2234 – Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism (podcast 2023)

Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism

“Amelia, Djamil, Christian, and Rudy join for a discussion on the history of Soviet Cybernetics and the use of computers for socialist planning. We discuss the origins of Cybernetics, its role as a reform movement in the sciences, and why cybernetics became attractive to the Soviet academy in the 50s, before moving to the biographies and projects of Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushkov. We reflect on the failures of OGAS, and what could have been done better, as well as its positive legacy and finish by discussing the ways in which cybernetics was kept alive until the collapse of the USSR and the remaining possibilities for computerized planning.”

References:
B. Peters – How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
L. Graham –Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union
S. Gerontovich –InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
S. Gerontovich – From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
O. V. Kitova & V. A. Kitov – Anatoly Kitov and Victor Glushkov: Pioneers of Russian Digital Economy and Informatics
V. Pikhorovich –Glushkov and His Ideas: Cybernetics of the Future
Y. Revich –The Story of How the USSR Did Not Need the Pioneer of Cybernetics
D. West –Cybernetics for the command economy: Foregrounding entropy in late Soviet planning 

I will not comment on this since it speaks for itself – it is one of the most interesting and stimulating discussions I have listened to lately. It touches on a variety of topics from a variety of perspectives without closing down this huge discussion. Instead of basically labeling it as failed or as just empty words (from Cyberspeak to Newspeak), it is important to see where cybernetic thinking left traces and how it moved away from its initial lofty goals. Should be listened to together with the podcast on Allende’s Cybersyn experiment. I have been also recently going back over my small collection of cybernetics and system theory book because I considered them to be a missing link in this history.

2230 – TraumaZone aka What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy by Adam Curtis 2023 (Russia 1985-1999)

Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (subtitled in promotional media as What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy) is a seven-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 13 October 2022. Using stock footage shot by the BBC, the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. (wiki)

I have written elsewhere about Adam Curtis and while I definitely do not dig his “God” perspective, his overbearing voice, his simplifications, and his political position, I think it is an important documentary in the light of what has happened in the East after 1989. This is not to mean that it justifies in any way the destruction and the crimes committed in Ukraine by Russian troops at the present time or the neo-imperialism at stake. But it is important to realize that the West needs some Eastplaining since it cannot fully comprehend what it means that a world has collapsed. A world good and bad, a world certainly repressive and certainly lacking Western consumer goods, but with an aftermath that can not as easily be forgotten. What happened in the wake of this imminent collapse, as we have seen (like in other places such as South America) was full-on privatization that came undemocratically, imposed from above and more or less at the point of a gun. The rise of the mafia state, under extreme free market rule was a bounty for kleptocratic leadership. These are far from isolated phenomena that happened at the margins of the capitalist core. The best example is probably the so-called Wirecard Skandal – a German e-commerce firm whose massive level of fraud and market manipulation is a clear example of what went on during the last 30 years of financialization.

So yes think not just about East, Africa or the Global South but the entire world financial infrastructure, auditing firms, regulatory bodies and politicians. Apart from neoliberal schism and morphing we have today what some have called “market civilizations” that encapsulate a transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe.  The entire deregulatory push and austerity politics in Russia was undertaken under the guidance of global institutions and their specialists and is part of the increasing financialization of the world economy.

The collapse of the URSS has coincided with the collapse of supply chains, the destruction of the medical safety nets, of reduced and ailing educational and social welfare systems, and the immiseration of a great majority while the demand was now for the building markets and transforming overnight everyone into a hustling entrepreneur and rapid siphoning of funds abroad into bank account safety or feeding into financial markets speculation. One has to see this in parallel with Clinton’s administration opening up the floodgates of speculation and financial deregulation that even today affects us all.

More importantly, the entire West has been privy to this and especially American foreign policy. This documentary has to be seen and read with a book by historian and economist Isabelle Weber – who went on to describe how China escaped Russia’s fate (shock therapy) narrowly and during several times of its homegrown attempts at privatization and liberalization. I think one has to think about how during the planned economy something like this never happened. While I think that Adam Curtis is a bad guide to both the Soviet cybernetic history (and maybe even its Western examples), and one should take with a grain of salt all his comments on GOSPLAN and everything that has to do with the Perestroika years, I think his selection on the way the economist and prime minister Yegor Gaidar became the most hated man in Russia are quite telling. At the same time, because of his anti-statist bias, Adam Curtis dully ignored the way economic cybernetics has played out in Siberian institutes (which merits a documentary).

I think that Jeffrey Sach’s career and change of mind after being called in as economic advisor to the Russian state during Eltsin is also telling. Russia and Moscow was welcome into the fold of global capitalism, and it important it has profited as much as financial centers such as London have profited from it. Russian companies were very welcome till recently and they had mixed ownerships, behind tied with foreign Western interests. Oligarchs were sponsoring private schools in the UK, and till the recent sudden superficial boycott, they were quite welcome in The City (especially London the money laundering capital of the world where a majority of the offshore firms are registered).

1734 – Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 by M. John Harrison (book 2020)

M. John Harrison (from Goodreads)

Throughout his career, M. John Harrison’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else. This selection of stories, drawn from 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.

in Praise for his writing:

‘The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraint of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity.’ Ursula K. Le Guin

‘One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English.’ Robert Macfarlane

As a Fantasy writer he has no peer – inheritor of Mervyn Peake’s crown, he is, in the opinion of many critics, the originator of what is now known as ‘The New Weird’, his superb “Viriconium” stories and novels subverting Sword & Sorcery and Dying Earth motifs peopled with strange characters trapped in a strange world they never made.

His mainstream novel ‘Climbers’ is the only novel to ever win the Boardman Tasker climbing literature prize, expressing his interest in the interactions between character and landscape (he has long been a dedicated rock climber).

Harrison’s short stories run the gamut: from observational comedy to subtle ghost stories, from tales of cosmic entropy, their evocative settings and realistic charcters entrance – readers in Bath are still talking about the magnificent reading he gave of “Egnaro” at the Bath store in 1989.

Iain M. Banks described the first volume of his ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy as “Brilliant.” Like Banks, his work is admired by readers of both general fiction and genre fiction.

M. John Harrison is also one of The Guardian’s preeminent critics and reviewers. Come along to hear M. John read from his new collection, You Should Come With Me Now, which will be published by Comma Press in October.

review of the anthology by Gary K. Wolfe

Doe Lea (read here a free short story by M. John Harrison featured in this anthology)

blog of M. John Harrison