Cybernetics in the Republic

Abstract

Plato's Republic lurks in cybernetics, a word popularly attributed to US American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). In his accounts of how he came up with it, however, Wiener never mentions Plato, though he does note it was formed from the ancient Greek word kubernētēs (navigator). Among the earliest popular books about the cybernetics craze are three published in France, and their authors show a special interest in the origin of cybernetics. In something like learned rebukes to Wiener, all three books credit Plato with significant use of kubernē-based terms. This article presents evidence, one, that Wiener knows well he has chosen a word with a Platonic history and, two, that Wiener deems the technical and social climate of ancient Athens (and of the Republic) instructive only as an anti-model for the mid-20th-century United States and so does not feel compelled to associate cybernetics with Plato. Instead, Wiener focuses on the challenges cybernetics and automation pose for his own engineering-oriented, capitalist, multiracial, democratic republic. Wiener's decisions not to use Plato as an authorizing force and not to put ancient Athens on a pedestal merit recognition, since subsequent writers link ancient Athens with cybernation via a presumption that cybernation will enable and fully democratize the sort of leisure activities, including thinking and participation in public life, deemed by some to be emblematic of ancient Athens.

Few philosophers of politics nowadays care to confine their investigations to the world of Ideas of Plato. (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 164)

Après le miracle grec, la cybernétique trouva un étrange destin (After the Greek miracle, cybernetics found a strange destiny; Ducrocq, 1955: 11)

The ostensible coining of cybernetics

Plato's Republic lurks in cybernetics, a word popularly attributed to US American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) and credited with defining an era. ¹ Yet Plato never appears in Wiener's accounts of how he came up with it. ² In Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1962[1948]), the work that introduces cybernetics, Wiener explains the immediate context of its inception. While in France for a conference in 1947, he took lunch with Enrique Freymann, the Mexican director of a small, niche French publishing house called Hermann et Cie, founded in the previous century by Freymann's father-in-law, a professor of mathematics (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 24; 2017[1956]: 454; also documented in Geoghegan, 2020: 53–4; Johnson, 2014: 60–1). Freymann invited Wiener to contribute a short book on ‘communication, the automatic factory, and the nervous system’ to his series (Wiener, 2017[1956]: 454). Neither of them expected it to turn a profit, let alone come to christen a cultural age.

For this book and its subject, Wiener needed to come up with a name capacious enough to capture the wide-ranging work he and his collaborators had been doing but narrow enough that the name had no entangling etymons. Prior to 1947, Wiener had been part of several interdisciplinary research groups that had struggled to come up with a name for their shared enthusiasm across their knowledge domains for matters pertaining to communication and control within dynamic biological or mechanical systems (e.g. Wiener, 2017[1956]: 419–20). Ultimately, the need for a book title pressed a new form of an old word into service.

Since he had composed the manuscript for Cybernetics in a flurry during a research stay at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología in Mexico City, the then institution of his collaborator and friend, the Mexican physician and physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, Wiener's first public explanation of the name uses the ‘we’ of collaborative science. He describes how he and Rosenblueth had long been stymied by the lack of a superintending concept that would unify their various projects but had arrived, at last, at a word:

After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should; and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek κυβερνητης or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of κυβερνητης. We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanism. (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 11–12)

Extant words exerted themselves too much. A neologism it had to be. Perhaps poking fun, Wiener points to ‘artificial neo-Greek’ as an inexhaustible resource for scientists stuck for nomenclature. To certify the appropriateness of the choice of cybernetics, Wiener calls upon two earlier ship-related systems. The recognition of Maxwell hits a nautical note, since governors, invented by James Watt in the late 18th century, got their start in the steam engines of ships. The reference also acts as an informal scholarly citation. Wiener then acknowledges ship steering as one of the first and sturdiest cybernetic systems. That is all Wiener volunteers in Cybernetics about coming up with the name. The repetition of ‘we wish to’ before the two references suggests curated connection making.

The unlikely popularity of Wiener's book begat the rapid uptake of cybernetics. In particular, the quick French reception of and contribution to the cybernetics craze are notable for their attention to earlier forms of the word itself. ³ Though Cybernetics was not translated into French until 2014 (Wiener, 2014), the book, which had originated, after all, from a Parisian press, was read immediately in English. Indeed, the French strain of its reception was swift and animated enough to get Wiener's attention. For instance, he tucks an excerpt from a review of Cybernetics by a Dominican friar named Père Dominique Dubarle that ran in Le Monde on 28 December 1948 into his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener, 1950: 206–9). ⁴ French critics offering treatments of cybernetics school Wiener in the origins of the word he claims to have coined, demonstrating it was not difficult to discover the word was not a neologism at all. As I show, the most frequently credited early users are Plato and André-Marie Ampère. In their comparative study of the uptake of cybernetics, David Mindell et al. mention only the French writers’ insistence on Ampère's ‘priority’ (Mindell, Segal, and Gerovitch, 2003: 89). French writers are equally insistent, however, that Plato be acknowledged; it is a matter of conducting honest intellectual and conceptual history. The question of why it was not for Wiener becomes difficult to ignore in the face of this repetition from the French.

The actual history of cybernetics according to three French critics

1953 saw the publication of French science correspondent Pierre de Latil's book La pensée artificielle: Introduction à la cybernétique. ⁵ Among the three epigraphs in its front matter is a line from Plato's Gorgias (2001), presented solely in French: ‘La cybernétique sauve des plus grands dangers non seulement les âmes mais aussi les corps et les biens’ (Piloting saves from great dangers not only souls but also bodies and goods; Latil, 1953). ⁶ This line is actually a clause from the middle of a sentence in Gorgias, one of several dialogues about rhetoric. Regarded among the most shameless of all of Socrates's interlocutors, Callicles had insisted rhetoric helps one evade danger and had stressed its salvific function, a point Socrates here attempts to refute with reference to navigational piloting; unlike rhetoric, it is a true technē and truly based on the preservation of life. That line from Gorgias establishes an early and Platonic start for cybernetic terminology. Latil plays up that provenance by finding or rendering a translation that uses the French ‘la cybernétique’ for the Greek ‘τὴν κυβερνητικήν’, rather than ‘le pilotage’ or ‘la navigation’. The result is the chronologically zany implication that cybernetics saves. Even Plato said so.

Latil opens the first chapter as if he has been listening to a conversation and must get a word in: ‘Cybernétique?… Le mot vient brusquement à la mode’ (Cybernetics?… The word suddenly comes into vogue; Latil, 1953: 13). Most of the chapter is about Wiener, highlighting the lead-up to the composition of Cybernetics, a book whose origins are, after all, French. Latil reviews the narrative Wiener provides about how he came up with cybernetics and asks, ‘Mais “cybernétique” est-il vraiment un néologisme?… Pour la langue anglaise, peut-être. Pour la langue française, non’ (But is “cybernetics” really a neologism? For the English language, perhaps. For the French language, no; ibid.: 23). In French, the word had appeared in the writings of André-Marie Ampère more than 100 years before Cybernetics emerged.

Through the eponymous amp, short for ampere, the base unit measure of electric current, Ampère flows through circuits of wire and, to a lesser extent these days, of memory. Less commemorated than his contributions to electrodynamics is his two-part work classifying all of human knowledge, his Essai sur la philosophie des sciences: ou, Exposition analytique d’une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines. Throughout it, Ampère creates new French words out of ancient Greek ones. He is the first to give French form to two ancient Greek words that become cultural keywords in the subsequent century: technología, which becomes at Ampère's hand technologie, and kubernētikē, which becomes cybernétique (Ampère, 1834: 83; 1843: 143). ⁷ The similarity between their transliterated and French forms belies important differences between the ancient terms and Ampère's concepts, but I will spotlight cybernétique.

In the second volume of Essai, Ampère addresses the political theory of good government and finds himself needing a concept that did not exist in French. He seeks a term that will cover how those who govern will develop and use their knowledge of their polity—‘its character, its customs, its opinions, its history, its religion, its means of existence and of prosperity, its organization and its laws’—to ‘guide it in each particular case’ (Ampère, 1843: 141). Ampère explains that what he refers to here he will name ‘Cybernétique, du mot κυβερνητική, qui, pris d’abord, dans une acception restreinte, pour l’art de gouverner un vaisseau, reçut de l’usage, chez les Grecs même, la signification, tout autrement étendue, de l’art de gouverner en général’ (cybernetics, from the word kubernētikē, which, taken first, in a limited sense, as the art of governing a vessel, received from usage, among the Greeks even, the quite different meaning of the art of governing in general; ibid.). Ampère may be thinking of its obvious application to governing in Plato's Republic, but he does not specify. For his part, Latil writes only that the word was used ‘substantivement’ (substantively) by Plato, who put it into the mouth of Socrates, and, without further explanation, Latil supplies the same line from Gorgias he had used for an epigraph (Latil, 1953: 24).

The following year saw the publication of La cybernétique by the mathematician George T. Guilbaud (1954), a nimble explainer-type book that, like Latil's, draws only from Cybernetics. ⁸ Guilbaud opens with a chapter he names ‘Notes for a Dictionary Entry’, wherein he imagines he has been asked by a major dictionary to define the word cybernetics and so must trace its ‘origin, history and evolution’ (Guilbaud, 1960: 1). The very first note establishes its ancient Greek derivation and frequency of use in Plato: ‘The word occurs fairly often in Plato, both in this literal sense and in the metaphorical sense of the art of guiding men in society, i.e. the art of government’ (ibid.). Guilbaud does not provide references, but, again, it is not risky to hazard a guess: though, as Latil pointed out, Plato's Socrates uses kubernē-based words in debates throughout Gorgias, their use in Republic pertains much more clearly to government.

Sporadically in Book Rolls 1, 3, and 6, Socrates includes navigating and piloting a ship among a set of technai (craft systems) he uses to make comparisons to the main topics of the dialogue. ⁹ In Book 6, to impress upon his interlocutors the problem of democracy as he sees it, Plato's Socrates deploys a fleet of naval similes meant to model the challenges of guiding people and the structures designed to carry them safely. More precisely, this ‘eikōn’ (likeness) is suggestive of what happens to philosophers when they try to assert what Plato believes to be their rightful leadership position in a democratic polis. They are like a ship's pilot—a kubernētēs—whose efforts to use his knowledge to help deliver those on board to safety constantly get blocked by a rowdy crew, each of whom, wanting to do the navigating and steering, even though some of them have no idea what they are doing, tries to persuade the ship's owner to let them. In this ‘ship of state’ analogy, the ship corresponds to the polis, the shipowner to the dēmos (the people), and the sailors to the rhetors (public speakers) who try to persuade the power-holding people to give them the helm. The analogy is meant to clarify the arrangements of Athenian democracy so that their (ostensible) ridiculousness and dangerousness will be identifiable and undeniable to all: just as one would want a trained steersman to guide their ship, so should one want a philosopher to guide their state. However any reader of Plato's Republic in the ancient Greek may feel about the truth of this analogy, it is nonetheless the case that the recurrence of kubernē-based words in this section of the work would make kubernetic vocabulary very familiar.

The immediately subsequent short notes of Guilbaud pass through the Latin words gubernaculum and gubernator, derived from kubernētikē; the French and English political words that come from that Latin (e.g. government); and James Watt's so-called governor, the name of ‘a mechanism for stabilising the speed of rotation of a steam-engine’, whose action ‘replaced a man’, which Guilbaud guesses may explain why Watt chose a word historically designating a human actor (Guilbaud, 1960: 1–2). The fifth note briefly introduces Ampère, ‘who translated the Greek kybernētikē into the French cybernétique’ when he needed ‘a term to describe the study of means of government’ (ibid.: 2). Guilbaud notes that ‘French dictionaries such as Littré and the older editions of Larousse recognized Ampère's new term; though it is doubtful whether the word was actually used in France between 1934 and 1948’ (ibid.). When it did appear in France in 1948, it was in the title of a review of Wiener's Cybernetics. Guilbaud concedes that Wiener mentions the word's derivation from the ancient Greek word kubernētikē, but Guilbaud gets in this little dig: ‘He seemed to be unaware of the kybernētikē of Plato and imagined that the term was a new one’ (ibid.). Why is Wiener's recognition of its ancient Greekness but not of its use by Plato meaningful? Why point it out?

It could be that Guilbaud assumes Wiener does not know Plato well enough to be aware that Plato uses many kubernē-based terms. After all, if one Anglicizes a word one knows about from having read Plato (in ancient Greek, no less), surely one would highlight its Platonic provenance. It lends authority—to the term and to the term's user. Or Guilbaud may wish to suggest Wiener owes recognition to Plato because, just as Plato used kubernētikē to talk about something other than ships (i.e. democracy), so does Wiener use cybernetics to talk about a whole range of subjects (i.e. animal physiology, human labor, and, like Plato, democracy). Perhaps, in Guilbaud's view, the metaphorical capaciousness Wiener relies upon when he decides upon cybernetics started with Plato, and Plato deserves credit for that endowment.

As cybernetics enters into the wider cultural vocabulary, Guilbaud observes that the word causes complications in some contexts and not in others. For instance, the word has no history in English, so its use there is unburdened by earlier uses, whereas it has a history in French due to Ampère's earlier usage and its inclusion in 19th-century French dictionaries. He adds an amusing anecdote about classicists: ‘When someone eventually turned up the new term in Plato, some of the experts rose in horror, declaring that kybernētikē should on no account be translated “cybernetics”’ (Guilbaud, 1960: 3). ¹⁰ The term's biggest complication comes from its use in the mass media, since newspapers often reduce cybernetics to automatic machinery, and reduce automatic machinery to robots. Guilbaud observes that ‘as an adjective, “cybernetic” threatens to go the way of “atomic” and “electronic” in becoming just another label for the spectacular’ (ibid.). He is proven correct (Kline, 2015).

Appearing the year after Guilbaud's book is Découverte de la cybernétique by Albert Ducrocq, professor of physics and science writer. Ducrocq spends more time than Latil and Guilbaud situating la cybernétique in the ancient Greek world. He opens the book with the story of the blood sacrifice Athens was forced to make to the Minotaur in the labyrinth at Crete, put to an end by the sword of Theseus. Theseus's sea journey to Crete was feted in Athens thereafter in a celebration that put the kubernētēs in the seat of honor (Ducrocq, 1955: 7). Ducrocq moves from literal and commemorated ship piloting to metaphorical and analogical kinds. He names Plato's dialogues Alcibiades, Gorgias, Republic, and Clitophon (which is of disputed authorship) as sources for the latter, since ‘lorsque Platon évoque la cybernétique et vante ses bienfaits, nous le voyons bien faire allusion à des sujets très divers’ (when Plato evokes cybernetics and praises its benefits, we see him alluding to very diverse subjects; ibid.: 9). A section entitled ‘De Thésée à Wiener’ (From Theseus to Wiener) mentions only one intervening person: Ampère. For the word's lack of use for so long, Ducrocq offers no explanation but does marvel at its lengthy near-oblivion. Unlike Guilbaud, Ducrocq does not overtly accuse Wiener of being ignorant of Plato, but Ducrocq's efforts to figure out how to connect la cybernétique in antiquity with its manifestation at the middle of the 20th century CE are necessary only because Wiener does not acknowledge any connection.

Wiener acknowledges Ampère's non-engineering use of the word

Wiener again has occasion to reflect on his choice of cybernetics in his less technical, more essayistic cybernetics book, The Human Use of Human Beings, published in English in 1950. He does not seize the occasion, however, saying only this about its history: ‘Its name signified the art of pilot or steersman. Let it be noted that the word “governor” in a machine is simply the latinized Greek word for steersman’ (Wiener, 1950: 9). Wiener wrote The Human Use of Human Beings quickly, and it underwent a radical revision (cuts, mostly) before being published anew in 1954, the same year Guilbaud's book was published. When discussing how cybernetics came to be in the second edition, Wiener moves from the first-person plural of Cybernetics to a first-person singular frame:

Until recently, there was no existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one. Hence ‘Cybernetics’, which I derived from the Greek word kubernētēs, or ‘steersman’, the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word ‘governor’. Incidentally, I found later that the word had already been used by Ampère with reference to political science, and had been introduced in another context by a Polish scientist, both uses dating from the earlier part of the nineteenth century. (Wiener, 1954: 15) ¹¹

Wiener does at last acknowledge Ampère's place in the intellectual history of cybernetics. Plato, though, remains absent. But not entirely. In a later chapter, to prepare readers for an extended metaphor and to justify it, Wiener writes that ‘phantasy has always been at the service of philosophy, and Plato was not ashamed to clothe his epistemology in the metaphor of the cave’ (Wiener, 1954: 95). The cave metaphor is the most famous of all of Plato's metaphors, and, of course, it features in the Republic (514a–520a). Still, one need not have read the Republic to know that.

Wiener does write about the name cybernetics in one other place. Encouraged by his celebrity and while working on major revisions to The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener decided to write an autobiography, the two volumes of which contain additional insights into how he came up with cybernetics. For instance, we learn in the second volume that kubernētēs was not the first ancient Greek word he considered:

I first looked for a Greek word signaling ‘messenger’, but the only one I knew was angelos. This has in English the specific meaning ‘angel’, a messenger of God. The word was thus pre-empted and would not give me the right context. Then I looked for an appropriate word from the field of control. The only word I could think of was the Greek word for steersman, kubernētēs. I decided that, as the word I was looking for was to be used in English, I ought to take advantage of the English pronunciation of the Greek and hit on the name cybernetics. (Wiener, 2017[1956]: 458) ¹²

What does Wiener mean when he says he ‘looked’ for Greek words that would work? Where was he looking? When he says he ‘knew’ or ‘could think of’ these two ancient Greek words, he is telling us he is relying on his own previous knowledge. Angelos is common enough, but how did kubernētēs occur to him? He does not say directly here, but the earlier volume of his autobiography holds intriguing clues.

The son of a Harvard professor of philology who aggressively managed his education, Wiener started learning ancient Greek as a child, continuing his study of the language while a pubescent undergraduate at Tufts (Wiener, 2017[1953]: 82; 2017[1956]: 234). Among the courses he took during a postgraduate fellowship year at Cornell when he was 16 was one for which, he reports, he ‘read Plato's Republic in Greek’ (Wiener, 2017[1953]: 117). Translating Plato's Republic would have put him in the company of plentiful kubernē-based words. It seems likely, therefore, that Wiener's recollection of his teenage translation work begat cyber as an adjective for all manner of information-age phenomena. ¹³

Why Wiener steers clear of Plato

Wiener's knowledge of Plato's Republic in ancient Greek raises the question of why he does not mention Plato in connection with kubernētēs. For the French explicators of cybernetics, Plato is the obvious place from which to start an account of the word. Why not for Wiener? One potential answer is that Wiener cares to establish only the technical features of the history of cybernetics, from ancient navigation/steering through Watt's and Maxwell's governors for ship steam engines. The metaphorical work Plato does with kubernē-based terms is irrelevant to Wiener's literal leaning. But a more intriguing possibility presents itself when one considers a manuscript Wiener did not see through to publication.

Wiener wrote and completed Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas, in 1954, the same year the revised edition of The Human Use of Human Beings appeared and he was writing the second volume of his autobiography. The manuscript, finally published in 1993, contains a chapter on ‘social climate and invention’, wherein Wiener goes into ‘historical matters not so much for their own sakes, and particularly not so much for the hope of being able to say anything complimentary about them, as because I wish to lay the ground for a discussion of social relations in the present day as affect invention’ (Wiener, 1993: 58; emphasis added). Ancient Athens did not impress Wiener as a site conducive to inventive engineering—or, more importantly, to pervasive human flourishing.

First, he turns a phrase from the Republic to establish his invention-based critique: ‘Paraphrasing the modifying Plato's statement that in the ideal state, kings must become philosophers and philosophers, kings’, we might say that ‘for a great period of invention, the artisans must become philosophers or the philosophers, artisans’ (Wiener, 1993: 56). Wiener writes that ‘little or nothing in the training or orientation’ of residents of the democratic city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries permitted of a philosopher-artisan or artisan-philosopher. No writings from ancient Athens center on and celebrate people in whom theoretical, technical, and experimental modes meet in the fabrication of objects or material systems.

He goes on to disapprove of the subordinated status of artisans and craftspeople and of the altogether vaulted plane of the philosopher, ‘a gentleman, participating in affairs of state and in affairs of war, interested in reflection, but with soft hands’ (Wiener, 1993: 56). Democratic ancient Athens did not last long, and while it did, he writes, ‘the gentlemen had the leisure to be philosophers, and the rough work of life was left to slaves and to disenfranchised metics’ (ibid.: 57). This contrast of ‘soft hands’ and ‘rough work’ uses sensual words to render judgment about the particular inclusions and exclusions of all-mighty Athens. Those who had leisure had it due to the labor of enslaved and resident non-Athenians.

There is only one ancient Greek figure who interests Wiener as a potential relation of the contemporary engineer: Daedalus. Earlier, in Cybernetics, Wiener had stationed the techniques of Daedalus, along with those of Hero of Alexandria, at the start of the automaton tradition, stating that ‘the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people’ (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 39). ¹⁴ The fascination with automata continues into Wiener's time, and, of course, beyond, and yet he resists a popular urge to reduce cybernetics to human-like robotics. In Invention, Wiener opines that ‘Daedalus is more a contemporary of Watt in his thoughts than he was of Plato’ (Wiener, 1993: 57). It was James Watt who invented ‘the governor’ for steamship steering, selecting the word due to its Latin etymology, which is related to kubernētikē. Wiener's appreciation for Daedalus does not end with his technical acumen but extends to high regard for Daedalus' communication with the power brokers and decision makers of Daedalus' day. Daedalus did not restrict his attention to his workshop, and his creations were too impressive to ignore.

This manuscript demonstrates that Wiener knew Plato's Republic and Plato's Athens well, and knew, too, the exclusions abounding in what ancient Athenians called democracy. Plato's Republic presents a polis not only whose workings are not engineer-centric but also whose structure is antidemocratic. Wiener does not think actual ancient Athens is a time and place from which 20th-century US American engineers should look for analogues or models, either, since it lacks what he calls the requisite technical and social climate to be worth serious emulative study or even to be the stuff of useful analogies. The only democracy Wiener thinks is worth learning from is that of the United States, and its lessons are largely warnings.

The (democratic) republic Wiener cares about

In his two cybernetics books, Wiener writes plenty about democracy. The democracy he centers, though, is US American democracy. He does not seem to hold back his criticisms of it, always a bold choice but especially during the era of McCarthyism, and he does not shy away from calling out the antidemocratic tendencies of entrenched powers, such as big business, that threaten human flourishing.

The chapter titles of Cybernetics evince the wide applicability of the formation it names, ranging from time and statistics to psychopathology and the nervous system. Overall, it is a technical book, including lots of equations. But it has some deeply social moments. For instance, its introduction closes with attention to what Wiener calls a ‘social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil’ that he deems on par with that of atomic energy: the automatic factory (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 27). What it holds for humanity is the promise of ‘a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor’ (ibid.: 27). Calling automated systems or, more usually, machines ‘slaves’ predates this instance. ¹⁵ For instance, ‘The Book of Machines’, part of Samuel Butler's 1872 satiric novel Erewhon, is a pamphlet that uses the language of master and servant and slave to imagine how human–machine relations might change over time (Butler, 2015[1872]: 138–60). The pamphlet had split the Erewhonians into ‘machinists and anti-machinists’, resulting in a protracted civil war, the victory of the anti-machinists, and the destruction of machines (ibid.: 137). Wiener mentions the book often, including in this very passage (e.g. Wiener, 1954: 182–3; 1960: 1355, 1357; 1962[1948]: 27). ¹⁶ He goes on to observe that ‘such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty’ (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 27). We find him emphasizing an economic congruity and a moral incongruity of likening machines to enslaved people; the former he does not qualify, but the latter he seems to judge as an improvement over the enslavement of humans. Yet, in a piece published in Science in 1960, Wiener provides a retrospective look at the consequences he predicted in Cybernetics, and he comes at this issue from another angle. In a section titled ‘Man and Slave’ he writes:

The problem, and it is a moral problem, with which we are here faced is very close to one of the great problems of slavery. Let us grant that slavery is bad because it is cruel. It is also, however, self-contradictory, and for a reason which is quite different. We wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able to assist us in the carrying out of our tasks. However, we also wish him to be subservient. Complete subservience and complete intelligence do not go together. How often in ancient times the clever Greek philosopher slave of a less intelligent Roman slaveholder must have dominated the actions of his master rather than obeyed his wishes! Similarly, if the machines become more and more efficient and operate at a higher and higher psychological level, the catastrophe foreseen by Butler of the dominance of the machine comes nearer and nearer. (Wiener, 1960: 1357)

Using Butler's novel to catalyze the comparison, Wiener makes identifications between a machine more advanced than ones of his time and a shrewd Greek ‘philosopher slave’ and between a human and a less smart Roman enslaver soon outwitted and disobeyed. Through this ancient Roman example, Wiener implies that both brute force and sociocultural power are vulnerable to intelligence, by means of which the conquered can undermine the conquerors. A few issues later, the journal publishes a refutation to Wiener's piece that calls the machine-to-slave analogy ‘misleading’ and ‘fallacious’ (Samuel, 1960: 741), a debate that continues today.

Wiener refuses to come down on either side of the question of whether machine slaves would be a boon for humans: ‘It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove it from the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know’ (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 27). Wiener is constantly alert to unintended consequences and human fallibility; included is his sensitivity that cybernetically automated machines would be operating in a capitalist system. Whereas the first industrial revolution devalued the human arm, this second one will devalue most human brains, such that what he calls ‘the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy’ (ibid.: 27–8). That is precisely why Wiener insists that automation decisions cannot be made according to market logics, a typical American tendency. In fact, he asserts that ‘the answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling’ and that does not balk at the prospect of ‘a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle’ (ibid.: 28). He himself felt duty-bound to seek out as many labor union leaders as he could to prepare them for what was coming, and he did (ibid.; Wiener, 2017[1956]: 450–1). ¹⁷

Wiener shows remarkable honesty about the situation in which he and his collaborators find themselves, calling their ‘moral position … not very comfortable’. They have set forth ‘a new science’ that ‘embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil’, he repeats, and they ‘can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima’ (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 28; see also Wiener, 2017[1956]: 441–7). He describes what is unfurling as unstoppable and enjoins those working on cybernetic projects that ‘the best we can do is to see that a large public understands the tread and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation’ (Wiener, 1962[1948]: 28). The only naivety in the entire book may be this belief that there can be a type of research into matters of communication and control that can be safe from potential mobilization for war and exploitation. That said, Wiener highly valued the moral agency of scientists. Resistance is futile only if not enough scientists take their moral agency seriously. To encourage resistance, the year previously, Wiener had allowed the Atlantic to publish as an open letter a private response Wiener had addressed to a research scientist with military connections who had been seeking access to Wiener's wartime research (Wiener, 1947; 2017[1956]: 438–40).

Wiener wrote with astonishing velocity, and The Human Use of Human Beings arrived two years after Cybernetics as an introduction to cybernetics for laypeople. Its title is intended as an anthem. Originally, Wiener wanted to call the book Pandora or Cassandra, summoning a mythic woman with a strange relationship with hope or one with a strange relationship with doom. Objecting on the grounds of salability, however, his editor repurposed for its title a line from the manuscript's introduction (Kline, 2015: 80; Wiener, 1950: 2). Here is the paragraph that enlarges upon the book's central theme and impetus:

Our view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government. Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions. Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return. The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism. (Wiener, 1950: 15)

Wiener uses the incipient language of cybernetics to parse power relations characterized by unidirectionality of communication and subordination tending toward reification. He continues:

I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is an almost equal degradation to assign him to a purely repetitive task in a factory, which demands less than a millionth of his brain capacity. It is simpler to organize a factory or galley which uses individual human beings for a trivial fraction of their worth than it is to provide a world in which they can grow to their full stature. Those who suffer from a power complex find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions. (Wiener, 1950: 15)

Wiener rages against those who would press people into designs and configurations meant to make them small, manageable, and predictable. From the perspective of the etymology of cybernetics, it is striking that Wiener here uses a nautical example that calls back to a time before steam power. And the factory, that fixture of the industrial revolution, is a place whose operations cybernetics is poised to disrupt. Foremost, Wiener stands for humans being used in ways commensurate with their humanness. Throughout the book, he arrives at what that means indirectly by enumerating current constraints on humans living to their full measure. Remarkably, this introduction does not appear in the book's second edition, leaving readers wondering about its title somewhat adrift. It is striking, too, that this long paragraph contains what could be read as anti-Republic resonances, such as the reference to humans being chained to oars to follow the orders of another without resistance and the strict social categorizing that reduces the variety and complexity of a human's life.

Wiener knows his own country well and knows it will be where cybernetics will unspool the most quickly. He cannot separate the many dangers he sees from his view of the national character. Throughout the book, he judges that US Americans, in general: worship progress and by that they usually mean making bad things more efficient; are complicit with a government that has dealt and continues to deal unfairly with Indigenous people, especially when it comes to interpretations of treaties; do not seem to care about their unsustainable devastation of nature; display a swaggering prioritization of ‘know-how’ (what we technically know how to do) over ‘know-what’ (the principles and ends to which our ‘know-how’ should be directed); do not handle gloom and doom well and so have no stomach for the tragic view of life. He believes US American business commodifies everything and is ruthlessly profit-driven and short-term-gain-oriented, all of which stand to work against any new technology or other resource being managed responsibly and democratically. He also thinks the antagonism with Russia is ridiculous. All of this adds up to the country mishandling the opportunities cybernetics presents.

Again and again, the substance of Wiener's writings about cybernetics in the democratic republic of the United States show him to be an early alarm ringer about how cyber-tech could further entrench extant systems of asserted superiority. For example, Wiener points to dangers related to actual histories and potential futures of domination that have limited and will limit human possibility. In a chapter called ‘Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior’, he ventures into human communication. He offers Inuit ‘social community’ as an example of a communication structure with little subordination and Indian social community, with its caste structure, as one ‘in which the means of communication between two individuals are closely restricted and modified by their ancestry and position’ (Wiener, 1954: 50). Where does the United States fall in that spectrum? He opines that ‘most of us in the United States prefer to live in a moderately loose social community, in which the blocks to communication among individuals and classes are not too great. I will not say that this ideal of communication is attained in the United States. Until white supremacy ceases to belong to the creed of a large part of the country it will be an ideal from which we fall short’ (ibid.). Despite many of the national notions of the era, people in the United States did not enjoy open and unrestricted communication. In calling out pervasive anti-Blackness as a pattern of hierarchy, separation, and exclusion, Wiener casts doubt over whether unbound, unblocked social community is something white US Americans even want.

Insofar as democracies depend on citizens communicating with one another and treating one another as equals, what the United States has going is, at best, an inchoate democracy. Still, Wiener appraises that ‘even this modified formless democracy is too anarchic for many of those who make efficiency their first ideal’, a poignant observation to make in 1950, when the United States was heralding itself as the bastion of democracy and its freedoms (Wiener, 1954: 50). Wiener details how ‘worshippers of efficiency’ would much prefer each of us was born into and die having moved in a ‘social orbit’ we cannot alter, serving a function we cannot change (ibid.). They would never explicitly say so, of course, but in many ways that ‘show that the democracy to which they pay their respects is not really the order in which they would prefer to live. The regularly ordered state of pre-assigned functions toward which they gravitate is suggestive of the Leibnitzian automata and does not suggest the irreversible movement into a contingent future which is the true condition of human life’ (ibid.: 51). This is the inhuman use of human beings for which Wiener is on guard. Though he associates it here with the automata of Leibnitz, what Wiener describes is not far off from the strictly ordered conditions of human life within the ideal polis as articulated by Socrates in Plato's Republic. At bottom, one's designs for social life depend on one's definitions and understandings of the human.

The human has long been (and continues to be) a controversial and contested category. In the introduction to the first edition of The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener addresses the trickiness of defining humans: ‘The problem of the definition of man is an odd one. To say that man is a featherless biped is merely to put him in the same class as a plucked chicken, a kangaroo, or a jerboa. This is a rather heterogeneous group, and it can be extended to our heart's content without throwing any further light on the true nature of man’ (Wiener, 1950: 2). Wiener does not note that ‘featherless biped’ is the infamous genus for the human offered by Socrates in Plato's Statesman (1925: 266e). For Wiener, ‘What does differentiate man from other animals in a way that leaves us not the slightest degree of doubt, is that he is a talking animal.… There are animals besides man which are social, and live in a continuous relation to their fellow creatures, but there is none in whom this desire for communication, or rather this necessity for communication, is the guiding motive of their whole life’ (Wiener, 1950: 2). ¹⁸ In passages following his reference to Leibnitzian automata, Wiener goes on to profess his belief that ‘variety and possibility are inherent in the human sensorium—and are indeed the key to man's most noble flights—because variety and possibility belong to the very structure of the human organism’ (Wiener, 1954: 52). To flourish, from the level of the individual to the level of the species, we need contingency. We need to know that things can be otherwise, that we are not absolutely stuck with things as they are. Conditions that are so regulated as to be determined are optimal for machines, which function best when ‘probability is negligible’ (ibid.: 181). Such conditions harm humans. For Wiener, then, the need for communication and contingency mark human being. This attitude of his, above all, may explain why Wiener does not link cybernetics to Plato's Republic. Plato may have used the word, but he does not own the word.

Wiener thought certain cybernetic applications could, under the right conditions, most of them counter to US America's strongest-tugging tendencies, amplify human life, but he never looked back to ancient Athens for a productive paradigm for how that might be so. And he certainly never sought inspiration from Plato's Republic. Connecting cybernetics to that dialogue in particular risked misrepresenting the cybernetics message Wiener wished to deliver. Control within a cybernetic system—be it mechanical, biological, or social—takes forms dynamic and distributed, not static and top-down. When Wiener chose to supply a brief etymological gloss of cybernetics rather than to undertake its intellectual history, he was not doing so out of ignorance. Whereas advocates of cybernetics after him take full-on inspiration from ancient Greece, Wiener took only one word.

Those who looked back to ancient Athens to see the future of cybernetics

My proposal that we consider Wiener knew very well that Plato had used kubernē-based terms in the Republic points to Wiener being knowledgeable enough about that dialogue and about classical Athens to use it as a comparison point in his social analyses if he wished. He did not. Wiener's attitude toward the Republic and ancient Athens is that they offer little that a postwar, multiracial democracy with an unprecedented kind of engineering power should emulate. In Cybernetics and in The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener provides plenty of examples from which the United States must learn, and they come from its own past and present.

Wiener's refusal to employ Plato as an authorizing force and to put ancient Athens on a pedestal merits recognition, since subsequent writers link ancient Athens with cybernation via a presumption that cybernation will enable and fully democratize the sort of leisure activities, including thinking and participation in public life, deemed by some to be emblematic of ancient Athens. By 1984, classicist Maurice Balme can observe, ‘There is a common belief that in ancient Greece slaves did the work while free citizens lived a life of leisure at the expense of the state, and so we might find some useful lessons for ourselves in the new age of automation’ (Balme, 1984: 140). One need not look far beyond Wiener to find both of those beliefs taking form.

Among the most ardent believers in the potential of cybernetics for good was Alice Mary Hilton, who studied classics and comparative literature at Oxford, earned a degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, and founded and presided over the Institute for Cyberculture, a term she coined to mean ‘that way of life made possible when an entire process of production is carried out by systems of machines monitored and controlled by one computer’. ¹⁹ She was also one of two women members of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, a group of US American activists, academics, and public intellectuals who delivered to President Johnson in March of 1964 their analysis of the interlocked revolutions in cybernation, weaponry, and human rights. ²⁰ Throughout her published writings in the 1960s, she includes attention to the ancient Greek origins of cybernetics, including its Platonic use, and she comes to regard ancient Greece, by which she usually means exclusively Athens, as a guide and goal for the cybernetic age (Hilton, 1963: 3–4; 1966: xi). April 1964, the month after Wiener passed away, saw the publication of her call for ‘An Ethos for the Age of Cyberculture’.

In general, the piece argues for a replacement of the Protestant Ethic (better known today as the Protestant work ethic), the ‘ethos of any society that knows scarcity and danger’, which has long suffused US culture, with an ethos habituated to abundance, leisure, and play, conditions she credits to the potential effects of cybernetics upon culture (Hilton, 1964c: 142–3). The major exigence compelling her call is unemployment, which she links causally to cybernation. Hilton points to the legions of Baby Boomers whom it is looking like the emerging economic system will not be able to accommodate gainfully. The first step of the way out of this intensifying crisis, she believes, is to acknowledge the obsolescence of capitalist structures and the ethos that makes clinging to them a virtue.

She insists her fellow Americans must ‘learn to live with and use our electronic and mechanical slaves’, more specifically that everyone must ‘prepare ourselves for the age of cyberculture by turning unemployment into leisure, by solving the transition problems of scarcity, and by doing everything human ingenuity can devise to perfect our electronic slaves and complete all processes of automation’ (Hilton, 1964c: 142, 144). Wiener had referred to cybernetic automated processes and equipment as ‘mechanical slaves’, and Hilton may even have gotten the phrase from him. But Hilton pushes the analogy, finding in the prospect of these machines solutions to dogged human problems amplified by capitalism but of much earlier origin.

Her serious regard for it results in an unacknowledged ironic juxtaposition. She insists ‘there can never be another ethos for the future than the obsolete ethos of the past’ and that ‘already our world has changed beyond all recognition and comparison’, but she offers ‘the Golden Age of Greece’ as a time, place, and culture from which to learn how to adjust to leisure and abundance (Hilton, 1964c: 142, 144). To support this notion, she cites a passage about bios politikos from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, a book prompted by the talked-about-everywhere potential of automation to offload labor from humans (ibid.: 145; Arendt, 1998[1958]). Arendt argues that what elite Athenian citizens had through slavery—leisure for philosophical contemplation and political action—the average US American could have through automation, if only modern phenomena (such as the rise of ‘the social’ and especially of ‘mass society’) did not complicate what it means to think and to act in the context of a polis.

Next, Hilton supplies her anti-model: ancient Rome. She uses much of the stereotypical vocabulary of decline (e.g. ‘moral disintegration’, ‘brutal titillation’) to narrate how affluence brought about both apathy and violence (Hilton, 1964c: 145). At the conclusion of a series of questions about why ancient Athens went one way and ancient Rome the other, she wonders ‘whether the Golden Age of Athens could have endured if the Athenian had found a way of out of his dilemma: his need for leisure and his rejection of human slavery’ (ibid.: 146). What Hilton is referring to here in terms of the historical reality of ancient Athenian rejections of enslavement is unclear. What is clear is that she is using ancient Athenian elites to think through the position of people now on the cusp of the cybercultural revolution. In the seventh decade of the 20th century, ‘we can rejoice that we have what humanity never knew before—slaves to free us from the necessity of laboring “in order to” sustain life that are not human, so that we need not be ashamed to enjoy what they produce’ (ibid.). It is always worth spending some time with a writer's use of the first-person plural pronoun. Here the ‘we’ seems to speak to a group whose members know they should feel guilt or shame to benefit from enslavement. I find it difficult to believe Hilton is not talking to white people and speaking here to white guilt or white shame about having benefited from slavery, moral and affective states catalyzed by the intensifying civil rights movement. She is offering permission to white people. In this regard, Hilton's choice to highlight ancient Athens as a paradigm shows another function: it keeps her distant from US America's much more recent (and ongoing) history of enslavement. She never mentions it.

Sounding like Wiener, she claims that humans cannot compete with machines without ‘accepting the conditions of slave labor’; sounding nothing like Wiener, she claims that ‘human beings who learn to use the machine wisely, on the other hand, will be freed by the machine to achieve excellence’ (Hilton, 1964c: 146; Wiener, 1954: 162). As for the question of how to prime children of cyberculture to strive ever to be the best and to live the good life, Hilton suggests that ‘[a] good curriculum might well start with questions about Greek civilization and Roman decay’ (Hilton, 1964c: 148). As model and anti-model, respectively, ancient Greece and Rome comprise the foundation of cybercultural education. ²¹ A nearly two-page appendix of Hilton's suggestions for hastening the new ethos falls into two sections—government action and individual action—and concludes with the most-quoted line from Plato's Apology: ‘“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates. This clearly makes it the responsibility of every citizen to examine his own life and to assist others (though not to force it upon them, because that would be ineffective) to examine their own lives’ (ibid.: 152). That parenthetical qualification removes the mandibles from Socrates the gadfly, making him all buzz, no bite. It is representative of the version of ancient Athens forwarded by Hilton in this piece, which does not seriously contend with anything difficult, complex, or wrong about that culture.

In the summer of 1964, Hilton convened the First Annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution. At her invitation and speaking to panel themes and paper titles she meted out, 50 speakers addressed topics like ‘The Negro and Cybernation’, ‘Our Concept of the Good Life: Idleness or Leisure’, and ‘The Cybercultural Revolution of the American Dream’. The line-up included the social psychologist Donald N. Michael (who had coined cybernation in 1962), the aforementioned philosopher Hannah Arendt, and the civil rights and labor activist James Boggs, with feminist sociologist Betty Friedan and civil rights and labor activist Grace Lee Boggs in attendance. Throughout the three-day event, several speakers invoked ancient Athens.

The most critical invokers of ancient Athens were orthodontist and biologist (and also Hilton's husband) Herbert Layton Hayward and labor organizer Ted F. Silvey. Hayward spoke honestly about the role enslaved people played in the daily and conceptual lives of ancient Athenians: ‘The sole reason for the existence of the slave in Athens was the production of those essential elements without which the citizens could not be humans. In the past, it has always involved the dehumanization of a certain portion of humanity to make it possible for the other part of humanity to be human’ (Hilton, 1966: 63–4). Silvey is more descriptive: ‘The relatively few intellectuals and leaders of the Golden Age of Pericles in ancient Athens could exist only because of the great substratum of human slaves—who grew the groceries, did the housekeeping, and carried the slops for the few on top’ (Silvey, 1966: 127). Yet Hayward and Silvey hold tight to the cultural logic of the enslaving aristocrat. Hayward enthuses that ‘we have now, at last, reached the happy state—or there is now at least a vision, a possibility that in the foreseeable future the happy state can be reached—where those who, if they want to, may be aristocrats can approach one-hundred percent of all human beings’ (Hilton, 1966: 63–4). Silvey gushes that ‘today, the inanimate apparatus under democratic control can serve as a mass of slaves beneath our entire population … [which] could ensure the cultivation and blossoming of each person's maximum achievement’ (Silvey, 1966: 128). Machine slaves allow for a scaling up of classical Athens, is the idea, with no upper limit on whom machine enslavement frees for excellence in thought and deed. Also avoided, of course, are the cruelties of human enslavement.

Hilton and Arendt are less critical in their engagements with ancient Greece. Hilton hypes the Homeric archetype of the excellent individual: ‘A population will evolve which, endowed with the leisure to fulfill human tasks, can create a society in which the individual has the opportunity to excel, in the Greek sense of the word, i.e. to distinguish himself from all others’ (Hilton, 1966: 148–9). Hilton does not write about ancient Athens as a model of and for mass politics. Arendt does, though. Hearing from her fellow panelists excitement about the cultural exuberance of ancient Greece, she urges a more foundational consideration of the ancient Greek polis. Arendt insists, first, on precision about the relationship between leisure and what it enabled the humans who had it to do: ‘In ancient Greece, even the artist—the painter, the sculptor—was not recognized as a full citizen, precisely because he was too busy. The citizen was not free to create the high flowering of culture but to engage in political activities’ (Arendt, 1966: 217). Her view is that anyone enthusiastic about ancient Greece as a model ought to be clear that political action was the defining feature of free, meaning both unenslaved and unoccupied, citizens. She wonders whether the keenness for ancient Greece extends to its fundamental unit of organization and what it would mean to ‘devise liberal institutions for our political lives which will fulfill the function the polis fulfilled for the free citizens of Greece’ (ibid.: 219). Arendt offers the infrastructural counterpart to Hilton's centering of the individual.

In the discussion that follows Arendt's talk, Hilton rallies that the promise of cyberculture is that we can ‘devote ourselves, as civilized beings should, to poetry and politics’ (Hilton, 1966: 234). In response, Grace Lee Boggs expresses relief that Arendt, with whose work Boggs claims familiarity, and Hilton have finally mentioned politics explicitly. She argues that ‘creative political energy’ has been unable to build because all the energy working people have is exhausted through their economic productivity (ibid.). She also points out that white people will have to make social and actual space for those historically excluded by racial capitalism, and she does not think they will do so voluntarily. A member of the audience with the last name of Houghton adds that liberation from work is not an inevitable outcome of cybernation and that to assume so is to shift attention away from ‘the immediate struggles the black and white workers of this country are presently involved in and will be more deeply involved in in the future’ (ibid.: 237). Overall, the contributors to the conference characterize the cybercultural revolution as emancipatory, and, largely, the locus of freedom is the individual, who becomes the best version of themselves once liberated from drudgery. It is the activists participating in Hilton's event who keep alert to the politics of such self-centrism, in the United States, in 1964. By December of that year, automation and cybernation had begun appearing regularly in the speeches of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., suggesting growing concerns about their contributions to racial inequality. ²²

Conclusions

Contrary to the assumptions of some of his contemporaries eager to trace the term, it seems likely that Wiener was aware of Plato's use of kubernētikē in the Republic when he decided to use cybernetics as the name for the transdisciplinary study of communication and control within dynamic systems and the title of his first book. As Wiener's posthumously published manuscript Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas suggests, it is plausible he did not write about the connection between Plato's Republic and his own work because he did not think either Plato or ancient Athens, traditionally that most celebrated of ancient Greek poleis, had anything to offer 20th-century engineers concerned about the best cultural contexts for inventiveness, the best cultural contexts for democracy, and the tensions between the two, attributable primarily to capitalism. As Wiener's public cybernetics work attests, he thinks the United States’ own vainglorious history and struggling present as a multiracial, capitalist democracy provide ample material from which to learn—and potentially to make better choices.

An enthusiast of cybernetics, Alice Mary Hilton cannot mention the etymology of the word without adding a shout-out to Plato, an insistence that may be related to her coming to understand the promise of cybernetics as a Golden Age like that of democratic ancient Athens, a view she did not hold uniquely—and that continues in our time (Regalado, 2012). If cybernetics delivers on that promise, she and others argue, then people will need to be educated and habituated radically differently. To use her own cybernetic imagery, the issue is whether we steer into a future that promotes human flourishing or drift into one that harms us. ²³ Wiener, too, makes kubernetically marked forecasts. In the short term, he believes ‘we are proceeding on our course on the basis of charts on the idea of progress which do not mark the threatening shoals’ (Wiener, 1950: 214). When he surveys our world, engineered toward capitalist ideas of progress, he foresees the long term, and it does not look good: our destiny is to be ‘ship-wrecked passengers on a doomed planet’ (Wiener, 1954: 40). He has little confidence that the power of our future choices can overcome that of our past ones. We are all in the same boat.