54 Chapter 1
later discussions of the design and development of national networks. The
designers of major early cold war national networks in the Soviet Union,
the United States, and Chile sought, implicitly or explicitly, to model their
own self-governing national networks after cybernetic neural networks. In
the comparative network designs (including distributed, hierarchical, and
participatory), early network scientists proposed differing images of the
relationship between a network and the living body politic of the nation.
The mind analogies all share a common cybernetic impulse to analogize
between information systems underlying organisms, machines, and societ-
ies. (The organizing itch of cybernetics is simply that a better-understood
system can inform a less well-understood system.) Analogies are neither
right nor wrong: they should be judged by their interpretive use rather
than their epistemic weight. (Or as Evelyn Fox Keller once noted, the word
simulation meant deception before it meant analogical likeness.) Given this,
it is striking that each of the network architect teams at hand (Glushkov’s
OGAS, Beer’s Cybersyn, and Baran’s ARPANET) chose to analogize or model
its national network project after the same basic image—the human mind,
or an organic nervous system. But each of these national networks expressed
the basic design analogy differently.
These early national networks projects—OGAS, Cybersyn, and ARPA-
NET—were designed after different models of the (human) mind. Even
though Beer and the Cybersyn project rejected previous and ongoing Soviet
attempts to manage the command economy, the OGAS and Cybersyn proj-
ects pursued a national model in which the nation is likened to the body of
an organism and the computer network to the nervous system that incorpo-
rates that nation’s communication.^134 The ARPANET, by contrast, inspired
by McCulloch’s neural network research, is analogized to a disembodied
brain itself. In this case, the nation is like the brain itself: whatever organi-
zation the network serves constitutes its own neural network. To oversim-
plify, Baran foresaw a national state network simulating a brain without a
body, while Glushkov (and Beer) anticipated a network nation simulating a
body with a brain—a government in touch with its people.
As cognitive philosophers have submitted, analogies of (a nation as) an
embodied mind and a disembodied brain work very differently. Although
Soviet scientists were understandably wary of overbold political proclama-
tions, the OGAS design reaffirmed the self-conception of the Soviet state
as a decentralized hierarchical heart of the Soviet nation. In a colossal
nation, workers were to be incorporated and animated by planning that
emanated from the central processing unit, or social brain, in Moscow. That
state would not be simply centralized and top-down. In the OGAS design,