A Global History of Cybernetics 51
technological apparatus brought with it a promise of systemwide structural
reform, and although that reform was never fully realized, the technologi-
cal apparatus was. Cybernetics accompanied the transformation of Soviet
society into an already networked information society, although it did so
without bringing about the intended social, organization, and techno-
logical reforms and self-governance. The early nationwide cybernetworks
explored in subsequent chapters are central to understanding the Soviet
experience and the unintended political consequences of sociotechnical
and technocratic reforms.
A glance at the history of early Soviet cybernetics might at first steer
readers to think that technocratic sciences are politically neutral, capable
of adapting to whatever the political discourse of the day is, whether Sta-
lin’s rejection, Khrushchev’s reform, or Brezhnev’s reconsolidation of tech-
nocratic science. Yet this is not the case: claiming technocratic neutrality
itself is a consequential political posture that often is filled by whatever the
politics of status quo at the time and place are. The nationwide networks
created to save the flagging economy and technical data infrastructures dis-
cussed in later chapters are presented as socially neutral technocratic solu-
tions to social problems—and yet that position of neutrality proved to be a
veiled form of ideational investment. Considered generally, the cybernetic
goal of controlling and regulating information systems in abstract and sup-
posedly neutral mathematical terms appealed to post-Stalinist scientists
who were fed up with political oppression. Cybernetics struck Moscow-
based bureaucrats and party officials as a politically feasible way forward
in preserving the centralized state as an information system without the
abuses of Stalinism.^129 Behold the promise of control without violence and
of a socialist information society liberated from its stained past by the neu-
tralizing politics of computation.
Others promised technological improvements without politics long
before the onset of computers and digital media. Soviet discourse of what
James Carey called the “electric sublime” begins with Lenin’s famous 1920
statement that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of
the whole country,” perhaps the highpoint of the Soviet reputation in the
West as well as a memorable declaration of the Soviet Union’s commitment
to achieve social progress through technological modernization.^130 Soviet
cybernetic discourse built actively on that tradition—particularly that of
the Soviet digital economic network projects, which, like Lenin’s electrifi-
cation (or GOERLO) project, promised to rework the technological infra-
structure of the whole country—the factories, the grids that united them,
and the giant hydroelectric and computer stations that powered them. The