Milieu 01 of 12
The Macy Conferences
Cybernetics began by modelling a human being well enough to shoot him down, and its founder spent the rest of his life warning about what he had built.
- Years
- 1946 to 1953
- Location
- New York
- Funder
- Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, a medical philanthropy
- Institution
- Ten invitation-only interdisciplinary conferences
Ten conferences, small and interdisciplinary by design, held in New York in the years immediately after the Second World War.
The climate
Straight out of the war. Norbert Wiener's wartime job was an anti-aircraft predictor: model a pilot's evasive behaviour accurately enough to put a shell where he is going to be. The founding gesture of cybernetics is treating a human being as a predictable feedback system under fire, and that origin never entirely washes out of the field.
Who was in the room
Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. Warren McCulloch in the chair, with Walter Pitts. Claude Shannon. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Heinz von Foerster. Kurt Lewin.
Anthropologists and psychiatrists sitting with mathematicians and engineers, which is exactly why the vocabulary of feedback, homeostasis and information moved into the social sciences as fast as it did.
What came out of it
Wiener, Cybernetics (1948) and, more usefully, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950, substantially revised 1954). The title has two edges. Wiener built the science of control through feedback and then wrote the warning: a society that treats people as components in a control loop, managed by information they do not hold, degrades them into messages in somebody else's system. Read the 1950 and 1954 editions against each other. The second is more pessimistic and the changes are informative.
Wiener also refused military funding after 1947 and published the refusal, as "A Scientist Rebels" in the Atlantic, January 1947. A founder trying to withdraw a technology from the institution that paid for it is rare enough that the document is worth reading in full, and it is the reason he appears in the counter-tradition.
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) applied feedback to families, schools and schizophrenia, and produced the double bind: a control structure with no exit, where every available response is punished.
Heinz von Foerster developed second-order cybernetics, whose point is that the observer is inside the system being observed. Anyone building a theory of control should sit with that one for a while.
What it adds
The engineering layer underneath the philosophy. Foucault describes discipline; cybernetics supplies the actual mechanism, feedback and the servo loop, plus a first-generation insider's alarm about applying it to people.
The line runs directly from here to control after discipline, where Deleuze describes control as continuous modulation, which is a feedback loop by another name.
Institutional history
Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group (1991). Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (2015). Both are institutional accounts rather than intellectual biographies, which is the right way to read this cluster.