Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

403 Pages·2016·6.89 MB·English

by  Thomas Rid

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
—Richard Brautigan, 1967
Contents
Preface
Rise of the Machines
1. CONTROL AND COMMUNICATION AT WAR
2. CYBERNETICS
3. AUTOMATION
4. ORGANISMS
5. CULTURE
6. SPACE
7. ANARCHY
8. WAR
9. FALL OF THE MACHINES
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
PREFACE
WHAT DOES “CYBER” EVEN MEAN? AND WHERE DOES THE idea come from?
Many people have been asking this question for some time now. My students
at King’s College London did, as did cyber warfare officers in the US Air Force
and Pentagon strategists. Secretive British spies inquired, as did bankers and
hackers and scholars. They all struggled with the rise of computer networks, and
what that rise means for our security and our liberty. And they all slapped the
prefix “cyber” in front of something else, as in “cyberspace” or “cyberwar,” to
make it sound more techy, more edgy, more timely, more compelling—and
sometimes more ironic.
I didn’t have a good answer for them, despite having written widely on
cybersecurity. This was frustrating. Like so many others, I could only point,
vaguely, to a curious origin story: that of a science fiction novel written in the
mid-1980s, William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The indefatigable Gibson plucked
cyberspace out of his airy imagination, the story goes, and then punched the
future into his olive-green portable typewriter, a Hermes made in 1927. For
Gibson, that new electronic space inside the machines, meaningless yet
evocative, was the perfect replacement for outer space as a playground for the
protagonists of his science fiction novels. He simply wanted an unblemished
stage. That origin story, as improbable as it is, has been repeated countless times.
Remarkably, one of the biggest challenges to our civil liberties and state
sovereignty in the twenty-first century was commonly traced to a fictional story
about a drug addict escaping into hallucinatory computer networks.
Could that be right? It was as if history started in 1982 with a fantasy. How
did Gibson’s story fit into a larger picture, into a cultural and technical trajectory
that takes a longer view? How exactly had “cyberspace” made the leap from
Gibson’s solitary typewriter to the Pentagon’s futuristic and lavishly staffed
Cyber Command? By 2010, a fast-growing share of the work of the National
Security Agency—and of its British counterpart, Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ)—was somehow “cyber related,” as jargon had it.
Then came the great intelligence leaks of 2013. The NSA’s and GCHQ’s
publicly revealed technological capabilities outraged privacy activists and some
allies—but humbled many of the world’s most fearsome spy agencies; “the leaks
demonstrated a capability gap to us,” one Chinese intelligence officer told me in
Beijing later that year. China had to catch up. Meanwhile, major computer
network breaches escalated, with foreign spies and criminals siphoning off vast
amounts of intellectual property and sensitive personal information. By 2015, the
global cybersecurity market of firms offering a smattering of security solutions
had surpassed $75 billion, swelling at double-digit rates. So precarious were the
new threats that even in times of economic hardship and austerity, government
and military budget lines weren’t just safe from cuts, but sloping up fast.
Yet the real story of one of the world’s most exciting, most expensive, and
most menacing ideas remained an enigma. So where does “cyber” come from?
What is the history of this idea? And what does it actually mean?
I started digging. Rise of the Machines is what I found.
“Cyber” is a chameleon. For politicians in Washington, the word stands for
power outages that could plunge entire cities into chaos at any moment. For
spies in Maryland, it stands for conflict and war, and for data being stolen by
Russian criminals and Chinese spies. For executives in the City of London, it
stands for major security breaches, for banks bleeding money, and for ruined
corporate reputations. For inventors in Tel Aviv, it triggers visions of humans
merging with machines, of wired-up prostheses with sensitive fingertips, and of
silicon chips implanted under tender human skin. For science fiction fans in
Tokyo, it stands for an escapist yet retro punk aesthetic, for mirrored shades,
leather jackets, and worn-down, dusty gadgets. For romantic internet activists in
Boston, it stands for a new realm of freedom, a space beyond the control of
oppressive governments and law enforcement agencies. For engineers in
Munich, it stands for steely control, and for running chemical plants by computer
console. Ageing hippies in San Francisco nostalgically think back to wholeness
and psychedelics and “turning on” the brain. And for screen-addicted youth in
between, “cyber” means simply sex-by-video-chat. The word refuses to be either
noun or prefix. Its meaning is equally evasive, hazy, and uncertain. Whatever it
is, it is always stirring, it is always about the future, and it always has been.
One way to clear the fog is to study the history of one of the weightiest and
most pivotal ideas of the twentieth century, an idea whose legacy is set to be
even more momentous as the twenty-first century moves on: cybernetics.
Cybernetics was a general theory of machines, a curious postwar scientific
discipline that sought to master the swift rise of computerized progress. From the
get-go in the early 1940s, it was about computers, control, security, and the ever-
evolving interaction between humans and machines.
A crucial moment, it turns out, was World War II—in particular, the air
defense problem that emerged as this epic confrontation got under way. To shoot
down deadly new bombers, ground-based artillery needed complex ballistic
calculations, completed faster and more accurately than human “computers”
could perform, or even read off precalculated range tables. Machines needed to
be invented for the task. And soon “mechanical brains” started to “think,” in the
quaint language of the time. The rise of the machines had begun.
In 1940, in the midst of all this, a curious story ran its course at the vast
campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Norbert Wiener, an
eccentric mathematician, read about howitzers and artillery shells and was
inspired. Shooting at the blue sky, aided by creaking computers, appealed to the
roly-poly professor. After the war he took a tangled set of ideas from electrical
engineers and weapons designers, straightened it out, refined it, repackaged it,
and, with a generous gesture, threw his creation out to an eager public like candy
to a throng of hungry children.
The timing was perfect. At the end of the decade, the technological wonders
of the military effort were beginning to seep into industry and private
households. Somebody needed to explain the new gadgetry and its purpose.
Enter cybernetics, the bold theory of future machines and their potential. Wiener
and his keen acolytes would enchant the machine; seduced by their own theory,
they endowed it with spirit and an appeal that would extend to the cultish.
Engineers, military thinkers, politicians, scholars, artists, and activists started
projecting their hopes and their fears into the future of thinking machines.
The postwar rise of the machines spans a wide arch: the most crucial anchor
point of that arch emerged in the late 1940s with the publication of Wiener’s
epoch-making book Cybernetics. The tweedy scholar with thick, horn-rimmed
glasses revealed the magic of feedback loops, of self-stabilizing systems, of
machines that could autonomously adapt their behavior and learn. Automata
now had a purpose and could even self-reproduce, at least in theory. The
machine suddenly seemed lifelike.
The story that ensued is spellbinding: this sizzling-hot new discipline
transformed what computers stood for over the next half century—from
machines of assured destruction to machines of loving grace. By the late 1940s,
the fantastic new way of thinking about cybernetic self-adaptive systems
galvanized charlatans and weapons engineers alike, from the Church of
Scientology to the Boeing Corporation gearing up for the Cold War. Cybernetics
promised to guide stray missiles to targets and lost minds to exaltation. By the
1960s it had given rise to exoskeletons to load nuclear bombers, as well as to
deeper connections among wholesome hippies. It improved kill ratios of air
force fighters and electronically “turned on” San Francisco’s counterculture.
By 1980, a cybernetic space inside the machines had emerged, a mythical
place of hope for a freer and better society—and a fierce domain for battle and
war. This twisted cybernetic history has a firm grip on what we expect from
technology, security, and liberty in the twenty-first century. Ultimately,
cybernetics itself—often shortened to “cyber”—would acquire the very features
of those mythical machines that it had predicted since midcentury: the idea was
self-adapting, ever expanding its scope and reach, unpredictable, and
threatening, yet seductive, full of promise and hope, and always escaping into
the future.
Rise of the Machines is my attempt to disentangle seven distinct historical
cybernetic narratives, each peaking in a particular decade. The book’s themes
are wide-ranging: they extend from autonomous robots, exoskeletons, and
walking trucks to virtual-reality goggles and remailers; sometimes, therefore, a
chapter’s specific line of inquiry will be abandoned to maintain the book’s focus
as it moves on to the next decade. The chapters are organized chronologically,
but the themes may overlap; in the 1960s, for instance, cybernetics shaped
visions of the future of the body, of work, and of community. The narrative at
the start of a new chapter may therefore jump back in time to illuminate events
that happened simultaneously with events already discussed.
With a focus on the history of cybernetic myths, a word on the mythical is in
order. Myths are deeply embedded in our collective memory; they shape our
understanding of technology at every turn, even if we aren’t aware of this
palimpsest, the deep and hidden legacy of the cybernetic history. Contrary to the
use of everyday language, a myth—as articulated in a prominent tradition of
political theory1—doesn’t mean that something is factually wrong. Myths don’t
contradict the facts; they complement the facts. Saying something works as a
myth doesn’t mean that it is “only” a myth. On the contrary. Political and
technical myths are very real and work in powerful ways. And they may even
align smoothly with the observed, hard facts. Myths are more than real in at least
three different ways.
First, myths overcome the limits of fact, experience, and technology at a
given moment in time. The rise of the machines was always projected into the
future, not into the present or the past. Evidence was always in short supply. The
cybernetic promise, of course, was neither wrong nor right. Any vision of the
future is neither false nor true until the predicted future, or some pale version of
it, actually comes to pass. For their adherents, subscribing to the cybernetic
narratives of the future required more than evidence. It required belief. And the
myth made it easy to believe. With its inherent uncertainty cloaked in the
unflinching language of science and technology, the line between scholarship
and worship blurred again and again over the decades. It did so subtly, and
seductively.
So powerful was the myth that its own creators kept falling for it. Technology
myths have the form of a firm promise: the cyborg will be built; machines that
are more intelligent than humans will be invented; the singularity is coming;
cyberspace will be free. The myth is underdetermined by fact, yet it purports to
be as certain and as hard as empirical evidence can get, shielded from debate and
contradiction. Faith dressed as science.
Second, mythologies are remarkable not for their content, but for their form.
The basis of the myth appears as fully experienced, innocent, and indisputable
reality: computers are becoming ever faster; machines are ever more networked;
encryption is getting stronger. But at the same time the myth makes a leap, it
adds a peculiar form to the meaning. And this form is always emotional. Myths
are convincing because they appeal to deeply held beliefs, to hopes, and often to
fears about the future of technology and its impact on society.
These beliefs are informed by visions and projections, by popular culture, by
art, by fiction and science fiction, by plays, films, and stories. But the myth often
harks back to fiction clandestinely, without making the cultural inheritance
explicit. Science fiction novels, for instance, inspired the 1990s national-security
debate. And sometimes hard-nosed experts even wrote the fiction, to spell out
dystopian visions of future conflict, freed from the unbearable shackles of fact.
The crypto activists of the 1990s, a movement of fervent and influential zealots
extolling the many blessings of spreading encryption, unabashedly
recommended science fiction as the “sources” and the main inspiration for
anarchy in “cyberspace.”
The third and most crucial feature of cybernetic myths is that they transcend
the present. Mythical narratives form a path between the past and the future to
keep a community’s shared experiences in living memory. For political and
historical myths, such as the German raids on the City of London during the
Blitz, the more stable anchor point is in the past. The political myth draws a