IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 69

from the performance is able to change the general
method and pattern of performance, we have a process
that may well be called learning" [29, p. 61].
Wiener's learning and Dewey's "connection of things"
point toward the notion of a fluid, potentially self-improving network. Dewey promoted "an ethos of flexible
openness and democratic self-government" that might
combat what he considered an increasing "democratic
pessimism" and authoritative elitism taking hold of the
country [14]. While seemingly at odds with the notions
of control, the democracy of Dewey, even in the early
1900s, was marked by the notion of "harmony" - or
to borrow a cybernetic term, homeostasis - among
human organisms as a flow of self control or self regulation that contributed to the greater good while still allowing innovation [14].
From Wiener's perspective, "local enclaves" - small
closely knit micro communities like the New England
towns he adored - offered an example of harmony
and homeostasis [29, p. 12]. As several scholars have
noted, Wiener envisioned "a society of small communities of educated, independent producers" that act both
individually and collectively through permeable borders
based on a check-and-balance system of feedback and
transactions. For Wiener, their ideal includes "entrepreneurs [with] the freedom and the resources to strike out
on their own, but with social control of commanding
heights" [16, p. 214], [18]. These small, micro communities comprised larger entities that, in turn, made up a
macro, or universal, organism.
Wiener warned that these communities would be far
from utopias. He considered the Adam Smith form of freemarket economy and the push for progress unstable for
both micro and macro organisms. Wiener saw the second
coming of the industrial revolution and worried that its
"intelligence-amplifying machines" would lead to job loss
and widespread social dislocation. He warned union leaders of their workers' doomed plight and cautioned"upper
middle class" parents that their children, guarded "solicitously against the awareness of death and doom," may
bitterly come to learn that "Santa Claus is a myth" [16,
p. 214], [29, p. 41].
Wiener also noted Americans' "comfortable passive
belief in progress," in which some meander along as
others elbow their way through - nearly all blind to
the patterns of information and feedback around them.
He warned that progress does not mean "the winning
of the West," which leads to "economic anarchy" and
further social dislocation - elements that work against
homeostasis [29, p. 43]. As Wiener put it, the pursuit
of progress encourages "an attitude not unlike that
of Alice's Mad Tea Party," in which the guests' greed
and lack of information exhaust all the tea and cakes
around the table. The guests move through the circuit

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of seats, consuming everything as they go, only to find
themselves in their original positions [29, p. 45].
Whether the Mad Hatter and the March Hare are any
the wiser depends. Were they aware of their transactions
and the emerging patterns around them? As a dark but
genuine humanist, Wiener saw some hope. By blurring
the boundaries of techno-social forces through a fluid
flow of learning in the form of transactions, feedback,
experience, and information, human organisms and
their machines could come to see the patterns of the
macro organism. They could come to recognize the
short-sightedness of a free-for-all tea party.
The world of the 1940s and early 1950s - as Wiener wrote of it - is not closed, as many scholars suggest. Rather, the early Cold War era, for him, offered
a fluid collection of micro and macro communities,
"where [life] finds its home" and expands outward [29,
p. 12]. These enclaves can be looked at as nodes on
a network or within a system, and they can be recast

From Wiener's perspective, "local
enclaves" - small closely knit
micro communities like the New
England towns he adored - offered
an example of harmony
and homeostasis.

from an individualistic, simple form to a more complex
and nuanced society. When the nodes come together
- occasionally by design but more often by chaotic
chance - they act as "whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water" - inputs and outputs comprising "patterns
that perpetuate themselves" in a grander cybernetic
organism [29, p. 96]. Closed systems do not perpetuate
themselves; they stagnate and suffer a chaotic demise.
As Wiener explains, "it is manifest that the importance
of control and communication as mechanisms of the
organization move beyond the individual to the community" [27, p. 18].
Wiener acknowledges the fluid boundaries between
the individual, community, and larger society. He considered openness a requirement for a relatively stable
state of equilibrium between the different but interdependent elements (or groups of elements) of an
organism - the very definition of homeostasis [19].

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