User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/holmes/

Abstract

Brian Holmes: Future Map. Or: How the Cyborgs Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance. In: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com, September 9, 2007.[1]
The essay explores the "systemic unity of man and machine, split at its heart by an ontology of the enemy […] in order to understand a new understanding of surveillance".

Key Points

1. Norbert Wiener
   • God & Golem, Inc. > Can god play a significant game with his own creature?, 1964
   • Teleological Society to study intersections of neurology and engineering
   • this transformed into the famous Macy Conferences > term Cybernetics, 1947
   • about "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems"
   • renounced any direct collaboration with the military brass and giant corporations
   • anti-militarist stance placed him next to anti-communist and matematician Van Neumann
2. Van Neumann
   • central figure in the creation of the atom bomb and developer of two-person game theory
   • attended the Atomic Energy Commission meetings on a wheelchair
   • thought to have been among the models for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
3. Wiener – God and Golem
   • worked on a closed-loop information system called an antiaircraft predictor, 1940
   • inscription of the human element into a system > servomechanism and feedback loop
   • new creatures between machinelike, implacable humasn and intelligent, humanlike machines
   • cybernetics was a manichean science, permeated by the violent interrogations of its subject and the dissimulating absence of its object > the ontology of the enemy
4. Concept of Surveillance
   • has to be expanded far beyond its traditional range
   • automated inspection of personal data can no longer be conceived as purely negative
   • proactive force > multiple feedback loops of a cybernetic society, to controll the future
   • Golem is ourselves, the cyborg populations of the comuterized democracies
   • our movements become the information that is merged into statistics for products / services
   • Wiener's philosophical question returnes in an inverse form:
   • Can a creature play a significant game with her creator / the cybernetic society?
5. Cardinal Points
   • four characteristic technological systems, which trace out the contours of our society:
   • The Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System
   • InferX privacy preserving real-time analytics
   • Personicx customer relationship management system
   • Orbit Traffic Management Technology