Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [246]
Wiener concentrated after the war on extending and diversifying the influence of this "theory of messages." At its most ambitious, the "cybernetics group" that met in these years argued that cybernetic principles should influence all social decisions: how to design machines, what values to embrace, what actions to take or avoid. In the age of the concentration camp and the atom bomb, they were acutely conscious of the moral implications of such an ambitious science. Wiener introduced cybernetics to the public with a warning of a "modern industrial revolution" that might well devalue the brain as emphatically as the first Industrial Revolution had the hand. "It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in terms of the market," he cautioned, if they left the majority with nothing to sell. He made desultory efforts to interest the labor movement in agitating for political intervention to forestall such an outcome.42 Concerns about the appropriation and blockage of information equally haunted his evangelizing.
Wiener was convinced that intellectual property was obstructing the potential of information science. In large part this conviction originated with his own experience of dealing with AT&T. But he had fallen foul of state secrecy too, having submitted a proposal for a digital computer only to see it neglected. In 1944 he therefore noted with some pride that his collaborators on a pivotal computing endeavor were "unanimous" in repudiating the corporate patentees RCA and Bell Labs (that is, the old radio trust and AT&T). These convictions appeared both in the relatively technical announcement of the new field in Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) and in the more popular account he published as The Human Use ofHuman Beings (i95o). Cybernetics was one of those publications that exemplifies its own argument, in that it was commissioned by an associate of the Bourbaki collective (an antiauthorial collective of mathematicians), Enriques Freymann. Freymann wanted it for a new publishing venture "as nearly free from the motive of profit as any publishing house can be." And Wiener voiced increasingly strident denunciations of secrecy as incompatible with science. He was removed from the government's list of scientists approved for classified work for his pains.43 His "rebellion," as he characterized it, soon became irreversible, as Wiener ostentatiously began de- clininggovernment funds for research. From the early i95os he increasingly laid aside research to concentrate on exposing what he saw as the corruption of science by intellectual property He intended to issue a third and much longer expression of his convictions in a book he entitled Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas.44 It assailed the practice of patenting on which corporate science rested. He largely completed it, but then left Invention unpublished.
Wiener developed a historical account of invention itself. It centered on information, and in particular on the flow of information. He insisted that it was theorists, and not "gadgeteers," who produced truly radical departures. His paradigmatic inventors were figures like Newton, Max well, Gibbs, and Wiener himself. His ownworkwith Lee, indeed, counted for him as an exemplary case of a "change in intellectual climate." It had made manifest what had previously been implicit in the theories of Gibbs and Fourier. This was