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

(Ben Green) #1

42 Chapter 1


broadened and colored the ambition of cybernetics to match Marxism-
Leninism. Sensitive to the many eastern European origins of cybernetic-style
thinking, Kolman’s narrative assimilates cybernetics into a longer history of
computational machines, including Ramon Llull in 1235, Pascal in the mid-
1600s, the engineer Wilgott “Odhner of St. Petersburg” (and not Stockholm,
Wilgott’s native city), and the late nineteenth-century mathematicians A.
N. Krilov and P. L. Chebishev. He then discussed how the Soviet mathemati-
cians Andrei Markov Jr. (a constructivist mathematician who later became
a leading cyberneticist), N. C. Novikov, N. A. Shanin, and others advanced
the last hundred years’ worth of precybernetic work in Russian.^94 Kolman’s
internationalism allowed two people west of Berlin to slip into his history—
Norbert Wiener and Nikolai Rashevsky, the first Pavlov-inspired biomath-
ematician and a Russian émigré at the University of Chicago.
Thus, the battle to legitimize Soviet cybernetics began internally and was
fought against by and among Soviet philosopher-critics, the vanguard and
police of ideological debate in Soviet discourse. Both procybernetic articles
(especially Kolman’s) were loaded with discursive tactics that were meant
to protect cybernetics from counterattacks, so much so that, even in pro-
nouncing it, the first act of Soviet cybernetics partook in cold war game-
theoretic strategies. In the first public defense of cybernetics, which was a
lecture given at Moscow State University in 1954, Kolman notes that “it is,
of course, very easy and simple to defame cybernetics as mystifying and
unscientific. In my opinion, however, it would be a mistake to assume that
our enemies are busy with nonsensical things, that they waste enormous
means, create institutes, arrange national conferences and international
congresses, publish magazines—and all this only for the purpose of dis-
crediting the teachings of Pavlov and dragging idealism and metaphysics
into psychology and sociology.” By imagining enemies as rational actors,
not pseudoscientific bourgeois, a cybernetic worldview provides its own
first defense: “There are more effective and less expensive means than the
occupation with cybernetics,” Kolman the philosopher-critic continues, “if
one intends to pursue idealistic and military propaganda.^95
Kolman employed the logic of reversing the rational enemy that was
implicit in all Soviet cybernetic strategy to save the fledgling movement
from future Soviet critics. Kolman invites his Soviet listeners to consider
cybernetics from the perspective of an economically rational American sci-
entist.^96 We should imitate the enemy, Kolman reasoned, because we can
infer that the enemy knows something we do not, for he is occupied with
something we do not understand. To its participants, cybernetics took ini-
tial shape in a militarized discourse of the postwar and cold war.

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