In reality, cybernetics may appeal to utopian idealism in terms of a designed, auto-poetic, society where a ‘blueprint’ utopia can automatically adapt itself through homeostasis and feedback loops. In practice, we contend that cybernetics is anti-utopian and produces dystopia. It is intended to be an exhaustive theory of reality, subsuming all disciplinary methods and approaches. These totalising tendencies run together with an epistemology that reduces all entities, organisms and relationships to stocks and flows. It is therefore a rearticulation of functionalist sociology, rejecting alternative positions on materiality and subjectivity. Cybernetics leads to a mechanic form of domination and oppression.