A Global History of Cybernetics 37
exclusively on Wiener’s 1948 book (although these early Soviet cybernet-
ics made notably less of the field as an applied science and more of it as a
universalizing theory than did Wiener). Second, it retooled Wiener’s con-
ceptual vocabulary into a Soviet language of science. Gerovitch details the
translation of their terms: “What Wiener called ‘the feedback mechanism’
they called ‘the theory of feedback’ ... ‘basic principles of digital comput-
ing’ became ‘the theory of automatic high-speed electronic calculating
machines’; ‘cybernetic models of human thinking’ became the ‘theory of
self-organizing logical processes.’”^70 In fact, the coauthors used the word
theory six times in their definition of cybernetics to emphasize the theoreti-
cal nature of the new science, possibly as a way to avoid having to discuss
the political implications of introducing a practical field of human-machine
applications into a society well suited to adopt them.
The coauthors also integrated and expanded the stochastic analysis of
Claude Shannon’s information theory while simultaneously stripping Wie-
ner’s organism-machine analogy of its political potency.^71 Wiener’s core
analogies between animal and machine, machine and mind were stressed
as analogies—or how “self-organizing logical processes [appeared] similar
to the processes of human thought” but were not synonyms. At the same
time, the article scripts his language of control, feedback, and automated
systems in the machine and organism into the common language of infor-
mation, or Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. For Kitov,
this “doctrine of information” took on wholesale the task of universaliz-
ing statistical control in machines and minds. It did so by preferring the
“automatic high-speed electronic calculating machine” (that is, computer)
to Wiener’s original base analogy for cybernetic comparisons—the servo-
mechanism. The servomechanism is an automatic engineering device used
in a larger mechanism to correct, using error-sensing negative feedback,
that mechanism’s performance: examples could include the steam engine
governor, modern cruise control in cars, or, in Wiener’s case, antiaircraft fire
control mechanisms controlling a gun and its gunner.^72 Despite the coau-
thors’ efforts to silence the social implications of the theory, computer algo-
rithms added a further layer of technical complication to Wiener’s feedback
mechanisms, even as their neuronal analog to electronic switches quietly
implied opening new research horizons in human-computer interaction,
robotic prosthetics, and cyborgs. By formulating the science in terms of
cutting-edge computers, not servomechanisms, the coauthors propelled
the Soviet cyberneticist and his computer into the front lines of the esca-
lating space and technology race. Thus, conceiving of the computer as a
general regulating machine for any control systems, the Soviet formulation