On Rise of the Machines

I first got interested in cybernetics through Mark Fisher, though I’d been interested in computers far longer — I’m of the first generation some call “digital natives,” to the point where, more often than not, I don’t see the interface at all. Fisher’s dissertation, Flatline Constructs, responds directly to Norbert Wiener, and cybernetic ideas run through his other work too (K-Punk in particular); he was one of many members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick, alongside more notorious figures like Nick Land. All of which is to say: I was part of the first “cyber” generation and still didn’t really get what “cyber” was. As Rid argues, cybernetics as a scientific discipline had mostly died off by the 1970s, even though the vocabulary still gets thrown around in fields like cultural studies.

This book is interesting in that it tries to trace the history of cybernetics, and though it’s smart, learned, and detailed, it doesn’t fully succeed — I’m not sure it would even be possible to. In short, cybernetics is the study of feedback loops: an input is fed into a system, which emits an output, and the outputs get fed back in until they become indistinguishable from the inputs, producing complex systems — machines — that have come to dominate every aspect of our lives. The field came out of the Second World War. During the Battle of Britain, scientists in the UK and US tried to build anti-aircraft equipment that could keep pace with planes moving ever faster in the dead of night, and the watershed was the realization that pilot and plane, together, act as a single unified whole — we might even call that pilot-plane combination a cyborg. From there the book follows the development of cybernetics as a science up to the rise of the American counterculture, which took it up as a vocabulary for understanding rapid social change: where machines had once been seen through an anthropomorphic lens, humans came to be seen as increasingly machinic, and that opened both utopian and dystopian horizons — are we cyborgs? how much of our labor will be replaced? how much should be?

The last few chapters diverge, and I’m not sure how they fit. The emergence of the internet is covered somewhat, but Rid is far more interested in the development of cryptography and what it means for privacy and freedom — politically, ethically, socially — and the final chapter, on “war,” is really about cyberwarfare, returning cybernetics to its origins in the nascent military-industrial complex; the book ends with the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. It works on several levels at once, to its advantage, and there’s an interesting through-line in the tension between West Coast libertarianism and the East Coast federal military establishment — one camp pursuing cybernetics for “national security” and the control of information, the other seeing in it a liberatory potential. Rid doesn’t push that argument as far as he might, perhaps to the book’s detriment, but it’s a fair narrative, and you can see the two coasts increasingly merging: Palantir holds contracts with the Department of Defense, Elon Musk just departed the White House, Bezos sold out the Washington Post. The trouble is that the story Rid is trying to tell doesn’t quite work. Is it a history of the internet? Of the machine? Of cybernetics? Ostensibly cybernetics, but the later chapters don’t really bear that out.