4 ms·

The cybernetics scare and the origins of the Internet (2009)

77 points by nanna 5y ago

mc32 5y ago
Apparently the scare part was a pre-emptive attempt by Stalinists who saw Kibernetika as a threat to Workers -their bread and butter. So it was suppressed and derided ideologically. After the Stalinists, Khrushchev sought to leverage Cybernetics and use it everywhere, so much was their propaganda the US took their rhetoric as actual policy and feared falling behind in the Cybernetics race. After Stalinism Kibernetika was rehabilitated: >"In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked cybernetics as “a modish pseudo-science” and “a reactionary imperialist utopia”. Soviet critics used all tools in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments (accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics “a technocratic theory” whose goal was to replace striking workers with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscience-laden soldiers with “indifferent metallic monsters”). Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans”, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons."
photochemsyn 5y ago
Some interesting excerpts: ". . . In their view, machines, organisms, and human society were all seen as self-organizing control systems, which, operating in a certain environment, pursued their goals (hitting a target, increasing order, achieving better organization, or reaching the state of equilibrium) by communicating with this environment, that is, sending signals and receiving information about the results of their actions through feedback loops." That's probably an overly simplistic view of biology and ecosystems. ". . . Wiener was deeply critical of capitalist America. He did not believe in the ability of the “invisible hand” of free market to establish an economic and social equilibrium, or homeostasis in cybernetic terms. His social outlook was overtly pessimistic: “There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses.” Not much has changed eh? ". . .He believed that describing society in cybernetic terms as a self-regulating device would make it clear that controlling the means of communication was “the most effective and most important” anti-homeostatic factor, which could drive society out of equilibrium.16 Wiener noted that on both sides of the Atlantic “political leaders may attempt to control their populations” by manipulating information flows, and argued that “it is no accident that Russia has had its Berias and that we have our McCarthys”.17 His views of capitalism and communism were best summarized by his colleague and friend Dirk Struik: “plague on both your houses”." Now about mass consolidation of corporate media and social media platforms, with fairly arbitrary censorship and an obsession with 'control of the message' in government-corporate circles, ahem. Antitrust for media sounds like a very good idea.
dogman144 5y ago
Cybernetics, as a search query, opens up access to a great collection of tech-critique mixed with philosophy and solid intellectual rigor. 100% recommend checking it out. "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" is a good place to start (MIT Press has it). "Cybernetics" as a descriptor went out of style by the 2000's I think. Prior to that, you can find writing from ideologues/philosophers/academics who grasped what tech would look like and put it through analytical frameworks wrt its impact on systems outside of tech. I think they were able to do this because by the 1960's, the capabilities of tech were becoming clear if to someone in the right networks or from the right background. Pair that with the 1950's-1980's generating some heavyweight philosophers like Albert Camus (although idk if he ever wrote about tech) or writers like Huxley who blur the line a bit, and you can find some really interesting insight on tech. The cybernetics writers did a good job of understanding that tech would change everything in some fundamental and abstract sense, so they focused meta-analysis to cohere the "so what" of it all (impact on ethics, governance, politics, sociology). An example is analyzing the trend in tech of `if system is discovered -> then attempt to codify and automate it.` This provides some scaffolding for thinking through AI-driven governance, for instance, but with a little more intellectual rigor than a substack article. It's similar to the value-add of reading really good sci-fi, but this time from Camus or Nietzche versus William Gibson or Neil Stephenson. If you feel that our times warrants some level of serious analysis, find like there's a general void of comprehension outside of small pockets and policy circles, and therefore decide to settle for pulling insights from a sort of disappointing blend of cypherpunk writing, Peter Thiel-isms, Lex Fridman interviews, and Andrew Yang because at least "they get the big picture of what tech will do": writing on cybernetics is good to check out.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > "Cybernetics" as a descriptor went out of style by the 2000's I think. A bit off topic, but in the ‘science of automatic control systems’ sense -- one could argue today it could be pronounced ‘kubernetes’. But imagine the consternation when we first collectively realized k8s had no cybernetics, no auto-governance (another related word*) of tech running on it. This is why a few of us met with CoreOS in the mid-2010s to talk about the idea that would turn into Operators: put the cybernetics back in kubernetes. Disappointed even today that so much mindshare and effort is around standing up and running k8s itself, or ‘declaring’ what runs in it (tbc, this part is good), and much less on ‘Operators’ so k8s could run your SaaS for you (which would be better). The original public introduction of the concept: - Brandon Philips @ CoreOS, Nov 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20170129131616/http://coreos.com/blog/introducing-operators.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170129131616/http://coreos.com... A more recent take: - RedHat, 2020: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-operators https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-operators --- * Note: “The word ‘governance’ came from the Latin verb ‘gubernare’, or more originally from the Greek word ‘kubernaein’, which means ‘to steer’. Basing on its etymology, governance refers to the manner of steering or governing, or of directing and controlling.”
rbanffy 5y ago
I found it interesting that Stafford Beer was only mentioned in the references section.
- nanna 5y ago
  Since he had nothing to do with Soviet cybernetics or the invention of the US internet?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I somehow doubt his work was unknown in the Soviet Union, as he worked in the Cybersyn project in Chile, before the US-sponsored military coup ensured it'd not happen.
elzbardico 5y ago
It is amazing how the CIA didn’t end up dragging the USA into the Third World War. Missile gap, dominoes theory, programmer gap, space gap, wmd in Iraq, the list is almost endless
masijo 5y ago
If someone's interested in Cybernetics, I recommend to look at Paul Cockshott's work; mainly his book "Towards a New Socialism" were he explains why and how computers could be used in economy planification. Really interesting stuff, no matter where you sit on the "political spectrum" or whatever. Direct link: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_soci...
SaberTail 5y ago
Francis Spufford's Red Plenty is a interesting, semi-fictional book about this optimistic period of cybernetics in the Soviet Union, and why the dream ultimately didn't come true.

77 points by nanna 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

Apparently the scare part was a pre-emptive attempt by Stalinists who saw Kibernetika as a threat to Workers -their bread and butter. So it was suppressed and derided ideologically. After the Stalinists, Khrushchev sought to leverage Cybernetics and use it everywhere, so much was their propaganda the US took their rhetoric as actual policy and feared falling behind in the Cybernetics race. After Stalinism Kibernetika was rehabilitated: >"In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked cybernetics as “a modish pseudo-science” and “a reactionary imperialist utopia”. Soviet critics used all tools in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments (accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics “a technocratic theory” whose goal was to replace striking workers with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscience-laden soldiers with “indifferent metallic monsters”). Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans”, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons."

photochemsyn 5y ago

Some interesting excerpts: ". . . In their view, machines, organisms, and human society were all seen as self-organizing control systems, which, operating in a certain environment, pursued their goals (hitting a target, increasing order, achieving better organization, or reaching the state of equilibrium) by communicating with this environment, that is, sending signals and receiving information about the results of their actions through feedback loops." That's probably an overly simplistic view of biology and ecosystems. ". . . Wiener was deeply critical of capitalist America. He did not believe in the ability of the “invisible hand” of free market to establish an economic and social equilibrium, or homeostasis in cybernetic terms. His social outlook was overtly pessimistic: “There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses.” Not much has changed eh? ". . .He believed that describing society in cybernetic terms as a self-regulating device would make it clear that controlling the means of communication was “the most effective and most important” anti-homeostatic factor, which could drive society out of equilibrium.16 Wiener noted that on both sides of the Atlantic “political leaders may attempt to control their populations” by manipulating information flows, and argued that “it is no accident that Russia has had its Berias and that we have our McCarthys”.17 His views of capitalism and communism were best summarized by his colleague and friend Dirk Struik: “plague on both your houses”." Now about mass consolidation of corporate media and social media platforms, with fairly arbitrary censorship and an obsession with 'control of the message' in government-corporate circles, ahem. Antitrust for media sounds like a very good idea.

dogman144 5y ago

Cybernetics, as a search query, opens up access to a great collection of tech-critique mixed with philosophy and solid intellectual rigor. 100% recommend checking it out. "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" is a good place to start (MIT Press has it). "Cybernetics" as a descriptor went out of style by the 2000's I think. Prior to that, you can find writing from ideologues/philosophers/academics who grasped what tech would look like and put it through analytical frameworks wrt its impact on systems outside of tech. I think they were able to do this because by the 1960's, the capabilities of tech were becoming clear if to someone in the right networks or from the right background. Pair that with the 1950's-1980's generating some heavyweight philosophers like Albert Camus (although idk if he ever wrote about tech) or writers like Huxley who blur the line a bit, and you can find some really interesting insight on tech. The cybernetics writers did a good job of understanding that tech would change everything in some fundamental and abstract sense, so they focused meta-analysis to cohere the "so what" of it all (impact on ethics, governance, politics, sociology). An example is analyzing the trend in tech of `if system is discovered -> then attempt to codify and automate it.` This provides some scaffolding for thinking through AI-driven governance, for instance, but with a little more intellectual rigor than a substack article. It's similar to the value-add of reading really good sci-fi, but this time from Camus or Nietzche versus William Gibson or Neil Stephenson. If you feel that our times warrants some level of serious analysis, find like there's a general void of comprehension outside of small pockets and policy circles, and therefore decide to settle for pulling insights from a sort of disappointing blend of cypherpunk writing, Peter Thiel-isms, Lex Fridman interviews, and Andrew Yang because at least "they get the big picture of what tech will do": writing on cybernetics is good to check out.

Terretta 5y ago
> "Cybernetics" as a descriptor went out of style by the 2000's I think. A bit off topic, but in the ‘science of automatic control systems’ sense -- one could argue today it could be pronounced ‘kubernetes’. But imagine the consternation when we first collectively realized k8s had no cybernetics, no auto-governance (another related word*) of tech running on it. This is why a few of us met with CoreOS in the mid-2010s to talk about the idea that would turn into Operators: put the cybernetics back in kubernetes. Disappointed even today that so much mindshare and effort is around standing up and running k8s itself, or ‘declaring’ what runs in it (tbc, this part is good), and much less on ‘Operators’ so k8s could run your SaaS for you (which would be better). The original public introduction of the concept: - Brandon Philips @ CoreOS, Nov 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20170129131616/http://coreos.com/blog/introducing-operators.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170129131616/http://coreos.com... A more recent take: - RedHat, 2020: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-operators https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-operators --- * Note: “The word ‘governance’ came from the Latin verb ‘gubernare’, or more originally from the Greek word ‘kubernaein’, which means ‘to steer’. Basing on its etymology, governance refers to the manner of steering or governing, or of directing and controlling.”

rbanffy 5y ago

I found it interesting that Stafford Beer was only mentioned in the references section.

nanna 5y ago
Since he had nothing to do with Soviet cybernetics or the invention of the US internet?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I somehow doubt his work was unknown in the Soviet Union, as he worked in the Cybersyn project in Chile, before the US-sponsored military coup ensured it'd not happen.

elzbardico 5y ago

It is amazing how the CIA didn’t end up dragging the USA into the Third World War. Missile gap, dominoes theory, programmer gap, space gap, wmd in Iraq, the list is almost endless

masijo 5y ago

If someone's interested in Cybernetics, I recommend to look at Paul Cockshott's work; mainly his book "Towards a New Socialism" were he explains why and how computers could be used in economy planification. Really interesting stuff, no matter where you sit on the "political spectrum" or whatever. Direct link: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_soci...

SaberTail 5y ago

Francis Spufford's Red Plenty is a interesting, semi-fictional book about this optimistic period of cybernetics in the Soviet Union, and why the dream ultimately didn't come true.