Norbert Weiner

Finally, before we get to Land's ideas themselves, we have to discuss cybernetics, the science that complexity theory, control theory, and systems engineering spilled out of in the subsequent decades. Fundamentally, it's the science of feedback loops: how do systems whose outputs feed back into its inputs, modified by extra information processing and interaction with external factors, behave over time? Once you have Marx and the Austrians' views of capitalism not as a continual motion toward some kind of static equilibrium, but instead as a circuit and an information processing system, the application of ideas from cybernetics becomes natural, almost necessary, and that is exactly what Land does, primarily applying ideas about feedback loops.

The two core cybernetics concepts Land draws from are those of negative and positive feedback loops. Negative feedback loops are what Weiner focused on, because it is typically waht engineers want in a system: it preserves the meta-stability of a system over time by exerting pressure on a system in the opposite direction to where it is tending, keeping it generally in the same place, or oscillating stabily around one place. For instance, imagine a thermostat upping the temperature of the air it pumps into the room if the room is getting too cold, and lowering the temperature of the pumped air of the room is getting to hot. Negative feedback is, in essence, somewhat humanistic, reterritorializing.

Meanwhile, positive feedback leads to runaway: in other words, it pushes a system even more in whatever direction it is already tending, thus making it accelerate in that direction even faster (think about microphone feedback). This is generally something nobody wants in systems engineered to serve a particular purpose for human ends, because positive feedback loops tend towards extremes, and eventually self or other-destruction. Land argues that, through the circuit of commodity production, capitalism can be thought of as a positive feedback loop, shackled by incomplete and not strong enough partial negative feedback loops (like Keyensianism) which just produce rapid and wild oscillations or temporarily put a human mask on an inhuman system.