Everything

When organic machines get wedded to mechanical machines, the synergy called cybernetics raises the human animal to a whole new level. On a broader plane, cybernetics reaches beyond mere flesh and machine to embrace the technologies of communication, language, electrical impulses, complex systems, and thought itself. Drawn from a Greek phrase meaning “to steer or govern,” cybernetic practices employ complex interactive systems – computers, electronics, prosthetics, mathematical formulae, linguistics, philosophy, even social dynamics – to extend the practitioner’s control… first over his own reality, and then over the reality of other systems and entities.

Essentially, the cybernetic practice views Creation as a vast machine whose systems can be understood and manipulated with sufficient dedication. For many adherents – like the members of Iteration X – that dedication includes merging their bodies with mechanical components. Other practitioners, though, use cybernetics as a theoretical construct – a model through which calculations, psychology, symbols, and external devices and machines (as opposed to implanted ones) can bend probability (through Entropy), change minds (the Mind Sphere), transform materials (Life and Matter), channel energies (Forces and Prime), and redefine temporal physics… or, in plain English, reroute Time.

Despite the dated overuse of “cyber” as an adjective, cybernetics remains a bleeding-edge discipline. Rooted in Chinese, Greek, and Arab technologies, this discipline blossomed during the Industrial Revolution and hasn’t stopped blooming yet. In the 21st century, whole nations are composed of cyborgs – smart-phone-using, video-watching, TV-nurtured, socially networked machine-people whose relationships and realities are defined by the 24/7 interface of our Information Era. And although the science-fiction landscape of depersonalized drones looks nothing like the world as we know it now, every element of life in our new millennium depends upon a complex interplay of cybernetic forces that very few people truly understand… and that even fewer – aside from certain technomancers – can control.

Associated Paradigms: A Mechanistic Cosmos; Everything is Data; Everything’s an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake; Might is Right; One-Way Trip to Oblivion; Tech Holds All Answers

Associated Abilities: Academics, Biotech, Computer, Crafts, Energy Weapons, Hypertech, Media, Politics, Science, Technology

Common Instruments: Books, brain/ computer interface, computers and IT gear, devices and machines, gadgets, inventions, laboratories, languages, mass media, nanotech, numbers and numerology, weapons, writing and inscriptions