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Author: Slava Gerovitch Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262572255 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
Author: Slava Gerovitch Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262572255 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
Author: Slava Gerovitch Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 0822980967 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.
Author: Benjamin Peters Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262034182 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.
Author: Stanislaw Lem Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262542935 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
The first English translation of a nonfiction work by Stanisław Lem, which was "conceived under the spell of cybernetics" in 1957 and updated in 1971. In 1957, Stanisław Lem published Dialogues, a book "conceived under the spell of cybernetics," as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. Mimicking the form of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Lem's original dialogue was an attempt to unravel the then-novel field of cybernetics. It was a testimony, Lem wrote later, to "the almost limitless cognitive optimism" he felt upon his discovery of cybernetics. This is the first English translation of Lem's Dialogues, including the text of the first edition and the later essays added to the second edition in 1971. For the second edition, Lem chose not to revise the original. Recognizing the naivete of his hopes for cybernetics, he constructed a supplement to the first dialogue, which consists of two critical essays, the first a summary of the evolution of cybernetics, the second a contribution to the cybernetic theory of the "sociopathology of governing," amending the first edition's discussion of the pathology of social regulation; and two previously published articles on related topics. From the vantage point of 1971, Lem observes that original book, begun as a search for methods "that would increase our understanding of both the human and nonhuman worlds," was in the end "an expression of the cognitive curiosity and anxiety of modern thought."
Author: S. Gerovitch Publisher: Springer ISBN: 113748179X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
In this remarkable oral history, Slava Gerovitch presents interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand. Rather than comprising a "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.
Author: Maria Rogacheva Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108171338 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Rogacheva sheds new light on the complex transition of Soviet society from Stalinism into the post-Stalin era. Using the case study of Chernogolovka, one of dozens of scientific towns built in the USSR under Khrushchev, she explains what motivated scientists to participate in the Soviet project during the Cold War. Rogacheva traces the history of this scientific community from its creation in 1956 through the Brezhnev period to paint a nuanced portrait of the living conditions, political outlook, and mentality of the local scientific intelligentsia. Utilizing new archival materials and an extensive oral history project, this book argues that Soviet scientists were not merely bought off by the Soviet state, but that they bought into the idealism and social optimism of the post-Stalin regime. Many shared the regime's belief in the progressive development of Soviet society on a scientific basis, and embraced their increased autonomy, material privileges and elite status.
Author: Ethan Pollock Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400843758 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy.
Author: Sonja D. Schmid Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262028271 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 395
Book Description
Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Translation -- Acronyms and Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Envisioning a Nuclear-Powered State -- 2: Between Atomic Bombs and Power Plants -- 3: Training Nuclear Experts -- 4: "May the Atom Be a Worker, Not a Soldier!"--5: Chernobyl -- 6: Conclusion -- Epilogue: Writing about Chernobyl after Fukushima -- Biographical Notes -- Methodological Appendix -- List of Interviews -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Author: Atsushi Akera Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262512033 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
How the complex interplay of academic, commercial, and military interests produced an intense period of scientific discovery and technological innovation in computing during the Cold War.
Author: Matthew Jesse Jackson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226389413 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
"Matthew Jesse Jackson's writing and quality of mind put him in the forefront of the next wave in modern art studies." Thomas E. Crow, Institute of Fine Arts --
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Author: Benjamin Peters
Author: Stanislaw Lem
Author: S. Gerovitch
Author: Maria Rogacheva
Author: Ethan Pollock
Author: Sonja D. Schmid
Author: Atsushi Akera
Author: Matthew Jesse Jackson