Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 149
In subsequent OGAS preparatory proposals, Glushkov reframed the
barebones EGSVTs network not as a matter of direct economic manage-
ment but rather as a support for information management related to the
national economy. This was so even though, in practice, the network he
proposed also advanced data exchange and communication across the local
and national levels. In the 1960s, Glushkov and his team tried at least two
times to propose to Party leaders a technical EGSVTs network—first as an
all-nation network (in 1963) and later as a regional network in Ukraine
(in 1967).^78 A metadata management view informed both proposals: “To
organize information flows on the national scale,” as Glushkov once put it,
“one needs to centralize interagency management of all information banks
and computer centers, not the management of the economy.”^79 In reorient-
ing his claim from the politically entrenched national economy itself to the
supposedly neutral territory of information banks, technical networks, and
data clearinghouses, Glushkov adopted the abiding belief that was com-
mon among cybernetics and many digital technologist heirs in the neutral
politics of code. Nonetheless, he proclaimed his task to be “not only scien-
tific and technical, but also political,” espousing the recurrent and trouble-
some idea that the politics of computation and technology are somehow
more neutral than other politics.^80
Instead of imagining a future communism arising out of exchanges
ordered by an automated network, Glushkov envisioned the revised OGAS
Project as the means whereby human planners might process accurate
information about the economy via a national computer network. The
Soviet computer network, like similar computing projects elsewhere in the
1970s, appeared foremost to be a “public utility” and a mass medium for
serving information over great distance.^81 (Computers too were mass media
in the age of mass media.) This revised model proved durable politically in
part because it came with the added efficiency of promises of liberal pricing
reforms, while capitulating to the more pragmatic demands of reforming
an economic planning administration staffed with self-interested humans.
Moreover, the revised emphasis on having OGAS manage the supposedly
immaterial information about economic interactions (rather than com-
mand the actual economic planning) also proved a salient political hedge
for the defense of the project going forward. Although striking near the
heart of the state communist project’s goal to transform the material well-
being of every citizen, the OGAS defenders publicly defended their reform
ambitions as merely immaterial and informational, even as the design ana-
log and cybernetic philosophy quietly espoused the more fundamental
fact that every information reform is also an organizational and thus social