Re:The cybernetics scare and the origins of the Internet (2009)
by mc32 on Monday September 27, 2021 @10:16AM
(#28670910)
Apparently the scare part was a pre-emptive attempt by Stalinists who saw Kibernetika as a threat to Workers -their bread and butter. So it was suppressed and derided ideologically.
After the Stalinists, Khrushchev sought to leverage Cybernetics and use it everywhere, so much was their propaganda the US took their rhetoric as actual policy and feared falling behind in the Cybernetics race.
After Stalinism Kibernetika was rehabilitated:
>"In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked cybernetics as “a modish pseudo-science” and “a reactionary imperialist utopia”. Soviet critics used all tools in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments (accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics “a technocratic theory” whose goal was to replace striking workers with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscience-laden soldiers with “indifferent metallic monsters”). Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans”, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons."
After the Stalinists, Khrushchev sought to leverage Cybernetics and use it everywhere, so much was their propaganda the US took their rhetoric as actual policy and feared falling behind in the Cybernetics race.
After Stalinism Kibernetika was rehabilitated:
>"In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked cybernetics as “a modish pseudo-science” and “a reactionary imperialist utopia”. Soviet critics used all tools in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments (accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics “a technocratic theory” whose goal was to replace striking workers with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscience-laden soldiers with “indifferent metallic monsters”). Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans”, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons."