Conclusions and Cautions

It is my contention that what is important about the history of information sciences for contemporary debates about human relationships with technology is the interrelation of two competing emotional structures that emerged through the new rhetorical technologies of cybernetics and computer modeling. These technologies of deliberation help us to think about the present and future and to draw a representation of possible futures. This imaging and imagining of the future becomes codified with epistemic value since such models are generated from logical-mathematical systems that have (supposedly) accounted for all relevant variables. By valuing such representations as "true" or sufficiently close to "real" instead of the virtuality they are, these technologies are utilized in policy making decisions. Such was the result of information sciences at RAND where emergent information sciences came together to reduce entire populations to statistics and metonymize political leaders to machines.

Historically, this reduction of people to machines and populations to statistics for decision making was born from the optimism of scientists who believed that humanity could overcome severity through a technologized ordering of the self. This optimism, however, became tempered with the contemporaneous passion of paranoia that was inscribed by the Cold War onto the sciences. It seems as if as soon as optimistic communication and control machines were conceived, they were captured by the paranoia of the times within which they emerged. They at once became something that was desired for survival and feared for their destructive capacity. As a result, the advent of World War II gave an epistemological response necessary translation into terminal hardware and, therefore, an immediate political dynamism. It brought to the vanguard four figures — von Neumann, Turing, Wiener, and Kahn — who might otherwise have been nothing more than brilliant mathematicians; irrelevant as philosophers or political theorists. Out of their intricate intellectual concerns over the efficacy of formalism, logic, and rationality, they helped fashion a momentous cultural force. The presence of their firstborn, the atom bomb, made it seemingly impossible to ignore. Its short term effect was to turn many Americans into paranoid androids. Even now, at the end of the Cold War, uncertainty still looms. As a result, their cybernetic ideals will not simply fade into insignificance.

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