Beyond the closed world

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Notes

1. Mahoney, ‘History of Computing.’

2. Edwards, Closed World; Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Grier, When Computers Were Human; Akera, Calculating a Natural World; and Ensmenger, Computer Boys Take Over.

3. On the circulation of science and technology as a historiographic theme, see Anderson and Adams, ‘Pramoeyda’s Chickens.’

4. See, e.g., Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs;’ Gray, Cyborg Handbook; and Law and Moser, ‘Cyborg.’

5. Mindell, Between Human and Machine; and Galison, ‘Ontology of the Enemy.’

6. Heims, Cybernetics Group; Pickering, Cybernetic Brain; Aumann, ‘Distinctiveness of a Unifying Science;’ Mindell et al., ‘From Communications Engineering;’ and Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.

7. Kline, ‘Where are the Cyborgs?’ For specific fields, see, e.g., Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?; Kline, ‘Cybernetics, Automata Studies;’ Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Richardson, Feedback Thought; Edwards, Closed World, chaps 6–8 (cognitive psychology and AI); Light, From Warfare to Welfare; Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory;’ Mills, ‘Disability and Cybernetics;’ Pickering, Cybernetic Brain (psychiatry, music, art, and architecture); and Dunbar-Hester, ‘Listening to Cybernetics.’

8. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman.

9. Bowker, ‘How to be Universal;’ and Galison, ‘Americanization of Unity.’ On the decline of cybernetics in the USA, see Kline, ‘Where are the Cyborgs?’ 351–54; and Eden, ‘Cybernetics.’

10. Medina draws on an unpublished paper of mine for the concept of the ‘disunity of cybernetics’ (Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 9, 11). Before the book was published, I commented on its Introduction and shared some correspondence from the Heinz von Foerester Papers at the University of Illinois (n. 19, p. 297).

11. For a review of the book, see Kline, ‘Cybernetics as a Usable Past.’

12. Dubarle’s review is partially quoted in Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 206–09. For the context of his review, see Mindell et al., ‘From Communications Engineering,’ 75–76.

13. Wiener, Cybernetics, 37–39; and Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, chaps 9–10.

14. On this view of Wiener’s politics, see, e.g., Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, chap. 4; and Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 23–24.

15. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, chaps 3, 6. Cybernetics followed a similar ideological path in France and Eastern Europe. See Mindell et al., ‘From Communications Engineering,’ 74–81; and Aumann, ‘Distinctiveness of a Unifying Science,’ 23.

16. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, 317–20, 330–31; John J. Ford, ‘Long-range-scientific Capabilities of the USSR (1963–73): The “Complex Scientific Problem, Cybernetics,”’ May 1, 1963, working draft, Walter Rosenblith Papers, Institute Archives, MIT, Cambridge, MA, box 50; and Gerovitch, ‘Cybernetics Scare,’ quotation on 38.

17. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 16–28, chaps 2, 4.

18. See, e.g., Lilienfeld, Rise of Systems Theory.

19. Basset, ‘Aligning India;’ and Tinn, ‘Working with Computers.’ For a non-computer example of this approach, see Moon, ‘Takeoff or Self-sufficiency?’ Transnationalism has also become a theme in the history of science in the Cold War. See Heyck and Kaiser, ‘Introduction.’

20. Hecht and Edwards, Technopolitics of Cold War.

21. Edwards, Closed World, 12–13.

22. Hecht, Radiance of France, 15–17.

23. Medina relates her work to Langdon Winner’s well-known article, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics? in his Whale and the Reactor, but could have done much more in this regard. I was struck, for example, by how the plasticity of some design elements of Project Cybersyn corresponded to Winner’s example of the low Long-Island bridges enacting racist politics in New York City, and how the criticism that Cybersyn was a centralized command-and-control system corresponded to Winner’s argument that nuclear power plants required a centralized form of political control.

24. MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy; and Hecht, Radiance of France.