User:Dave Young/rm/1-2/Colossus-Imaginary-Futures

~Introduction~

In this text, I would like to examine the film Colossus: The Forbin Project as a reflection on the ideology of cybernetics prevalent in the United States during the Cold War. Under production in the late 60s and released in 1970, the film is set in an alternative vision of the era where computer technology is represented in a curious duality: processing power is so advanced as to allow the creation of artificial intelligence, yet the physical aesthetics and engineering of the technology remains contemporary to the film's production. The film articulates a number of important points about the history and application of cybernetics, presenting them in a dramatic-paranoia style popular in American cinema at the height of the Cold War. Colossus also reflects on the paradox of the obsessive desire for political and military control enacted through the rapid construction of machines of increasing complexity and autonomy, illustrating the huge levels of investment in military research at labs such as RAND.

Much science-fiction of this time is similarly concerned with technologically-induced catastrophes. As the public generally only had conceptual access to such machines either through fictional narratives in cinema or literature, the notion that their sole realities were calculators of missile trajectories or dysfunctional cyborgs was reinforced in films such as Colossus. In this respect, science-fiction cinema was an important aspect of the discourse of technological critique during the Cold War, creating a dramatised and exaggerated alternative reality readily believable by the masses.

~Cybernetics as Ideology~

Cybernetics was initially developed by Norbert Wiener during the 1940s while he was working on a manned anti-aircraft gun called the Predictor, designed to estimate the future position of an enemy aircraft in the sky. In order to accomplish this, Wiener created a complex system of feedback loops between the human and the mechanics of the gun itself, correcting and adjusting the aim of its operator in order to improve accuracy. The resulting mathematical frameworks he developed were outlined in his book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and presented at the Macy Conferences in the early 1950s, at which point his theories became an important development in the American scientific community. Despite some detractors, cybernetics was generally assimilated into a diverse array of sciences, to the level of importance where it surpassed being just a set of mathematical tools and became an ideology, a way of thinking about the world.

In post-war America, Cybernetics encouraged a switch in academic thinking about the political problems of the era. As Jack Burnham states, there was a move from an 'object oriented culture' to a 'systems-oriented' culture, prioritising an understanding of the relationships between concepts rather than of the concepts in isolation. The application of cybernetics was universal, with ideas such as 'feedback' being integral to developing and creating many new scientific fields, from social science to computer science. According to its advocates, Cybernetics offered the alluring prospect of calculated clairvoyance. With its ultra-rational and cool set of methodologies it could supposedly predict the future behaviours of the Russians and define the best possible reaction in the case of an attack.

~Colossus: The Forbin Project~

In Colossus: The Forbin Project, the narrative follows a genius computer engineer who builds the world's most powerful supercomputer for the US Military, functioning as a retaliatory machine that, if predicting a Russian offensive manoeuvre, will objectively launch a relative counter-attack at a Russian target. Partially mirroring the actual Cold War US Military policy of 'Mutually Assured Destruction', the purpose of Colossus is to frighten the Russians into inaction and to prevent the escalation of war between the two superpowers. Within the film, we can see a hyperbolic role-play of the cybernetic ideology: Colossus behaves as the ultimate cybernetic subject, rationally demanding more control over its environment in order to stabilise the intensely complex system of Cold War international relations.