---
title: Part Two — The Missing Governor
book: Purposive Accelerationism
author: '@jamie247'
position: 9 of 24
canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#part-two
version: 1.1
language: en-GB
licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution
---

# Part Two — The Missing Governor

“A governor is a part of a machine by means of which the velocity of the machine is kept nearly uniform, notwithstanding variations in the driving-power or the resistance.”

— James Clerk Maxwell, “On Governors”, 1868

The last chapter ended by asking who threw the steersman overboard, and why. This section answers this question across three chapters, as a genealogy rather than a history. Where a history asks what happened a genealogy asks how something once chosen came to look like a fact. How a position that somebody argued for, often against opposition, hardened into a background assumption nobody now thinks to defend. It works backwards from a belief that seems settled to the moment it was still a claim, and it names the people who were in the room at the time. We need this approach because what stands in the way of a governor is not a technical matter. Maxwell worked out its equations in 1868, and Wiener generalised them in 1948. Nothing in the engineering forbids one. The obstacle is rather a conviction; that no such thing is available, that the process simply is what it is, and that anyone proposing to steer it has failed to understand the nature of the machine. Argue with that belief head-on and you might as well shout into the wind, because whatever evidence you bring, the reply is that you have somehow missed the point. So the work is to show that the conviction was a position, taken by identifiable people for stated reasons, defensible on its own terms and contested at the time. When that is shown, it stops being the shape of the things and becomes somebody’s opinion about it. A decision can be defended, or reversed, only once it is seen.

The section runs from the idea to its deletion. Naming the Governor recovers the idea as it was first described, by Wiener, Gregory Bateson and Stafford Beer, between the 1940s and the 1970s. Its Refusers follows the critics, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Ivan Illich, who saw what a machine left to its own arithmetic would do to human ends and were widely read for it, yet could not say how to respond. The Deletion finds the moment the governor was struck out, in the open and as philosophy, by Nick Land at Warwick in the early 1990s, who accepted the whole cybernetic account and put the runaway itself in its place. It then follows the industry that inherited his deletion without knowing it, which is how it can build at this scale while declining to say what any of it is for. Where Land said plainly that the process discards us, and called it glorious, his heirs kept the move but dropped the confession.