A Global History of Cybernetics 55
the network would serve as a nationwide nervous system that responded
to and adjusted in real time to local events and maintained dynamic bal-
ance through complex feedback loops with its internal and international
information environment. This metaphor was both materialist and ideal-
ist—materialist in that it grounded the nation in the industrial and eco-
nomic realities already on the ground and idealist in that it ignored the
fact that the economy did not behave like a healthy or single body (but
instead like an environment for nonsymbiotic competition over bureau-
cratic positioning).
Also consider how the U.S. ARPANET analogy of the nation as a disem-
bodied brain, although articulated here for the first time to my knowledge,
has already been inscribed many times. Most often the interpretations
smack of triumphalist political overtones. Seeing the nation (network) as a
brain, not a body, signifies that the United States is conceived as an organ
for knowledge work, not physical labor; that its civilian communication
networks imagine its citizens, not the state, as the democratic decision-
making mechanism for the nation; that those citizens exist in peer-to-peer
relationships where, like nodes in a distributed network, each may act and
interact with her neighbor as equals; and that (particularly common in digi-
tal libertarian discourse) the computer network itself constitutes the higher
order of technological freedom that is necessary for the natural emergence
of a more robust political order. (When Baran described distributed net-
working, his word was not robust but survivable because his network was to
survive nuclear attack, which puts a less optimistic spin on things.) Baran,
we might assert, was acting in the libertarian tradition by espousing the
organic nation as a marketplace of individuals dating back to Herbert Spen-
cer.^136 Or perhaps Baran designed the ARPANET after the image of the state
as an enlightened social brain, channeling the American progressive notion
of the state (or any other depository of organized intelligence, including
the news-reading public, schools, universities, and scientific laboratories)
as a “social sensorium” dating back to John Dewey and Charles Horton
Cooley.^137
With enough imagination, the analogy of the national network to a
human mind can serve almost any end, such as the engine of a sensing
being interacting in a mediated environment, a nervous system animat-
ing a living body, or the gray matter filling a skull. Perhaps the reason that
these cyberneticists populated their analogies with the human mind was
(to paraphrase a leading neuroscientist) simply the fact that humans like
to believe that the human mind is the most complicated thing in the uni-
verse, even though this idea is probably no more than the brain’s opinion