or alleged limitations. I could never
really make much sense of this concept until Chat GPT was introduced,
as I have the strong intuition, and I can confirm this from
conversations I have with students, that many of them, especially at
the beginning of their studies, feel they lack the ability to meet the level of (alleged) perfection when they compare their own writing with 
a chatbot’s generative content. Reversing this feeling of Promethean
shame is central to teaching in the age of Large Language Models.

My work is inspired by Anders’ positions. His oeuvre continues to
challenge us, as subjects living in a digital age. Even more, it now
confronts us in an age that is pervaded by so-called “genAI,” where
several of its concepts are easily attributable to phenomena that, in
such concretion, it was unable to really anticipate. That’s precisely
why, in retrospect, I would say it lends much credence to Anders’s
philosophical method.

GL: Another unknown critic of cybernetics is the German philosopher
Hans Jonas. His article “Critique of Cybernetics” is from 1953. You
compare his piece with Margaret Mead’s later remarks. Can you explain
what these early reflections on this emerging philosophy of computing
were about?

AVN: It was fascinating to me to reread Jonas’s early critique of
cybernetics. And a coincidence that I read it roughly at the same time 
as I read several early writings that emerged at the beginning of
second-order cybernetics, Mead’s (and later on Heinz von Foerster’s)
writings as central pieces. Of particular importance to me were Mead’s 
remarks made before the term “second-order cybernetics” was coined by
Heinz von Foerster. It is important to explain Mead’s theses first
before highlighting the centrality of Jonas’s earlier critique: Mead
argues that cybernetics needs to self-transform to develop. This was
at a time when cybernetics faced an existential crisis. First,
cybernetics had become so broad a term that it was unclear what it
actually meant, making the prior “glamour field” seem rather vague.
Second, cybernetics entered a moment of legitimation crisis in the
West as soon as it became relevant to real-existing socialist
contexts, especially the GDR and the USSR. Mead made this claim during 
a conference hosted by the Society for General Systems Theory, which
was close to cybernetics. An organization needs to constantly reflect
on itself to adapt to its environment and survive, and she reiterated
this proposition in the context of the Conference Proceedings of a
Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics. This is where the
second-order perspective is taking shape, and Heinz von Foerster then
edits the text and coins the term “second-order cybernetics” to
describe the cybernetisation of cybernetics. Von Foerster then later
claimed that he came to understand that the problem with
first-order-cybernetics was that it, for instance––thinking of the
external observer perspective in which the mind was described in the
sense of neural nets, think of McCulloch and Pitts, for instance, or
Ashby’s homeostat––that first order cybernetics essentially could not
come up with a way to account for its own descriptions: How can a
thinking subject explain the processes of thinking when it is
thinking? This is where von Foerster identifies first-order
cybernetics as a blind spot and proposes recursivity.

What’s fascinating is that Jonas makes similar statements when he
criticizes first-order cybernetics in his early critique. Absurdly
enough, he does not only describe the context in which a group of
cyberneticists at a conference of cybernetics were to describe
itself––i.e., the context in which second-order-cybernetics would then 
effectively emerge from many years later––but more importantly, he
criticizes that cybernetics is unable to account for itself, since if
the human mind, for instance, were practically reducible to binary
digits and neural signal transmission the cybernetician was unable to
account for how he can even reach that explanation in thinking. I did
some archival work to find out whether Jonas’s text might have been
read by cyberneticists at the time, given the obvious similarities.
Bertalanffy was, interestingly enough, in contact with Jonas, and he
was also an important figure in the emergence of second-order
cybernetics. But I could not prove that Jonas’s text was actually read 
by the key figures of cybernetics.

It remains interesting that it took first-order cybernetics so long
to respond to a quite similar critique. Or rather, to develop it
itself. This has a lot to do with a general affect against
philosophical investigation and critique. This affect is very visible
in early cybernetics––although cybernetics claimed to be
interdisciplinary and a new, open field, it was almost stubborn when
it came to philosophical accounts that, for instance, questioned their 
techniques of analogization between human and machinic behaviour, or
between the workings of the mind and the brain; or the way in which
they came to ascribe intentionality to both humans and machines, or
how they used systemic and abstract terminology to describe social,
technical, or biological systems, thus erasing all (material)
differences among them. Instead of engaging with such critiques,
cybernetics simply ignored them or deemed them irrelevant.

GL: Your approach is author-centrist. In your study, the critique of
systems is not voiced by engineers, users, programmers, activists,
artists, or entrepreneurs for that matter, but by philosophers. How
did they come to this knowledge? This is a sincere question. If we
follow Stafford Beer’s “purpose of a system is what it does” and map
these “doings” in the light of (self) organization and bottom-up
planning, how relevant is it to reflect on the system as a whole? The
Gen Z-driven Hegel memes indicate a need to go for the whole, a
techno-totality. Is the choice between detailed case studies and big
ideas a false one?

AVN: What’s of great importance is the dialectical method that takes
into account the interrelations and contradictions between the whole
and the part, the abstract and the particular. It’s always a challenge 
to find this position between closeness to the phenomenon and the
distance of the Begriff, Adorno would say, Begriff und Sache, without
operating in violent abstractions. In Beer’s maxim, I see the problem
that systems that center solely on operability and self-reproduction
lose sight of any purpose, that’s their apoliticality, which I find
deeply problematic, as it is easily instrumentalized politically.
That’s close to the circularity we have around generative AI and the
ideology of total scalability, rather than using a particular dataset
to train a particular model for a democratic end. Ironically, in the
context of Cybersyn, Beer kept track of both––mostly at least––he
rarely lost sight of the political purpose of what he tried to
accomplish there, using cybernetics. That’s where I still see the
potential of his approach.

Regarding my work and the way it reads philosophical positions, this
is why I focused so much on authors: I did not ascribe to a concrete
philosophical viewpoint, as I did not want to hypostatize. That is
also why I chose a genealogical method, both to describe and
understand the development of cybernetics, and the development of
critiques of cybernetics–– and the intertwinements between both. I do
reflect on the normative critiques made at the time, and uttered, for
instance, against the new terminology of systems that, as Habermas and 
Wolf-Dieter Narr argued, was too abstract and too far removed from
social phenomena to account for. As they argued, the language was
completely detached from political processes or from political
questions concerning inequality, participation, and resistance.
Importantly, some of these critiques emerged at a time when
cybernetics and its central premises were still subject to debate.
This was at a time when there was a distance between cybernetics and
its critics; between the phenomenon in question and the critical
theories that discussed it; between, as it were, the object and the
subject, more broadly.

The landscape changed with the advent of cybernetic capitalism and
the personal computer, when control tools seemed to have been
‘decentralized’ and dismantled from the technocratic control of the
state. Critics, all of a sudden, seemed to be somewhat part of, or in
the midst of, what they criticized. And that was very consciously
reflected upon, as a central dilemma that provoked the question of
where and how to find a place from where to observe critically, and
find a distance to the object, by each of the theorists I engaged
with, from Anders to Habermas to Baudrillard and Tiqqun––as is well
known, Deleuze and Guattari borrowed the term “plane” from Bateson,
which shows how they integrated cybernetic thinking whilst at the same 
time attempting to transcend its circularity. Each critic found a
different answer. Anders formulated a philosophy of critical
exaggeration in the context of his idea of a moral phantasy
(moralische Phantasie). Habermas sought to limit the
systemic-technological colonization of the lifeworld through
communicative reasoning. Baudrillard used the figure of the Möbius
strip to describe the clashing of binaries in the course of what could 
be termed a digital binarization in the midst of his somewhat ironic,
provocative mode of critique. And Tiqqun utilized strategic tactics of 
anti-net resistance, as it were–forms of noise production,
interruptions. The external observer problem, as problematic by both
second-order cybernetics and poststructuralism, is not easily
attainable nowadays. But this does not mean we have to throw a
critically self-reflective (not self-circular!) objectivity or a
process of critical enlightenment (in Foucault’s sense of interrupting 
the hegemonic forms of being-governed) away, as Heinz von Foerster at
points seemingly does, who to my account throws away conceptuality as
such for some lose account of “cybernethics”, as he terms it, which,
however, appears random to me at points.

When Adorno claims that there is objectivity in suffering and that
this is the condition of all truth, this focus can attain and preserve a particular form of ethical objectivity that can survive the clash of 
the subject-object distinction. My problem with second-order
cybernetics is that it starts from the system and returns to it in a
recursive, not reflective, form. The system comes first, always––
whereas in an ethics of alterity perspective, what is named the Other, 
the Third, or the “Nichtidentische”, with Adorno (who, to my account,
shares some affinities with an ethics of alterity), plays an entirely
different role. This is where ethics starts: precisely from some place 
that transcends the system, from some Other that remains unknowable.
Cybernetic and post-structuralism are therefore, to my account, very
distinct from each other, also with regard to their thinking of
futurity.

GL: Cybernetics, as the art of controlling the context, failed.
Overload is systemic. As Stiegler warns, the danger of entropy is
imminent. Can we still ‘steer’ and adapt to these new circumstances?

AVN: What we currently observe is close to your argument that we are
approaching the extinction internet moment, where networks, the
internet as such, and ‘smart’ systems are simply not working anymore,
where they produce their moments of “enshittification”, bullshit or
slop, where they reproduce racism, systemically, and operate on
steroids, where they reproduce and intensify an overload of
extraction. AI hallucinations and Elon Musk’s recent construction of
35 illegal gas turbines in Memphis to power his xAI are the most
obvious examples of the system’s irrationality. We’re approaching a
tipping point, not just with regard to the climate catastrophe but
also with regard to the evolution of the internet. Both these dynamics 
intersect.

Regarding the history of cybernetics, adaptation narratives began to
change when the term was no longer solely associated with
stabilization, as it was in the early days of the Cold War, as its
Greek origin “kybernetes” suggests (meaning “steersman”). Although
back then it was, of course, also connected to entropy and moments of
crisis, it was always concerned with creating order from noise and
diminishing chaos. Yet, during the dotcom bubble and the early
instabilities of the new economy, it became clear that cybernetics was 
not necessarily a technique of stabilization but rather produced its
own instabilities; this is why Virilio spoke of “integral accidents”.
This moment coincides with the becoming hegemonic of the second-order
paradigm, as well as with the advent of complexity, chaos, and systems 
theory.

What we face is a series of attempts to solve ongoing
politico-economic crises with adaptation techniques. These, however,
not only provoke further problems of adaptation (think of climate
engineering “techno-fix” strategies) but also reproduce the systemic
status quo without really addressing the causes of systemic
injustices, inequalities, etc. Technology in this context is never a
solution to a problem; it is always a (cheap, and only supposed)
solution and a problem. The question then, if we take seriously the
fact that solutionism is manufacturing problems, is how to find a
better way to address the adaptation and steering problems of the
present. The response here should be to not frame political problems
as adaptation problems: we have, for a long time, made this mistake.
Take nudging, which was prevalent in the aftermath of the 2008
financial crisis. Nudging is a neo-cybernetic technique of governing
and adapting that ignores the systemic causes of the crises we have
faced and still face today, positing the illusion of a
post-ideological world. It is no coincidence that nudging was widely
used in smart city initiatives, in which citizens were sold
“smartness” and related concepts. Instead, we need to politicize
narratives of cybernetics and adaptation. Cybernetics is connected to
a post-political illusion, one that describes or creates systems in
such a way that they are–– allegedly–– technological alternatives to
politics. But the problem lies precisely in the depoliticization of
adaptation.

GL: I am glad you ‘limited’ your study to the role of critique in the
overall roll-out of ‘cybernetization’ of society. This is arguably
only one side of the story. The other is the split in 1955 and the
separation between the feedback-networking side and the artificial
intelligence direction, led by Minsky and others. You did very well in 
keeping the ‘knowledge’ part of machine learning out of your
investigations. Given the current hype around large language models
and AI, how do you defend your choice? How do you relate to the
current AI onslaught?

AVN: There is a connection between the different traditions and
lineages of cybernetics and cybernetisation and what is currently
termed AI or generative AI. First, Wiener’s work in the context of the so-called Anti-Aircraft-Predictor develops an early form of predictive analytics on the grounds of anticipations of the future that are based 
on the collection of past data on behavior, in his context, regarding
the directions of enemy aircraft. This technique remains relevant for
LLMs that rely on probabilistic assessments and stochastic methods.
Also, we should not forget that McCulloch and Pitts developed the
first neural net at the beginning of the 1940s, with the aim of
simulating the brain’s behavior; similar to Ashby’s construction of
the homeostat, a model of a living brain. There is a link between
early cybernetics’ accounts of the brain-computer-nexus and notions of AGI–so I was not at all surprised, for instance, when Marc Andreessen, the right-wing-libertarian author of the now infamous “Techno-Optimist 
Manifesto,” quotes McCulloch and Pitts’s seminal text from 1943 to
claim that the “revolution” of AGI builds on McCulloch’s and Pitts’s
proposition. This is entirely superficial, but I still think it is
interesting that he refers to them. What Andreessen means here is: In
the early forties, the idea was to imitate the human brain, and we
have forgotten that, later on, with narrow AI and now with projects
aiming for AGI, superintelligence, etc. We are back to building that.
Is it a coincidence that Anthropic’s Claude is named after Claude
Shannon? The Shannon, whose mathematical information theory was
instrumental to cybernetics, especially to Wiener’s and Deutsch’s
work? I don’t think so.

GL: The last part of your study describes the past ‘internet’
decades, defined by omnipresent connectivity, wearables, and
platforms. One element I would like to take out here is ‘the social’.
You discuss Alex Pentland’s Social Physics and Tiqqun’s Cybernetic
Hypothesis. The way algorithms work on social media is how billions
experience the feedback mechanism today. It is hard to imagine how
social relations in the near future will not be shaped by code. How do 
you envision ‘the social’ as part of a form of governance that is
transparent and not extractive?

AVN: I would probably not call it transparent in the first place.
Rather, we have to think of the social beyond social media, and beyond 
mere connectivity, and what we would need, among other things, is a
different imaginary based on a different terminology. I always felt
close to an ethics of alterity, in a Derridean, maybe also Levinasian
sense. Levinas thinks responsibility in the sense of being able to
respond. It is a response to a demand placed on me by the Other, and
this demand is asymmetrical: it places the Other first, which is
important, as it goes far beyond a mere network-based approach to
(supposed) decentrality and horizontality. Response-ability understood 
in this sense can never be reduced to feedback. Yet, it is equally
important not to stop here. For Levinas, the ethical relationleads to
politics through the inevitable integration of a “Third”. The
political, understood in this sense, is a disruption of the ethical
relation, but it is necessary to offer the possibility for justice in
being; in that sense, it is also related to the inevitably political
tasks of organization and conceptualization.
The question for me would be of how to think through a response-able
politics in this sense, for the current age in which the social as a
category is corroded, hollowed out, by the bad sociality and the
schlechte Unendlichkeit of social media. Such a response-able politics 
can be close to your (and Ned Rossiter’s) approach to “organized
networks”: creating relations that are not reducible to mere
connectivity, giving subjects the space to evolve beyond being reduced 
to nodes in a network. Next to the pragmatic question of organization
(and politics, for that matter), we have to pay equal attention to the 
question of relationality and sociality: Is there a way to reimagine
how we relate to each other that goes beyond connectivity?

GL: According to Chris Anderson, the plenitude of data provokes the
“end of theory”. From now on, the program is the theory. Together with 
Felix and others, you are running the Critical Data Lab. How do you
see data in relation to theory? Should philosophers indeed know more
than just prompting and have classic programming skills? How do you
envision a critical tech education? German institutions are
notoriously conservative and behind in this respect. Should philosophy 
still be taught the way Adorno and Arendt once gave their seminars?
What are your early experiences in Oldenburg in this respect?

AWN: Tech critique today needs to pay close attention to the
developments regarding tech-fascism. This should be the first task,
and these issues are also at the heart of the seminars I am teaching,
often together with Felix. What we try to make clear is that we need
to investigate the manifold forms of power involved in
techno-authoritarianism–from communicative power (think of Musk’s
propaganda on X), to geopolitical power (such as Musk’s usage of
Starlink in the context of the Ukrainian war), and financial power (to 
point to the obvious). Next is to come up with multiple ways of
resisting these forms of power. I am sympathetic to the now-emerging
AI refusal movements around the globe and to the revival of critique
in the Luddite tradition (which I do not view as a refusal of tech
tout court, though). It is important that we give the protesters
currently protesting the construction of new data centers a voice, and that we also address our media coverage of their tactics. I would like to point here to Karen Hao’s list of organizations and movements. Take 
the Cables of Resistance Conference in Berlin. It is important to
understand that a whole new movement that politicizes tech critically
is currently underway.

It is equally important that we correct the misconception that
digitization is an immaterial process by examining the materialities
of the digital. Many current forms of so-called AI are regressive, not 
progressive; ineffective, not effective; centralizing, not
decentralizing; closing, not opening. On that note, responding to
these powers requires different forms of critique: deconstructionist
techniques, ideological critique, and discourse analysis can help
unravel the tactics and strategies of Big Tech actors, for instance.
But methods from computational social sciences can help here as well,
for instance, in identifying new ideological narratives in the context 
of communities such as Effective Altruism and the TESCREAL bundle.
Regarding EA, narratives about AI have, for instance, shifted to
“superintelligence” narratives around the time Bostrom’s book of the
same name was published a few years ago, prompting EA to shift to
longtermism, as Carolin Müller (from ZeMKI in Bremen) recently argued. 
Several of these narrative nuances have shaped AI regulations, so it
is vital to understand which discursive dynamics are at play. So, yes, 
(critical) data can also play a role in informing critique, I would
say, also with regard to making things visible–think of projects such
as Data in Feminicide in this respect. I think here we need to be
creative in developing new methods as well.

I am fortunate in Oldenburg to be teaching bright, excellent students
who are well-read in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as in
post-structuralism. Many of them are deeply concerned about
contemporary developments regarding the rise of
techno-authoritarianism. They are engaged and open to critical
thinking through contemporary phenomena surrounding the digital
condition together. Many of my seminars are very experimental;
recently, I used a very open format, which I co-taught with my
colleague Tilman Hannemann, a scholar of religious studies, to examine 
the religious aspects of techno-fascism. We invited Carolin Müller,
who conducts ethnographic research in EA circles, to present her work. 
The idea for the seminar emerged from the shared conviction that we
can learn from each other’s perspectives and use trans-disciplinary
approaches and methods to better understand the complexities of
particular phenomena.

GL: An element of future theory could be the regression of
cybernetics up to the point where civic computing collapses and
returns to its military origins. Back to Friedrich Kittler? You use
the term ‘authoritarian cybernetics’ for this. Do you see a need to
move on from all the platform blues and address the more urgent issues 
of our time, like ‘antifa’ resistance against AfD and the
militarization of society after the Ukraine invasion by Russia? In my
recent work, I have pointed out the violent turn in internet culture.
Is the subtle term ‘governmentality’ still appropriate in such a dire
situation? Can we still state that power has disappeared into
invisible infrastructures? All these contradictory developments seem
to accelerate and collide at the same time.

AVN: I am afraid we are already advancing well into this stage. To my
account, it is no coincidence that Palantir is openly speaking of the
new era of deterrence, whereas this new deterrence will be, as Alex
Karp is very explicit about in his propaganda, AI-based. Several of
the major themes of first-order cybernetics recur currently with
regard to AI weapons systems: predicting the future to anticipate the
enemy’s moves, etc. In a promotional video, Palantir recently
proclaimed that they help address the challenge of “navigating the fog 
of war,” which directly alludes to the navigability metaphor central
to cybernetic and neo-cybernetic steering techniques. The centrality
of cybernetics becomes visible, too, when Musk currently draws on
cybernetics implicitly when he speaks of “cyber-powers” in relation to 
his company Neuralink and the improvement of brain-computer
interfaces, when he dubs people as “always already cyborgs”, or when
he speaks of X as a “cybernetic collective superintelligence”.

Equally, Zuckerberg speaks of companies as “learning systems”––which
is a central figure of second-order cybernetics––while Andreessen
directly alludes to cybernetics in his Techno-Optimist-Manifesto. This 
is not mere rhetoric and is not only reflective of the influence
cybernetics has had on the counterculture that then shaped
cyberculture, which, in turn, shaped Silicon Valley. To my mind, there 
is more to that; in fact, I do think that we are witnessing the
reemergence of central motifs that were prevalent, especially in
first-order cybernetics. Although we also witness a fusion of both
forms of cybernetics, I would say: Think of the way in which Musk uses X, of course, He uses it as a quite centralized form of propaganda, in 
a sense, but this form of propaganda is still using feedback, also
horizontal feedback, for messages and content to spread. So
centralized modes of steering and governing are more prevalent in
current forms of cybernetics, but modes of circularity and
self-recursion remain part of the whole picture. In my account, this
fusion of centralized and decentralized forms of control is central to 
cybernetic authoritarianism.

GL: You may know Made in China, Designed in California, Criticized in
Europe. How do you respond to this tragic role of Europe that has
reduced its role to the legal work of the world’s tech regulator?
These days, Berlin is not exactly perceived as the global capital of
free thinking. Is Europe tired and provincial? How can we envision a
vital culture of criticism that is not bitter and does not arrive a
decade too late with remarks on the side? Is Germany still the right
place to develop a philosophy of technology for the 21st century?

AVN: A philosophy of technology for the 21st century would most
certainly have to involve the perspectives of those who are mostly
affected by the negative impact of current digital systems. This is a
perspective that I am trying to hint at as well at the end of my book: 
That we need to make visible what is usually hidden from view with
regard to cybernetic capitalism, and that includes of course the
exploitative labor that is the basis of current AI systems, and the
ecological costs of LLMs, for instance, including the communities that 
are mostly affected by them.

We won’t solve these structural issues with ethics committees. You
are right to point out that our legal systems are simply not fast
enough or well-equipped enough to adequately regulate these
technologies. A ban on big tech lobbying might be worth considering as 
an additional measure in this context, given the extent of lobbying
efforts in recent years and their influence on AI regulations. We have 
to come up with ways to democratize these systems from the ground up,
a way of democratization that includes the full stack. Your concept of stacktivism is to the point here, and I am also thinking of people who 
have recently worked on the Euro Stack framework. One task is also to
bring together the various groups currently mobilizing against AI. If
we come up with ways to democratically govern these technologies, the
question of regulation is less relevant–logically, as these systems
would be designed democratically, from the ground up. It is important
to emphasize that these democratic structures already exist, think of
the Fediverse. Not all here is optimal, but this can serve as a basis
for the course. Yet, to arrive at a more democratic digital society,
we also need to cultivate a different sociotechnical imaginary when
using and speaking about these technologies.

—

Interview with links:

https://networkcultures.org/geert/2026/06/13/interview-with-anna-verena-nosthoff/.

Info on her German book:

https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/anna-verena-nosthoff-kybernetik-und-kritik-t-9783518300794.



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