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

(Ben Green) #1

A Global History of Cybernetics 27


computing pioneer Alan Turing, his Bletchey Park colleague and cryptog-
rapher mathematician I. J. Good, neuropsychologist Donald MacKay, and
astrophysicist Tommy Gold. The historian of science Andrew Pickering
chronicles the lives and work of six active and largely forgotten Britons who
were preoccupied with what the brain does—neurologist W. Grey Walter,
psychiatrist W. Ross Ashby, anthropologist, psychiatrist, and Macy Confer-
ence attendee Gregory Bateson, radical antipsychiatrist R. D. Laing, psy-
chologist Gordon Pask, and management cyberneticist Stafford Beer (who
also features prominently in the Chilean cybernetic situation described
below). Interdisciplinary discussions ranged widely across themes such as
information theory, probability, pattern recognition, artifacts that act (such
as William Ross Ashby’s homeostat and W. Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises),
and philosophy. Among their guests over the years were at least two Ameri-
cans who later played roles in the development of the ARPANET—J.C.R.
Licklider and Warren McCulloch.^35 According to Pickering, what each of
these pioneering cyberneticists held in common was an interest in the
brain as a machine that acts, not thinks—or communication systems that
perform, not cogitate.^36 Cybernetics took root on its own terms in Britain—
not the postmodern theory of France but what Pickering calls the “non-
modern” performances of neurological structures.
Chile and to a lesser extend Argentina also experienced the influx of
cybernetic ideas that ended up framing the debate about national networks.
In 1959, as a graduate student at Harvard, the Chilean biologist Humberto
Maturana coauthored an important paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the
Frog’s Brain” with lead author Jerome Lettvin, Warren McCulloch, and
Walter Pitts. In the early 1970s, Maturana and his student Francisco Valera
secured their part in what has been called the “second wave” of cybernet-
ics together with the editor of the Macy Conferences proceedings Heinz
von Forester and Gordon Pask, among others, with their contribution of
the idea of autopoiesis—a system that generates, maintains, and reproduces
itself (such as a biological cell). The idea found resonance with the work on
the Chilean socialist economy led by the British management cyberneticist
Stafford Beer during the political rule of Salvador Allende between 1971
and the military coup in 1973.
During this period, Project Cybersyn took place, and it was perhaps the
most prominent experiment in developing a national network intended
for managing the socialist economy. As historian of science Eden Medina
has recently revealed, the British management cyberneticist Stafford Beer
served as principal architect for the rapid design, development, and partial
deployment of this nationwide network of telex machines connected to

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