The Closed World ─ Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories ofcomputers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when wesimultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold Warsocial and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology - and were transformed, in turn, byinformation machines.The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories - the history ofAmerican global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in scienceand culture - through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it revealsintimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers,and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.Edwards begins bydescribing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control throughhigh-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGEcontinental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advancedtechnologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command andcontrol projects - for containing world-scale conflicts - helped closed-world discourse dominateCold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a "Star Wars" space-basedballistic missile defense.Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers becomeaxial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the HarvardPsycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes theformation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences asinformation machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complextechnological systems of the closed world.Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identityin science fiction - from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanicalrobots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner - where Information Ageculture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed.Inside Technology series