Re: <nettime> Cybernetics and the Internet

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

t byfield wrote:

> Oh please. Could you be a little more blatant about your straw men?
> You yourself admit your ideas were based on first readings, whereas
> others (at least a few of who've been thinking about this for years) 
> couldn't see or [cue the ominous music] couldn't *face* the truth?

Ted, could you explain who these "straw men" might be? I am 
uncertain what you mean. If it is yourself, that's a 
misunderstanding. What I have written does not respond in 
any particular way to your previous posts, even though they 
are always interesting. Kenneth Werbin was the one who set 
off the lightbulb for me, back in 2006 -- but I definitely 
did not take him or anyone else as a "straw man"! My first 
readings date from 2006-07, which has allowed a little time 
for "second readings"... As for the ominous music, you're 
right, I do feel something ominous about the way our 
civilization has developed and I do think that few people 
want to face the truth, or even take the time required to 
uncover some hints of it. For a long time a majority of 
Americans found it impossible to say that the US was acting 
as an empire, probably because it is very difficult to face 
the idea that one is born of an empire and not a democracy. 
So in recent years I have focused my work on this theme, 
with a particular emphasis on the relation between computer 
networks and liberal empire. Of course that emphasis affects 
the results, but there are simply no results without some 
kind of initial focus. And sure, the US is arguably both a 
democracy and an empire, but to content oneself with the 
platitudes of two-sided arguments and ambiguity during the 
Bush regime appeared intellectually dubious to me.... To 
call it a liberal empire based on so-called open systems was 
a way to bring the contradictions a little closer to home!

> Maybe you're genuinely talking about several threads, but for me the 
> one that jumps out is this:
>
>   http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0810/threads.html#00036

Well, yes, I am *genuinely* talking about several threads 
and they usually begin with the word "Cybernetics." They go 
back to 2006:

--http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet.nettime/1571

--http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet.nettime/2535
(followed by: 
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet.nettime/2648)

and the Zittrain thread you mention, as well as this post 
that I inserted into it:
--http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet.nettime/3485

I was quite motivated by all these discussions, I could 
never have written this stuff without manifold insights 
gleaned from nettime. By the way, thanks also for your 
encouragements, I appreciate it.

>  I thought 
> then and, in light of the vague wording noted above, still wonder -- about 
> the 'dramatic' aspect of the historical narrative you offer. It relied too
> heavily on WW2 as a decisive historical rupture and on a moralizing sort
> of genealogy to make the more or less Kantian point that freedom ain't so
> simple or all it's cracked up to be.

Yes, I remember what you said in the Zittrain thread and I 
have reread it now. But we simply disagree. The idea that 
cybernetics did not emerge from WWII is shared by very few 
authors, maybe you're the only one! Most do agree on some 
antecedents: Turing's prewar work, Wiener's prewar work, the 
physiologist Cannon who invented the idea of homeostasis, 
the long lineage of governor devices studied by Otto Mayr, 
and then whatever else you can dig up! I refer to those 
things in my texts, to the extent of my limited knowledge. 
But the idea that coded information flows could serve as 
negative feedback for self-correcting behaviors in man, 
animal and machine (Wiener and his gang) and the binary 
model of neurons allowing neural networks to be conceived as 
calculators of propositional logic (McCulloch-Pitts), both 
these emerged during the war, and their appearance at around 
the same time is what made it look as though a general 
theory of control information in man and machine was going 
to be possible. Moreover, the people directly involved in 
these discoveries are among the ones who pushed for the 
creation of a theoretical metalanguage to associate widely 
different fields: control engineering, neuroanatomy, logic, 
animal physiology, the nascent field of automated computing, 
linguistics, sociology, etc. Two other people who were 
instrumental in pushing for this metalanguage were the 
anthropologists Bateson and Mead, who had heard Wiener and 
Rosenblueth speak about their notion of teleological 
principles in 1942. Of course Bateson and Mead had done lots 
of their own work before the war. But if you compare 
Bateson's 1936 book, Naven, to an immediate postwar book 
like his Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychology, 
then you can see that the objects, the operative terms and 
the style of reasoning have all changed tremendously, due to 
the influence of cybernetics as Bateson himself says. 
Indeed, he gave Naven a 1958 postface to correct its 
argument through the application of cybernetics!

At the same time, the US had gone through a fundamental 
change: it took over the role of hegemonic power from the 
UK, and had to manage a vast army/navy/air force scattered 
across the earth, with vastly expanded markets and whole 
governments to run militarily for varying periods of time, 
as in Japan, Korea, Germany, Austria, etc. The demands for 
information, calculation, communication, remote control of 
machines and also social control or at least "steering" of 
populations were all tremendous. This is why the idea of a 
"science of government"(cybernetics) had such appeal, and 
why so much funding was given in support of it. Some kind of 
similar technological acceleration had happened during WWI, 
as Bucky Fuller's biography and life work testifies with 
particular intensity; but it was shorter, there was no 
empire at the end, and then the economy crashed in just one 
decade. The five years of WWII not only saw the emergence of 
coordinated "Operations Research" departments turning 
science into technology on a huge scale, with strict 
timelines and cost-benefit analyses that were perfect for 
adoption by the corporations later on; but even more, those 
five years were followed by the institution of global 
governance structures like the UN and NATO and by the 
institution of a permanent war economy, with tremendous 
research budgets and vast production campaigns like the one 
that gave rise to the SAGE early warning system, the 
founding contract for IBM's computer department. All of that 
in the context of a twenty-year long manufacturing and 
export boom...

For sure, you could analyze the changes in corporate 
organization during the 1920s and 30s, and you would find 
the roots of Operations Research (also known as "Management 
Science") in those earlier periods, in both Britain and the 
US. Some even argue that Charles Babbage - the designer of 
the unbuilt "Victorian computer" - is the father of OR! But 
the point that we should all remember with some anguish 
today is that although the multidivisional, vertically 
integrated corporation emerged around 1890-1900, with 
Standard Oil and the like, its development into a structure 
with enough logisitical and disciplinary power to operate 
global extraction, production, distribution and advertising 
was halted by the Great Depression. The corporation only 
gained its capacity to to plan technological innovation and 
implement it on a massive scale during WWII and in the Cold 
War that followed. The war economy is the social context 
that made the development of computers and computer modeling 
necessary; and we had better hope that a new cycle of wars 
will not be needed to make the networked corporation with 
its self-reflexive, second-order models viable... Fuller 
understood all this perfectly,  because he had been through 
WWI. Check out his 1963 "World Design Initiative" lecture in 
the book Your Private Sky, for a quite amazing perspective 
on what war does to science and technology.

Where I myself disagree with the majority of authors is that 
I don't think cybernetics just stops in the 70s, when the 
initial paradigm falls apart. I think that ideas related 
both to the initial paradigm and to its second-order 
challenger continued to develop in a number of research 
programs during the 80s and 90s, exerting important 
influences on the development of neoliberalism. I also think 
one can detect the continuing influence of imperial 
imperatives on the aspects of those programs that have 
become part of the economy and part of daily life. 
Unfortunately, not many media theorists seem to have pursued 
the question of cybernetics beyond the Cold War period, and 
maybe if I have any originality in this vast domain, it is 
here. The coevolution of cybernetic machines and liberal 
empire is what I have tried to sketch out in all five of the 
texts which I introduced in this thread.

> I'd argue 
> that your analysis would be much stronger if it looked for continuities 
> spanning the pre- and postwar 'periods' rather than relying on WW2 as a
> sort of analog of the Middle Ages as that which separates Antiquity from
> the Renaissance. There's no question that some tenets of cybernetics were
> 'forged in the crucible of war'; but nor is there any question that the 
> participants themselves -- to say nothing of their predecessors -- were 
> explicitly researching many of constituent problems decades earlier.

Yeah, agreed, it's always more interesting to know more! But 
it is also very interesting to put a particular, polemical 
point on a subject, without necessarily closing off avenues 
of further research.

> The firms that have seemed to
> own the world aren't just illiquid, they're insolvent -- maybe infinitely 
> so, that is, able to destroy as much 'wealth' as we throw at them through 
> high-velocity arbitrage in flowing in reverse. If that's so, the cultural 
> problem isn't just semiotics, it's epistemology, because that stratum of 
> history -- the 'creation' of value and wealth -- may flow in reverse as 
> well. So it really may be a question of who is to be master. So will it 
> be history or cybernetics?

The question of who creates value, who assigns it to 
specific objects, who stabilizes that assignation and 
thereby makes a world cohere, is the fundamental question 
that interests me. It is all too often a question of who 
will be master. One can pull back and look dispassionately 
at a "historical process" or try to explain everything with 
some overarching structural grid. I prefer to look at 
people, geographic locales, classes, nations, regions, and 
see how they are playing out these inextricably intertwined 
questions of the creation, assignation and stabilization of 
value. Because only when you get to know people, locales and 
operating methods can you possibly intervene. It is likely 
that many of the rules for the formation of value will now 
change, and maybe the outgrowths of cybernetic research will 
no longer matter so much. My belief is that they will matter 
in different ways - which we won't even be able to recognize 
if we have not understood the old ones, the rupture that 
makes them ancient history, and the ruse that brings them 
back in new guises.

best, Brian