A cheerfully scathing walk through the inner workings, the developmental history, and the nightmares of a society obsessed with self-optimization, which exerts its control not through power, but through feedback and self-regulation. Dany shows how cybernetics, as a model for self-regulating systems, has become a matrix of constant optimization for individuals and society: From the cybernetically inspired social psychology of the 1950s, Wiener and Lewin's feedback theory made its way into self-experience groups, which then carried it into shared living spaces. Meanwhile, these methods flowed into management as social engineering and later into social networks, where the communication panopticon found itself again in a new form. Everyone is now an observer of everyone else and observed by all others. Control no longer means...