Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid (review)

Published in 2016, Rise of the Machines already has proven a popular introduction to the burgeoning literature on the scientific history and cultural analysis of cybernetics. Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, dramatizes the history of cybernetics, the postwar science of communication and control, across twentieth-century American scientific and popular discourse about technology. The result weighs in at over 400 pages of breezily readable prose, anchored by roughly 700 minimalist footnotes.

I propose to reduce his argument to this statement: cybernetics, a postwar science, has never been postwar; indeed, the myths of the rise and fall of the machine have always involved such contradictions. (I phrase the argument deliberately in contrast with his previous classic, The Cyberwar Will Never Come, which argues that cyber security strategies never have constituted warfare.) Cybernetics, born in World War II and articulated in the early Cold War, continues to be ever so much about war, especially about how human-machine systems may help respond to, evade, and even repair wartime chaos. As Rid chronicles, the promises and perils of machines in the fray of the battlefield have long fascinated the military community—and now the cyber security community. His sweeping narrative brings most of a century of American myths surrounding smart machines squarely into the popular readership's proverbial radar and sights.

Of course, scholars will nitpick. The Rise of the Machines is not for those interested in policing the borders of scholarly influence and insight, such as Ron Kline's recent landmark history of cybernetics. Strictly speaking, most of Rid's book is not about cybernetics, so much as a breezy chronicle that hops between fascinating interludes, glossing over the subtle tensions that differentiate cybernetics from subsequent imaginaries of digital technological fact, faction, and fiction. For example, nowhere does Rid note—even in his fascinating descriptions of the head's up display and gunner-gun assembly as central to the popular imagination of man-machine assemblies—that self-proclaimed cyberneticists rarely talk about cyborgs or tech flower-power themselves. (Wiener's hearing glove goes notably absent.)

Norbert Wiener, as tends to happen, receives both too much and too little critical attention: a founder of cybernetics, Wiener certainly was the often childish, clueless genius Rid makes him out to be, but not so much the unalloyed doomsday prophet of automation or the pessimistic foil to Alice Mary Hilton's rose-colored automated future where "all the plows pull themselves" (p. 103). Rid similarly bathes the stories of the Silicon Valley tech commentator class—John Perry Barlow, Stewart Brand, William Gibson, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary, Timothy May, Howard Rheingold, and the like—in more sympathy for their personal details than subtlety for their ideas: often these are fascinating (Lanier inventing a company name on the spot or Nathan Kline's offhand remark that the word "cyborg" sounds like a town in Denmark), but sometimes they go too far. His actors are prone to "instantly" see and understand problems: the failed computer scientist and science fiction futurist Vernor Vinge, for example, is mysteriously described as being "well-placed to be a pioneer" because "he then worked as a professor of computer science and mathematics at San Diego State University" (p. 206).

Still, Rid's history and analysis of machine myths and war sheds insight on (the curvature of the earth as both aviator and countercultural resource, the V1 rockets and its British countermeasures), even if it falls short of criticizing, its main target—the present-day state and corporate militarization of machines itself. The American state—the FBI, the NSA, the U.S. Armed Forces—appear throughout the analysis as the natural or normal institutions for managing questions of technological risk and cyber security. While not historically wrong, it seems to me that this framing misses the abnormal and critical responsibility that the global military-industrial-academic complex bears for driving and profiting off of such technological myths. Consequently, non...