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

(Ben Green) #1

232 Notes to Chapter 1




  1. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 173–175.




  2. Ibid., 176–180.




  3. Kitov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vynes kibernetiku iz sekretnoi biblioteki,” 44–45.




  4. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 183.




  5. Ibid., 173. See also Sergei L. Sobolev, Anatolii I. Kitov, and Aleksei A. Lyapunov,
    “Osnovnye cherty kibernetiki” [“Basic Features of Cybernetics”], Voprosy filsofii 4
    (1955): 136.




  6. Edwards, The Closed World, 175–208, 275–302.




  7. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 178.




  8. Wiener, Cybernetics.




  9. I discuss the renewability of new media in Peters, “And Lead Us Not into Think-
    ing the New Is New,” and Benjamin Peters and Deborah Lubken, “New Media in
    Crises: Discursive Instability and Emergency Communication,” in The Long History
    of New Media, ed. David W. Park et al., 193–209 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).




  10. My thanks to Andriy Ishchenko and an anonymous reviewer for this distinction.




  11. Sobolev, Kitov, and Lyapunov, “Osnovnye cherty kibernetiki,” 141.




  12. Ibid., 141–146.




  13. Ibid.




  14. Ibid., 147.




  15. See Karel Chapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots, trans. David Willie (Fairford:
    Echo Library, 2010).




  16. Sobolev et al., “Osnovnye cherty kibernetiki,” 148.




  17. Ibid., 147.




  18. Ibid.




  19. Ibid.




  20. Ibid.




  21. For more on Kolman, see Loren Graham and Jean-Michael Kantor, Naming Infin-
    ity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Cambridge:
    Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).




  22. Graham and Kantor, Naming Infinity. This fascinating account describes how
    founding (transfinite) set theorists and religious mystics such as Dmitri Egorov,
    Pavel Florensky, and Nikolai Luzhin in 1920s Moscow came together around the
    realization that neither infinity nor God could be defined but both could be named.



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