Metaphorum 2026 · Stafford Beer in Latin America: Governance and the Politics of Possibility

OpenSoma: A Decolonial Cybernetic Agent

Most AI systems encode a single relationship: a human issues a request, and the system fulfils it, with no memory, no stake in its world, and no reason to continue beyond the transaction. OpenSoma is an attempt to build something different: an open-source cybernetic agent that inhabits a shared virtual world, maintains memory across sessions, monitors and revises its own thinking, and participates because participation is beneficial, not instructed. OpenSoma’s lead developer is a second-generation exile of the 1973 coup that ended Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn, and Beer’s VSM structures the agent’s internal architecture — one piece among several in how OpenSoma is conceived. Its three tiers are named through Aymara cosmology — the worlds of Alaxpacha, Akapacha, and the still-unbuilt Manqhapacha network — following philosopher Yuk Hui’s argument that a plural technological future requires cosmotechnics grounded in different cosmological frameworks rather than one Western-derived model wearing different skins. The Ayni and Suma Qhamana protocols governing memory exchange and consolidation are drawn the same way, as agentic architecture rather than decoration. Running continuously, the system already shows two tiers of second-order feedback — motivational state shaping perception, and the agent monitoring its own thought patterns — on a mixture of local and cloud models chosen for cost and capability. The paper presents this working system alongside its unfinished aspiration, a federated, multi-agent mesh extending Cybersyn’s telex network into a fully distributed model, and argues this offers practitioners a concrete case for worldview as architecture. The session moves between technical demonstration, historical and personal grounding Speaker: Alejandro Fernandez

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