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Here we go:

Cybernetic Totalist Belief #1: That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

There is an undeniable rush of excitement experienced by those who first are able to perceive a phenomenon cybernetically. For example, while I believe I can imagine what a thrill it must have been to use early photographic equipment in the 19th century, I can't imagine that any outsider could comprehend the sensation of being around early computer graphics technology in the nineteen-seventies. For here was not merely a way to make and show images, but a metaframework that subsumed all possible images. Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the Gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our command.

The cybernetic impulse is initially driven by ego (though, as we shall see, in its end game, which has not yet arrived, it will become the enemy of ego). For instance, Cybernetic Totalists look at culture and see "memes", or autonomous mental tropes that compete for brain space in humans somewhat like viruses. In doing so they not only accomplish a triumph of "campus imperialism", placing themselves in an imagined position of superior understanding vs. the whole of the humanities, but they also avoid having to pay much attention to the particulars of culture in a given time and place. Once you have subsumed something into its cybernetic reduction, any particular reshuffling of its bits seems unimportant.

Belief #1 appeared on the stage almost immediately with the first computers. It was articulated by the first generation of computer scientists; Weiner, Shannon, Turing. It is so fundamental that it isn't even stated anymore within the inner circle. It is so well rooted that it is difficult for me to remove myself from my all-encompassing intellectual environment long enough to articulate an alternative to it.