Becoming #NewMacy

Published 2022-09-26

#NewMacy emerged in March 2020 as the pandemic of COVID became the new global wicked challenge. Lack of effective response to this latest pandemic is both enervating and catalyzing for change: how can we — from the scale of individuals and communities to nation states and societies — evolve such that we gain resilience across physical and social scales and embrace the need for change.

This theme, captured in the phrase ontological resilience, is a recent thematic shift in the ever-changing present of #NewMacy. It represents our embrace of change, not for its own sake, but as a means of individual and collective, emotional and rational, survival. What has not changed is our parallel embrace of the history of transdisciplinary conversations at the birth of Cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s, those original Macy Meetings. These conversations brought scholars together across hard and soft sciences, arts and humanities, to find commonalities across systems who share purposive behavior without exclusion based on how they may be embodied in technical, biological, physical, or social systems.

However, in the 21st century, transdisciplinarity is not enough. We must also embrace transglobal inclusivity and diversity, and transgenerational participation — for it is newer generations that must reap, and repair, the errors of their priors.

In this condensed version of recent and upcoming experiential sessions across multiple hours and days, we will present a brief introduction to #NewMacy and enact an historical evocation of the original Macy Meetings. Thereafter we invite the audience to participate in an improvisation as if calling a 1-800-CYBERNET “toll free number” that offers Cybernetics-as-a-Service, in service [sic] of the needs of any group grappling with wicked challenges across the many pandemics of today. We end the session with an invitation to all to create a poetic expression of their experience with #NewMacy as well as to join our future conversations with topics prior and new.

Participants
Carlos Castellanos, Damian Chapman, Kate Doyle, Xiao Fang, Mikal Giancola, Michael Lieber, TJ McLeish, Paul Pangaro, Eve Pinsker, Eryk Salvaggio, Larry Richards, Fred Steier, Mark Sullivan, Claudia Westermann