Cyber-nations: the Cold War contest for cybernetics and automation in the US, USSR, and divided Germany

Thesis

This dissertation explores how the United States, the USSR, and a divided Germany responded to the new science of cybernetics during the postwar. Invented by the MIT mathematician, Norbert Wiener, cybernetics offered a new quantitative framework for studying feedback loops across physical, biological, and sociological systems. The potential economic applications of cybernetics promised a future of increased mechanization which threatened to undermine the role of labor in both capitalist and socialist systems. The present study examines how thinkers across the Cold War divide received cybernetic ideas and developed socio-political, economic, and artistic responses to automation and productivity enhancements. Each chapter offers a case study focused on a particular state (The United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic), and analyzes socialist and liberal responses to cybernetic ideas. The wide-ranging applicability of cybernetic concepts prompted varied responses, which ranged from early forms of digital art in West Germany to proposals for networked computer systems in the Soviet Union. Through tracing cybernetic reception across ideological and geographic boundaries, this dissertation aims to uncover an important moment of cybernetic radicalism in the 1960s. This perspective provides much-needed historical context for current concerns about the dominance of big tech and potential changes in twenty-first century labor practices.

Authors: Sanchez, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7rdrpdb0a
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English