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

Tue Aug 18 21:28:55 CEST 2015

Hi Denis, 

This is a long quote from the intro: 

"G.H. Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician and author of A Mathematician's Apology, reflecting on the value of mathematics, insisted that it is a 'harmless and innocent occupation'. 'Real mathematics has no effects on war', he explained in a book for the general public in 1940. 'No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity . . . A real mathematician has his conscience dear.' Yet, in fact, at that time physicists were already actively engaged in experiments converting matter into energy (a possibility implied by the Theory of Relativity) in anticipation of building an atomic bomb. Of the younger generation which he taught, Hardy wrote, 'I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as have helped them to it, as useless as my own . . . '
Norbert Wiener took issue with his mentor. He thought Hardy's attitude to be 'pure escapism', noted that the ideas of number theory are applied in electrical engineering, and that 'no matter how innocent he may be in his inner soul and in his motivation, the effective mathematician is likely to be a powerful factor in changing the face of society. Thus he is really as dangerous as a potential armourer of the new scientific war of the future.' The neat separation of pure and applied mathematics is only a mathematician's self-servingillusion.

Wiener came to address the alternative to innocence -namely, taking responsibility. After he himself had during World War II worked on a mathematical theory of prediction intended to enhance the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire, and developed a powerful statistical theory of communication which would put modern communication engineering on a rigorous mathematical footing, any pretence of harmlessness was out of the question for him. From the time of the end of the war until his death in 1964, Wiener applied his penetrating and innovative mind to identifying and elaborating on a relation of high technology to people which is benign or, in his words, to the human - rather than the inhuman - use of human beings. In doing so during the years when the cold war was raging in the United States, he found an audience among the generally educated public. However, most of his scientific colleagues - offended or embarrassed by Wiener's views and especially by his open refusal to engage in any more work related to the military - saw him as an eccentric at best and certainly not to be taken seriously except in his undeniably brilliant, strictly mathematical, researches. Albert Einstein, who regarded Wiener's attitude towards the military as exemplary, was in those days similarly made light of as unschooled in political matters."

Weather in competition to Nazis, or Communists, these people served to complex and systemic development of what is about to get almost realized a SkyNet of cybernetic control as in Total Recall or Big brother as in 1984, or Panopticon in Bentham's imagination. As founders of such mathematic based holistic vision of how complex systems interact and rise, it would be very fun if they missed to see what they are being part of, and not opt out, nor resist. 

Recently in another list engaged in a discussion with some friends, about supposedly one of most radical strands of the left known as autonomia traditionally giving their En language distribution to the MIT press; famous publishing house that publishes supposedly mostly on left-radical-autonomist-anarchist revolutionary resistance strategy targeting  this emerging dark-net is syndicated to MIT territory. Told them that this is like giving the most advanced armory to enemy for protection and spread of revolution. I like to look into deeper for Wiener's role -with others like McLuhan, and some others from psychology-physiology fields and the advancing of 'military deception science' 

Best, Orsan

Sent from my iPad
> On 18 aug. 2015, at 07:01, Denis Postle <denis.postle at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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' 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> 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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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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