The Closed World – Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Inside Technology) - Hardcover

Edwards, Paul N

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 026205051X ISBN 13: 9780262050517

Publisher: MIT Press, 1996

Synopsis

"The Closed World" offers an alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology - and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects - for containing world-scale conflicts - helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apothesis was the Reagan-era plan for a space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the work of the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse". By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse helped integrate people into the hypercomplex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction - from the disembodied, panoptic AI of "2001" to the mechanical robots of "Star Wars" and the engineered biological androids of "Blade Runner" - where information age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed.

About this title

Review

The Closed World is astonishing. One of the most important books of the 20th century.

--Howard Rheingold, Whole Earth Review

From the Back Cover

The Closed World offers a radical alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology - and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories - the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture - through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links among the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 026205051X
• ISBN 13: 9780262050517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 458