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channel, however crude, would thus be opened for mass debate—or, better,
a dance of agency—with the government. Again, policy making could thus
emerge in real-time interaction.
Like many of the cybernetic devices we have been exploring, these alge-
donic meters of Beer's were at once serious and amusing, and even startling
in spanning the gap between the two. Their origins, I would guess, lay in the
clapometers and swingometers of the BBC's popular music TV shows and
election reporting.
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An interesting feature is that they were truly algedonic in
being able to register pleasure as well as pain, unlike the algedonic signals in
the basic VSM, which were regarded as warnings that something was wrong.
Though Beer initially conceived their use in mass communication, they could
obviously be deployed in much more limited contexts—in small meetings,
say, where some planning group reported to its constituents, or at factory
gates as feedback from the workers to management.
Beer's son Simon, an electrical engineer, built a prototype system “of ten
algedonic meters, linked by a single wire in a loop through a large summation
meter” (Beer 1981, 284), and took it out to Chile, where experiments were
done on its use with a group of fifteen friends. These friends, however, “rap-
idly learned how to rig the system. They joined in plots to 'throw' the lecturer
by alternating positive and negative responses, for instance” (286). The alge-
donic meter was, in this instance, too much fun. And one can easily imagine
less amusing forms of rigging—the political party instructing its supporters
to slam the indicator to the left whatever an opponent said—or even argu-
ments about whether “unhappy” should be at the left or the right. This form
of feedback was thus never introduced in Chile, leaving Beer to reflect that its
design was a tricky problem and that more cybernetic research was needed.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to stay with them just a little longer.
Beer contrasted his algedometers favorably with another and more familiar
form of quasi-real-time feedback from the people to government: question-
naires and opinion polls (Beer 1974a, 334-38). From Beer's perspective, the
great thing about the algedonic meters was that they were inarticulate, word-
less. They measured “happiness,” but the nature of happiness and its causes
were left undefined. They simply indicated a positive or negative response on
some undefined scale. Beer's enthusiasm for this mode of communication had
to do with his intense interest in performance and his associated suspicion
of representational knowledge. The trouble with opinion polls, Beer argued,
is that the domain of inquiry is circumscribed by the questions asked (them-
selves framed by politicians, journalists, academics, and so on) and lacks va-
riety. Articulated questions might therefore be able to determine how people
