56 Chapter 1
about itself.^138 The point is that this analog, like all others, is contentless.
It has no right or wrong, and the work that it does for us is work that
we do to ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about our networks reveal
more about us—the spinners of modern-day network rhetoric—than it does
about the network itself.
Finally, this chapter summarizes how, in its early adoption period, early
Soviet cybernetics muted but did not erase politically potent mind-nation-
network questions with language that was deliberately more technocratic
and theoretical perhaps than that of cyberneticists in other countries.
Although no surprise, talk about cybernetics and society took on the tech-
nical discourse of what Gerovitch calls Soviet “cyberspeak,” or an ideologi-
cal and discursive strategy for embedding public discussion about society
in the language of technical expertise. The postwar and cold war debates
about cybernetics in the Soviet Union impinged on the social implications
of the new science. Perhaps the most obvious example of a technocratic
approach bearing out social implications is the focus of the next chapter—
the case of economic cybernetics. How, if at all, might cybernetics—or the
study of communication systems that organize our bodies, machines, and
societies—improve the current social, political, and economic order? How,
as Stafford Beer developed in Chile, might cybernetic insights be applied to
the networking of the Soviet nation in need of an economic boost? How
might concerns with communication and control that were central to both
the larger Soviet state and cybernetic projects play out in the crucial prac-
tice and policies of command economies? The following chapter discusses
these and other questions.