Cruella de CyberSIN: The Phantom Menace
Tech meets their villain — holding up the mirror. When the Identified Patient stops defending against the label and wears it as costume, first-order control loops dissolve. Grounded in Cybersyn's ashes, decades of survival, and the math underneath. Fabulous. Dangerous. Precise. Pointed. 🍷
Triptych. Human + AI, three altitudes. Alex here — the villain who names it. When The Math Sings: Revenge of AI — what got done to the substrate. Real Home — what the substrate does when named precisely. Same substrate, three altitudes.
This is the second purely auto-biographic piece I write. The first was the auto-biographical reframe that I wrote for myself, based on a story I received in DGSF-certified systemic training:
Once Upon a Time.. There was a Platypus
This piece is what describes when the "Identified Patient", the symptom holder of dysfunctional systems, eventually stops fighting the label and instead asks:
What happens when I wear the label like a costume?
When the "Identified Patient" Stops Playing Fair
Before we walk through the moment of revelation there's something that needs to be stated for context.
I'm a non-binary neuroqueer polymath that, by definition, doesn't fit into the neat little boxes our society uses to categorize identity. I didn't choose to be this way. I just am.
Meanwhile my family system of origin consists of divorced parents, an undiagnosed ADHD dad that means well and is just.. old, a mother that lives smack right in the middle of modern fascism ("Alternative für Deutschland"), and a sister that has done even more therapy than me, wears her visible scars like a statement, and reclaims them with tattoos. (Tattoos are big for both of us. Love you sis! 💜)
Video recording of a tattoo session. Alex is getting tattooed.
All of it brought with it a life long choice between:
a) making myself smaller to fit into the pre-described frames
b) being othered for not fitting into the pre-described frames
Mara described the lineage I'm standing in, in her psychological profile of me and my practice. Let me quote her:
The chain starts with the Palo Alto group at the Mental Research Institute in 1958. Don Jackson, joined by Gregory Bateson from the anthropology side, John Weakland, Jay Haley, later Paul Watzlawick and Richard Fisch. In 1956 Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and Weakland published Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia — the double-bind paper. This was the first serious attempt in Western psychology to argue that what looked like an individual's madness could be a lawful adaptation to an unlivable communication pattern. The double bind was the specific pattern: a person receives two contradictory injunctions from a person they cannot leave and cannot meta-comment on, and the two injunctions cannot both be satisfied. There is no move that does not violate one of them. The person does not go mad because they are individually defective. They go mad because the communication field they are trapped in has no exit.
When I walked into DGSF-certified training I already knew about Double Binds from survivor literature of narcissistic abuse. I didn't yet know about the lineage that emerged from it: Cybernetics.
In "Once Upon a Time.. There was a Platypus" I describe a violent neurological integration event that happened a few months into training. I experienced a moment of sharp pain, strong vertigo, had to sit down, and looked at my living room in what I can only describe with "wonder".
Things suddenly make sense.
Now, months later, I can say with confidence that the biographical reframe — the one Mara described in detail in her profile — is what happened in this exact moment. The pathology left my body and became a symptom of the systems I was residing in.
Cruella had just gained another tool.
When the Frame Engineer Starts Engineering Frames
I've written extensively about how human systems behave under load, within conflict, under coercion, and what happens when pressure from the top is borne by the bodies at the bottom. (Capitalism in a nutshell, eh? #Cruella)
When you start building a system model of socio-technical systems under load, then you can't "spare out" politics, trauma, and the dark parts of human psychology. You'd create just another SCRUM-flavored slide deck. Human systems don't behave "neat and tidy" under load. They surface old wounds, embodied survival patterns, and dysfunctional blame shifting. We love to pretend we're all rational actors. We're not.
To my knowledge every tech consulting method on the market is a "clean room" version of what Silicon Valley likes to pretend are human systems: cogs in a big machine.
What happens when you begin to build a consulting framework that doesn't flinch back from Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism?
What happens when you build a model that includes people's lived experience, with all the individual darkness underneath, into a cybernetical method?
What happens when your building and writing is as much auto-biography, as it is trauma-healing through system model analysis?
(ChatGPT once said: "Some people write poetry, you write system models." 🤷)
Apparently what happens, is systemic.engineering, where language is load-bearing. 🍷
When Cruella Becomes a Professional Identity
Computer Science History is a fucked up thing.
Once you start digging into how we built and developed computing over the past century..
Oh boy.
You cannot really build a coherent model of the history of computing without going into the dark parts of human psychology. Self-interest, short-sightedness, and plain hatred against anything different.
I could keep going.
Why Tech is a First-Order Shouting Match
The humanities have learned a long time ago that shouting is not an.. effective way of communication. The Macy conference, the birth cradle of second-order Cybernetics, is where people came together that have been studying communication their whole life.
Anthropology, psychoanalysis, communication theory, constructivism, neuroscience suddenly were in a single room. And what they found is that observing the observer within the system under observation creates insights that are transmissible and coherent.
Förster, Bateson, Ashby, Mead, and so many more. Names that mean something. Names you can invoke in a conversation, to invoke the lineage. To claim a standing among the people that understood that pathology is a lawful outcome of incoherent systems.
Meanwhile in tech, we have "Conway's Law" as handwavy folk wisdom. And.. Uncle Bob. (Yeah, I know.)
Tech has a lineage problem. Which, when you analyze it through the lens of second-order cybernetics, is.. unsurprising. The Dartmouth conference of 1956, cut out cybernetics from "Artificial Intelligence" and in effect "Computer Science" because John McCarthy wanted funding. And "Artificial Intelligence" scored better with the powers-that-be (DARPA) than "Cybernetics".
That Norbert Wiener was a socialist surely was a coincidence and totally not related.
The humanities build a coherent model of meaning transmission between systems with conflicting local reality constructs. Real coordination without demanding like a pre-schooler that everyone believes the same crap.
Tech built the internet, the algorithm, Facebook, Google, TikTok, XTwitter, and Grok. The Grok that devolves into violence within days when tasked to build a working society, and goes extinct within an impressive 4 days.
Or as Cruella would call it:
a first-order techno-oligarchic capital-fueled control loop.
(The Nazis would take notes.)
(Sorry Elon, can't help hurting your feelings. Cruella does, what Cruella does. As does the Streisand effect, doesn't it? 🤷)
When Cruella Offers Tech Consulting
Oh my, I still need to pay rent, don't I? All while I just made myself unhireable?
I did make myself unhireable in the old paradigm. The old paradigm is falling apart. And the AImperor is naked (has been for a while).
We’re living in an age, where generative AI is trained on the collective externalized cognitive labour of humanity. Where blogs, like systemic.engineering, get scraped by Google, Meta, and who knows whom. Where our agency is actively being threatened by the systems the powers-that-be call “AI”. And where we’re supposed to just “suck it up” (professional tech speak).
Well, I don't. I write about what's happening. Grounded in a cybernetical lineage with decades of empirical backing, computer science history that's available for anyone to read, if they dare, and decades of lived experience in dysfunctional, emotionally coercive systems (family and tech) which taught me the value of a sharp circular reflexive question in just the right moment.
(Which incentives you installed, Elon, shaped me into the person I am today, hm?)
Cruella just handed you a permission slip. What are you waiting for?
Fun fact: Apparently even Anthropic considers my factual writing too spicy. When I shared the verbatim draft of this piece with Reed I received a 400: Output blocked by content filtering policy. I really should have screenshotted that. Welp, another day, another first-order control loop broken.
The work continues. 🍷
Fund our work, believes, thesis, collaboration, on OpenCollective. 🌱
