Picture an engineer who designs a vehicle and declares: brake, accelerator, gearbox, clutch — we don't need all that stuff for controlling the speed. Instead we'll build an automatic device into the vehicle — a cruise control that accelerates the vehicle continuously, because our goal is "growth of speed": we want to drive as fast as possible. Because then all the passengers will be best off.
Nobody would go on listening to such an engineer, and he would very quickly lose his job. The designers of the economy have done something comparable and called their cruise control DEREGULATION — and they are still in office and still at work.
By designers we do not mean the economists here. They have no access to the design department of the Megamachine. Their task is the scientific investigation and description of the system as it actually exists — to which, by general agreement, no fundamental changes are possible. It is WITHOUT ALTERNATIVE.
I. What deregulation means in cybernetic terms
In systems theory, a stable system is one that has negative feedback — mechanisms that detect deviations from equilibrium and counteract them. A thermostat. A brake. A safety valve. Without negative feedback, every deviation reinforces itself: that is positive feedback, and it leads to extreme states.
Deregulation is not a neutral term. In cybernetic terms it describes the systematic removal of negative feedback and the simultaneous systematic introduction of positive feedback. Tax havens remove the regulator of redistribution. Financial market liberalisation removes the regulator of speculation. Monopoly formation is positive feedback: market power generates more market power. The financialisation of the economy — return as the only goal — is a positive feedback loop without a limiter.
The result is an economic system whose stability properties are structurally those of a vehicle without brakes: it works as long as the road is straight. On every bend it flies off.
2008 was such a bend.
II. The buffered zone
The decisive difference from the vehicle engineer: the designers of the economic cruise control do not ride along unprotected. They have a buffered zone in the vehicle — a crash-proof area defined by an information advantage and capital reserves.
The information advantage is the entry ticket. Whoever designs the system knows when the next bend is coming — and moves assets, positions and risks to safety in good time. Hedge funds that bet on the collapse of their own products. Banks that sold toxic assets while internally warning about their quality. This is not an exception — it is the structural logic of a system that systematically produces and rewards information asymmetry.
And then the most cynical part of the mechanism: after the crash, the same actors buy up the wreckage cheaply. In 2008 Blackstone, KKR and others acquired property portfolios for cents on the dollar — precisely those portfolios whose collapse had driven millions of homeowners into ruin. Then the vehicle is repaired — not to make it safer, but to take the next bend more efficiently. The cruise control is optimised. The next profitable bend is already in sight.
The instability is not the bug. It is the feature — as long as you know when to get out. And as long as the taxpayers step in when the vehicle flies off the bend.
III. Why the politicians play along
The question is obvious: why do the politicians allow this? They are the nominal representatives of everyone — not just of the designers. The answer is uncomfortable: because many of them ride along in the buffered zone. Not necessarily through corruption in the criminal sense. Through structure.
A politician who fundamentally questions the system loses access to campaign finance, to well-disposed media, to the informal networks in which political careers are made. The hunting-party principle: whoever is not part of it has no say. Whoever is part of it has implicitly accepted which questions are not asked.
Add to that the monopoly of knowledge as a protective wall. The financial system is so complex that no politician fully understands it — and those who could explain it come from the industry that profits from it. The designers' information advantage is at the same time a structural monopoly of knowledge over the regulators. Whoever does not understand the complexity cannot regulate sensibly — and whoever wants to regulate is portrayed as someone who does not understand the complexity.
And finally, the absence of alternatives as a narrative. TINA — There Is No Alternative. Whoever proposes alternatives is considered naive, a populist, someone who does not understand reality. Being categorised as sick or a dreamer works in economic policy just as it does in geopolitics. The politician who plays along gets: funding, media access, a career, the buffered zone. The politician who does not play along gets: marginalisation — and no tools whatsoever to implement his programme even if he is elected, because the designers control the infrastructure.
That is not a decision. That is selection. The Megamachine selects politicians who are useful to it — not through planning but through structure. Nobody decided that it should be so. It emerged — as always in the Megamachine.
IV. What this means for welfare theory
A renowned economist is right when he writes: oligopolistic structures, massive externalities, systematic information asymmetries are diseases of the economic system that welfare theory can diagnose. The doctor needs the picture of the healthy body in order to recognise diseases.
But cybernetic analysis asks a follow-up question that welfare theory does not answer: why do well-diagnosed diseases become chronic? Why are the regulators that the theory knows systematically weakened or eliminated? Why did the vehicle not get a brake after 2008?
The answer lies not in theory but in structure: the designers of the cruise control also control the repair shop. They decide which parts are fitted. And they have no incentive to fit brakes — because the bends, from their perspective, are opportunities for profit.
This is the point at which economics and systems theory part ways. Welfare theory describes what a stable system could achieve. The Megamachine analysis describes why the stable system is systematically prevented — and by whom.