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

(Ben Green) #1

A Global History of Cybernetics 39


would arise out of the “chaotic conditions of the capitalist market,” and
his widely publicized postwar fear of “the replacement of common work-
ers with mechanical robots.”^79 A word play in Russian animates this last
phrase: the Russian word for worker, or rabotnik, differs only by a vowel
transformation from robot, the nearly universal term coined in 1927 by the
playwright Karel Capek from the Czech word for “forced labor.”^80 The first
industrial revolution replaced the hand with the machine, or the rabotnik
with the robot, and Wiener’s science, the coauthors dreamed, would help
usher in a “second industrial revolution” in which the labor of the human
mind could be carried out by intelligent machines, thus freeing, as Marx
had intimated a century earlier, the mind to higher pursuits. “Automation
in the socialist society,” the coauthors wrote in anticipation of Khrush-
chev’s declaration at the 1956 Congress, “will help facilitate and increase
the productivity of human labor.”^81 Although Stalin had found no use for
Wiener’s sounding of a “new industrial revolution,” these mathematicians
had found and refashioned in Wiener an American critic of capitalism, a
founder of a science that was fit to sound the Soviet call for the “increased
productivity of labor.”^82
Given this explicit adoption of Wiener into the Soviet scientific canon,
it is surprising to note that the coauthors quoted only one line from any of
his works. That line reads: “Information is information, not matter and not
energy. Any materialism that cannot allow for this cannot exist in the pres-
ent.”^83 By distinguishing between information, energy, and matter, Wiener
skips across two recent paradigm shifts in modern physics—first, from a
Newtonian physics of matter to an era of thermodynamics and Bergson and
second, from the thermodynamics of energy to a new but related paradigm
of information science and Wiener’s cybernetics. For many in the West, this
quote meant that information is nothing but information, a value-neutral
statistical measurement on which to rest objective science and the search
for computable truth. The technical meaning was the same for their Soviet
counterparts, but it also meant something more. By singling out Wiener’s
alliance of materialism and cybernetics, the coauthors implied that Wiener
had in mind a position that was amendable to the official philosophy of
Soviet science—the dialectical materialism of Marxism-Leninism. If dialec-
tical materialism did not update itself for the information age, it could not
exist. The same quote also leaves open the opportunity that the coauthors
were lobbying for—that Soviet dialectical materialism could allow for infor-
mation to be information in its fullest cybernetic or stochastic sense. The
quote thus renders Wiener as a sort of foreign prophet announcing a dia-
lectical materialist science of information science, a science whose present

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