Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear.

The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics 
crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly 
drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions 
by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the 
phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not 
for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous 
electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings 
ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects 
of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint. 
Hence the name.
Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal 
maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because 
it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts, 
because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field 
settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was 
difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print 
documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some 
ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes.
Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development 
of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for 
Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase. 
In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves 
reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an 
object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation 
was intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the 
Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to 
spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade 
later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_ 
to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to 
imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider 
usage. (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop 
shelves a "browser.")
Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight 
variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them 
started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy 
speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't 
box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest 
explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of 
aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it 
came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly 
exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money, 
etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that 
would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew.
Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of 
studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of 
the pilot with the plane is an ur-moment in human–machine 
hybridization.
Cheers,
Ted


On 28 Mar 2019, at 14:48, Felix Stalder wrote:

> Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since
> the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a 
> "black
> box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my
> understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each 
> other.
> In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a
> (complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the 
> relationship
> between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the
> airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various 
> recorders
> of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no
> output at all, at least not during the flight.
>
> There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and 
> cybernetics,
> after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest
> example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans
> and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main
> thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this
> little detail irks me.
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