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

Useful Art as a Toolkit for Cybernetic Change: A Viable Systems Model for a Better World Today

This paper asks whether past utopias can serve as a portal for reimagining how today's high-powered technologies — AI, quantum computing, and beyond — might be redirected toward building a better world. Rather than one-size-fits-all, top-down, financialised solutions imposed by tech bros and populist leaders, it proposes a decentralised model rooted in real-world local innovation: linked micro-activisms empowered with ground-up capabilities, enabling dialogue to genuinely reach power. Central to this inquiry is the Cybersyn archive, approached as a site of latent potential for clarifying our present predicament. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's insistence that excavating past utopian dreams is a legitimate — even necessary — method for imagining alternatives, the paper revisits Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and the wider Cybersyn project as a resource for confronting today's complex technological landscape. A key comparative thread runs through the 1970s Latin American World Model (LAWM), developed in response to the Club of Rome's report that the world could not sustain its current trajectory. Where the Club of Rome saw limits, LAWM offered a qualified yes — if certain structural conditions were addressed. This paper argues that new global reports are, in effect, saying the same thing again, and that LAWM's logic remains instructive. Finally, the paper reactivates Marx's concept of the 'General Intellect' to theorise decentralised activist networks as fluid, self-regulating systems — and proposes Useful Art as the toolkit binding these local activisms into a coherent, networked, decentralised political economy. These are ideas which, in one form or another, I've been playing with for over twenty years, drawn together here as a proposal for thinking cybernetically about change, today. Speaker: John Byrne — Liverpool John Moores University

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