DaveYoung-DescriptionOfYear1

In the first year of the course, my work was primarily research-based, centering on the representation and influence of cybernetic theory within American popular culture during the Cold War. This interest was a continuation of my thesis/practice during my BA in Dublin which dealt with the influence of cybernetics on systems art, and the works of many of the theorists, critics, and artists I was studying then were reframed within this new 'Cold War' and pop-culture context.

My first essay examined the influence of cybernetics on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, outlining how they reinforced the very ideology the were rebelling against through the 'squaring' of the Silicon Valley tech industry. I described how, for the hippies of the 1960s, cybernetics offered a framework for creating a non-hierarchical society, built on decentralised networks and group feedback sessions. I continued the essay by illustrating how the communes of the early 1970s - the practical tests for their new vision of society – were short-lived and ultimately a failure, resulting in a migration of the counterculture to California and the formulation of the early computer industry. The hard lessons learned from the communes were newly applied to the advancing technology of networks, fueled by the desire to create a utopian networked space – the 'global consciousness', enabling people to share information in real-time through the internet. I then explained how the dream that cybernetics could 'rescue' society from inequality and autocracy had failed alongside the commercialisation of the internet in the 1990s/2000s, a cause of the sky-rocketing value of corporate data stores and the loss of user-autonomy on the biggest web services. In summary, I proposed that the problematic social hierarchies of the 1960s had been dutifully reinforced by some of the people that were ideologically opposed to it.

Popular films from the 1950s and 1960s became integral sources for my research in the second trimester, providing me with a wealth of conflicting viewpoints, propaganda, and metaphorical narratives that gave insight into Soviet-American relations at various times during the Cold War. I was particularly interested in Peter Galison's description of cybernetics as one of the three 'war sciences'. With technology playing a very central role in the public posturing of the Americans and the Soviets, cybernetics became an important ideological figure in the background of much Cold War era cinema, and I tried to unpack this in my research.

My second essay was an attempt to examine cybernetics as an ideology before it was appropriated by the counterculture in the 1960s. I was curious about the the military ontology of cybernetics, and how it had been extended into the corporate and economic spaces that gave the counterculture cause for protest. I begin by introducing Norbert Wiener as the 'inventor' of cybernetic theory, and the concepts of the human-as-machine at its root. I continued by discussing the point that cybernetics was attractive to the strategists in the American military as they perceived that it could provide them with the power of precognition – undoubtedly a useful superpower during a time of unpredictable international relations and tense foreign policy. In summary, I describe how the promised powers of cybernetic precognition was a fantasy. The military intelligence used as inputs for the strategist's systems were often exaggerated in order to favourably influence the military spending budget. Furthermore, the necessity to mathematically reduce the complexity of human behaviour to hyper-rationality and being driven by the will for self-preservation was problematic in practice.

The motivation for writing these two texts lies in my interest with how the Cold War sciences have been represented in non-military contexts. Throughout the late 20th century, the legacy of cybernetics, game theory and operations research have had a great influence on the ways in which we attempt to solve problems and design solutions – be they social, economic, or infrastructural. I felt that I could gain a unique insight into the process of influence through the close examination of popular cinema and social movements from the Cold War era.