226 Notes to Inroduction and Chapter 1
For more on the historical designator new media, see Benjamin Peters, “And Lead
Us Not into Thinking the New Is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History,”
New Media and Society 11 (1–2) (2009): 13–30.
Aleksandr Ya. Khinchin, “Teoria prosteishego potoka” (Mathematical Methods
of the Theory of Mass Service; more literally, Simple Stream Theory), Trudy
Matematicheskogo Instituta Steklov. 49 (1955): 3–122.
János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1992); David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand
Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 94.
The field of institutional economics offers pragmatic approaches to observed
irrationalities in individual and group actions. A few standard references in the lit-
erature include Thorsten Veblen’s heterodox position in “Why Is Economics Not an
Evolutionary Science?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (1898): 373–393; Thomas
C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978); Douglass C.
North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998); Ronald Coase, “The New Institutional Economics,”
American Economic Review 88 (2) (1998): 72–74; and William Kapp, The Foundations
of Institutional Economics (New York: Routledge, 2011). For comparison to the quirki-
ness of individual decisions, see popular introductions to cognitive psychology and
behavioral psychology and economics, such as Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking Fast
and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), and Dan Ariely, Predictably
Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: HarperCollins,
2008). Compare these to recent works on the informal and violent character of post-
Soviet economics, including Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat,
Networking and Information Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
and Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian
Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
The English-language literature on tech entrepreneurs is long and popular,
including Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), and
Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York:
Crown Business, 2014), but very little of it to my knowledge looks beyond the West
(in particular, the west coast of the United States and the eastern Asian rim), such as
Eden Medina, ed., Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in
Latin America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).
Chapter 1: A Global History of Cybernetics
- See note 20 on cybernetic literature in the introduction to this book.
- See Wiener, Cybernetics; Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strate-
gies, 1943–70”; Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy”; and J. R. Pierce, “The Early