Ironically, the Soviet cyberneticists (Kantorovich and especially Glushkov) were decried as secretly capitalistic for not employing enough central control! The

Ironically, the Soviet cyberneticists (Kantorovich and especially Glushkov) were decried as secretly capitalistic for not employing enough central control! They were still working on a planned economy, but their goal was to create a system where economic components could send signals to dictate their requirements upwards, essentially self-organizing necessary inputs. (The differences between that and capitalism being that a central administrator could set priorities, and the value of final goods wasn't to be determined by "what people are willing to pay" but "what's been allotted".) Any system that can adjust its behavior to circumstances involves 'control'. Really, anything that responds to stimuli at all has some control component. Confusing that with centralization or a lack of autonomy suggests that Lloyd is missing something pretty fundamental about the history of cybernetics.