Information Technology Reference
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they are not a priori ridiculous. Also, unlike their cybernetic predecessors,
the contemporary projects we will be looking at are fragmented; their inter-
relations are not obvious, even to their practitioners. Aligning them with a
cybernetic lineage is a way of trying to foreground such interrelations in the
present—to produce a world.
The last chapter, chapter 8, seeks to summarize what has gone before in a
novel way, by pulling together various cross-cutting themes that surface in dif-
ferent ways in some or all of the preceding chapters. More important, it takes
further the thought that the history of cybernetics might help us imagine a
future different from the grim visions of today.
