Editorial: Conversations on Four Cybernetic Approaches to Embracing Uncertainty

In 2024, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). In more than eighty, mostly participatory, sessions, the conference stretched over five days. Under the overarching theme “Living Cybernetics Playing Language,” the conference encouraged participants to reflect on cybernetics in everyday contexts, ranging from academic research to the building of communities. This special issue of Constructivist Foundations contains four target articles that emerged from this conference, and their related discussions. The contributions to this special issue are case studies of cybernetic practice and diversity. And yet, as the study of the four target articles and the related commentaries show, in their embrace of uncertainty, they share a particular technicity in which formation and reflexivity become intertwined and co-evolve. In its engagement with contemporary challenges, cybernetic technicity introduces recursive links, setting relations across boundaries. Contemporary cybernetic practice, through varied approaches, is a living tradition of enacting open futures.