Richard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey, “Controlling People” (Australian Academic Press, 2015)

New Books in Sociology · May 4, 2018 · 1h 11m

The word “control”, with its seemingly instantaneous mental associations with forms of top-down oppression, is one that makes even some cyberneticians nervous and is often downplayed in contemporary descriptions of the field. Perhaps this is one reason why William Powers’ fundamentally cybernetic Perceptual Control Theory, or PCT, has, in recent decades, continued its substantial development outside the disciplinary boundaries of cybernetics proper. But, in fact, PCT stands as one of the most robust and fully developed strands of the cybernetic legacy which, through its impact on psychology…