Open questions

These are not rhetorical questions. They are gaps in the research, stated as invitations. If you are looking for something to work on, one of these is more useful than another summary of Foucault.

1. Personnel flow, 1946 to 1960

The Macy Conferences and the Bureau of Applied Social Research overlapped in people and in period. Nobody has fully mapped the personnel flow between cybernetics, communications research and psychological warfare. Christopher Simpson does part of it in Science of Coercion and says himself that it is incomplete.

What would settle it: archival work on institutional rosters and grant records, which exist.

2. Tarde's public under recommender systems

Gabriel Tarde argued in 1901 that the modern formation is the public rather than the crowd, and that the public is constituted by many people reading the same newspaper at the same time. See older foundations.

The algorithmic public is constituted by different people reading different feeds at different times. That may break his mechanism entirely, or it may be its purest form. Nobody has redone Tarde with recommender systems properly in view.

3. Radical monopoly and the platforms

Illich's radical monopoly is the strongest unused concept for platform analysis and it is largely absent from that debate.

Antitrust asks whether a firm has excluded competitors. Radical monopoly asks whether a mode of provision has abolished the alternatives. That is a different and more relevant question when the issue is that there is no longer a non-platform way to do the thing at all.

4. Patronage control, then and now

The Congress for Cultural Freedom model, meaning control through patronage rather than censorship, has an obvious contemporary analogue in research funding, philanthropic media grants and platform monetization. The comparison has not been done rigorously.

It is also the question any organization built out of this research has to answer about itself, before anyone else asks it.

5. The colonial angle, and it is the largest gap

Every milieu on this site is North Atlantic. The colonial testing ground argument, following Mbembe and Mitchell on Egypt, suggests these techniques were often developed at the periphery and reimported to the centre.

A version of this project built from that angle would look substantially different. It does not exist here, and saying so is more useful than a paragraph pretending otherwise.

6. Gramsci against Michels, unresolved

Gramsci's answer to hegemony is counter-hegemonic organization. Michels' finding is that organization itself generates an oligarchy with interests distinct from its members, and he derived it from the most internally democratic party then in existence.

Both cannot be fully right. Nobody has adequately worked the tension, and it bears directly on anything built out of this material, including this site.