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

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
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
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
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