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A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics
Before ‘cyber’ was a prefix for everything internet and computers, it was how mathematicians were going to conquer the world.
I first encountered the word cybernetics while reading Benjamin Peters’s account of the Soviet Union’s attempts to invent the internet, How Not to Network a Nation (still a little disappointed that MIT didn’t spell it Nyetwork, come on!) At the time my reaction to it was “Ew gross” — anything with the prefix cyber- feels cheesy and passé — followed by confusion. The dates seemed impossible. Cybernetics actually predated both the internet and the rise of the computing industry by decades? Could that be right? Could the word cyber have had another meaning not related to virtual experiences that had been entirely lost?
Prior to WWII the word cybernetics was used occasionally by mathematicians to mean the dynamics of government in society. The idea that society had a set of mathematical rules that governed it the same way physical objects had laws of physics was not much appreciated. But WWII profoundly changed that. On both sides technology was used to orchestrate deployments at scales never seen before. The Nazis used IBM’s tabulating machines to commit genocide on a shocking and unbelievable level. The British used it the crack codes believed to be unbreakable. The US used it to mass produce armaments on short notice post-Pearl Harbor (and also, it’s worth noting, to track down and round up Japanese Americans.) This technology build up demonstrated that nations and their economies could be focused and directed to extreme ends.
The mathematicians who had seen that mobilization firsthand became more and more interested in whether the principals that allowed it to happen were purely human constructions or forces found in the natural world. Politicians who had seen bets on the mobilization payoff began to wonder if society could actually be designed. By 1948, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener summarized his thoughts on this topic in his landmark book Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
What is Cybernetics?
The word cybernetics comes from the greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) which means a pilot, governor, someone who steers. Cybernetics, therefore, is the study of control and…
