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THOMAS RID studies war at King’s College London. Recently he has been pondering “cyberwar”, since “cyber” garners much military-industrial gold and glamour these days. This has led him to wonder what people could possibly mean by a strange term like “cyber”.
This thoughtful, enlightening book is his answer: a melange of history, media studies, political science, military engineering, and, yes, etymology.
It takes Rid a full 25 pages of cautious scholarly preface to get to his original research, but after that, every chapter opens up as smoothly as an automated glass door. In Rise of the Machines, Rid has created a meticulous yet startling alternate history of computation.
Within Rid’s framing, Alan Turing’s famous Colossus codebreaker merely lurks in a dim barn somewhere. The true primal beast of modern computing is the interactive gunsight system, an artillery gizmo that spewed tracer fire across the dark skies of the second world war.
Our central protagonist is not Alan Turing but Norbert Wiener, an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time, who was researching anti-aircraft weapons. Wiener sought to mathematically automate a new prediction and aiming system so that Allied ack-ack gunners could outguess dive-bombing Axis pilots. He had no engineering success whatsoever; meanwhile all the truly capable MIT guys were away, building atom bombs in the desert.
Then peace broke out, and Wiener revealed his new, general theory of humanly interactive yet self-steering machines. He called it “Cybernetics”. Trendspotters quickly picked up and spread the idea, and it’s here that Rid comes into his own as an able historian, excelling at who knew whom exactly when.
In the main, the early cybernetics community was made up of peacenik, left-wing intellectuals who were dumbfounded by the A-bomb. Bertrand Russell considered Wiener a moral titan. Wiener also got a swift, favourable hearing from the soft-science brigade, who quickly realised that “cybernetic feedback” was Darwin-scale high concept, an intellectual gift that would keep on giving.
“Cybernetic feedback was Darwin-scale high concept, an intellectual gift that would keep on giving“
As a working technology, cybernetics reached its apogee before any digital computers appeared. Rid has a historian’s tenderness for odd cybernetic mechanical systems, and these, far from being the parents of true computers, are better considered the children of weapons systems. Gadgets like the obscure Ashby homeostat (“the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man”, Time magazine proclaimed) have a mid-century Alexander Calder beauty about them: they move mysteriously, metal mobiles steering through a breeze.
The original, pre-digital cybernetics was conceptually akin to a vital fluid, a mathematical phlogiston that could manage living organisms, complex mechanisms, human intelligence, and, well, pretty much anything.
It certainly had the mythic power to be prefixed to pretty much anything, which is why our world now darkly rejoices in cyber bombs, cyberbullying, cyber coins, cybercops, cybercrime, cyber dominance, cyber ecosystems, cyberespionage, cyber forensics, cyber fraud, cyber gangs, cyber-geddon, cyber intelligence, cyber jihad, cyber mercenaries, cyber policies, cyberspace, cyberwar… and on and on.
All-purpose plaster
To achieve that semantic feat, the term cyber had to ooze through the eager hands of many avid individuals and interest groups. Rid names them, dates them, and divvies them up by decade and areas of activity. They are a loose but persistent social network, unified by their choice of the term cyber as an all-purpose healing-plaster.
I had to restrain myself from cheering when “cyberpunks” suddenly appeared, mid-narrative. It’s interesting to see science-fiction writers so carefully placed in a historical perspective. Rid has a remarkably firm understanding of how big, vague ideas can duck and dodge between niche cults and popular mainstreams. He is certainly the only scholar I’ve ever heard of who would study the now defunct magazine MONDO 2000 from a military perspective.
Rid went to California to confer with the cyber hippy movers and shakers of Silicon Valley: Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, R. U. Sirius, Jaron Lanier and others. I’ve known most of them for quite a while, yet I’ve never seen them assigned their historical place with such understanding and attention to detail. I’d go so far as to say that Rid has done them justice.
With the passage of years, these California cyber hippies now come across quite like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalists. They were standard American bohemian thinkers, but in intimate contact with some alarmingly practical yet crazy ideas. They were lucky prophets.
The atomic age also had its visionaries, of course, but that era died of radioactive poisons. The space age had wild-eyed prophets galore, but it could never control its budgets. The cyber age was different: it had just as many nuts and flakes, but it ripped the lid off the planet with a comprehensive ruthlessness that we’re only now beginning to understand. 
Many avid fans have had a hand in taking the “cyber” label global
Francois Lenoir / Reuters
Rise of the Machines ends rather suddenly in the present day. Rid has little to offer about the future of “cyber”; he thinks the word has outstayed its welcome, especially in war studies. Rid is a brave scholar who doesn’t mind staking out a strongly dissenting position, so he is quite ready to declare that “cyberwar” is hype, a crock, a fundraising pitch. In his view, aggressive code-juggling can’t be true “war” at all, for it lacks the straightforward, kinetic, lethal potential of guns and bombs. Rid would prefer to have done with cyber altogether.
I sympathise with that assessment, but I don’t think it will happen. The useful verbal murkiness of cyber still thrives in terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning”. The latter neologism is exceedingly Wiener-cybernetic, since it’s all about mysterious, oddly vitalised neural networks, devoid of logical code, wafted toward grand mystical answers on the big-data breezes. The ambassadors of Google, Facebook – they drink that kooky Kool-Aid by the gallon now. Today’s technocrats are every bit as fond of snake oil as their grandparents were.
“The ambassadors of Google and Facebook… are as fond of snake oil as their grandparents were“
“Cyberspace sovereignty” is another new, hard-charging cyber term: it’s all about breaking up the old internet in the service of an aggressive real-world empire. Chinese “sovereign cyberspace” is a mortal enemy of Californian 1990s global-business flat-world cyberspace, but these drifts and contradictions are typical of etymology. Words are made to work; all myths are up for grabs.
What’s truly interesting about cyber was how well, and how long, it sheltered people who never built any actual machine guns. Starting with Wiener himself, they were gadget-happy moralists: a preachy, handwaving, philosophical caste who never dug a fibre-optic cable trench or won the US National Medal of Technology.
Yet they dreamed and spoke relentlessly about frontiers, spaces, communities, nations, peoples and possible futures. They were cyber techs, cyber-scientists, cyber-artists, even cyber-anarchists, but when you strip those cyber masks off, they’re revealed as earnest public intellectuals – rather weird ones, yes, but the cultural transition they were living through was weird. They were a crank minority, yet a truly prescient community. There is a touching authenticity to them. Maybe history will be kind.
Thomas Rid
W. W. Norton
This article appeared in print under the headline “How the cyber age gave peace a chance”
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