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employing self-teaching computers.” Pulling no punches, he concluded
that if the United States continued to neglect cybernetics, “we are in-
ished” (ibid.).
Even discounting for the hyperbole that often accompanies the effort
to convince those in power to take action, Schlesinger's statement and
those of the CIA amount to a declaration that the Soviets' early version of
the cloud, with its central planning through cybernetics, would work and
might very well defeat the United States. The furor continued as President
Kennedy set up a task force to examine the threat of Soviet cybernetics
and the CIA continued to sound the alarm. The U.S. military got into
the act, too, with the commander of the Air Force Foreign Technology
division alarmed that “the system could be imposed upon us from an
authoritarian, centralized, cybernated, world-powerful command and
control center in Moscow” (ibid.).
As with many U.S. assessments of the Soviet threat, these fears proved
exaggerated. Only a small fraction of the Soviet program was implemented
because the government diverted available resources to the military, which
steadfastly refused to share them with what top commanders believed was
the useless project of the economic cyberneticians. This cloud did not
vaporize overnight, however. The Soviet Union's cybernetics team was
able to patch together a semblance of a computer system for planning and
allocating resources, producing less than a robust network, more mist than
cloud. Moreover, it took a national network of human “ixers” whose job
it was to use whatever means necessary to keep chains of production and
distribution working, or, at least, keep them from seizing up entirely, so
that the façade of central planning through cybernetics and what Francis
Spufford (2010) called the belief in “Red Plenty” could be maintained.
The Soviet Union's dalliance with an early version of cloud computing
demonstrated both the potential and the pitfalls of using it for national eco-
nomic planning. Most analysts have understandably focused on negative
lessons, including some combination of the inherent dificulty of develop-
ing a cloud model for a massively complex economy, the structural prob-
lems built into the Soviet system, and the recognition that computers were
not nearly advanced enough to carry the load. Scholars are just beginning
to assess the actual potential of the Soviet cybernetics program to meet
the government's economic goals (Dyer-Witheford 2013). It would also
be interesting to consider the impact of the cybernetics program on the
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