A lively and rigorous historical exploration of how a scientific idea from the cybernetic prehistory of AI has informed radical politics—and vice versa.Politically, “self-organization” is all about bottom-up, spontaneously democratic processes. It’s the term we reach for to describe massive social movements that seem to erupt out of nowhere, everywhere and all at once. Meanwhile, in the sciences, “self-organization” names the way living organisms, emergent systems ...