How Not to Network a Nation. The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

46 Chapter 1 was anything but. Berg’s series Cybernetics: In the Service of Communism pro- duced heated debate and fierce divisi ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 47 adjectival form, cybernetic, an adjunct to anything that its users see fit to apply it. From ...

48 Chapter 1 Nonetheless, the runaway institutional success of cybernetics in the Soviet Union also meant that, by the time Leon ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 49 his public reception, Wiener’s friend Dirk Struik, a Dutch mathematician and Marxist theoreti ...

50 Chapter 1 without a founder, and because founders precede identities, all foundations must be laid by what must appear post f ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 51 technological apparatus brought with it a promise of systemwide structural reform, and althou ...

52 Chapter 1 cybernetwork projects integrated and updated a longer tradition of the industrialist, Taylorist megaprojects that m ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 53 subject to the punishing pleasures of contest, prestige, and competition^133 — appeared par f ...

54 Chapter 1 later discussions of the design and development of national networks. The designers of major early cold war nationa ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 55 the network would serve as a nationwide nervous system that responded to and adjusted in real ...

56 Chapter 1 about itself.^138 The point is that this analog, like all others, is contentless. It has no right or wrong, and the ...

Civilian computer networking in the Soviet Union first developed among cyberneticists who applied their science to a unique envi ...

58 Chapter 2 economy. A command economy is one in which the coordination of econ- omy activity is carried out not by market mech ...

Economic Cybernetics and Its Limits 59 Gossnab, in contrast, was responsible for implementing Gosplan’s plans by procuring and s ...

60 Chapter 2 October coup, the Bolsheviks eliminated the remnants of the oppositional armies run by the tsar and the Mensheviks, ...

Economic Cybernetics and Its Limits 61 cyberneticists and other economic planners as informal competition in the command economy ...

62 Chapter 2 the planning process. Consider this 1962 complaint in Pravda from a fac- tory director about the determination of c ...

Economic Cybernetics and Its Limits 63 wartime conditions, could manage and execute all the operations neces- sary to sustain th ...

64 Chapter 2 over his years in power, further splintering and territorializing the single national economic administrative hiera ...

Economic Cybernetics and Its Limits 65 the then contemporary functioning of the command economy (with its pyramid bureaucracy of ...