148 Chapter 4
a system that could command information about those commands—or
the economic metadata. When faced with the possibility of controlling
all economic information, the commission reviewers concluded, given
the already tumultuous economic supervision in the early 1960s, that a
national economic network could supervise, not directly manage, the com-
mand economy.
Similar to Kitov’s Red Book show trial, the official rationale for the initial
decision to strip the OGAS of any capacity to reform the planning pro-
cess itself came with a justification that did not quite match the action.
In this case, the Central Committee denied the automated management
portion of the OGAS proposal due to what they deemed (not without
contradiction) to be the inefficiency of rational management systems. In
practice, the Committee apparently denied the request out of a fear that
Glushkov’s OGAS would strip its own unsanctioned informal control over
economic power. Commission members who supported the OGAS also
worried that even with top-level support, midlevel administrators would
sabotage OGAS’s efforts to rationalize their management powers. The ini-
tial 1963 decision to postpone the capacity of OGAS to reform economic
planning took place as Khrushchev was falling out of power and limited
Kosygin-Liberman liberal economic reforms were being introduced. The
submarining of both reforms highlights the contradictions that faced the
commanding heights of the Soviet state. No matter how obvious it was that
the mismanagement of the command economy drove the state’s economic
woes, the state could approve no major reform without a sweeping revolu-
tion in how it managed itself.
Glushkov learned his lesson from the 1963 commission experience and
scaled back and reframed his work on networking the command economy
from direct management to indirect information supervision. Beginning in
1963, he publicly repeated that “the OGAS does not command the econ-
omy, rather it commands the flows of information about the state of the
economy,” although in theory and practice, Glushkov grasped the inherent
politics of recordkeeping.^77 There are good reasons to doubt this position as
a political compromise. As Glushkov theorized elsewhere, (1) a strict divide
between data and metadata functions denies the basic cybernetic propo-
sition of feedback loops that ensure that metadata observation is never
influence-neutral, and (2) no organizational reform can ever be divorced
from its political implications. Whether for political protection or other-
wise, the OGAS team, not unlike other information omnivore projects,
sought to ease its critics’ concerns by asserting that it would traffic merely
in metadata.