Titled after Italo Calvino’s influential 1967 essay on the future of literature in a world where computers can write as well as humans, the new anthology Cybernetics, or Ghosts?: Stories from Myth to A.I. collects ambitious, inventive fiction writing from contemporary artists operating in and around the expanded field of cybernetic literature. Not to be confused with science fiction, cybernetics is an interdisciplinary and genre-agnostic space where the tools of what we usually think of as “the humanities”—which is to say writing and other soft arts—go to work in response, relation, and at times paradoxically harmonious opposition to the harder (though often just as speculative) sciences and philosophies of technology. While cybernetic writing may appear similar to sci-fi and other speculative genres, or indeed may even interpolate itself through those and other generic costumes, the key characteristic of cybernetic literature is that it is always excitingly reaching one step further, to not just examine or perform possibility on the level of imagination but enact through craft the political-aesthetic conditions of technologized existence. It is writing and thinking that dwells particularly on the inevitable, often unintentional yet potent bleed between those established and conceptually separate spheres of analog and digital, biological and mechanized, natural and built, human and non-. Thus cybernetics, while engaged with traditions of literary speculation, transhuman/posthuman philosophy, and fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness itself, should not be conflated with sci-fi, pure occultism, or the kinds of pseudo-scientific philosophical-bordering-on-religious market dreaming promulgated by Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and other tech-accelerationists of the AI “revolution.” There is a difference between the future and futures.
Michael Salu, editor of Cybernetics, or Ghosts?, is a British-born Nigerian artist and writer who has been making work amid the wide and amorphous cybernetic field, bearing meaningful disruption to those conventional genre distinctions as well as the hegemonic political defaults of tech-accelerationism. Through his long-running Red Earth Project and accompanying codex Red Earth, Salu highlights the ways literature and technology symbiotically imprint upon and reproduce each other. Salu’s work pays especial attention to the effects and affects of technology’s operation within extractive and exploitative global systems, offering models for literary approaches that go beyond “world-building” to take up critical arms at the conceptual intersections and dichotomies that define our foundational understanding of technology’s possibilities for our lived lives.
Occasioned by the anthology’s release, I reached out to Michael to ask about his approach to assembling Cybernetics, or Ghosts? and how the work of editing a new anthology of cybernetic literature fit among his broader work and interests. Our conversation led to Red Earth and the colonial histories/post-colonial futures of digital technologies and the humanities, indigenous conceptions of time and possibilities for (post)humanism beyond or irrespective of “the West,” extractive venture capital and disappointing Large Language Models, cybernetics vs. sci-fi, aesthetics and politics of interdisciplinarity, and the small press as a site of future-making.
Zach Peckham: It seems, in a boring genre way, that the difference between cybernetics and sci-fi isn’t always so apparent. This may be especially invisible to the lay reader, leading to misconceptions or under-understandings about the lively and multivalent nature of cybernetic literature, which is unfortunate because the ideas at the heart of cybernetics feel more active and relevant than ever. From where you stand, as a multi-modal artist who has been working in and around this wide field for quite some time, what do you think defines and differentiates cybernetics as a humanistic field?
And, given that you’ve just edited this whole shimmering anthology of new and deeply exciting cybernetic literature, are there particular aesthetics and politics that you see recurring across these varied works? Or is this question flawed, and is the unifying force of the anthology occurring on a deeper level, or (sorry) even a shallower one, all simply a matter of editorial curation?
Michael Salu: The title Cybernetics, or Ghosts? intends to mislead a touch. We wrestled with whether to use “cybernetics” in the title, given, as you say, the weight this word now bears. I eventually decided to stay true to Calvino’s 1967 lecture and later, essay, “Cybernetics and Ghosts” which drives this anthology, and to his research of nascent computational linguistics. I invited contributors to read and respond to Calvino’s essay with works of fiction. In the essay he speculated on the future for the human author when machines reach enough sophistication to synthesize thought, write comparably to us, and respond with works of fiction.
When I say mislead, it isn’t to say this anthology evades cybernetic theory, but more that I’ve dropped a pin and contributors will bring their references and experiences to this point of reflection, however consciously engaged they are or not with cybernetic influence, which is pervasive regardless. This project is intended as an echo to the networked image, idea, avatar, or digital fable composed of words filled and swarmed with metadata. My artistic practice is informed by literature and conceptual art and I’ve approached this anthology as an artwork held together with editorial structure. There’s Calvino’s essay as the central node, and the authors as a series of generative nodes. There’s intentionality to its construction, from the generative collective reading—a shared temporal experience to shape a cybernetic moment—then writing within a timeframe, and even the eventual discrete relationality between the works. The reading is as equally important as the writing. Even if the writers have previously encountered the essay, the source material was freshened and the reading experience shared. I was keen for the anthology to use the breadth of where Calvino’s thought experiment goes: into language, storytelling, and mythological origins.
Each contributor brings their knowledge to this inquiry. The hope was, through this gathering of minds—invited more for their respective excellence at dissecting myth, be they old, or unfolding, or speculative—that they would alight upon on a different aspect of Calvino’s expansive essay based on their respective interests and inclinations, bringing myriad approaches to thinking about our individual and collective relationships with machines, which I suppose is quite a cybernetic approach. With this as the Oulipo-like constraint, a very loose framework forms around the project. If a reader has certain expectations from a volume like this, they’ll hopefully meet a surprise or two.
I love this instinct, to situate the foundational essay not as perimeter but center, and then to allow it to be surrounded by a range of responses that form centers of their own. To insist on centers rather than frames feels like revelatory thought technology. It’s clear that this potential instability has made for incredibly generative prompting in all directions, like making the oyster from the pearl, inviting a galaxy of pearls.
Could you talk a little more about the particular genesis of the project? Where did the impetus to assemble an anthology of such work originate, and what were your priorities?
The project idea began with a guest edition for UK online literary magazine WritersMosaic. Gabriel Gbadamosi, one of their editors, had been aware of my work in this area for a while and invited me to curate an edition on writing and technology. This invitation arrived during the second year of the pandemic. I was revisiting Calvino at the time, and in particular his essay collection The Literature Machine. I’d read “Cybernetics and Ghosts” some years prior, but my memory of it was foggy, so upon rereading in this new context, after having worked with machine learning for a time, Calvino’s observations were really stark. I could have picked any essay for this exercise, but I was especially drawn to the discursive nature of this piece, an exploration taking true writer’s liberty, stepping beyond theory and academic rigor to wander imaginatively. This made me think writers who aren’t necessarily knowledgeable of cybernetics or computation could use this piece to reflect on their respective relationships with digital technology. For the guest edition I’d invited fiction writers to respond to the essay with flash fiction and invited one expert, cognitive neuroscientist Abeba Birhane, to offer a response. Abeba’s essay “Human agency in the age of algorithms” explained the vast differences between the human brain and aspirational “artificial intelligence” in order to cut through the venture capitalist hype.
With the guest edition, my approach was overtly political, inviting only women of color, as I feel they’re least regarded in technological discourse, whilst being some of the most exploited. For the anthology, keen to see what comes from a fairly global coterie, I opened up the invitations. Therefore its political dimensions are subtle but complex and resonant if one looks closely. The reveals occur naturally, surfacing recurrent themes like automated authoritarianism, desire and the suppression thereof, mortality, and techno-semiotics. Technology is inherently political and according to Heidegger, we do not understand technology, which is both metaphor for and the driver of humanism today, revealing economic and social dissonance as well as what I consider an amnesia, or suppression of the full scale of technological revolution beyond what is penned in official records. Your average software engineer will know code, but very often lacks knowledge or even curiosity for the theoretical formation of that code, and how the bigger picture, aspirational or otherwise, tends to be rendered, which I find shocking, given the significance.
The gig economy shows us how the various rungs of the economic ladder will be automated, determining whether you’re driven into a subjugated and surveilled labor force, or become a consumptive passenger, or a mathematically optimized entity, both physically and cognitively, able to then consolidate wealth amongst fewer and fewer peers. There are also cultural and geographic differences to our uses of technology. Across many parts of Africa for example, the laptop was essentially leap-frogged as the default computer due to their prohibitive cost, and smartphones were adopted early as the device for all daily functions, long before Westerners began to use them that way. One could argue most of us still don’t use anywhere near the potential of the portable computers we keep in our pockets. You’ll see how the stories in the anthology operate on a sliding scale of human/machine symbiosis and where political disposition becomes more overt, and how language and its synthesis plays its role in this, from more technical experimentation to folktale and the fable. This anthology situates itself in that antagonism between science and poetry. A reviewer stated they couldn’t discern whether some of the stories had been aided by computation or not, which I find interesting. (They haven’t.)
That’s hilarious. I’ll admit when I first saw the book I wondered how much collaboration with Large Language Models (LLMs) or other machine models would be part of the writing inside, and actually it’s kind of funny—by which I mean both playful and curious—that it doesn’t. Not only because we see a lot of disappointing literary experiments with language machines these days—we do!—but because then you’re pushing the relationship into this even weirder place, thus the antagonism is far more generative than the machine itself.
I agree with you about those LLM literary experiments. I think their failure is often due to superficial engagement with these tools. Hence the playful ambiguity of this anthology, which is also less about Calvino, and more about using his essay as a conduit to render new reflections in this discordant space between cybernetics and sci-fi with some temporal elasticity, but very much for our current moment. Further to this is a desire to articulate what I perceive to be relatively lacking: a common everyday or literary language for digital existence. I’ve long been interested in the cognitive tension between physical and digital life. How we map and inhabit virtual space and time. Each digital environment has its ways of synthesizing or structuring language and community. I think of TikTok or Discord for example, yet if you pick up a regular recent novel, it’s unlikely to articulate this active out-of-body sociality, where the physical appears to recede and digital or virtual becomes increasingly dominant. The industrial process separating Western “man” from the world, flora, fauna, geology, atmosphere, and so on, began a long time ago, so today, it seems easier than ever, and lucrative, for resource-intensive autonomous systems to transcend the last fallible hindrance, the human body.
Though the space which cybernetics terminologically denotes is so exciting to think about and clearly useful when it comes to investigating these very networked, fluid, and fraught relationships between human, machine, and world, I remain aware of the ways that the area of inquiry we call cybernetics are so often diluted: Subsumed by sci-fi on the one hand or relegated to some freaky experimental cultural theory on the other. Do you think that slipperiness is a product of surface-level similarity leading to generic conflation, an actual lack of meaningful theoretical differentiation, a basic language problem, or something more devious in the critical or political climate? In what ways do you hope the anthology, alongside your own work, responds to or even disrupts this discourse?
Having worked in this space for over a decade, I’ve often felt critical literary discourse doesn’t take the digital realm—and consequently cybernetics—seriously, even though its social and political influence these past couple of decades is impossible to ignore. Until maybe recently, even with huge political upheaval, the nefarious behavior of Silicon Valley moguls exerting influence over every aspect of society went somewhat ignored—to the extent they might plan secessionist digital nation states, and most would be none the wiser. Maybe that’s simply a lack of understanding of the invisible magic of our time. If one tries to write a novel about digital life today, it’ll be either shelved under internet novels, or science fiction, which both seem insufficient to me. There’s an intense metaphysical battle for the soul unfurling. One’s will and agency is funneled through coiling mechanical algorithms by technologists—so knowing exactly what cognitive levers to pull and how is of great consequence. Such deference to power and the relinquishing of an individual’s responsibilities is the kind of authority once bestowed upon the church. One can see accelerationist ideas play out, compressing our experience of time. A man can be lynched live for nine minutes. Those nine minutes expand exponentially through millions of replicated instances, then millions of looped nine-minute sequences stretch out to lacerate the globe with grief, surfacing the fissures of racial capitalism and speeding us along into the seemingly inevitable. I think this is an example of what is often left out of cybernetic exploration, a void spoken around and not into, namely: the negated “other” symbiotically upholding techno-racial-capitalism.
Who holds conscious language for these active societal formations, and how and where do they evolve? Looking at cybernetics intellectually, only as a field of philosophical inquiry, falls short for me at least. Your average person, subject to this influence, doesn’t consciously engage with this field, and this arguably includes even sophisticated readers. Cybernetics seeps through endless content streams of popular culture, yes, but through this synthesis, changes to the human condition are somewhat augmented, leaving us detached and unable to observe in real time. Many of us avoid talking about—or lack the vernacular for talking about—the digital part of our lives, as if it were a dream world, which intrigues me.
In terms of the difference between cybernetics and science fiction, there is of course a lot of overlap, and I think the two borrow rapaciously from each other. Science fiction appears more imaginative, but generally lives within allegory, which becomes its limitation. Cybernetics does more to butt against the limits of epistemology, but as a result can have a tendency to obfuscate into esotericism.
Cybernetics, on the surface at least, seems to focus more on self-actualizing control systems, geared to machine as metaphor and as implicit evolutionary inevitability. Science fiction wants to think beyond the human and even human consciousness, with a certain awe to the scale and possibilities of the universe, which works both metaphorically and otherwise. It attempts to be more expansive, narrative and imaginative, even if it often falls into the hierarchies of the aforementioned humanist model.
I first came to know your work through your book and accompanying expanded media project Red Earth, a labyrinthine text that also serves as source material and document of your broader artistic practice. Similar to how one may first encounter cybernetics, I wondered initially where the through-line was from touchable book-object to conceptual and even cloud-dwelling literature/study of AI and the historical and geographical centers of tech power. The first section of the book, at least, doesn’t immediately reveal this framing, with the text proceeding as a kind of monologue before destabilizing later on, eventually reaching beyond the book-container itself.
Apart from maybe echoing a crude problem of language (definition, genre) alluded to previously, how do you see Cybernetics, or Ghosts? and the project of editing it in relation to your own project of Red Earth and wider work as a writer? What are the through-lines, so to speak?
The two parts of Red Earth are in quiet conversation with each other and the wider art project. Part one grapples with “The Vestibule,” a state of flux as active existence between two modes of being, two languages, and essentially two cultural formations that inform each other through many loops of transference. I think about how the Yoruba culture I’m descendent of also informs the middle passage and the Black Atlantic tradition, data from which also contributes to generative AI and computational futures, however inequitably, and this speaks to the second part of the book.
The first part of the book comes from an attempt to articulate the dynamic liminality of UK migratory legacy, which has been for the most part successfully buried, certainly in comparison to US Black history. I aim at an unsettling pulse of what might be (depending on the reader) an opaque cultural ancestry as it is spoken into Western frameworks of literary form, but the whole text resists clear binary divisions between these things. This Yoruba ancestry disrupts the expected form and conceit of the book. I work from traditional Yoruba engagement with time, which upholds a non-linearity and continuity, which is what I use to find a way for the intimate to speak to the planetary—and as a kind of conjuring—visualizing a fluid, non-binary, non-logical intervention in my own Western education and therefore expectations, from, say, a story, or even a prose poem. The characters or voices are intended as porous entities, each a part of the other, but also part of the planet’s flora, fauna, and geological time.
This leans a little on the Yoruba concept of Ori-Inu, “inner head” or “inner consciousness,” which cannot occur in isolation, but the self being diffused and interconnected with all life. There are distinct echoes between Yoruba traditional thought and quantum mechanics, and I’ve long been interested in these parallels, and how some of these ideas are inherent to cybernetic thought, as well as symbiotic to any pursuit of Western occult traditions.
Similarly, the feedback loop architecture of cybernetic systems in play in society seem to have commonalities with traditional notions of non-linear time, like in the Yoruba tradition. This is what I carry forward into the interdisciplinary expansion of The Red Earth Project, without clear form or end, hosted online and in the physical space of exhibition and book. I began using early machine learning translations back in 2019 to extract data from my prose, which is what I’ve used as the basis for a number of artworks. It is a process-based project, where works bleed into each other and across disciplines, again using the virtual as a way of trying to manifest some of these traditional ideas.
The second part of the book aims to order some of this thought, posing the main question of how we understand morality, and ultimately automated digital morality, from a single ontological framework, a dominant European ethical origin. I am interested in what that means for other cultures, particularly as we’re now witnessing the congealing and erasure of information on the internet, which was very incomplete in the first place.
Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview, which will be published later this week.
Zach Peckham is a writer, editor, and educator. He is the author of the poetry collection As If And (New Mundo, 2026) and his writing has recently appeared in Annulet, APARTMENT, Landfill, mercury firs, Oversound, and Tilted House. He holds an MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA and teaches at Cleveland State and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is the managing editor at the CSU Poetry Center and an editor-at-large at Cleveland Review of Books. He also runs a small press called Community Mausoleum and a journal called Coma.
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