Philosophical essay on yin‑yang and cybernetics with no actionable claims

that comes afterwards, as the crops absorb water and grow. The idea of a balance of yin and yang is among the oldest in Chinese philosophy. “When heaven and earth were formed, they divided into yin and yang,” the Huainanzi, one of China’s greatest political texts explains. “Yang is generated from yin and yin is generated from yang.” Hangzhou became a capital of yin. It produced perhaps some of the greatest Chinese philosophy and poetry and art. Greatness emerged from that stillness - and, even today, to sit by West Lake and drink a cup of the Dragon Well tea produced on the nearby hillsides is to have every one of your senses flooded by tranquility. That yin-yang balance gives us, in a sense, a way to understand that split power ona network by seeing it is not, really, split. Network power is energetic and wild at the ends, with all the creative energy of a world filled with devices, empowered human dreams, and the violent slips of old balances. Yang. But at the center it is dense, still, even quiet with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power. The computer science pioneer Claude Shannon saw information in 1949 as wild, uncertain, and pulsing with the instability of an entropic system. Yang. The machine architect Norbert Weiner, writing at nearly the same moment in 1948, saw the digital age differently - as an expression of stability and structure. Yin.1° His vision for a digital order, what he called “cybernetics,” emerged from the Greek concept of kibernetes - the orderly steering of a ship through sometimes chaotic waters. We now know: the humming webs around us are both. They are ordered and structured. 1°? Good and evil. Power in this connected age is concentrated and distributed. Each feeds the other. The crops need the thunderstorm; the thunderstorm feeds from the heat radiated off the land. Or: The yang violence of the Manchurian wars bred the conditions for the yin renaissance in Hangzhou. The massive distribution of connected points creates revolutions, economic disruption, crackling innovation. But it also creates a need for more centralization, more agreement on protocols or platforms. This idea of opposites balancing into a whole is not unique to Chinese civilization. You can find it too in ancient Greek or Roman tradition. Heraclitis, for instance, insisting, “All things are one.” Or in the view that there can be no love without hate, no stillness without chaos, no beauty without the unbeautiful and fortunately - as we're about to see - no destruction without creation. 102 The computer science pioneer: See D. Bawden and L. Robinson, “Waiting for Carnot”: Information and Complexity. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66: 2177-2186; Norbert Wiener Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1948); Warren Weaver, “Science and complexity”, American Scientist, 36(4), 536 103 They are ordered: Carlos Gershenson, Peter Csermely, Peter Erdi, Helena Knyazeva, and Alexander Laszlo,“The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research”, arXiv:1308.6317v3, 23 Sept 2013 76 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018308