The Coda pushes the implications of the book’s argument both backward and forward in time. Love reads Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes as a nineteenth-century precursor to the cybernetic impulses of data-collection and data-processing, and points to the growing body of criticism that is probing the historical parameters of cybernetic thinking even further back in time. Love proposes that the emerging sense of a literary–critical cybernetic paradigm is particularly significant to scholars of modernism in light of the field’s recent global turn. Finally, she illustrates how the cybernetic reading of modernist formal experimentation can both illuminate and offer aesthetic alternatives to contemporary technological debates surrounding issues like surveillance and privacy. This conclusion drives home the argument that modernist literature can help us understand the longer and more diverse cultural history of our present-day, information-rich world; it also gestures to new possibilities for research and analysis that might push our awareness of cybernetic thinking back even further into earlier cultural moments, movements, genres, and texts.

This chapter explores why the promises of allocative efficiency in neoliberal and Soviet economics - neoclassical ‘general equilibrium’ and the Soviet's ‘balanced plan’ - cannot be fulfilled. Early Soviet conceptions of planning had aspired to be based on an evolving social reality, in contrast to the highly abstract, competition-based, and hence de-historicized neoclassical arguments for general equilibrium. The Stalinist shift to synoptic planning had nevertheless confronted Soviet economists with the same challenges their neoclassical colleagues faced in the west: that of how to produce essentially machine-like models of allocative efficiency in social reality. These challenges would drive later generations of Soviet and neoclassical economists to fixate on, and fail to solve, the problem of how to account for the information that was evidently ‘lost’ both in planning and in market mechanisms. Innes explains why both concepts of allocative efficiency had proved even theoretically incoherent by the 1970s, and demonstrates that it was at this, the lowest point of intellectual credibility for the theory of general equilibrium, that it became a foundation of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Chapter 4 describes the field of cognitive science, which is the arena where all those who study “intelligent systems” (“minds“) get together to compare notes. A shared idea is that the mind can be understood as an information-processing computational system. We will see how during the 1960s renewed interest in the mind from different academic disciplines emerged as a reaction to the denial of the mind of an approach to psychology called behaviorism. We then discuss the various strands of thinking in a variety of different fields that led to this “cognitive revolution.” We learn that there are fundamental, opposing views in this field that are relevant to the nature–nurture debate. Despite differences, a general understanding within cognitive science is that the mind can be studied at different levels of abstractness and from different angles which to some extent compete but also complement each other.

2. With the benefit of hindsight, Serge Moscovici tried to reflect on what had motivated him to develop the theory of social representations. Socio-political and intellectual resources that underlay his thinking were complex. They were determined by events during the War and its aftermath, as well as by his personal and interpersonal experiences. In contrast to social psychological studies in the 1950s which were preoccupied with the study of attitudes and small groups, Moscovici was interested in urgent global issues such as the impact of science and technology on historical changes in society, the role of masses, conflicts, and the construction of social knowledge. He believed that social psychology would be able to respond to these challenges.

The two masters who had a tremendous impact on Moscovici’s career during the first years of his research in Paris were the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré. They re-orientated Serge Moscovici’s life and he called them his two fathers.

Moscovici’s choice to study social representations of psychoanalysis was inspired by several intellectual reasons and coincidences. Above all, he thought that psychoanalysis would be suitable subject matter to explore the transformation of ‘scientific’ or professional knowledge into daily knowledge.

In 1972 and 1973 Lovelock and Margulis composed and circulated their first Gaia articles. After initial rejections at the end of 1972, they published three co-authored Gaia papers in 1974 and a fourth in 1975, lead-authored by Margulis. After this set of original Gaia articles was published, the immediate response was muted at best. Margulis continued to work on her reconstructions of Gaia’s early evolution. However, at mid-decade, Lovelock was embroiled in the ozone controversy, putting their joint efforts on hiatus. Around 1977, Margulis revived their collaboration with a Gaian consideration of planetary atmospheres in light of data from the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. After a decade of Gaia writing in the professional article format appropriate to the introduction of a new concept, they now proceeded to book projects. As the 1970s closed, Margulis was working on her next major book, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, while Lovelock was putting finishing touches on his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

The correspondence commences in the summer of 1970, when a still untenured Margulis sends Lovelock a request for information along with offprints of her own work. The scientific collaboration of Lovelock and Margulis launched in earnest in January 1972, a year and a half after their first exchange of letters. The opening chapters of their correspondence document Margulis’s importance for both the construction and the communication of Gaian ideas. Their collaboration develops precisely as a writing partnership, with Margulis in the de facto role of in-house editor as well as co-author of their early papers. The letters exchanged in 1972 show them meticulously working through the host of technical matters intrinsic to their bold project until an initial manuscript is ready for submission. These early letters are also the most minutely specialized, as they are both still teaching the other what they need to learn in order to bring their respective specializations together.

Part IV centers on the flow of information that becomes news stories. Close analyses of source–fixer–reporter interactions that informed reports on the Turkish government’s crackdown on domestic critics and on the country’s July 2016 coup attempt show, concretely, how fixers transform the information that passes through them from source to reporter. From the ways they prepare reporters for interviews to the words they choose when interpreting between Turkish and English, fixers cannot help but shape reporters’ perceptions and so the news. Fixers nonetheless operate within the tight constraints of news organizations’ framings of events and templates for coverage. Fixers’ interventions into information transmission are patterned by socially constructed but idiosyncratic moral considerations: their personal and political aspirations, as well as their desire to harmonize emergent conflicts between the parties they broker.

This chapter considers the idea of a posthuman city and its representation in American literature. Surveying posthumanism as a field of inquiry emerging from animal studies, which considers the blurring of species-based definitions of “human,” and cybernetics, which figures human agency as constituted by technological adjuncts, the chapter also traces the growing body of inquiry into urban life from these perspectives. Tracing the discourse of the smart city and earlier projects such as archologies and megastructures in experimental architecture, the chapter considers science fiction as a site for critiquing the social control nascent in smart cities by instead imagining intelligent cities. The chapter considers Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice (2013); Ancillary Sword (2014); Ancillary Mercy (2015)) as emblematic of this critique and as a model for imagining cities that embody emotional intelligence in addition to standard sensing practices more widely associated with smart cities. Leckie uses a truly posthuman city to challenge how human agency is figured in architecture and urban planning.

Machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems arise as images of the posthuman within the discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. From the side of technoscience, advances in cybernetics and systems theory have been the prime movers of the posthuman imaginary. AI and its elaboration in the cultural imaginary is particularly instructive with regard to transhumanist visions of transcendence. Where cybernetics spread across organic bodies, computational devices, and the social dynamics of communication, AI bypassed multiple cybernetic couplings to concentrate on the design, construction, and study of computational agencies. AI discourse ran alongside the development of SETI—the scientific program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Both AI and SETI foreground how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. The 2015 novel Aurora overcomes the AI imaginary as previously constituted by bringing ecological realism to the relations to machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems.

Mead and Bateson were two of the most famous and influential anthropologists whose research and advocacy have had broad influences on social sciences and mental health in the twentieth century. Although their marriage lasted only four years, they continued to influence each other until their dying days. After Mead’s death, their only daughter, Catherine Bateson, also an accomplished anthropologist, found out that Mead had been a closet lesbian since her early adulthood, and for years was a lover of another famous anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. These entangled relationships are described and discussed in the context of their achievements and contributions. Also included in the narratives are Mead’s original fieldwork in American Samoa and controversies surrounding Samoan teenagers’ sex life; Mead’s relationship with Benjamin Spock and their influences on contemporary child-rearing practices; Bateson’s complicated and tragic family background; and Bateson’s contributions to systems biology, double bind theory, and cybernetics.

This chapter explores the emergence of a new culture of corporate credit in the 1970s, one specifically tied to the corporate self and the practices of financialisation that supported it. It examines the ways in which these cultures were supported by the self-affirming logic of neoliberalism that was capable of rejecting the very possibility of perceiving the world outside of its own terms. It argues that William Gaddis’ novel JR draws on an alternative history of post-war economic thought, one associated with Norbert Weiner rather than Milton Friedman, which offers a critique of the positivist triumphalism of 1970s economic thinking. It reads JR through the potently ambivalent idea of entropic failure – one that suggests an entirely different conceptual trajectory for understanding the meaning of the emerging debt cultures in this decade.