There can be different orientations of Mundania, such as in-between, beyond and beneath. There can also be different properties. One such property pertains to practices and consequences of concealment. Complex systems, organizations and technologies are hard to oversee and to fully see through. Powerful stakeholders, governments, corporations or other conglomerates can hide their businesses for various reasons. Sometimes justly and fairly, sometimes not. There are also intrinsic trade-offs and distributions between simplicity and complexity, as we saw in the previous chapter, ‘Beneath’. Tradeoffs between ignorance and knowledge. Between transparency and opacity.

Black boxes

A widely used concept to capture the distribution of knowledge and control when it comes to technologies is the Black Box. It has been used as a metaphor or analogy to describe how complexity is hidden in a process, technological artefact, or system. The black box is about concealment of complexity. What does a person need to know to use a device or system, to be part of something, to handle or deal with something? What is possible to know about complex processes and circumstances, and how is this knowledge distributed among different partakers?

The black box, as a concept related to technologies and knowledge, was first used in the development of military technology during World War II (Petrick 2020: 577). The black box as a metaphor was furthermore adopted and transformed within the emerging field of cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s. Cybernetics grew as a wide scientific field that studied regulatory and complex systems among animals and machines. How could the processes in steam engines, thermostats, electronic circuits, the nervous system or social behaviour be understood through common models involving inputs, outputs and feedback loops? In this sense and context, the black box was a means to analyse systems that were too large or too complex to fully grasp (Petrick 2020: 576).

Since the uses of the black box within military technologies and cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century, it has been brought up in several other contexts. Among these different contexts and associated practices there is also a multitude of understandings of what the metaphor might mean. Maybe this was the case from the very beginning?