cybernetics and society

Public Lecture Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) 'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms' Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) Convenors Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge) Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge) Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) Summary As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more. These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.

Public Lecture Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) 'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms' Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) Convenors Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge) Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge) Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) Summary As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more. These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.

Dr Bernard Geoghagen (Media, Coventry) Discussant: Dr Christopher Ball (Anthropology, Notre Dame) Abstract How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family members encode and decode informational streams in feedback loops that promote the stability (or “homeostasis”) of the individual as well as the group. Mental illness, in this account, sprang from atypical coding patterns. This talk examines how technical affordances of mid-twentieth century “new media” such as experimental film and information theory facilitated this production of cybernetic families.

Dr Bernard Geoghagen (Media, Coventry) Discussant: Dr Christopher Ball (Anthropology, Notre Dame) Abstract How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family members encode and decode informational streams in feedback loops that promote the stability (or “homeostasis”) of the individual as well as the group. Mental illness, in this account, sprang from atypical coding patterns. This talk examines how technical affordances of mid-twentieth century “new media” such as experimental film and information theory facilitated this production of cybernetic families.

The Arrol Adam Lectures were set up in memory of William Arrol Adam, who read Chemistry at Fitzwilliam House in 1905 and died in 1939. It was the stated intention of the bequest, made in 1962 by his widow Jane Wylie Adam, to disseminate knowledge, promote discussion of issues of general interest and concern and to foster the use of plain and simple English.

Speaker: Dr. Seb Franklin, English (King's College London) Discussant: Nathaniel Zetter, English (Cambridge) Abtract In January 1951, R. S. Hunt--a British technical editor and former chemist without any university degree or diploma--sent a manuscript titled "Two Kinds of Work" to the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who did not read it. Hunt's manuscript promises to "put metaphysics within the scope of physics." And it claims to do so by making "such quantities as beauty, virtue and happiness," as well as all manual and intellectual labor tasks, intelligible as electronic circuits. In other words, Hunt's text anticipates the wildest fantasies of digital culture and the concepts of affective and immaterial labour associated with post-Fordism. "Two Kinds of Work" is centred on a concept that Hunt names "G-energy." This force, Hunt argues, "defies the second law of thermodynamics" by moving material systems from less to more probable states. In other words, it represents all processes that give form or pattern. The 'discovery' of G-energy, Hunt insists, necessitates a radical new ontology; humans, nonhuman animals, machines, materials, and concepts all hold and transmit G-energy, and are thus connected in networks of exchange. Hunt's formulation predicts the current methodological formations of matter and bodies as vital networks. But crucially, Hunt's underlying motivations are not philosophical but economic: G-energy is for him the essence of value, a 'natural' phenomenon that is represented by money. It is what employers are really paying for when they think they are paying for time. By reading "Two Kinds of Work" in the light of current theoretical concerns, this talk identifies historical and conceptual connections between theories of digitality and value. Bio: Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English at King's College London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Camera Obscura, Cultural Politics, Grey Room, Novel, andWorld Picture.

Speaker: Dr. Seb Franklin, English (King's College London) Discussant: Nathaniel Zetter, English (Cambridge) Abtract In January 1951, R. S. Hunt--a British technical editor and former chemist without any university degree or diploma--sent a manuscript titled "Two Kinds of Work" to the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who did not read it. Hunt's manuscript promises to "put metaphysics within the scope of physics." And it claims to do so by making "such quantities as beauty, virtue and happiness," as well as all manual and intellectual labor tasks, intelligible as electronic circuits. In other words, Hunt's text anticipates the wildest fantasies of digital culture and the concepts of affective and immaterial labour associated with post-Fordism. "Two Kinds of Work" is centred on a concept that Hunt names "G-energy." This force, Hunt argues, "defies the second law of thermodynamics" by moving material systems from less to more probable states. In other words, it represents all processes that give form or pattern. The 'discovery' of G-energy, Hunt insists, necessitates a radical new ontology; humans, nonhuman animals, machines, materials, and concepts all hold and transmit G-energy, and are thus connected in networks of exchange. Hunt's formulation predicts the current methodological formations of matter and bodies as vital networks. But crucially, Hunt's underlying motivations are not philosophical but economic: G-energy is for him the essence of value, a 'natural' phenomenon that is represented by money. It is what employers are really paying for when they think they are paying for time. By reading "Two Kinds of Work" in the light of current theoretical concerns, this talk identifies historical and conceptual connections between theories of digitality and value. Bio: Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English at King's College London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Camera Obscura, Cultural Politics, Grey Room, Novel, andWorld Picture.

Professor Ronald Kline, STS (Cornell) Discussant: Dr Richard Staley (HPS, Cambridge) Abstract This seminar will focus on two works in progress: "Why the Disunity of Cybernetics Matters to the History of the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940-1980" (which is an extension of research in Professor Kline's book book Cybernetics Moment); and "Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing" (which is a draft of a chapter on a book in progress on the history of digitalization). The seminar will tie these two papers together under the rubric of “disunity of science” in order to argue that the multiple interpretations of cybernetics and the term “digital” are important to understanding their past (and present and future). The paper on cybernetics discusses disunity in regard to first-order cybernetics (in the work of such figures as Karl Deutsch in political science, George Miller in psychology and Herbert Simon in management science) and the revision of the field known as second-order cybernetics (in the work of Gregory Bateson in anthropology, who crossed this boundary.) The second paper discusses why the venerable words analog and digital were appropriated by computer builders in the 1940s, what alternatives were proposed, how they became paired keywords, why closure occurred so quickly in the U.S., the different ways in which digital and analog engineering cultures interpreted the terms. The paper also speculates on the reasons why the concerns raised at the 1950 Macy conference — that the terms were vague and that analog was not the logical opposite of digital — were ignored.

Professor Ronald Kline, STS (Cornell) Discussant: Dr Richard Staley (HPS, Cambridge) Abstract This seminar will focus on two works in progress: "Why the Disunity of Cybernetics Matters to the History of the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940-1980" (which is an extension of research in Professor Kline's book book Cybernetics Moment); and "Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing" (which is a draft of a chapter on a book in progress on the history of digitalization). The seminar will tie these two papers together under the rubric of “disunity of science” in order to argue that the multiple interpretations of cybernetics and the term “digital” are important to understanding their past (and present and future). The paper on cybernetics discusses disunity in regard to first-order cybernetics (in the work of such figures as Karl Deutsch in political science, George Miller in psychology and Herbert Simon in management science) and the revision of the field known as second-order cybernetics (in the work of Gregory Bateson in anthropology, who crossed this boundary.) The second paper discusses why the venerable words analog and digital were appropriated by computer builders in the 1940s, what alternatives were proposed, how they became paired keywords, why closure occurred so quickly in the U.S., the different ways in which digital and analog engineering cultures interpreted the terms. The paper also speculates on the reasons why the concerns raised at the 1950 Macy conference — that the terms were vague and that analog was not the logical opposite of digital — were ignored.

Professor Sonja M. Amadae (University of Helsinki and MIT) Discussant: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, University of Cambridge) Abstract This paper focuses on game theory and its application to the nuclear security dilemma to argue that game theory’s mindless strategic rationality, not coincidentally, is profoundly entangled with the strategic posture it recommends. Nuclear strategy is ostensibly more effective the less intelligible it is to observers because deterrent threats achieve credibility at the price of absurdly endangering constituents with apocalyptic terror. Far from the popular conception of either the public or journalistic authors, the nuclear strategy sanctioned by game theory is not Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), but rather NUTS, Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection. Whereas MAD is structured to symmetrically hold nuclear weapons in reserve to bi-laterally counter a nuclear attack, NUTS develops asymmetric advantage based on coercive bargaining, threatening to be the first to introduce nuclear warheads into conflict, and preparing to achieve escalation dominance at all levels of engagement. The mindless quality of game theory is useful in nuclear security because by its internal logic, credible deterrence depends on preparing and intending to wage an omniscidal nuclear war by deploying an arsenal of up to 7000 warheads with the destructive capacity to destroy life on earth multiple times over. Thus, the fact that strategic rationality jettisons intelligibility, or understanding of the problem it aims to solve, enables it to rationalize mobilizing and maintaining a surfeit of material resources to extinguish all humanity within weeks, if not hours. Finally, this essay explores how this alienating logic of unintentional, and not necessarily intelligible, choice informing nuclear deterrence has been elevated into the standard understanding of instrumental rationality. This now informs modeling and decision-making spanning from non-human actors to individuals’ choices and collective action, including the exercise of national sovereignty.

Professor Sonja M. Amadae (University of Helsinki and MIT) Discussant: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, University of Cambridge) Abstract This paper focuses on game theory and its application to the nuclear security dilemma to argue that game theory’s mindless strategic rationality, not coincidentally, is profoundly entangled with the strategic posture it recommends. Nuclear strategy is ostensibly more effective the less intelligible it is to observers because deterrent threats achieve credibility at the price of absurdly endangering constituents with apocalyptic terror. Far from the popular conception of either the public or journalistic authors, the nuclear strategy sanctioned by game theory is not Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), but rather NUTS, Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection. Whereas MAD is structured to symmetrically hold nuclear weapons in reserve to bi-laterally counter a nuclear attack, NUTS develops asymmetric advantage based on coercive bargaining, threatening to be the first to introduce nuclear warheads into conflict, and preparing to achieve escalation dominance at all levels of engagement. The mindless quality of game theory is useful in nuclear security because by its internal logic, credible deterrence depends on preparing and intending to wage an omniscidal nuclear war by deploying an arsenal of up to 7000 warheads with the destructive capacity to destroy life on earth multiple times over. Thus, the fact that strategic rationality jettisons intelligibility, or understanding of the problem it aims to solve, enables it to rationalize mobilizing and maintaining a surfeit of material resources to extinguish all humanity within weeks, if not hours. Finally, this essay explores how this alienating logic of unintentional, and not necessarily intelligible, choice informing nuclear deterrence has been elevated into the standard understanding of instrumental rationality. This now informs modeling and decision-making spanning from non-human actors to individuals’ choices and collective action, including the exercise of national sovereignty.