From Newspeak to Cyberspeak - by Slava Gerovitch (Paperback)

About the Book

An archive-based history of Soviet cybernetics that focuses on the interplay of scientific, economic, and political discourses in the Soviet Union and Russia from the late 1940s through the 1990s.

Book Synopsis

In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.

The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."

Review Quotes

"An exceptionally lively and interesting book. This is by far the best-informed and most insightful account of cybernetics in the Soviet Union."--David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

" An exceptionally lively and interesting book. This is by far the best-informed and most insightful account of cybernetics in the Soviet Union." -- David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

" An exceptionally lively and interesting book. This is by far the best-informed and most insightful account of cybernetics in the Soviet Union." -- David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

-- David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

About the Author

Slava Gerovitch is a Dibner/Sloan Postdoctoral Researcher at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and a Research Associate at the Institute for the History of Natural Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.