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

by Paul N. Edwards

The Closed World offers a radically new 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 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 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 apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars " 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 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 assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction—from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey , 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. Inside Technology series

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Technology, Computers, Academic, Politics

462 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Paul N. Edwards is Professor in the School of Information and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996) and a coeditor (with Clark Miller) of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (2001), both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Lucas Gelfond · Rating 4 out of 5]

rounding up for 3.5, again long review because read for my capstone!

Paul Edwards’ The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America offers up what it suggests as a “counter-history” of the computer. Most histories take one of two path: computers as an embodiment of ideas about information, and histories as economic and social forces, shaped by business and consumer trends. Both situate computer history in mathematics or formal logic, and downplay what takes place beyond the lab or company. It is this history that Edwards sets out to tackle: “there is little place in such accounts for the influence of ideologies, intersections with popular culture, or political power.” Edwards, thus, seeks too emphasize the “contingency” of many developments, the individuals and individual agencies that directed the character of computing, and to reject some sense of computing’s inevitability.

Edwards takes much of the first half of the book laying out conceptual ground, before getting into the meat of his argument. He takes on this project with two primary analytical constructs: the “closed world” and the “cyborg world.” Edwards’ “closed world” involves ideas of containment, geopolitical strategy, and military command and control. As he sees it, the “closed world” is mobilized primarily in three ways: an idea of enclosing and protecting capitalist nations / “the West”, of enclosing the Soviet Union, or of extending the capitalist world-system to enclose the whole world; interpreted in this frae, all events are a struggle between superpowers. This view is opposed to what Edwards calls the conceptual “green world”—one of natural setting, uninhibited flow, and openness.

Edwards refines his definition in a series of scenes, most compellingly in “Operation Igloo White,” an American military strategy project in Laos. Technicians scattered tons of sensors across the country, rigged to control and release bombs when triggered by movement. Designers framed the project as high tech and highly effective, but its actual impact was dubious; the project claimed to have destroyed more trucks than existed in all of the region, and many of the supposedly destroyed vehicles were never found. Edwards cites this example as emblematic of an obsession with techno-rational solutions, of concreteness even when misleading, and of a desire to justify all actions in terms of statistics; these weapons emerge from techno-rational culture, and techno-rational culture emerges from these weapons. Much of this statistical modeling, Edwards suggests, comes from the existence of nuclear “ultimate weapons.” For Edwards, because neither superpower actually detonated weapons, statistical analysis and simulation was more real than the actual weapons either power could deploy.

Edwards’ second analytical concept, “cyborg discourse,” comes directly from Donna Haraway, his doctoral advisor at Santa Cruz who he makes extensive mention to in his acknowledgements. For Edwards, this means the metaphor of mind as a computer, and invokes ideas of human-machine symbiosis. Cold war popular culture is interesting, in this frame, because it merges cold war and cyborg discourse.

Soon after, he details his view of what ‘discourse’ is to refine both contexts, largely by suggesting why he avoided other terms. “Ideology” was too slanted, “paradigm” (a la Thomas Kuhn) suggests too much coherence, “world view” overemphasizes subjectiveness and lacks connection to material conditions. Edwards suggests “social construction” would be closest, an idea of groups simultaneously building technology and its meaning, invoking Wittgenstein’s language-game: that meaning is use, and definitions only make sense in their specific context. He also briefly invokes Foucault, emphasizing that discourse is separate from representations (or semiotics), and instead is “where knowledge is constructed,” further highlighting that power produces truth and determines what can count as true and false.

Edwards connects computers to a “discourse” by suggesting they, like clocks, do no physical work, but are “autonomous machines,” acting based on internalized models of the world. He suggests that tools shape mental models and discourse, and that discourse around tools also shapes them.

The relevant influence on computing for Edwards is the role of the military; rather than a merely passive actor as it is often framed, Edwards argues that practical military objectives guided development down certain channels it may not otherwise have taken. The American military, after WW2, was predisposed to like technological solutions. The war, now positioning the US as a global leader, involved littell American suffering, and weaned the country off of its prior isolation. Technology, it seemed, could allow the US to constrict its military budget in peacetime, while maintaining its activist role.

The war had also ballooned defense budgets, which would remain at elevated levels after the war. It, too, would shape the nature of research culture, which would remain nationally oriented. The military took interest in computers because it seemed they could accelerate military tasks, and promoted visions of a bloodless, remote-control victory. Edwards writes that, in ‘closed world’ war, computers could make “a chaotic and dangerous space [...] orderly and controllable by the powers of rationality and technology.”

Analog computers were already in use by the military; they needed no conversion between analog and digital, and as such could be used in control systems. There, too, was a strong community of analog programmers who felt threatened by digital computers, and opposed their development.

Digital computer development began with Whirlwind, an attempt to build a “general” flight simulator that could be tuned for any task. Whirlwind was already tooled toward military applications, staffed by grad students who’d served previously, but its budget ballooned, and it nearly lost funding. During its development, however, the DoD took up special interest in ideas of “air defense,” a suggestion that the military could use preemptive fire to disable enemy munitions, winning wars in the air by overwhelming the enemy with force. This fiction was remarkably compelling, and with the looming threat of nuclear war, government agencies gave the project a “blank check” for development.

Whirlwind, which eventually became SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) shaped the next few decades of computing. It brought several “firsts” in computing—networking, graphical displays, and more. SAGE, too, was a boon for the private sector; half of IBM’s income came from the military, and 20% of their workforce was staffed on SAGE. In Edwards, words “SAGE taught the American computer industry how to design and build large, interconnected, real-time data- processing systems.” SAGE, too, was an “archetypal closed-world space: enclosed and insulated, containing a world represented abstractly on a screen, ren- dered manageable, coherent, and rational through digital calculation and control.”

Ideas about air defense and computerized control challenged present military function. The military uses a “command tradition”—while officers follow orders through hierarchy, they are tasked with implementing their instructions. SAGE proposed a centralized model that concerned many commanders, but the automatic control it proposed was an illusion—the system was faulty and could not account for contingencies, and would still need humans in the loop. Still, as Edwards notes, “SAGE worked as ideology, creating an impression of active defense that assuaged some of the helplessness of nuclear fear!”

Edwards focuses his next chapter on “operations research,” and other statistically-driven wartime techniques. He expands on his point of the importance of symbols and models in war: “Each side based its weapons purchases, force deployments, technological R&D, and negotiating postures on its models of strategic conflict and its projections about the future choices of the other. This is why the Cold War can be best understood in terms of discourses that connect technology, strategy, and culture: it was quite literally fought inside a quintessentially semiotic space, existing in models, language, iconography, and metaphor, embodied in technologies that lent to these semiotic dimensions their heavy inertial mass.” Edwards notes that this model encouraged sky-high thinking about future technologies: “ policy- makers tended to highlight systems under development or still in the research phase by giving their projected but still unproven capabili- ties equal weight to those of forces in being, which since they had been tested in practice were less subject to inflated performance claims.”

Edwards usefully parses the obsession with war statistics—while such numerical answers gave the appearance of being “hard” and resulting from quantitative analysis, they often rested on shaky assumptions, and yielded poor results. The defense establishment quickly became suspicious of “armchair generals” and “computer types who are making defense policy don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.” This focus on statistics even bled into how war was fought—troops often “risked their lives to obtain information of dubious quality” because superiors would be promoted on better information. These conditions degraded the quality of these statistics further; as Edwards notes, “they were pressured to produce high counts—so they inflated them or simply made them up.”

Edwards pauses for what he calls an “interlude” about the politics of subjectivity, a section he uses to lay out more conceptual ground. He begins with more definitions. For Edwards, politics is a contest among social groups for power, recognition, and satisfaction of interests. Culture is the informal world of art and language constructed for human subjects. He also suggests metaphor “is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive,” before diving more deeply into computer metaphors of the mind. Most amusing in this chapter is its dating: Edwards notes that “by now, in fact, most of the American middle class has probably had some kind of direct experience with computers in school, at work, or at home.” Wild this was just 1996!
Edwards lays out conceptual groundwork many have taken up with computers and minds: brain as hardware, mind as software, thinking and perception as computation. He, too, takes up the culture of programming, with a brief look into programming-language subcultures (which are alive and well today!); LISP programmers as hackers, sloppy but artistic visionaries; Pascal pro- grammers as precise but uncreative formalists, self-described “software engineers.” Programming languages, like verbal or written language, also seem to structure thought: he notes that “certain languages seem more likely to lead toward more organic, ‘soft’ methods of program- ming than ‘harder,’ more structured languages.”

He brings focus, too, to the psychology of programming, particularly programmers’ ability to become engrossed or mesmerized in computers, to love the power it brings. Edwards suggests this culture “attract losers and outcasts; people who love control” and ties this to masculinity. While “certainly women can be loners and outcasts [...] male gender identity [is] based on emotional isolation and demands for competitive achievement.” He goes so far as to note that “many men choosing engineering careers replace missing human intimacy with what are for them empowering, because fully ‘rational’ and controlled, relationships with complex machines.” I identify pretty strongly with being a programmer (and not particularly with being a loser or outcast; although certainly as someone who loves control)—remains a pretty wild read!

Edwards devotes his next chapter to cybernetics’ influence on psychology. Two approaches emerged in the mid 20th century: behaviorism, which saw organisms as a black box, and cognitive psychology, which saw humans and animals as cybernetic machines. Psychologists, embracing the latter view, became increasingly interested in information-theoretical approaches to language and communication processes, while remaining hesitant about their spread; Edwards cites a skeptic, who begged for “intellectual responsibility” in the use of such terms, comparing it to the quick (and insidious) adoption of phrenology by psychologists over a previous generation. Systems discourses, and views of cybernetics in the brain, spread regardless of whether or not cyberneticians wanted them to, however.

A few models challenged cybernetics, but failed to catch on. Most notable here, I think, are ways in which computer scientists or those with quantitative backgrounds manage to trample disciplinary boundaries; John Stroud, a cybernetician, “spoke the engineering language the cyberneticians understood, and they were unconcerned by what the psychologists heard as his loose usage of technical psychological terms (such as ‘phi’ for ‘apparent motion’) and his reformulation of traditional psychological problems in formal/mechanical terms.” This seems, perhaps, like Edwards’ primary claim through the book—that technical language or formalism can often mask a lack of real knowledge, but present as objective. Edwards makes this explicit: “With no stakes in the disciplinary history of psychology, [cyberneticians] responded well to the mathematical regularities and mechanical comparisons Stroud used.”

Edwards soon moves to a brief history of artificial intelligence. Cyberneticians favored “disembodied” models, which were formal, mathematical, and abstract, rather than those which emulated biology; in essence, they focused on the mind over the brain. A move away from hardware is perhaps clearest in the advent of compilers, programs which convert programs of higher-level languages into machine code; they suggest perfect standardization across languages, even if they remain buggy and inefficient, a scourge of hardware engineers.

Edwards makes brief reference to the now-legendary Dartmouth artificial intelligence conference. His true interest, however, seems to lie in J.C.R. Licklider’s paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” presented at the conference. Licklider’s paper came in the wake of new “time-sharing” procedures, which allowed multiple users to work on a computer at the same time. He promoted a view of computers as “partners in thought,” encouraging people to program with computers. Edwards notes this idea was not purely Licklider’s, but rather “a product of the wider discourses of the closed world and the cyborg, technological approaches to politico-military problems and cybernetic metaphors of computers as minds and brains.”

Edwards then details a brief history of Reagan Era cold war revival, which he calls “Cold War II.” The period brought renewed optimism about new technologies and saw AI and computing as culturally central. New fears about nuclear attacks brought back more interest in computerized solutions, most notably in the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” dubbed “Stars Wars.”

The project was, essentially, science fiction. it suggested that a sufficient warning system could create an invulnerable shield that could intercept weapons, in a purely defensive way. In being pure defense, Reagan suggested it might even be shared with the Russians. Efforts were technically totally out of touch; my favorite is a note from an assistant director of the project, who noted that he would “eliminate bugs by administrative fiat. ‘The notion of bugs and errors goes back to the notion of high quality,’ he asserted. ‘We prevent bugs by design. We don’t like to pre-plan removal of bugs.’”

Edwards closes with a chapter about cultural embodiments of the aforementioned phenomena, largely about green worlds and closed worlds. Most of these are not worth exploring in detail, although I found a few quite interesting. Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” suggests an irreversible nuclear device, where pilots will disregard all voice communication after its deployment, emphasizing the problems of total reliance on faultless computers. The movie “places the moral burden of the catastrophe not on the system-builders but squarely on the politicians who permit their deadly technological hubris.” Edwards explores the closed-world aesthetics of Dr. Strangelove and an interest in Kubrick’s deployment of the green world in an otherwise closed 2001, in the “dawn of man” and childlike songs played by HAL.

Edwards’ epilogue, “Cyborgs in the World Wide Web,” is an amusing gesture at the early internet. He notes that “at this writing, traffic over the World Wide Web is increasing at the astonishing rate of 341,000 percent per year (and rising).” He ends with a gesture at the future: “Cyborgs in the World Wide Web will face the tripartite ten- sion among the global bonds of communication and control technology; the ideological individualism of cyberspace, with its totally malleable personal identities and disposable virtual communities; and the deepening crisis of culture in an increasingly rootless world.”

I generally like Edwards’ approach a lot, although at times his points are belabored or become tedious. I found his points compelling—his elaboration of the “closed world” is rigorously defined and descriptive. I also generally buy his thesis: military influence on early computer development is underrated by current histories. I got a lot out of the Closed World!

[CL Chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bit cumbersome, but the combination of history of technoscience (computer, systems analysis, cybernetics, and psychology), political history, and cultural criticism is still fresh 20 years after its publication.

[Ry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic analysis of the ways that computers have changed the way we understand ourselves and the world, even without them working most of the time

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire the complexity and persuasive case Edwards puts forth regarding the development of computers as connected with the discourse surrounding security and the Cold War. However, his introduction is particularly theory-heavy, making the structure of the book somewhat difficult to penetrate, and making the reader less compelled by the prospect of doing so. This should be required reading for anyone studying the history of communications technology, but doesn't really need to be read by anyone else.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since it covers such a fast moving topic, this book is starting to show its age a little. That being said, The Closed World is a great history of the cold war origins of the modern computer. Aspects of the computer baked into its design come from the need to manage complex systems of war and guide ballistic missiles. Advancement came through massive military funding, and that human-machine interfacing has roots as far back as the second world war. Very cool read.

[Christoph Pingel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, apart from the topic at hand (the cold war) I think this book excels as an example of how to successfully analyze the rhetorics which are implied or 'baked into' technology. The crucial point here is to see how technology mirrors itself back into the realm of discourse, it's not just at the 'receiving end' but also a source (of arguments, of metaphors, and so forth). So this book is an achievement both regarding the insights it provides as well as in the methods it applies.

[YL · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prefer harraway's homage to her australian shepherds at doggery.com than this masticated throw up of the cyborg manifesto.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredibly dense and dependent on theoretical suppositions. Would be better if written with less academic focus and more of a narrative of what occurred over time

[Almielag]

Gave it a shot! Ha ha