Culture is the Cybernetics of ConsciousnessAri Melenciano
June 2025







“We shape our tools and thereafter  our tools shape us.”
- Vilém Flusser, Czech-born philosopher of communication and technology










“Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / 
But I did 5 mil — I ain’t been rhymin’ 
like Common since.”
- Jay Z, Bed Stuy-born philosopher of culture and capital












Thesis
Cybernetics offers a framework for understanding consciousness as a dynamic system of relational inputs, feedback loops, and adaptive behaviors. These behaviors are circumstantially-shaped expressions of consciousness and generate culture, which can be read as distributed intelligence. Yet our current perception of consciousness is limited to what is visible, and to the language we've constructed to make it legible. The invisible, embodied, and ancestrally opaque dimensions of human experience are often deprioritized in the sciences, rendering them less legible within modern Western frameworks. To understand consciousness more fully, and to design for it more intentionally, cybernetic thought must expand to include affective, multicultural, and sensorial memory.




Core Message
We often equate human consciousness with neurobiological processes, computational logic, and machine-readable patterns. This paper explores how consciousness also emerges through culture, memory, relationships, and sensorial experience. It is continuously shaped by inherited and evolving feedback systems. AI, cybernetics, and design must begin to reflect this broader spectrum of sentience and cultural intelligence, or risk reinforcing reductive, colonial, and mechanomorphic models of mind.




Sub-arguments
  • Our tools (AI, media, platforms) shape our perceptions, often invisibly.

  • Legibility, feedback, and conditioning create behavioral culture.

  • Mechanomorphism flattens naturally complex ways of being.

  • Consciousness cannot be reduced to logic and standardization.

  • AI is great for external optimization but design intelligence requires inward attention.





Introduction
This essay reveals threads that both entangle and disentangle the relationships between sentience and systems, influence and behavior, expression and perception, and the technological and the spiritual. It explores the relationships between cybernetics and consciousness as a formula for culture. Originally presented as the opening keynote for Instrument’s company-wide convening on June 6, 2025, this essay grounds those explorations in the lens of popular culture, using it as a shared language of relatability.

Vilém Flusser proposes that the tools we create ultimately shape who we become. His insight transcends discipline, industry, and politics, suggesting a principle of nearly universal application. In dialogue with his quote is a lyric from Jay Z, an artist whose work reflects a lived negotiation with systems of race, capital, and cultural production. Flusser defines the logic; Jay Z shows what it costs to align with it. In any system, alignment with the rules brings rewards, but also trade-offs. Both voices speak to the choices and conditions that shape who we become. These systemic influences, whether seen or unseen and structural or emotional, are what this essay seeks to explore through the lens of cybernetics and consciousness.







Cybernetics and Consciousness
Cybernetics was coined in 1948 by MIT professor Norbert Wiener. The term originates from the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman (which in today’s terms, would translate to the person who is steering a ship) or governor (the regulator of a system’s performance). Wiener developed the concept while working on anti-aircraft systems during World War II, studying how machines could respond to changing inputs in real time. This led him to explore how both living organisms and machines use feedback to maintain control and adapt to their environments. Cybernetics became the study of systems (ranging from societies and economies, to neural systems and supply chain management) and how they regulate themselves through feedback loops.

Familiar examples of cybernetics today include social media algorithms that retain our attention, thermostats that regulate temperature, and self-driving cars that navigate through traffic. But these examples reflect machine-level cybernetics, where inputs and outputs are constrained and feedback loops remain relatively predictable. The cybernetics we are exploring, and that matter most to the future of design, media, and perception, are not so neatly closed. They involve complex, adaptive, emotionally and culturally encoded systems. These systems are less programmable and far less predictable. They are more emergent and amorphous.

To explore consciousness through a cybernetic lens is to examine how our influences shape our behavior, and how our behavior, in turn, shapes the influences we attract and respond to. But consciousness, a notion as expansive as it is elusive, requires tools that can recognize both legible and illegible forms of influence and behavior. Much of consciousness exists beyond visibility or language: memory, intuition, and forms of sentience we may not yet have the capacity to perceive. In such cases, tracing feedback loops becomes far more difficult. This essay will eventually move toward that more amorphous domain. But first, we begin with what is more readily seen.









How the Machine Sees How We See Ourselves
My research in artificial intelligence explores both its capacity and its limitations to digitally compound human and non-human consciousness, and to simulate cybernetic behavior through an anthropomorphic lens. I’ve called this practice Computational Anthropology, a method of using AI to reflect human tendencies back to ourselves.

For example, in this grid, I examine how my identity (phenotype, presentation, expression) is morphed based on how AI has been trained to associate certain words with imagery. AI does not inherently understand attributes like emotions, ethnicities, or personality traits; it only reflects how we, as a society, have most frequently labeled and represented them. It processes our collective patterns of description and regurgitates them back to us. When prompted with precision, AI becomes a mirror, revealing the unspoken social codes embedded in our language and visual culture.












Philosophy of Design
Computational Anthropology allows us to reverse-engineer the "black box" of AI by studying the relationships between inputs and outputs within a system of constrained variables, such as images and text in generative models. Prompting with precision requires understanding the nature of the system, and understanding a system's nature is foundational to all design. From this, I’ve developed a design philosophy centered on the power of precision:



Good design builds the box.

Better design goes outside the box.

Excellent design renders the box invisible.


This theory echoes a sentiment I’ve encountered many times before. As a daily reader of the Tao te Ching, its frameworks continue to shape my perception of the world, and inform how I think about design.

This framing is similar to the Tao’s idea of leadership in Chapter 17. Within the spectrum of leadership, the worst leaders are those their people despise. Common leaders are feared. Good leaders are liked. But the greatest leaders are barely known. Their influence is so well-integrated into the lives of their community that it becomes unnoticeable. While a leader’s impact depends not only on their own choices but on the systems that either support or obstruct them, there still appears to be a relationship between societies with high measures of happiness and the degree to which citizens are even aware of who governs them.

This idea, that invisibility can be a sign of deep effectiveness, has broad application. Let’s explore how it manifests in design, and eventually in cybernetics and consciousness, through the case study of social media, particularly, Instagram.

Good design builds the box. Design, at its most basic, serves a function: to move us from problem to solution. But in digital culture, design becomes something more. It shapes how we share and perceive ourselves. When Instagram launched in 2010, its stated mission was to “make sharing your life as instant and magic as those first Polaroid pictures must have felt.” Within two months, it had 2 million users. In just under a year, it reached 10 million. By April 2012, it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion while hosting 30 million users. Instagram was a massive success, and quickly achieved its initial mission.




Better design goes outside the box. Let’s continue exploring this principle through social media but now from the perspective of how users navigate a platform’s design for optimal performance and feedback. I would identify the time between 2010 and 2015 as Instagram’s unselfconscious glory days. People posted with casualness. There was little investment in curating a branded identity. It was spontaneous, scattered, and human. But in 2016, when Facebook began integrating algorithmic engagement models, Instagram shifted from a chronological feed to an engagement-based one. This marked a turning point in influencer culture. The platform began to penalize authentic multidimensionality and reward formulaic behavior.

To go outside the box on a platform once rooted in casual sharing now required a kind of strategic performance. Instagram introduced a new metric for what aspects of life were worth sharing, and how they should be shared. Attention to composition, color palette, consistency, simplicity, and beauty became norms within a system originally designed for informal expression. Those who played the game well were rewarded with engagement and status metrics.

Within this design framework, the “better design” phase is about navigating the system through performance, feedback, and iteration. Going beyond the box meant transforming a visual-sharing app into a platform for influence and self-branding.

Excellent design renders the box invisible. What begins as novelty eventually becomes normality and a new status quo. And once something feels familiar and accessible, people begin to question it. When the formula becomes visible, the form is scrutinized. It’s easier to be influenced when you don’t realize you’re being influenced. As the Tao alludes, it is easier to be led when you feel like you are leading yourself.

When the hidden agenda of influencer culture became legible, people naturally began to experience fatigue. So how does the agenda of influence and engagement hide again? By operating in ways people don’t expect. If influencer culture revolves around idealized self-presentation (curated feeds, brand alignment, photogenic lifestyles), then its counterpoint must offer the opposite: low-effort visuals and anti-aesthetic values. 





















(source/curation: @coquettesvanilla) 




Memes celebrate imperfection, awkwardness, failure, and absurdity, and often mock the very lifestyle that influencers promote. Though memes have existed since the early internet, in the context of Instagram’s engagement-based algorithm, they function as a subversion of influencer culture. To audiences that are fatigued by perfection, their agenda of influence becomes hidden once again, rendering their “box” invisible. Their tactics to maintain the opacity of their intended influence includes:

- Signaling “authenticity” by not being polished, mitigating skepticism

- Signaling “relatability” by not taking itself seriously. Low standards = High invitation

- Choosing to exhibit poor design taste. What I call, “Ironic Talent”


But even subversion, once legible, becomes another feedback loop. To better understand how these shifts in design and behavior shape users’ perceptions, let’s now turn to media theory.








Understanding Perception
In 1964, Canadian media theorist and professor Marshall McLuhan published one of his most influential works: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. His ideas helped shape the foundation of media theory, communication studies, and how we interpret digital culture today. In this book, he introduced his most famous phrase: “the medium is the message.” The phrase suggests that the form of a medium (whether television, print, or radio), is more influential than the content it delivers.

For example, a meme criticizing influencer culture gains traction on Instagram not just because of what it says, but because it exists within the native terrain of influencers. This context makes the critique more immediate and ironic. The platform conditions how a message is both received and performed. A mocking meme may seem playful within someone’s Instagram stories but politically charged on their feed, and professionally risky on LinkedIn. The image remains the same, but each platform frames perception differently.

But it is now 2025, sixty-one years since McLuhan introduced that phrase. Media platforms have become global in scale and multicultural in perspective. Users of vastly different socio-economic statuses, identities, values, and lived experiences now share fewer collective online spaces of thought and inquiry. At the same time, global monopolies on digital platforms are producing increasingly uniform media environments. While experiences are becoming more individualized through algorithmic curation, the sources of those experiences are becoming more centralized. Our so-called pluriverse, a term shaped by Arturo Escobar to describe a world of many worlds, is beginning to resemble a single mediated universe shaped by globalized aesthetics and logic.

This dynamic reflects a form of perceptual training, grounded in the psychological concept of conditioning. The term “conditioning” originates in the early 20th century from the work of Ivan Pavlov, who demonstrated how behavior could be shaped by repeatedly pairing a neutral stimulus with a meaningful one. In his now-famous experiment, a dog learned to salivate at the sound of a bell after hearing it consistently just before receiving food. Similarly, repeated exposure to the same types of media across platforms and cultures begins to shape perception itself. What we pay attention to and respond to emotionally is being trained by the frequency and framing of what we are shown. In this way, the form and repetition of media begin to shape both what we think, and how we learn to think.





This is an expansion McLuhan’s thinking to consider an emerging digital age. His insight that the medium shapes the message still holds. But in today’s networked media landscape, it is also the relational metadata (volume, rhythm, and emotional cadence of our exposure) that determine what and how it becomes meaningful.













The Chinchilla Coat





Let’s ground this theory in cinema. Flash back 50 years to an emotionally loaded, culturally encoded moment in the film, American Gangster. Frank Lucas wears a $100,000 chinchilla coat to the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. We pan in on the coat, then zoom out to examine how three central characters interpret it differently, each through their own lens of context and intent. 














Their perspectives, shaped by their own metadata, transform the coat from a garment into a message. This is a climatic moment in the film because up until this moment, Frank Lucas had carried himself with a calculated invisibility, which played a crucial role to his success in illegal activity. But at this moment, Frank diverged from his own philosophy of safety through anonymity by wearing what he once considered a liability: flamboyant attire. This was in effort to appease his soon-to-be wife, who gifted him the coat and recognized it as a physical expression of her love and a status symbol of his earned success. Ironically, the beginning of Mr. Lucas’ downfall is not through a violent act or a business slip, but through the coat as seen by Detective Richie Roberts. To the detective, the coat wasn’t just loud; it broke the quiet strategy that had shielded Frank, heightening his visibility in a system already primed to surveil Black men. The film reveals how three characters interpret the same coat in entirely different ways, each shaped by their own social, emotional, and perceptual frameworks. The coat becomes legible through the dialect of each viewer. Like the coat, all media are filtered through inherited perspectives that shape how we see. Objects take on meaning through the contexts we bring to them, contexts shaped by increasingly individualized experience.

In this light, each of us is “wearing” a chinchilla coat. Our identities, styles, signals, and self-presentations, especially in digital culture, are perceived through the lenses of others. And how people respond to what we wear depends less on what it is, and more on their own relationship to what it represents.








Cybernetics of Sentience
Whether we realize it or not, much of our lives is spent both consciously and subconsciously studying the systems around us. We learn, often quietly, how to exist within them or how to rebel against them. Some of our earliest feedback loops come from our relationships with the communities closest to us, from parents to teachers to friends. We receive praise and affection when we operate within the system as expected, and correction or punishment when we go against its norms. This is the foundation of socialization. 

Films, television, and advertising are also forms of social programming. Through them, we learn what is presented as desirable or undesirable. Many of us never fully recognize the subjectivity of these cultural messages or the intentions behind them. Some do recognize these influences but continue to follow their logic, either because they genuinely agree or because familiarity feels safer than the unknown. As social creatures, we often prioritize belonging within the communities we love over the uncertainty of divergence. Others not only recognize the pressure to conform but also recognize their ability to resist it, using their agency to shape a life that reflects their own values and desires.









Creating images of myself with AI became one of those moments of rupture. Some portraits were hyper-glamorous, while others situated my identity in environments I had yet to live within. They expanded my sense of self by surfacing possibilities I hadn’t realized I’d learned to exclude from my own imagination. These images revealed the subtle choreography of identity that many of us unconsciously perform: amplifying certain traits, while muting others, all to adjust for legibility within different rooms. This is often required of someone who wears many different hats: daughter, professor, artist, neighbor.

While much of this essay has explored technology and cybernetics through an anthropomorphic lens, there’s a subtler undercurrent at play: what I call mechanomorphism, the quiet imposition of machine-like expectations onto human life. Our humanity is increasingly being shaped to fit into systems designed for optimization and legibility. But at what cost?

A familiar example is passing through TSA, where a security agent must select either “male” or “female” for one’s body to be scanned. But a more urgent example lies in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which rests on the assumption that human intelligence is fully codifiable, even as we continue to struggle to understand our own consciousness. These systems are trained on dominant linguistic and cultural datasets, reproducing the logics of empire while excluding alternative ways of being and knowing.

The AGI project, as it currently stands, is epistemically colonial. It presumes a universal intelligence, detached from place, body, and hyper-local cultural context. But human knowledge is not universal. It is relational and value-shaped, embedded in memory and the complexity of lived experience.








Embodied Knowledge
AI systems are designed to extend what we already know, aggregating documented knowledge into outcomes that project us into the future. Dance, in contrast, has become a form of embodied inquiry, allowing me to access cultural and ancestral memory that is felt rather than consciously recalled. It offers a break from the cerebral efforts we often celebrate as intelligence and expands the idea of knowing beyond shared verbal language.

Stepping back from my research in AI, I began to explore consciousness through sensorial catalysts. I asked: how might I unravel layers of the subconscious through the senses? This began with a simple return to something I’ve always enjoyed, dancing. But as I dedicated more time to it, a new relationship with my body emerged. Over time, my body became a conduit for ancestral memory.

As a Dominican-American, I grew up listening to bachata and merengue. Only later did I recognize their rhythmic connections to the Congolese Vis-a-Vis, Nigerian highlife, Cabo Verdean Funaná, and the Afro-cuban jazz-funk vinyl records I had begun collecting. The Dominican Republic, once part of the Spanish colony on Hispaniola, was among the first places in the Americas where enslaved Africans were brought during the transatlantic slave trade. Dominican culture became a synthesis of West African, Western European, and Indigenous Latin American traditions, shaping the music, movement, values, and forms of expression that evolved over generations.















I had spent years studying African drum patterns and how they evolved across eras and geographies. But now, I was using my body as the research instrument. During a residency at the University of Maryland, I gained access to a motion capture facility. There, I digitized my movements to observe their correlations with sound in greater detail. These studies culminated in Cosmeage, an art film exploring diasporic rhythm and its relationship to consciousness.

Consciousness is shaped by inputs and outputs, but many of those inputs are invisible, embodied, inherited, and sensory. This raises the question: is the current model of cybernetics enough? The systems we have now interpret cognition through mechanomorphic logics. But culture itself, understood as shared responses to stimuli shaped by memory and community, suggests that consciousness cannot be separated from the body or from its relationship to place and time. Cybernetics began with machines mimicking men. But it is the recognition of embodied knowledge that crucially separates man from machine.













Culture is the System

This essay serves as a beginning in redefining intelligence, attention, behavior, and perception through a lens that moves beyond mechanistic and computational metaphors. Cybernetics, when shaped by affect, embodiment, cultural memory, and ancestral knowledge, becomes a tool for understanding consciousness in its fuller complexity. Designing systems that engage with consciousness requires a different kind of literacy, one that honors forms of knowing that are not always measurable or codified. While AI may mirror what we’ve made legible, it cannot recognize what we don’t yet know we know.

As our world is increasingly shaped by shared technologies but fractured realities, meaningful design begins with cultivated self-knowing. We begin by questioning the internalized codes that shape our perception, noticing the patterns we’ve inherited, and bringing awareness to the systems we unconsciously perform. Understanding culture as the cybernetics of consciousness means designing feedback loops that help us become more coherent both individually and collectively. Culture is often mistaken as a byproduct of systems, when it is the system itself. The ways we respond to the world around us become the ways we shape it.