“When I say that any system is in control, I mean that it is ultra-stable: capable of adapting smoothly to unpredicted changes. It has within its structure a proper deployment of requisite variety.”

It’s this thing that we were warned about. It’s this thing that we knew could happen. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, warned about it as a possibility. And despite all the warnings, and despite all of the cautions, we just walked right into it, and we created mass behavior-modification regimes out of our digital networks. We did it out of this desire to be both cool socialists and cool libertarians at the same time.