University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies Master New Media and Digital Culture
OUR CYBERNETIC WORLD:
ON CYBERNETIC SYSTEMS, KNOWLEDGE,
AND THE POSITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL
MA THESIS 2015 SUZANNE TROMP | 10001590
4th
of July 2015
Supervisor: Dr. N.A.J.M. (Niels) van Doorn Second reader: Dr. D.B. (David) Nieborg
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
1. From World War II to the Californian Ideology 1.1. Cybernetics: A Universal Science
1.2. From a Cybernetic Fear to the Californian Ideology
2. Knowledge Through Data
2.1. The Rhetorical Power of Data 2.2. The Naturalization of Data 2.3. Objectivity of the Machine 2.4. Discovering the Unknown
3. The Quantified Self
3.1. Self-tracking practices 3.2. Normalization
3.3. The Self
4. The Internet of Things
4.1. Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things 4.2. Agency and Control
4.3. Scalability
Conclusion: Our Cybernetic World
Reference List 10 10 19 28 29 30 37 40 45 45 48 51 58 59 63 67 71 78
ABSTRACT
In the years after World War II, Norbert Wiener, together with a group of interdisciplinary scientists, developed the theory of cybernetics. In this theory the human being and machines came to be regarded as acting similarly to each other, leading to a computational worldview in which the human being transformed into a cybernetic system. In this thesis it will be argued that the concepts developed by the cyberneticians and the computational worldview that followed can be found in contemporary phenomena such as the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things. By analyzing these two phenomena, this thesis develops a critical understanding of how the individual is positioned, and positions himself through the use of technologies, in a world that becomes more and more dominated by cybernetic systems.
Keywords: Cybernetics, data, information, knowledge, computational worldview, Quantified Self, Internet of Things.
INTRODUCTION
A mathematician working for the government spends his entire life developing a mathematical model to predict the future. In order to calculate the probability of an event to occur in the future, large amounts of data are necessary, to be able to establish relations between this data and discover useful insights. Through these insights the mathematician is able to calculate the future with high probability. Eventually, after years of research, due to this mathematical model the mathematician was able to predict that society was under threat in the future and would cease to exist within a period of three centuries, if nothing was done about it. To achieve a more favorable outcome, the mathematician then creates a ‘foundation’, which consists of the most talented scientists of society in order to preserve humanity’s knowledge and build the foundation for a new society.
This is the story of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, a fictional science in Isaac Asimov’s infamous science fiction series known as The Foundation Trilogy (1951; 1952; 1953)1
. Hari, a citizen of the Galactic Empire, develops the science of ‘psychohistory’ and predicts through his mathematical calculations that the Galactic Empire is about to fall. Although writing about the future, it is not strange that Asimov wrote these stories at that time. That is, Asimov wrote his books in a period when the idea of controlling the future by mathematical models had emerged in science as well. During World War II several scientific labs had the task to develop calculative machines, with the goal to be able to measure and analyze the past, in order to anticipate on the future. One of these labs was the Rad Lab at MIT at which the mathematician Norbert Wiener, together with a group of interdisciplinary scientists, developed the theory of cybernetics. Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine (11). Cybernetics would have great influence during the postwar period on how information, control and processes would be understood in the years that followed. It would blur the stark dichotomy between the human and the machine2
and would eventually lead to a fear in society where machines would be able to take over human functions all together, making the individual an insignificant part of the whole.
Although it is a science fiction story, The Foundation Trilogy feels familiar, not far removed from our reality at all. What Asimov’s story depicts is a utopian view of a select
group of scientists able to change the course of the future by predicting it using data. In the introducing paragraph, I intentionally left out the names of the character and the Galactic Empire to induce this feeling of familiarity with the story. That is, I believe that in our current society a similar story can be found: at this moment governments, companies, but also individuals are tracking and analyzing data, in order to be able to anticipate on a future that feels already present but is yet to come. There is a belief that one can predict something that is not here yet, but will be in the future, and thus being able to avoid something bad to happen, using data from our past to control the future. In the age of ‘Big Data’3
it has become a common practice to gather as much data as possible about our world by using advanced technologies, in order to gain knowledge and to act on it.
The reliance on data and technologies to be able to predict what will happen in the future will be the core of this thesis. Two phenomena that are present in our current Western society are therefore of particular interest in this thesis: the practice of self-tracking, and more specifically the Quantified Self Movement founded by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf in 2008, and the Internet of Things, a vision coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 in which objects will become intelligent and able to communicate with each other via the Internet in order to reduce waste, cost and loss. Both of these phenomena work according to the same logic: through technologies data is gathered and analyzed, and based on this data knowledge about ourselves and our future can be derived, so action can be taken.
My starting point for this thesis was my curiosity towards the goals and motivations for individuals to engage themselves with technologies to track and analyze data about themselves and their environment. This curiosity arose when I attended a Quantified Self Meet-Up in 2013 in Amsterdam. This meet up was organized by members of the Quantified Self Movement, a movement that connects individuals who track every aspect of their lives in order to understand oneself better and be able to improve their behavior based on the feedback that the technologies used for the data gathering provide. The Quantified Self and
3 One example illustrates the current appeal of Big Data vividly. In the book (and later the film) Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis describes the true story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the baseball team the Oakland A’s, who has the task to create a winning team with a very low budget. Through the use of a mathematical model to calculate the potential of players, a team was built that, in statistical terms, would be a winning team. Eventually, in 2002, the Oakland A’s, one of the poorest team in the league, would become the first team that won twenty games in a row. Steve Lohr, in his article “The Age of Big Data” states that the film Moneyball has made the idea of knowledge deriving out of big data more commonly accepted. Article:
the practice of self-tracking will be one of the phenomena I will critically analyze in this thesis. During the meet-up I listened with certain unease to the speakers who used technological devices to be able to know everything about themselves – ranging from sleep patterns, heart rate to mood swings. After the meeting, I couldn’t stop wondering in what ways this data could really enhance one’s life, but more importantly, how it could help these self-trackers to gain knowledge about themselves. It seemed to me that an individual that only aims to know himself through data would create a self that is superficial and only based on the outside. Furthermore, these individuals all delegated certain tasks to their devices – and left a large part of the data-analysis up to the technology. These devices would then be able to make connections between data points that were previously unknown to the user. In this sense, it seemed to me that these individuals gave up part of their agency in order to know more about themselves and the world.
The second phenomenon that will be analyzed is the Internet of Things. Basically, through the use of sensors embedded in everyday objects, objects, not lively before, are connected to the Internet, but more importantly, to each other, without human interference involved. These systems, whether they are in the household or in larger systems, promise to delegate daily tasks to machines, giving its user the opportunity to have an easier lifestyle.
These two phenomena are of particular interest in this thesis, because they both share a vision for the future in which data will increase knowledge about our world. Furthermore, although they both rely on data and technologies to acquire and analyze this data, the Quantified Self focuses more on the self as object of knowledge, whereas in the Internet of Things the vision is more about knowledge about our world around us. How do these two practices align with each other or complement each other? How do they fit within the same ideology of our computational worldview?
Although sufficient examples of these two phenomena will be provided, it is not my intention to analyze the precise technological basis of the technologies at hand. Rather, my concern will be the vision inherent to the Quantified Self movement and the Internet of Things and analyze how these visions reflect the ideas of cybernetic theory and Big Data. In order to unravel the implications for the human being of these visions, I will provide a theoretical analysis of these two phenomena. Moreover, through this analysis, I will be able to reflect upon these two phenomena in how they configure the individual, and how the individual applies these specific technologies to position oneself in his life-world.
What will be argued in this thesis is twofold: first, I will trace how cybernetic theory has led to a computational worldview in which human beings and machines both can be brought back to a simple binary decision – 1 or 0 – and how this view is problematic and is still very present when looking at technologies and their discourse such as the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things. Thus, although not my initial starting point, the concepts developed in cybernetic theory nevertheless has become an integral part and the very basis of this work. The concepts developed by the cyberneticians can be found woven through my arguments – as it proves a very useful tool for understanding current practices of data gathering and data analysis. The second thread is how this computational worldview has caused a belief that the gathering of data will automatically lead to information, and therefore knowledge. Based on the knowledge that can be derived from this information that technologies can give, it is possible to take action in order to anticipate on a probable future. I will argue that this is a problematic assumption as for data to become information it first needs to travel a trajectory of translation (Latour On Technical Mediation 32). The individual as free agent will be the focus within these two threads. By analyzing how cybernetic thought has influenced our way of thinking about the human and machine, and our view on how knowledge can be derived from data, I will be able to offer an account on how the individual is shaped by the technologies that are characteristic to the Internet of Things and the Quantified Self Moreover, I will show how the individual uses these technologies to position himself in this world. The main questions will be: How do individuals position themselves in a world that is largely dominated by systems that are beyond human comprehension? And how do they use technologies to make sense of themselves within this world?
By answering this question I will add to the field by placing the history of cybernetics into a contemporary perspective, showing that the ideas developed by the cyberneticians still impact our current view on the processing of data, information and knowledge, and how this view is translated into practices such as the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things. Moreover, I will show that the place that the human beings take in our world needs to be reconsidered.
This thesis is broken down into four main chapters. In the first chapter I will go back in time and will describe how cybernetics developed into a universal science. Through analyzing the core concepts developed by cybernetics during World War II and the postwar period, I will illustrate how these concepts have impacted the way in which information is regarded and how information can be understood in terms of control over the future. Important here are the
concepts of the feedback loop, black box and homeostasis. It will be argued that the universal science of cybernetics has established a computational worldview, in which human and machine can be understood as acting similarly, blurring the dichotomy between human and machine. This would lead to the idea that human beings can be regarded as information-processing machines – in which the human processes input into output. In addition, I will show how the cybernetic concepts sparked a fear in society during the 1960s, but how these fears were translated into a utopian vision of technologies being able to free the individual from the constraints of the bureaucratic government. It will be argued that this utopian vision is still very present in our ideas on technologies, what will be later illustrated in the chapters about the Quantified Self Movement and the Internet of Things.
In the second chapter, I will describe how the use of the term “data” has changed over time – and what this means for our current uses of the term. I will then analyze how, through the emergence of technologies that are able to process large amounts of data in real time, a belief has sparked among data proponents that data is a natural source that can be gathered directly from the outside world. Furthermore, I will argue that through the computational worldview that was established during the postwar period, it has become common to think that everything in the world can be translated into data – from human nervous systems to larger structures such as cities or a whole society. In this chapter a distinction between data, information and knowledge will be made, and it will argued that regarding these terms as similar or at least interchangeable to each other, is problematic.
Following the first two chapters, I will analyze how the Quantified Self Movement, and more generally the practice of self-tracking can be understood in the light of cybernetics and the ideas about data outlined in the previous chapters. It will be argued that the practice of self-tracking transforms the individual into a subject of risk, a subject that needs to take care of himself in the present in order to be secure in the future. What will be shown is that through tracking oneself a norm is established that the subject continually needs to reach. Central in this chapter is the self – how is the self constructed by the tracking of the self, and what kind of knowledge about the self can be derived from these tracking practices?
In the fourth chapter the Internet of Things will be analyzed. Through the visions of Weiser on ubiquitous computing and Ashton on the Internet of Things, it will be illustrated that the vision for the Internet of Things is already partly here, but that some aspects of their visions are not here yet but are reflected in the products that have entered the market. I will argue that through the automatic nature of these systems, it becomes harder for the individual to be in control, as the action to adapt has been delegated to machines. In a “smart”
environment, the individual plays a less central role than when one track the self, and becomes a smaller link within the larger system.
In the concluding chapter I will argue that both the Internet of Things and the Quantified Self can be understood as working according to the logics of a cybernetic system, and that the individual becomes part of this system. By being part of this system, individuals become subject to ‘governmentality’ as coined by Foucault. That is, the user of these technologies governs himself through the devices he uses to improve oneself and his surroundings. Although it seems as if the individual is able to be in control and uses these technologies to position himself in the world around him, I will argue that the individual through these emerging technologies is threatened to become a ‘one-dimensional man’, as described by Herbert Marcuse (344). That is, because technological systems are integrated in our lives, and we treat ourselves as a cybernetic system as well, and because these system have the ability to automate processes, and are black-boxed by nature, the liberal person that Wiener tried to maintain is under threat. This has become possible through the computational worldview that was established by Wiener himself, by reducing the individual to bits of data. Furthermore, following Katherine Hayles, I will argue that that we will become, or are in the process of becoming, ‘posthuman’ (2). By transforming into a posthuman, the human being will not be able to maintain their position as center of the world anymore, and need to step aside and acknowledge a world in which human beings and machines have to live together.
CHAPTER 1
FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY
“Cybernetics, that science-as-steersman, made an angel of control and a devil of disorder” – Peter Galison, 1994.
1.1 Cybernetics: A Universal Science
When Norbert Wiener entered the MIT laboratory in 1940, he was asked, together with his fellow scientists from various disciplines, to solve one particular problem. What no one could have imagined at that point in time was that this specific problem would eventually lead to Norbert Wiener and his colleagues envisioning the theory of cybernetics4
as a universal discipline, a universal discipline that would “recommend a reordering of the traditional hierarchy of sciences” (Bowker How to be Universal 107). In the midst of World War II, the goal of this specific MIT lab, funded by the US government, was to build a system that could predict future locations of war airplanes of the enemy, in order to make antiaircraft guns more accurate in shooting these planes from the sky (Hardesty n.p.). Together with an interdisciplinary group of scientists, Wiener set out to reach this goal. Through tests with a flight simulator in the laboratory of MIT, Wiener reconstructed the actions of warplanes and their pilots. In these tests it was found that a pilot’s behavior, under stress, is repetitive, and therefore the pilot has “algorithmic behaviors amenable to mathematical modelling and analysis” (Halpern 43). Just like a machine, the human, in this theory, became calculable and predictable.
Thus, deriving from these experiments two important results should be noted. Firstly, pilots’ actions are predictable when in stressful situations. Secondly, during the tests in the simulator it was found that the behavior was not correlative between different ‘pilots’, meaning that one pilot’s behavior becomes predictable based on his past actions, but this behavior is not similar to those of other pilots (Galison 236). In other words, every pilot acts differently from other pilots under stress, but behaves similar to an algorithm, predictive and repetitive. An algorithm can be defined as a sequence of steps that have to be performed in order to get a specific outcome. In the context of the pilot’s behavior, it was thus found that the pilot followed a set of operations that were predefined and repetitive due to the high stress level.
4 The term ‘Cybernetics’ derives from the Greek word ‘kubernetes’, which means ‘steersman’ or ‘governor’ (Wiener 11).
This discovery led to the idea that human beings and machines are not that different from each other regarding their actions. That is, Wiener imagined that future actions of a plane - which meant the pilot as well as the plane itself - could be predicted by measuring its past movements. In the process of theorizing the movement of airplanes, the operator of the plane and the machine itself had to be seen as linked in a closed system, working together as one mechanism (Galison 233). Inherent to this idea was that the pilot, just as the plane, could be seen as a self-regulative machine whose behavior was based on algorithms and repetition. By seeing the pilot and the plane as elements within one system, the boundaries between human and nonhuman, organism and machine become blurred: “Human behavior could be mathematically modelled and predicted, particularly under stress; thereby articulating a new belief that both machines and humans could speak the same language of mathematics” (Halpern 43).
Eventually, the device that predicted the location of these enemy’s planes, called the AA predictor, could calculate the location of an airplane four seconds ahead. Although other systems were built that could predict more accurately, the AA predictor, and the underlying thought of human and machine acting as one, has had great impact in the developing of cybernetic theories and the development of cybernetics as a universal science. However, the belief that the actions of humans and machines are not that different from each other would also spark the fear that human beings would become superfluous, as machines would be able to perform the same tasks, maybe even better and more efficient. Although this fear became clear during the 1960s, these ideas shifted towards machines being able to help human beings and change the world for the better, instead of taking over. It seems as if this shift goes hand in hand with the acknowledgement that human beings cannot do everything, that is, human beings need help from machines, as they are flawed in several ways.
Despite the growing unrest in society, and Wiener’s fears for the cybernetic theory to fall in the wrong hands, to which I will come back later in this chapter, after the world war the concepts of cybernetics remained a big influence on the sciences. Although Wiener and his colleagues began their research with one particular goal in mind, soon they realized that this theory was applicable to more fields, not just warfare, but also social disciplines. Following the logic of the AA predictor, in the years that followed the war, Wiener developed a theory which he coined cybernetics. During the Macy Conferences scientists from various disciplines gathered to discuss the communication systems that were developed by Shannon, Weaver, Wiener and other scientists. These conferences were held in the period of 1943 until the 1970s. What made these conferences important and interesting was that “[they] not only
produced a resource base for encouraging an emphasis on information and communication across many fields but also, more important, produced and affirmed a methodological emphasis on individuated enclosed systems, replacing other structural, historical and political economic approaches” (Halpern 47). As was mentioned earlier, Wiener and his colleagues came to envision cybernetics as a universal science. This started out with what the cyberneticians Heinz Von Foerster, Margaret Mead and Hans Lukas Teuber in the proceedings of the ninth Macy Conference in 1952 described as a ‘lingua franca of science’ (xiii) – a universal language. According to them, this language appeared because there was a relative scarcity of jargon among the interdisciplinary scientists working on the theory of cybernetics. The jargon was limited to a set of “handful terms borrowed from each other: analogical and digital devices, feedback and servomechanisms, and circular causal processes” (xiii) to which I will come back later in this chapter. Because of this scarcity, it was easy to understand and communicate with each other about cybernetics. Furthermore, the language of cybernetics would create an opportunity to share knowledge and get insights from various disciplines. As Bowker points out, this shared language could operate as a way to legitimize certain outcomes of researches: “An isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by pointing to support from another field - which in turn referenced the first worker's field to support its claims” (How to be Universal 116). Cyberneticians used different concepts from varying disciplines, and translated these concepts in the language of cybernetics. According to Bowker, cyberneticians made use of two layers of imperialist rhetoric. On the one hand they advocated cybernetics to be the universal science that should be adopted by everyone in order to practice good science, and on the other hand cybernetics could provide scientists with analytical tools: “At both the superstructural and infrastructural level, the rhetoric held that cybernetics was unavoidable if one wanted to do meaningful, efficient science” (Bowker How to be Universal 121).
Cybernetics was heavily influenced by Information Theory, a theory that was developed by Claude Shannon in his influential article from 1948 called A Mathematical Theory of Communication. According to the model Shannon developed in this article, a communication system consists of an information source that would send the signal through a transmitter to the receiver, which would then be translated and sent to the designated destination (see fig 1.). In this way, Information Theory treats communication as a system that encodes and decodes information in the process of sending a signal (Hayles 31). This model provided a different angle on communication. Instead of focusing on the meaning of a particular message, or the meaning deduced from the message by the receiver, Information Theory was only concerned
with “the choice between possibilities within a structured situation” (Halpern 47), the structured situation in this case being the communication system.
Fig 1. Claude Shannon’s model of a communication system.
Shannon’s model potentially could be applied to any scenario in which a message is passed through a communication channel (Davis 82). However, the message that is sent to its destination is subject to noise, that is, “at many points along this route, noise can intervene” (Hayles 32). Noise can be described as “the chance fluctuations, interference, and transmission errors that inevitably degrade signals as they make their way through an error-ridden and analog world” (Davis 82). Thus, for the signal to arrive as a whole, the amount of noise must be reduced to a minimum. This was Shannon’s second theorem, which stated that “any message can be coded in such a way that it can be guaranteed to survive its journey through the valley of noise” (Davis 82). Although this has never been proven, the importance of this idea lays in the possibility of technologies that can code information in order to deliver it without any noise interfering. And the possibility to directly deliver a message that remained unchanged during the process of transmitting, would lead to more control – as this would mean that the communication system, or any other system, could accurately predict what would happen in the future.
For Shannon, information was linked to the uncertainty of a message arriving at its designated destination. He linked information to the second law of entropy5
. Shannon described entropy as the measure of uncertainty (407). In this sense, entropy can be seen as the chaos or randomness within the communication circuit – and the more entropy exists in this circuit, the more unlikely it becomes that the initial message will arrive without noise at the designated person or thing. For Shannon, a message conveys more information when it traverses a system where more randomness, and therefore more uncertainty, exists. Thus, the more uncertain the delivery of the message as a whole becomes, the more information that particular message contains. Following this, information in this model has to do with novelty, because, as Erik Davis it describes: “For you to provide me with genuine information, you must tell me something new. That is, information requires an amount of uncertainty on the part of the receiver” (84). Therefore, in Shannon’s model, the amount of information in a message can be linked to disorganization and chaos – the more chaos and uncertainty, the more information will arrive. However, for information to make sense for the receiver, there should also be a certain amount of redundancy. That is, redundancy will make the message more predictable, which will ensure that not too much novelty will occur within the system (Davis 84). The question is, how much noise and randomness can exist within the system in order to have the most information as possible while still making sense for the receiver? It is a fine line between providing a lot of information, which in the model of Shannon is equivalent to randomness – and being understandable – which requires a certain amount of redundancy.
Although cyberneticians were greatly influenced by Shannon’s model, Wiener and Shannon disagreed on the meaning of information. Where Shannon identified information as randomness, in contrast, Wiener saw information as a measure of organization (Davis 86). Wiener saw noise as the evil that would get in the way of a communication system and therefore the transmission of information. Following this, “information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder, as improbable structure in contrast to the greater probability of randomness” (Von Foerster et al. xiii). Thus, in the eyes of the cyberneticians, information derived from the probability that something would occur; the more probable an event, the more information would be transmitted. “Cybernetics […] made an angel of control and a
5 According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when conversion of energy from one form to another takes place within a system, some energy is lost. Therefore, the Second Law depicts “the tendency of ordered systems to gradually decay into disorder through the dissipation of energy (Pepperell 53).
devil of disorder” (Galison 266). What we can deduce from this is that cyberneticians, in contrast to what Shannon had envisioned, focused on homogeneity in the behavior of the system. What became important for them were the patterns that could be found in the actions of the system. It was argued that through studying these patterns, it would be possible to predict the next move of a system, which they also had applied during the development of the AA predictor. Thus, for Wiener and the other cyberneticians, information could be found in patterns in the behavior of a system, whereas for Shannon this was the opposite, as he saw information as the deviations that came out of the system. For Shannon, every fluctuation of the system contained something novel and therefore it contained information. This contrast between these two views is a quite interesting one, because if we look at the phenomena of the Internet of Things and the Quantified Self, it can be argued that these principles of patterns and deviations continue to play a vital role in how we conceive of the information generated by calculative devices. This difference in the ‘definition’ of information led mathematician Warren Weaver to suggest “that information should be understood as depending on both predictability and unpredictability, pattern and randomness” (Hayles 32). In a way, Weaver was creating a compromise between the two contrasting definitions, in which information was both dependent on patterns and deviations. In the following chapters we will see how information is regarded when it comes to phenomena as the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things, but for now it is sufficient to say that, eventually, Wiener’s notion of information as a measure of organization became hegemonic during the post war period, leading towards an understanding of information as order.
According to Wiener, it was impossible to describe the world in its totality and implicit to this thought was that essence, or describing a thing in itself, was not of interest; rather one should focus on communication processes: “Processing was a thing in itself, not only an intermediate stage toward a more complete and final state or a representation of some external thought or reality” (Halpern 56). This meant that the focus shifted from representing the world to describing the relationships between different entities in the world and how they respond to or even “learn” from each other (Halpern 46). Important here was the idea that it was not of interest why these systems, whether organic or mechanic, acted in a certain way - the only interest of study was how the system functioned, and what the input and output are of such a system.
Although during the tests with the AA predictor it became common to regard human beings and machines as being able to act the same, this did not mean that they could be understood as entirely the same; their insides (could) differ from each other significantly.
Nevertheless, because similar behavior emanated from them, they could be understood as functioning according to the same logic, that is to say, as mathematical and calculable processes. In other words, “the world […] became one of black-boxed entities whose behavior or signals were intelligible to each other, but whose internal function or structure was opaque, and not of interest” (Halpern 44). The concept of the ‘black box’ thus created a possibility to understand human and machine alongside each other, without having the problem of needing to understand the precise workings of these entities. What mattered to cyberneticists were the inputs and outputs of the black box, in other words, the behavior that could be measured and calculated. This is a behaviorist approach to understanding the world, as behaviorism focuses solely on the measurable behavior of a individual, in which it is believed that “past consequences of a given behavior govern [the individual’s] present state” and therefore, by knowing what behavior had which consequences in the past, it becomes possible to predict the future behavior of the individual (Ritzer 413).
Following the concept of the black box, living beings came to be seen as “information-processing machines” (Davis 88). Cyberneticians used computers as an analogue, that is, they saw computers as a useful comparison in order to better understand human beings and other systems, such as social structures or the human brain. As cybernetician Gordon Pask pointed out: “precisely the same arrangement of parts in the computer can represent the spread of an epidemic, the spread of rumors in a community, the development of rust on a piece of galvanized iron, and diffusion in a semi-conductor” (14). This analogue was made possible through the interdisciplinary nature of the cyberneticians. For example, the mathematician Von Neumann, first worked on human interaction in games and economic behavior, but moved on to developing the theory of computers (Von Foerster el al. xviii). For Von Neumann, “computers came to be viewed as systems where the accumulation and rearrangement of basic decisions – “0/1” – would produce the conditions of possibility for a wide range of potential actions” (Halpern 47). According to the cyberneticians, the construction of computers raised similar questions as those that were raised when looking at the nervous system or even social structures and therefore the computer analogue was a useful tool to understand these systems (Von Foerster et al. xviii). Although they acknowledged that they ought to study the organism rather than the computers, “the computing robot provides us with analogues that are helpful as far as they seem to hold and no less helpful whenever they break down” (Van Foerster et al. xviii). Just as the computer was seen a system that made basic decisions – yes or no, 0/1 – out of a range of possibilities, so too could the human being be seen as a system that based its actions on these choices. By using the analogue of a
machine to understand human being and seeing both machines and humans as information processors, the cyberneticians established a ‘computational worldview’ in which everything in life could be brought back to a simple choice (Hayles 239). It allowed for analyzing complex systems, by bringing them back to a simple algorithm from which they could evolve into complex patterns and processes (Hayles 240).
Part of the concept of the black box was what Wiener called the ‘feedback loop’. According to Wiener, future actions, such as the one of the pilot, could be predicted on the basis of past actions. Wiener defined feedback as “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance” (Wiener in Halpern 45). The output of a certain black box feeds back into the same or a different black box as input, resulting in the regulation of its own actions and adjusting to the situation at hand. With the idea of the feedback loop, Wiener moved away from the dominant Aristotelian notion of cause-and-effect6 (Medina 21) towards circular causality – future actions can be predicted through past behavior rather than one action leading to one effect or outcome. As Von Foerster asserts, “a state reproducing itself, like an organism, or a social system in equilibrium or a physiochemical aggregate in a steady-state, defied analysis until the simple notion of one-dimensional cause-and-effect chains was replaced by the bidimensional notion of a circular process” (Von Foerster et al. xiv). Thus, what was meant by this circular causality was that machines, organisms and societies alike would have the ability to self-sustain, through the error correction what Wiener called negative feedback. The feedback loop would create a system that used the information that came out of it in order to regulate and control its future outcomes. These circular causal processes can be seen as a battle against noise and error, in order to maintain order in the system and in doing so to stay in control (Davis 88).
With the aid of the feedback loop, the system would be able to establish a state of homeostasis. That is, every fluctuation of the system, every deviation, becomes corrected through the circular causality of the feedback loop7
. Thus, inherent to the thought of information as a measure of organization was the notion that systems, either human or
6 According to Aristotle, knowledge can only be derived of something when we know its cause (Falcon n.p.).
7 This circular causality was theorized in the lab during the tests Wiener and Bigelow did when building their predictive fire-control apparatus. This apparatus would swing wildly from one side to another, which then became associated with a neurological purpose tremor. “Although the latter stemmed from a problem in the cerebellum, the area of the brain in charge of sensory perception and motor control, and the former from a problem in circuit design, Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow came to see both as problems of feedback, or control through error correction” (Medina 21).
cybernetic machines, are both information processors always seeking to find homeostasis, to become stable, even though they are always in the process of change (Hayles 65). This means that a system will always seek a stable state through the use of feedback processes. It can be seen as a continual process of achieving steadiness of the system. Therefore, deciding which data could be entered in the system and what should be left out in order to maintain homeostasis in the best possible way became one of the most important questions for cyberneticians (Halpern 61). If one allowed too much noise within the system, the system risked becoming unstable and this would lead towards a loss of information and an increase of chaos. This problem of selecting the ‘correct’ (amount of) information is still very present in our time with phenomena such as information overload and Big Data, and this process of selecting is always subject to interpretation, as I will demonstrate in the following chapter.
Systems, whether computers or living beings, were not only seen as carriers of information, but also as “powerful mechanisms of control” (Von Foerster et al. xiv) as they had the ability to self-regulate and seek homeostasis. This self-regulation was made possible through the data that was collected about the behavior of a closed system. This data would feed back into the system, in order for the system to control the next outcome. Thus, as I have mentioned before shortly, the collecting of the right data was important to cyberneticians, as this would make sure the system would be able to self-sustain. Through the analysis of the data that was collected about the behavior of a specific system it could be calculated, based on the past actions of that system, what was most likely about to happen next – in other words, what the probability would be for something to occur in the future (Halpern 46). By viewing the world as consisting of scalable self-regulating systems, it would then be possible to have more control over this probabilistic future and therefore avoid risks. This tendency to govern certain ‘risks’ is still visible in our society through what Louise Amoore has called ‘data derivatives’ (28) – which rely on data in a database in which the calculation of risk is based not so much on the meaning of the data as on the relations between certain data points. I will come back to the data derivative in chapter two, but for now it is sufficient to say that the data derivative is based on the same principles as the processes described by the cyberneticians. The eventual goal of the cyberneticians was to transmit information perfectly, without any noise interfering, in order to have control over the future. This aspiration would eventually have impact on several disciplines ranging from “postwar architectural movements to genomics to politics” (Halpern 47).
1.2 From a Cybernetic Fear to the Californian Ideology
One of the important aspects of cybernetic theory that influenced our way of thinking about man and machine is the belief that human beings and cybernetic machines can be seen as information processors, systems that have similar functionality and can therefore be understood as alike8
. This sparked the fear, also expressed by Wiener, that, because human beings can be seen as wired nodes within a larger system of humans and machines together, machines could for a large part take over the functions of men. Michael Arbib, one of the cyberneticians expressed this as follows: “Much that is human can, at least potentially, be shared by machines” (409). Back in 1948, when he published his book Cybernetics, Wiener imagined a computer that could play chess as a rational machine without emotions. This imagination led to the idea that because of the possibility of automation, “computers […] might step beyond the reaches of human control and begin to act on their own” (Wiener in Turner 23). Although at that moment there was no such thing as an intelligent machine, it was the possibility of the development of such a system that made Wiener fear for loss of control and agency. In addition to this, because in cybernetic theory human beings can be understood as black boxes of which only the measurable input and output counts and because their functions can be largely taken over by cybernetic machines, the essence of the human becomes unclear. Wiener’s fear was that control would become property of machines, rather than of humans, which was the main goal of cybernetic theory in the first place. As Katherine Hayles expresses it: “The science of control might rob its progenitor of the very control that was no doubt for him one of its most attractive features” (111), and “it implies that personal identity and autonomous will are merely illusions that mask the cybernetic reality. If our body surfaces are membranes through which information flows, who are we?” (109). If computers can take over our tasks, as rational beings, what role do, or will we, as human beings, play in this cybernetic world?
Even before the publication of Cybernetics, Wiener expressed his doubts about the social implications of his cybernetic vision. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
8 One of the theories that was heavily influenced by thinking in terms of systems was ‘functionalism’. During the early 1950s until the late 1960s functionalism became a very influential sociological science. “It was not uncommon to view society as an organism with differentiated parts that function together in order for it to adapt and survive in its environment” (Farganis 157). Talcott Parsons was influenced by cybernetics, as he came to view society as a self-regulative system in which its different parts worked together to establish a stable society. However, during the student protests functionalism received a lot of criticism, leading for some of the scholars to declare the theory “dead” (Farganis 158).
August 1945, he started to doubt his work in the scientific field, fearing for his publications to fall in the wrong evil hands (Galison 253). Although the AA predictor was not directly linked to the atomic bombs, Wiener started to associate cybernetics, and its possibilities, with the horrors of World War II. Resulting from this, Wiener argued that cybernetics should focus on the fields of physiology and psychology, “most remote from war and exploitation” (Wiener in Galison 254). Even though Wiener was contemplating to stop his scientific work altogether (Galison 254), in the years that followed the war cybernetics continued to have great impact on thought in many scientific fields varying from mathematics to philosophy, and this impact was partly made possible by the Macy Conferences, as described above.
During the 50s and especially during the 60s, Wiener’s fear for automation and loss of control also reflected the general public opinion in post war society (at least in the United States). Several science fiction stories containing cybernetic machines were published during this time. For example the renowned book 1984, by George Orwell, published in 1949, in which a totalitarian state is described controlled through the use of technologies that can track people’s every move. Or Asimov’s short story The Evitable Conflict (1950) in which machines are discussing what they should do with the humans, already having taken control over society. Not only in fiction the cybernetic dream, or nightmare, started to become evident; in the workplace more and more machines automated labor previously done by a human workforce. Furthermore, scientists wrote about the luring danger of machines taking control in their academic writings9
. These expressions of fear were sparked by the on-going threat of a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. Originating from World War II, cybernetic machines had the power “to save, enslave, or destroy humanity” (Galison 254). In an interview of the series “The Mike Wallace Interview” in 1958, Aldous Huxley, known as the author of A Brave New World (1932) amongst other books, warns the viewer for bureaucracies of big government, which are enabled by advancing technologies10
. According
9 On of these fears was expressed by Mumford in Art and Technics: “Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations” (Mumford 3).
10 For full interview, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzgqWTJkZlU
In addition to his warning for overpopulation, Huxley warns for propaganda technologies that have to ability to undermine democracy in the way that they take the rational choice, the very basis of democracy, away. Huxley argued that once one gets the consent of the ruled – by bypassing the rational part of men – one will be able to make them love their slavery.
to Huxley, our freedom is endangered by these technologies, because they have the ability to organize or control bigger systems, control that was before not possible. In return these organized systems would require more hierarchical bureaucracies, which eventually would lead to a centralization of power.
After World War II, the threat of a nuclear war was a very real one, and was felt throughout society. Children were taught how to respond in case an actual nuclear attack would appear via promotional videos that told them to “Duck and Cover”11
. One example of someone growing up under these conditions was Stewart Brand. Brand, who would have great impact by setting up the Whole Earth Catalog and later the WELL to whom I will come back later, had nightmares as a child about nuclear attacks with him being the only one surviving (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 42). When going to college, an additional fear appeared, for Brand and other students: to become an ‘Organization Man’, completely devoted to the corporation (Whyte). To students, the image of streams of men in grey flannel suits going to work everyday resembled the loss of your freedom, individuality and authenticity. The ‘Organization Man’ resembled the power government had over individuals through the use of automation. This notion of the organization man led to a growing unrest in the sixties about the management of universities amongst students. This resulted in big protests in Berkeley. On December 2th, 1964, Mario Savio, the leader of the Freedom of Speech Movement, gave his now famous speech during a sit-in on the steps of the Sprout Hall of Berkeley University12
. In this speech Savio compares the current university to a firm, in which the board of directors are the management, the staff the employees and the students the raw material to be bought by clients of the government. According to the Freedom of Speech Movement, students were treated as bits of data in a larger system, which could be sold as commodities, a system in which individuality did not play a role. For these students, “as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life […]” (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 2). The university, and society at large, was a machine, in which you could not be a free individual. The Freedom of Speech Movement found the organization man in every aspect of society.
11 Full promotional video from 1951: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFT8hLjHtuE 12 Speech Mario Savio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0
In 1962 students created the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), with the philosophy that “the goal of man and society should be finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic” (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 34). This personal authenticity and maintenance of one’s own individuality became an important requirement for the new society students were envisioning. The general feeling of distrust in the current bureaucratic government policies led to a belief that society should be reformed. The SDS, eventually known as the New Left, believed that through political activism and struggle this reform could be accomplished. The idea that one could not be a free individual within the larger system that society had become and therefore one should revolt, was inspired by the theory on ‘Repressive Sublimation’ of sociologist Herbert Marcuse. According to Marcuse, people are living with the “false consciousness” of comforts of society and the idea that they are free, through the illusions that the system produces. Society has turned into a system that leaves, through its mechanism of creating a sense of freedom and satisfying the needs of individuals, no room for any repression or alternatives to the established order (Marcuse 339). Because of the wealth of society, “a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior [emerges] in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives, that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are repelled or reduced to terms of this universe” (Marcuse 344). Therefore, Marcuse argued that individuals had become slaves in a system where “democracy […] entailed accepting the decisions of the majority” (Cranston 50). Following this, a new doctrine of toleration was needed, in which there was tolerance for the left, revolutionary violence and subversion, but intolerance for the right and the Establishment (Cranston 50-51). So, in Marcuse’s repression thesis, the students found their basis for their protests, as his thesis made clear how the current establishment resembled a totalitarian state, in which individuals were subjected to the system through a false consciousness without the possibility for deviations.
At the same time a similar group, which Fred Turner has coined the New Communalists, moved into a different direction. They believed that a new society could be built by returning to nature and the mind (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 36). This resulted in the New Communalists creating new communities for themselves. Just like Wiener had described with cybernetic systems, the New Communalists argued that if there were no rules or constraints within society, society would start to work as a self-regulating system that would adjust to internal and external changes, following the logic of the feedback loop (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 38). Paradoxically, it were exactly these feedback systems and the goal to achieve homeostasis that were so closely related to the war,
as the state had funded all the military research that eventually made cybernetics possible. Furthermore, what makes it even more problematic that the New Communalists accepted certain aspects of cybernetic thought is that the aim of cybernetics was to achieve homeostasis within a system, in order to increase control of the outcome of this system. This is exactly what Marcuse and the students were against, as in their eyes society had become a system that was governing its people through the creation of wealth, freedom, and order. The homeostasis that is achieved within this system causes, in the words of Marcuse, a ‘false consciousness’ among individuals, which has led to them tolerating the established order. It is as if the New Communalists picked the parts they liked about a specific theory or practice and left the history of these theories untouched. The practices of these two groups thus differed in several ways. Where the New Left believed that one could change society by revolutionary action, the New Communalists believed the best way to revolt was to drop out of society all together and creating new communities. Furthermore, the New Left, inspired by repression theory of Marcuse, did not refrain from using violence to achieve their goals, whereas the New Communalists were dedicated to nonviolence and love (Cranston 49). However, although the practices of these two groups differed, their beliefs were rooted in the same discontents about the current society: the continuous threat of nuclear war was felt throughout society and at the same time the fear to become a number when reaching adulthood. In addition to that, these groups were united by the shared antipathy toward the bourgeois and the established (Cranston 49).
Although the New Left rejected the advancing technologies altogether in the first place, seeing them as evil and a tool of the government to control them, eventually these exact technologies became the means of liberating the society of governmental bureaucracies. In The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argued that print media, in its linearity and fixedness, constrained people in their freedom. However, on the other hand, electronic media have the power to decentralize, which would lead to a village rather than the nation (Grosswiler 137). According to McLuhan, “electronic technologies had begun to break down the barriers of bureaucracy, as well as those of time and space, and so had brought human beings to the brink of a new age” (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 53). For the New Communalists in the 60s, this promise of a ‘global village’, decentralized and with the promise of togetherness, spoke to their imagination of a new free society.
As was mentioned before, Stewart Brand was one of these young people that grew up in the 1960s. In his diary, Stewart expressed his concerns on the governmental practices of
that time. He stated, “I will fight to avoid becoming a number—to others and to myself” (Brand in Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 42). During the 1960s Brand spent time with the New Communalists and was greatly influenced by their ideals of a free society. During this period, he was also inspired by the cybernetician and designer Buckminster Fuller and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who both depicted technology as a tool for social transformation (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 52). Fuller opposed the “grey flannel suits” that had marked the bureaucratic world, and believed that one should aspire to become an artist (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 57). This of course resembled exactly what the New Communalists attempted to do. Thus, the same technologies that were made possible by war funding during the Second World War, had become the means to bring about change in the world, as they had the power to decentralize.
The reason I mention Stewart Brand, is because in 1968 he set up the Whole Earth Catalog, which can be best described as a catalogue that provides the reader with a series of tools to position oneself in the world: The Catalog was envisioned as a way to bring about the ‘wholeness’ of the earth and all its systems. The first catalogue Brand created especially for those New Communalists who headed back to the ‘real world’ to provide them with tools to set up their communities within this world (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 5). The Catalog, which became immensely popular during its years of publication, has later been regarded as the first analogue form of the Internet. This can be explained by the collaborative nature of the Whole Earth Catalog. Although the first Catalog was assembled only by Brand, the later versions were made in collaborations with reviewers and readers. In this way, Brand established a “community in print”, a network of individuals that spoke with each other through the pieces in the Catalog (Turner Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy 489). What Brand envisioned for the Catalog was to create a self-sustaining information system; in which individuals would be able to see themselves as “gods” and the tools that were provided through this system would provide them with insight of the world. But more importantly, they would help them change themselves and the world around them for the better (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 83). These ideas reflected both the countercultural ideals of the free individual and those of technological communities theorized by the cyberneticians, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, and by combining these two visions Brand “generated a social vision in which small-scale informational technologies could be imagined to transform individual minds and, through them, the world” (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 101). It was a new way to position oneself within the world and change it for the better.
Although the last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog was published in 1972, its ideas and visions would inspire the creation of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the WELL) in 1985. The WELL, founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, was “a teleconferencing system” –which was not that different from other online communication systems that were developed in that time – that gave its users the opportunity to have conversations online through text messages in different topics and subjects (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 142). However, what differed from the other systems, was that the WELL created an environment in which counterculturalists, hackers and journalists were brought together (by Brand) and could collaborate within a network that was based on the New Communalist ideals and cybernetic thought (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 142). Within the system of the WELL, a ‘gift economy’ sprang up in which information was provided by users for free, with no expectation of an immediate reward. Instead, the Gift Economy, coined by Howard Rheingold, whom had been a great influence within the network of the WELL, worked well, because the potential valuable information provided by one user would later be rewarded with valuable information of others, over time (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 157). The WELL thus created a virtual community in which the ideals of a free society and individual freedom, inspired by the New Communalists, were discussed.
The virtual community on the WELL inspired John Perry Barlow to write his cyber manifest A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996 in which he declares that the Internet will be able to free individuals from their bodies and the constraints of the government:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather (n.p.). Barlow opposed the current government, calling them giants of flesh and steel, and had the belief that Cyberspace would liberate people from this government. In cyberspace one would be able to create a new community, where rules of the physical world would not apply or have any influence. Through his notion of cyberspace, which was widely adopted, “he transformed a formerly dystopian vision of networked computing into an imagined space in which individuals could recreate themselves and their communities in terms set by New Communalist ideals” and by lending the ideals of the WELL his notion of cyberspace, as
escape out of the real world in which governments have no control over individuals, resulted in a “universal metaphor for networked computing” in the 1990s (Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture 162).
Another development in the period of the eighties and nineties influenced people to think in terms of self-regulating systems. That is, during the Reagan presidency in the 1980s and the Clinton presidency in the 1990s, governmental practice was influenced by the ideas of a Laissez-Faire economy. In this economy, the market would work according to the logics of a self-regulating and self-sustaining system, in which governmental interference should stay limited or should be avoided all together in order to achieve a state of homeostasis. This Laissez-Faire economy was influenced by the ideas of Russian writer Ayn Rand13
. Ayn Rand was for the separation of the economic system and government, instead, ‘preaching’ for a “Laissez-Faire, free, unregulated economy” (Rand). This would mean that the welfare state that was established would have to be destroyed, giving men the opportunity to reach for their own virtue. The government would have no power over the economic system, and would have no right to force citizens to give up their own achieved property. In a Laissez-Faire economy stability could be reached by letting the society adapt to the system of the market.
What is interesting in this development and change of perception around technologies, is that Stewart Brand with the Whole Earth Catalog, and later with the WELL adopted two visions. On the one hand he adopted cybernetics logic in the sense that he wanted to create self-sustaining systems that would be able to maintain homeostasis on their own, which had caused in the first place the students to reject the bureaucratic government in the sixties, but on the other hand, he adopted the New Communalist’s view on freedom of the individual through technologies, inspired by theories of McLuhan and Fuller. It is this seemingly discrepancy between opposing views which Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have called the ‘The Californian Ideology’. The Californian Ideology combined the anti-corporate purity of the New Left, led by Stewart Brand, and later on by Howard Rheingold who promised a hi-tech gift economy online, and the ideology of a Laissez-Faire economy: “as a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answers this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticizing either of them” (Barbrook and Cameron 6). The paradox here is that, on the one hand the Californian Ideology promised a free gift-economy, an electric agora, and on the other hand, the entrepreneurs and companies became
13 Ayn Rand is the author of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), two books that were very influential among digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
ever more important through the ideology of the Laissez-Faire economy. However, both had the strong faith in networked digital technologies and their ability to transform society into a place in which individuals could be freed from the constraints of bureaucracy and governments, whether that was through a self-regulating market – an electronic marketplace – or through a gift economy where information flows freely.
What I have shown in this chapter is the development of the cybernetic theory into what the cyberneticians envisioned as a universal science. Due to the theories of cybernetics our understanding of what information is, has changed. Although Wiener and Shannon differed in their definition of information, they both were concerned with the process of transmitting information in a way that the least possible noise would interfere in this process. In this sense, information is seen as deriving from the process of systems seeking homeostasis through feedback loops. Although the use of the word cybernetics has become less frequent in scientific studies, I will illustrate in the next chapters that the cybernetic vision still plays an important role in our current society when it comes to contemporary phenomena such as the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things, and furthermore, how the Californian Ideology, with its underlying technological utopianism still is very alive in our society. But first, in the following chapter, I will describe what impact the notion of data and its current meaning in our computation age has on our understanding of information and knowledge.
