[P2P-F] [WSF-Discuss] Human Use of Human Beings by SS. Wiener (1989)

Denis Postle denis.postle at gmail.com
Tue Aug 18 07:01:02 CEST 2015 

Hi Orsan,
As Brian suggests I suspect you may be adrift about Weiner personally 
but the integration of military and political agendas of the kind you 
describe was very apparent while I was working and visiting MIT in the 60s.

For some background, take a look at my 1965 film about MIT 'How to be 
First' <http://www.veoh.com/watch/v47355561kATdtzG8>which MIT tried 
(unsuccessfuly) to block being transmitted in the US due to the way it 
points to MIT's integration with the military/industrial complex . I 
recall being impressed that some of the usual banks of IBM tape machine 
had tags attached saying 'Property of the Department of the Navy'.
Denis

On 17/08/2015 18:53, Orsan wrote:
>
>
> Probably there is a short circuit here as Franz and Brian you may be 
> rightly identified.. Yet how naive can a brain like Wiener? To miss 
> where life is leading him, and his work, paid by state and army. Can a 
> scientist be so precise and creative in systemic thinking and knows so 
> much about its relation of developing control mechanisms, and then be 
> so naive about where it is going... Does she or he have the luxury of 
> being ir- or non-responsible?
>
> Wiener, Bertalanffy, Hebb, Von Neumann, Boltzmann, Bohr, even Einstein 
> ... This large network of East European scientists and philosophers, 
> interestingly most of them having reformist-Jewish family back ground, 
> and somehow influenced by the relativist and energetic ideas and work 
> of Ernst Mach- most of them linked to or connected to -in Europe- 
> Vienna circle and Mont Pellerin society and -in US- Chicago where Von 
> Misses and Von Hayek (both are staunch followers of Carl Menger) built 
> their hubs (later Chicago centered Austrian School of Economists - 
> also known as 'Mach circle') and attracted state and corporate funders 
> like Rockefeller, Ford, Rand. These hubs became central to the 
> emergence of the Big Brother: networks of state and TNCs led 
> cybernetics and complex systems management centers (known as operation 
> research units) like Los Alamos, MIT labs, Silicon Valley, as Google's 
> and NSA-Prism's birth places.
>
> May be in terms of Wiener's or Bertalanffy's specific personalities I 
> have followed incorrectly connected dots and reached early/wrong 
> opinions. Yet I believe that they were very well aware of what they 
> have been doing, and what that was serving for. This is totally 
> opposite to what Bogdanov have done and how he done that, he developed 
> much more complete, compact and flawless theorization of complex 
> systems and their internal, external and interconnected dynamic 
> formation and changes, to steer the change bottom up. Not to steer thr 
> steerers, from winter palace. The most important point is what SSCB 
> missed with Bogdanov is caught and exploited by the West by resulting 
> in most sophisticated and meta-algorithmic war and oppression machine, 
> that is globalized capital and the transnationalised state, resting on 
> transnationally networked control and informational management of 
> organization of the people, things, ideas, behaviors, even nerves, and 
> genes.
>
> Orsan
>
>
>
> On 17 aug. 2015, at 16:52, Brian K Murphy <BrianKMurphy at bell.net 
> <mailto:BrianKMurphy at bell.net>> wrote:
>
>> Have you actually /read/ this book, Orsan?  I have considered it 
>> ‘required reading’ since I discovered it in the late sixties.  It is 
>> a profound and trenchant warning about the dehumanizing trajectory of 
>> technology in the 20th century, and the inevitable enslavement of 
>> humans in the service of the machine...
>>
>>
>> On 16 Aug 2015, at 10:52 am, Orsan wrote:
>> Human as a mean of production, by ex-nazi 21. cc Malthus, Norbert 
>> Wiener, a good friend of von Hayek. Wiener is guilty of plagrimism 
>> and assimilating work of Alexander Bogdanov, and put it in service of 
>> the builders of the panotpticon during the cold war:
>> s
>> "This is one of the fundamental documents of our time, a period 
>> characterized by the concepts of 'information' and 'communica­tions'. 
>> Norbert Wiener, a child prodigy and a great mathematician, coined the 
>> term 'cybernetics' to characterize a very general science of 'control 
>> and communication in the animal and machine'. It brought together 
>> concepts from engineering, the study of the nervous system and 
>> statistical mechanics (e.g. entropy). From these he developed 
>> concepts that have become pervasive through science (especially 
>> biology and computing a common parlance: 'in­ formation', 'message', 
>> 'feedback' and 'control'. He wrote, 'the thought of every age is 
>> reflected in its technique . . . If the  seventeenth and early 
>> eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth 
>> and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the 
>> present time is the age of communication and control.' "
>>
>> http://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf
>>
>>
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