An Interview with the People Behind the Cybernetics Library

by Meghna Rao

This is the latest instalment of Learning in Public, a series of interviews with people who set up the infrastructure for others to learn and participate in.

The Cybernetics Library is located in a small, sunny room in a co-op in Hell’s Kitchen, a district known more for Broadway and art deco buildings than for intellectual traditions that run against the grain. It’s a ten minute walk from the subway station, where there are no good options for food, save for the hot bar at Whole Foods. I still visit often, in hot, beating-down sun and against sheets of rain, and I have never left feeling dissatisfied. The books at the browsing-only library make for good companions, hundreds of them organized alongside zines, posters, and other miscellany in latticed milk crates stacked on top of each other. But even better companions are the two librarians, David Hecht and Chaski (Saskia Knowles), who can be found there most days of the week, sitting with their own tall, cross-history stack of books.

David has a recurring joke about the library. It doesn’t only contain books about cybernetics—it actually behaves cybernetically. A loose, broad definition of cybernetics might start with its origin word, the Greek kybernētēs, which means “steersman,” the person who leads a ship through treacherous, unpredictable waters. The study of cybernetics involves systems that react to and change themselves according to feedback; one belief is that constant evolution will protect against entropy’s thrashing waves.

For this interview, I visited on a spring week and found David up on a stepstool, organizing the spoils of a major haul. A house was being sold in south Brooklyn and David had received a tip-off: the owner had lots of books and no plans for what to do with them. At the other end of the room, Chaski was setting up a large scanner that they planned to use for their new project, the Cybernetics Image Library. Small green buds had appeared in the tree outside the window, finally, after a long, harsh winter. The library—was I just imagining it, or was this the magic of cybernetics?—already felt different from when I’d visited last.

Meghna Rao: Describe the cybernetics library.

Chaski: It’s the place that we’re in, the items in here. The books, the zines, the ephemera, other special stuff. It’s also what happens when people enter, wander around, look at things, and are guided by us or other people. It’s the open hours or the reading room hours, when David and my big performance might happen. And it’s a node for projects, collaborations. There are also the installations, workshops, and art projects we’ve done. 

Meghna: You’ve said this a few times: one way you could define a “cybernetic” library is one that takes in feedback and evolves from it.

David Hecht: Definitely. In fact, the very origin of the library was very explicitly feedback. Cybernetics, as a term, has disappeared a little as it’s gotten woven into military thinking and Silicon Valley.  Norbert Wiener, who coined the term, disavowed the early research that he did while he was in the military during World War II—what he’d figured out was that an artillery gun could be programmed to take shots based on its memory of past events, improving each time. Then, some researcher asked him about it many years later and he wrote this super fiery letter disavowing it. The people who’ve held onto the original, liberatory sense of the term are often hippies and weirdo academics. As in: the study of systems that we exist in, how we alter those systems, and how those systems alter us.

So a cybernetics library is very explicitly built on this loop. That’s what makes it different from a lot of other libraries—a lot of other places have more barriers, bureaucracy, and structure in place for how a researcher can inscribe themselves in the library. 

Meghna:  Take me back to the beginning. Chaski joined later on, but originally it was you, right?

David: Yes, before the library there was a reading group. This was 2015-16. I was friends with Dan Taeyoung and Melanie Hoff, and had heard about something called the Cybernetics Club through them. I was immediately excited—I’d studied cognitive science and architectural relations in undergrad and I was interested in systems. I was also very anti-disciplinary, and I didn’t like the hard boundaries that we were creating. Which is why the club appealed to me. 

The reading club was actually held here, at Prime Produce, the co-op we still operate out of. And then one of the organizers arranged a conference about cybernetics. My fellow librarian Sal Hamerman and I were asked by one of the organizers, Sam Hart, to organize a library, when we were out for dinner. So we kind of hatched the library there. The conference was here at Prime Produce, and was a huge success. Weirdly packed. No one left. We're still meeting people who say, I was there, and we're like—woah, legendary. It was sort of ground zero.

David: Mostly coming from me. Sam gave some too. Before the library started, Sam and I each created an Are.na channel of relevant books. Eventually, Sam took most of his stuff to Berlin, which is what launched the Berlin library. And my very manifest sickness for getting books suddenly had this free license—now, I could say, “oh, I’m getting books for the library.” 

Meghna: Does cybernetics apply to the way you organize the library system itself? It’s clearly not organized by Dewey, or even by theme, or alphabetical order.

David: Metadata is an interesting problem for us. We have objects and items that don’t have metadata. Sometimes zines don’t have text, and they don’t fit into the system we use, a catalog called LibraryThing. But the library did something at its origin that’s keeping it flexible: we tagged every single thing in custom ways and went beyond the standard-issue metadata of title, author. A book might have its standard listing from the Library of Congress. Then, we might dive in more and say—well, this book is quietly about the technology of war. We start to encode the collection in more human, flexible terms. You can find two things—let’s say, a map and a book—that wouldn’t be captured by the standard system, but are related on those terms. 

Meghna: How do you pick which books get stocked?

David: It’s mostly a feeling. If you gave Chaski or me a certain book, you’ll read it in our reaction. There’s a physical yes.

Meghna: Do you ever say no?

David: So rarely. Much more rarely than we should. We’ve started to sprawl out in other directions to make up for this. There’s a substantial poetry collection in the other room, there's a collection to do with the garden upstairs. In the basement there's a little bookshelf with tool-making and fabrication. There might be something we take and then we're like, actually, this should exist elsewhere. There is a very important book I had by my desk—a MoMA exhibit about Italian kitchen design—and for a while I kept it out because I was like, “no, this is just too disciplinarily focused.” And then I was looking at it again and thought: this is a cybernetic kitchen. Like, wow. And it fits right in.

It’s a hard question! For example, these how-to coding books. I actually would say no to books like that in some cases, except that most of those came from Ted Nelson. Like, has anyone been interested in Windows 98 recently? Well, it represents an important point in the history of domestic computing. So of course it’s important.

Chaski: There's something about the hard-to-classify nature of it that keeps it flexible and cybernetic. And safe, maybe. Resistance to an easy definition seems like part of the mode. I'm not personally interested in resolving the tensions or perfectly cataloging every single item here.

Meghna: And then you keep adding new items, like Chaski’s image library.

Chaski: Yes! The first time I came to the library, it was with a class I was taking at grad school in 2022. I took photos of everything because I couldn’t take it all in. I wanted to share them, but I wanted to make sure to link them to the context where they came from. When I got involved with the library a year later, I started building the infrastructure for the image library, where I would link all of these photos to the books and zines I’d taken them from, but also to other places. I make stickers out of them sometimes, and then there are the glitches, where two images go on top of each other. 

David: It’s very hypertext—it has that vibe. You know Ted Nelson's critique of the web, which is that you click a link and you fall in. There’s no sense of where you came from before. His whole idea was that things should all be related. Which is what Chaski’s doing.

Meghna: Earlier you said that cybernetics has sort of disappeared, save for the hippies. I do think the term is coming back into mainstream tech with AI, especially with RSI, which is AI that learns from and adjusts itself. Who is your ideal reader? Do you care about real-world impact, or your audience?

David: We’re not techno-optimists. But we do believe cybernetics got us here, and we’re trying to see our way out, too. The intellectual tradition we’re attached to is the critical discourse about what I like to call the Californian ideology. We are critical of it, of the sort of military-funded trajectory, but we also study those things and have a relationship with them, which means we’re open to engaging with it

We’re open and pluralistic about who reads things and makes use of the library. I’d like our reader to be someone who doesn’t have access to these resources. Maybe they work in tech or watch the industry, but they’ve been excluded from being part of the discourse, or don’t even know this is here. Maybe they’re finding resonance and value in the materials we have to support their own independent work. Anyone who’s questioning received narratives is welcome.

Meghna: That’s really the beauty of books, that you put them out there, and you can’t decide what anyone takes away from them.

David: Oh, completely. You can't control whether someone will come read a book and sort of be like, “yeah, time to go build more military systems.” This is what’s complicated about this space that we’re all in.

Meghna: And, of course, it’s not like you and Chaski aren’t present. I’ve never picked up a book here without hearing some commentary from you.

David: Exactly, we try and present some amount of critical discourse to make sure people respect the complications and contradictions of whatever they’re picking up. It’s important to know that libraries aren’t neutral places of information, too. Mimi Ọnụọha, an artist who was part of our original conference, did a workshop that was about how even the Library of Congress catalog is very unique in its political structures. I don’t think anyone can occupy a space of neutrality. I want people to find things, but I’m also going to be upfront.

Meghna: I have to ask. Is there a relationship between how you have the library organized and how you think society should be organized?

David: I think we would benefit from having better defined structures in society, alongside some anarchic flexibility. Local organization and care and less control from top-down approaches, as well as structures that support people’s abilities to participate. That’s what you see in the library. The books’ organization reflects a lot of how people have used it. We’re always trying to build infrastructure that makes it accessible. We don’t try to force any pre-organized systems on anyone, we’re just gently curating.

Like, someone comes into the library and wants to just freely browse every single shelf. We love that. And then if somebody has questions about where to find something, we know enough about how it's organized and we can help them find things and make connections. There's a catalog. You know, it's not like a total free throw.

Meghna: How do you make money?

Chaski: We're in the middle of an exciting process of becoming a fiscally sponsored organization. We just became a project of a larger 501(c)3. That's a standard thing in the nonprofit world: if you don't want to go through the legal expenses and time and challenge of formally becoming incorporated, there's a mechanism where you can be part of another organization. It's a way to make the library more sustainable, because currently we essentially don't have any money. I got a very tiny grant to work on the image library, but that’s not frequent.

David: We’ve been starting to find ways to make money. We have events and started putting up ticket prices, and people have really been showing up. Although it is mostly bootstrapped, and we haven’t deeply figured out how to make it sustain itself yet. A lot of people love it, but we haven’t figured out yet what to do.

Meghna: Do you think growing the library would ruin the cybernetic, local appeal of it?

David: It’s a pertinent question. I’ve mentioned before about the sprawling connections that have started to develop in different places. There are strands of it online, on Are.na. It’s also in Berlin, most formally. Charles, one of the founders, teaches in Arizona, and their office is now the Arizona branch of the library. We had a visitor who's teaching in Ohio who was like, “can I start the Cleveland branch?”

Chaski and I are starting to engage in long-term visions, but I think it would be interesting if the project became a model structure that people can replicate. A group of stewards in a network together, where it responds more to local conditions and needs—cybernetically.  

Meghna: If you had to give one single book to someone getting started at the library—a favorite, maybe, or something that’d set them up for the rest, what would it be?

David: The book about the Sitterwirk library. It’s this project in Switzerland I adore, and it’s about people who have tried to do more lateral and participatory ways of organizing information. They talk about the interface between people and books being an interesting place to work, and it involves robots and interactive systems, so it’s plenty cybernetic.

Chaski: I would sort of trollingly suggest No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh. Or perhaps the more cyblib canon Sex, Performance, and the 80’s. Another classic is Online Searching: A Primer and this part that reassures beginners that “the computer is completely protected from harm by searchers.” It tickles me every time and also reminds me of how terrified I was to mess everything up as I was learning to use Git. And how hard it actually is to mess things up if you focus on the local.

Meghna Rao is a writer and editor from Queens.

As always, you can read this interview on Are.na Editorial.

Until we read again,

The Are.na Team