A (cybernetic) musing: constructing my cybernetic world

I am going to use the occasion of the arrival of the (proper-ish) new millennium to write about aspects of my own work. I hope this won't seem very self-centred or indulgent. The idea came to me at Christmas: like many, I send relatives and friends a ‘Year Report’. This year I decided, also, to attempt to explain what I've been working at in cybernetics for the last 30 years, or maybe my whole life. I know that what I wrote (and present here in reworked form) is under-argued and it might be relatively easy to pick holes in it. I hope you'll not want to do that: this is an attempt to set a personal second order cybernetic scene which was originally intended for the completely uninformed, rather than a technical piece. On friend commented (about the Christmas version) that not only was it about a constructed world, but it actually constructed that world as well.