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

(Ben Green) #1

A Global History of Cybernetics 21


the label of cybernetics, and he also did not accept the label others had
given to his own “information theory,” preferring to the end of his life
his original emphasis on “mathematical theory of communication.” Each
of these sciences sought to theorize the technical means by which com-
munication could be controlled. The cybernetic sciences, especially but not
exclusively in the Soviet case, emerge as a communication science in search
of self-governing systems.
Although it has never been clear (perhaps even to cyberneticists) what
cyberneticists could do exactly, it also never has been obvious what cyber-
netics could not do (perhaps even the definition of cybernetics is self-gov-
erning). For example, in 1943, Wiener and his coauthors succeeded in
springing “feed-back”—a once obscure term on loan from control engi-
neering and reclaimed in his antiaircraft research—into an umbrella con-
cept that was fit for understanding any type of purposeful behavior, where
the behavior of humans, animals, and machines is understood as “any
change of an entity with respect to its surroundings.”^23 At this philosophi-
cal height, feedback loops proved a generalizable tool that could stabilize all
kinds of unsteady systems: feedback offers a process whereby information
that leaves a system is brought back into the system with the intention of
influencing that system’s future behavior.
Feedback comes in at least two kinds—positive and negative. When posi-
tive, feedback amplifies a signal cyclically, much like a microphone that is
set too close to a loudspeaker will cause painful audio feedback as the signal
loops out of control. Negative feedback by contrast can serve as a stabiliz-
ing agent, an internal check or correction on a system seeking balance in
an unstable environment. By working with feedback loops in communica-
tion systems, cybernetics sought a revolution in recognizing and operation-
alizing the nonlinear, self-recursive processes that abound in nature and
technology. Whatever cybernetics is, it is not a straightforward worldview
of Newtonian physics, Cartesian grids, Euclidian geometry, Aristotelian
cause and effect, and arithmetic. Rather, cybernetics espouses a mathemati-
cal worldview that helps us understand the midcentury struggle to balance
atop the tectonic shift in science toward pre-postmodern concepts such as
quantum physics, curvilinear grids, non-Euclidian geometry, cyclical cau-
salities, self-similar fractals, and modern probability theory.
The interpretive purchase of Wiener’s cybernetics rests not on its clarity
but on its synthetizing search for system self-regulation in the face of a topsy-
turvy postwar world. That is, the basic cybernetic approach seeks to har-
ness to the logical power of computing a wide range of scientific problems
with circularities and feedback loops. In this search for a balance between

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