This is a seminal work by Norbert Wiener,genius mathematician, who was a child prodigy who recieved his PhD from Harvard at 18, then denied a faculty postion because he was Jewish in 1936. He was a generalist, however, having first studied Zoology and philosophy; later psychology. He was absolutely prescient in his predictions about the sociopolitical outcome of Cybernetics a term that he coined himself. Cybernetics is automation, using feedback loops, that has led to robotics and machines making machines and leaving unemployment behind. Wiener predicted our current state of affairs in Cybernetics as well as in his sequel, Human Uses of Human Beings. It is a robustly readable book if one must skip the few mathematical formulas and milk it for its social implications. He discusses the coming concentration of media (communication), loss of local media, and the propagandization of our democracy leading to war. He predicts the economic failures that have seized the Western World before and since 2008 and that call for a "search for novel means of distribution of wealth" because full employment would no longer be needed or relevant. Here is a man who was at home with contemporaries Mead, Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Bateson. For his long range views, that valued decentralization, he was ostracised and maligned by centrists and war profiteers. This book is an essential building block for the understanding of modern social and political problems and for the beginning of solutions. It is a true classic in the humanities sense.
"Cybernetics typically denotes the interdisciplinary study and strategic deployment of communicative control processes in "complex systems" constituted by humans, other animals, machines, and the rest of living-nature. In what follows, I wish to suggest an even broader use of this term. Cybernetics, not simply as a field of techno-science research and application, but as a term connoting the most far-reaching of ultramodern forms of social control. In this sense, I will be using the phrase, social cybernetics, to provisionally configure the fluid, high speed, and densely layered webs of communicatively driven positive and negative "feedback" which, this very moment, affect the ways you are receiving my words. This is a story of how loops of cybernetic feedback are informing the energetic ritual organization of power between ourselves and others. Within the fast-flexible boundaries of global capital, the most dominant, but certainly not all, of these feedback loops carry a masculine, heterosexist, and racially inscribed charge. This is a history of the present." Stephen Pfohl [...] Such is the effect upon readers of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener.
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Print-on-demand reprint, poor quality
This review is about the specific edition ISBN 978-1773236650. It is not about the contents, just the form.It is a poor quality reprint and difficult to read if, like me, you are easily distracted by low resolution reproduction of original typefaces. Given the large number of mathematical formulae, often poorly rendered, it will be a tough slog.
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David H
An awesome classic in systems science
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2017