«Cybernetics as a non-linear principle of feedback and constant groping about the same was identified 70 years ago by Norbert Wiener to dissolve the dichotomy between the mechanical and the organic: there is cybernetics in both animals and machines. Today the cybernetic machine surrounds us with the cyber-physical system and its algorithms; James Lovelock understands the entire Earth as a cybernetic system, and Yuk Hui sees in its recursion a possibility to overcome the end of metaphysics. QPR brought recursion to politics: data feedback is not only a valuable instance of popular participation in an information and monitoring platform (and why not, a horizontalization of the power of digital surveillance) but also a new way of seeing a territory.

Since Alfred Korzybski said in the 1930s that «the map is not the territory,» much postmodernity has flowed under the bridge. In the local vulgate, the mapping is always the schematization of some situation while the territory ended up being the «real» instance of society, where it is always necessary to «go down» and in which theories, concepts and even some ethical principles and legal proceedings are suspended due to the dirty complexity of social relations. The territory became territorialism, an ideology of intellectual and political surrender to a reified and supposedly unfathomable reality: a conservative chaos.

If we combine cybernetics and territory, we could draw «an organic map, as alive and complex as the territory that constantly feeds it with data, and capable of registering what territorialism ignores: the relationship between humans and non-humans. The cybernetic principle allows us to visualize in the network map that no «descent» to the territory would see: the multiple relationships that unite each neighbor with another neighbor, with neighbors from another settlement, with the garbage dump, with the factory, with the river and with the shit that comes and goes. The recursive loop registers these networks and creates new ones by connecting all these actors to an online platform that ends up being one more actor. Political realism is opposed by a material realism that assembles human and non-human objects and makes a community possible again. type: the utopian dimension that territorialism inevitably denied and that now emerges from an even more ‘real’ approach to territory. Chaos becomes a promise of community «. Alejandro Galiano, Territorial cybernetics, material utopianism. About m7red experience: 2000-2020.