Active Noise Control: Cybernetics, Information Theory, and the Financialization of Randomness

In the second half of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon’s 1948 definition of noise as the enemy of communication became hegemonic basis of polities, economies, emergent network technologies and their mutual dependence. This cybernetic conjuncture was initially characterised by its exclusion of randomness from an external environment, but a series of developments expanding Shannon’s engineering paradigm to almost every human science also changed the relation between system and noise. In the twenty-first century, the cybernetic precept of control over probabilities and risks has been attenuated as an emergent conjuncture discovered ways to extract value – significance and profit – from previously excluded randomness. Analysing the history of cybernetic theory and practice since 1948, we propose that as defining technologies became distributed, the site of exploitation shifted from control to contingency. The interdisciplinary expansion of cybernetics and its powerful model of an immediately applicable technoscience capable of driving political, economic and cultural change has led to the assimilation of randomness, once the driver of radical aesthetic and political movements, into the core business of contemporary rule and finance.