A Global History of Cybernetics 53
subject to the punishing pleasures of contest, prestige, and competition^133 —
appeared par for the course. As the next chapter attempts to illustrate, the
case of Soviet economic cybernetics challenges historians and other agent-
observers of change with the suggestion that perhaps the ordinary, over-
looked elements of actors, ideas, practices, and policies—including those
governing everyday life in the command economy—best describe the cir-
cuitous historical course of science and social reform.
In one important sector, however, Soviet cybernetics and other infor-
mation sciences were not obviously subjected to a confusion of com-
peting motives—the Soviet military. The Red Army adopted cybernetic
research methods and vocabulary, usually coded in public simply as “spe-
cial research”; successfully theorized the military-technical revolution
spurred by computers and associated long-range, specific-target military
innovations; and maintained a competitive space and nuclear and long-
range conventional warfare armaments without the internal incoherence
and competition that was found in civilian sectors. So although the Soviet
cybernetic-lit military technology revolution of the 1970s did not lead to
application due to the political and economic incapacities of the Soviet
state, the key distinction from the civilian economic sectors is that, inside
the centralized military administration, real cybernetic reform was both
possible and carried out in theory.^134
In conclusion, having outlined a few sources that led to the consolida-
tion of cybernetics in Wiener’s 1948 masterwork, the Macy Conferences
on Cybernetics (1946–1953), its postwar spread through France, England,
Chile, and a vignette of how cybernetics became a loose techno-ideologi-
cal framework for thinking through information sciences in post-Stalinist
Soviet Union, I now comment on the idiosyncratic development of cyber-
netics across these moments in the early cold war global history. Several
comparisons and contrasts draw connections to other postwar climates
where cybernetics came to roost. The Soviet translation and adoption of
cybernetics share with the other case studies glossed here an underlying
fascination with the relationship of the mind to the machine, especially
as seen in the biology and neurology of the British and Chilean cybernet-
icists. The mind-machine analog is a politically charged two-way street.
Not only does cybernetics prompt us to think about how a logic machine
(computer circuits or any other Turing machine) may function like a mind
(a neural network), but it also raises McCulloch’s potent possibility that
subsequent neuroscience has soundly rejected: the mind (neural network)
might function like a logic machine (computer circuits). This reverse com-
parison (that a mind is like a machine) proves particularly enduring in