Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Cybernetics 101010

2025-Jul-11

It has been a few months since I reviewed a big nonfiction book here on the blog. There is a lot of book reading going on with me lately. Honest. You’ll have to take my word for it. Big fat nonfiction books. The kind that take weeks to finish. It should take me less than a few weeks for each of these, but the books are eventually getting finished. To bring myself to dig into these kinds of books feels like a war of attrition. More than I’d like to admit. I know once I actually put the book in my hands, letting go becomes just as hard as picking the book up. These deep books are a drag on the time management of my personal cybernetic systems.

The book we are talking about today was pretty good. It’s called The Rise of The Machines by Thomas Rid. Published not too long ago, so these machines mentioned in the title have been rising for over seventy years, or so says this author. The subtitle of this book is A Cybernetic History. This added subtitle aids in the discovery of this book when using a web search. When you ask a web search machine for the title of the book, the subtitle gives you extra search terms to filter past the third Terminator film. Guessing from how most web search engines want to steer you when searching for this title, T3 is the most popular one.

I found this book to be pretty good. The book entertained me. To me, a seasoned veteran of reading about cyber-whatever-you-can-think-of for decades, fiction or nonfiction—I found the book decent. Not great, because I think the idea of chronicling the nominal idea of cybernetics in its whole lifespan is inherently a flawed plan. The author did a good enough job putting together excellent prose to assemble some ideas that I do not altogether think were found in his chronicling of cybernetics.

What’s that? You say you don’t know what cybernetics are? That’s fine. Most people do not. Even well-respected writers who use the ‘cyber’ prefix for just about anything sometimes get it wrong, or more than half wrong. I’ve had a constantly evolving idea attached to that nominal phrase: cyber or cybernetics.

Fiction stories throwing the word ‘cyber’ around is how I came along to find the word. Probably among the paperback science fiction novels my father enjoyed. By the 1980s, cyberpunk literature was popular enough to be published by the same ones publishing the older sci-fi authors. If it was not those often exquisitely drawn covers on those sci-fi paperbacks, then probably in an ad for a pen-and-paper RPG within a comic book. Before I enjoyed reading sci-fi books, I enjoyed their covers. Non-science fiction books could not compete in coolness. Sometimes they didn’t bother to have any cover art at all! Just some big letters for the title and author’s name.

The cover art to Shadowrun is a very early memory of mine. Early enough to be from before I could read. I remember an image of modern-looking petty crime mixed with slight touches of the future. The future in the form of electronics is slightly better than what was available at the time. Hardware like paper-thin laptop computers or synthetic body parts. (And goat horns. But Shadowrun was a little more than just cyberpunk. It had that extra portion of fantasy.) The first appearance of the word ‘cyber’ is an inchoate mystery pivotal to the early development of my artistic tastes.

Whatever the official start was in my burgeoning psyche, cybernetics or anything prefixed with ‘cyber-’ grabbed me as a kid. Usually, they were stories with ideas that pulled me into a world of machines. Machines that would come after the first and second Industrial Revolutions. Semi-thinking machines. The ones that held memory in a state, which was only a fresh theory that did not work until the electronic computer. Machines that could hold logic expressed in zillions of bits held by zillions of transistors on a silicon wafer.

Machines that I would eventually come to utilize professionally in my adult life. My current idea of ‘cybernetics’ did not begin with ideas of software development on a ‘virtual’ machine. That’s a reflection of my tech career history and a slightly academic approach to the use of the word cyber-something.

When I was a kid, I liked the idea of humans with robot parts! Stuff like a normal modern guy but with a robot arm. That is also a sword! Or a robot eye that can see UV light! A hacker could tune a thief's eye to catch the frequency of light the security users use. And the hacker is physically plugged into the network host. Maybe he runs a side function that fools the local ATMs into spitting out cash as a diversion!

If you had read the previous blog post, you might see a pattern here. Most of my sophisticated artistic preferences are an overgrown representation of my childhood interests. I love boxy IBM mainframes now, but that was not something childhood me would enjoy without some cyber-embellishment. Maybe if that gymnasium-sized computer was controlling a big robot?
The cybernetic history talked about in this book is not about that type of cybernetics. The book does eventually get to the era—the phase of the word cybernetics—when approaching the end of the millennium. Where I found my first interests in fictional worlds made by creative types inspired by prior decades of serious scientific efforts.

The book begins with the acorn of the word cybernetics that germinated in the heart of the academic-military-industrial complex put together by the USA to harness all its might to fight World War II. Burst forth upon the world, from inside the mind of a very nerdily named guy: Norbert Wiener.

Before I picked up this book, I had worries that there would be a lot of retread territory I had seen in other books on the subject. The official world of cybernetics has a lot of overlap with many of my book-reading interests. The nonfiction books that have been mentioned here on the blog about DARPA, Skunk Works, the CIA, and the Cold War are the roommates to cybernetic history.
One of my most loved nonfiction books, The Information by James Gleick, was where I first heard of Norbert Wiener. The sections of that book felt less exciting than the ones talking about the achievements of more prolific engineers. The ones with more tangible results to their esoteric mathematical achievements. The kinds making cool new gadgets rather than summing together the knowledge of contemporaries into a cohesive body of thought. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician that made a lot of textbooks that included mathematical grounding to his ideas. A lot. What he did not produce was much in the way of real-world results. This book gets going once we get to Norbert trying to figure out how to guess the probabilities of how a human plus a German fighter plane will behave under anti-aircraft fire, so that an AA gun could be fired at it with a calculated guess, and with a way for the gun to incorporate feedback into the next guess.

To be frank, as an adult who felt he knew enough about computers to make a living from using them, I became put off by nonfiction work that still carried around the ‘cyber’ tag. Its use among artists and writers had poisoned the word in my mind as a viable topic of serious discussion. Too many Cyberforce comics, Cyberpunk 2077 video games, and online bootcamps that will make you a wiz at cybersecurity have cheapened the word.

Personal biases aside for the word cyber, what this book has given me is a decent answer for how to explain the original meaning of what cybernetics is supposed to be. It is remarkably low-tech. Almost outside the idea of tech, but the tech is still required. Humans swinging an axe at different angles as the tree is cut. That’s how low-tech cybernetics can be. This blog with a comment section giving me feedback on how to make this information distribution system better. You guessed it. All cybernetic systems. They are all systems that are reaching a goal, that gather information about their goal and incorporate that acquired information into their system to better reach its goal. It can be as high-tech as a smart bomb recalculating its trajectory millions of times a second, but it does not have to be. It’s all explained in the math.

I work with these computers day after day, yet when I look at the mathematical portion of what Wiener writes about, I am flat-out stumped. That was not provided in the actual book’s pages, but I felt curious enough to chase down what he actually said. The first decade or so after the cyber word was coined, he had somewhat of an oracular status among those in the know. I thought maybe there was some insight to be had from his numerical notes. I couldn’t feel any, so I’ll have to take Thomas Rid at his word that Wiener was on to something bigger than the hi-tech gadgets I normally associate with cybernetics.

What would he see now? The ideas, I suppose, are taken for granted. Almost so elementary that it is hard to see. I don’t remember if Wiener had a grand idea for how humanity would work in a system with their machines. I think he was leaning toward the singularity idea, in a positive way of thinking. I find a zen calmness to the idea of cybernetics. The author touches on the spiritualism used with the word. When pouring over the New Age epoch of cybernetics. When Leary was hocking computers. How droll.

The 1950s manga Astro Boy is not mentioned once in this book. I add this at the end of the post because I’ve been reading those too. They’re one of the fat books I mentioned before that take me weeks to read. Small in page area, though. Each story so far has been fairy tales about robots. When you get down to it, they’re all stories of cybernetic systems. Decision makers gathering information. Human or robot. In the mathematical jumble expressing the systems they participate in, they all look the same.