I first became interested in cybernetics through Mark Fisher, but I was interested in computers and computing for much longer. I’m of the first generation that some call “digital natives,” to the extent that–more often than not–I don’t really see the interface at all. But, Fisher’s thesis, Flatline Constructs, responds directly to Norbert Wiener, and cybernetic ideas are bound up in some of his other work (see K-Punk in particular). Even more, he was one of many members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) at Warwick, alongside other–some more notorious–scholars like Nick Land.

All of this is to say: although I was part of the first “cyber” generation, I didn’t really get what “cyber” was at all. Interestingly, as Thomas Rid argues, “cybernetics” as a scientific discipline mostly died off by the 1970s, although the language still gets widely thrown around in other fields like cultural studies.

This book is interesting in that it attempts to trace the history of “cybernetics” and, although it is smart, learned, and detailed, it doesn’t fully succeed in doing so. I’m not sure that it would even be possible to do so.

In short, cybernetics is the study of feedback cycles. An input is fed into a system, and it emits an output. But, the outputs get fed back into the system, where they become synonymous with the inputs. This produces complex systems–machines–that have come to dominate all aspects of our existence.

Cybernetics, as a field, emerged out of the Second World War. During the Battle of Britain, scientists in both the UK and the US attempted to produce anti-aircraft equipment capable of keeping up with planes moving at increasingly rapid speed in the dead of night. The watershed moment for cybernetics was the realization that pilot and plane, together, act as one unified whole. We might go so far as to call this pilot/plane combination a cyborg.

The text continues with the development of cybernetics as a scientific field until the emergence of the counterculture in the United States. Cybernetics gave activists a vocabulary for understanding rapid changes at the societal scale, and it became associated much more with a cultural framework. In fact, while machines were previously seen through an anthropomorphic lens, humans came to be seen as increasingly machinic. Such a framework offered both utopian and dystopian horizons: Are we cyborgs? To what extent will our labor be replaced? To what extent should our labor be replaced?

The last few chapters of the book seem to diverge from the earlier text, and I’m not sure how it fits together. While the emergence of the internet is covered here, to some extent, the author is much more interested in the development of cryptography, and what that means for privacy–politically, ethically, socially, and so on–and freedom. The last chapter, on “war,” is really about the development of cyber warfare, bringing cybernetics back to its origins in the nascent military-industrial complex. The book ends with the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.

The book works on multiple different levels, which is to its advantage. There is an interesting through-line that emphasizes the tension between West Coast libertarianism and the East Coast federal military establishment. While one group sought out cybernetics to ensure “national security” and control information, the other group saw it as having liberatory potential. But, Rid doesn’t push the argument too far, perhaps to his detriment. I think this is a fair narrative, and we can see the increasing merging of East Coast/West Coast stances: Palantir has contracts with the Department of Defense, Elon Musk just departed from the White Hosue, Bezos sold out the Washington Post, and so on.

The problem with the book is that the story Rid is trying to tell really doesn’t work. Is it a history of the internet? The machine? Cybernetics? Ostensibly cybernetics, but the later chapters don’t really express that.