A Global History of Cybernetics 19
Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, a series of semiannual (1946–1947)
and then annual (1948–1953) interdisciplinary gatherings chaired by War-
ren McCulloch and organized by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation in New
York City. The Macy Conferences, as they were informally known, staked
out a spacious interdisciplinary purview for cybernetic research.^11 In addi-
tion to McCulloch, who directed the conferences, a few noted participants
included Wiener himself, the mathematician and game theorist John von
Neumann, leading anthropologist Margaret Mead and her then husband
Gregory Bateson, founding information theorist and engineer Claude Shan-
non, sociologist-statistician and communication theorist Paul Lazarsfeld,
psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, as well as influential
psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers such as Kurt Lewin, F.S.C.
Northrop, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie, among others. Relying
on mathematical and formal definitions of communication, participants
rendered permeable the boundaries that distinguished humans, machines,
and animals as information systems. The language of cybernetic and infor-
matic analysis—including terms such as encoding, decoding, signal, feedback,
entropy, equilibrium, information, communication, control—sustained the anal-
ogies that bound together ontologically distinct physical phenomena.^12
The “invisible college” constituted by the Macy Conferences proved
immensely influential:^13 Von Neumann pioneered much of the digital
architecture for the computer as well as cold war game theory;^14 Shannon
founded American information theory; Bateson facilitated the adaptation
of cybernetics in anthropology and the American counterculture;^15 Lazars-
feld fashioned much of postwar American mass communication research;^16
and of special note here, Licklider went on to pioneer and manage the U.S.
ARPANET (predecessor to the Internet) and its founding vision of human-
computer interaction. The effects of World War II on the global research
community shaped both the number of international participants in the
group (for example, von Neumann was a Hungarian émigré and Lazars-
feld was Viennese) as well as the distinctly American approach that the
Macy Conferences represented as a trading zone between private philan-
thropic institutions (the Macy Foundation) and academics with strong ties
to U.S. military research (including von Neumann, Wiener, Bateson, and
many others).^17 Cybernetics emerged as a discipline that consolidated dis-
tinctly international sources of inspiration in a distinctly postwar American
setting.
The principles to emerge out of the Macy Conferences were many and far
from consensual. “Our consensus has never been unanimous,” McCulloch
quipped in a summary of the proceedings: “Even had it been so, I see no