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Invention and the Heaviside novel were products of a period of personal and collective strain. Far from providing a path for civilization's future, cybernetics was on the brink of collapse. And it was Wiener's fault. As he became increasingly fervent about openness in science, he grew more protectively authorial about his own endeavors. In 1951 he finally exploded. Wiener ferociously denounced McCulloch for appropriating his reputation as the author of cybernetics, calling him a "picturesque and swashbuckling" usurper. The evocation of a pirate was all but explicit.56 Accustomed to such tantrums, the president of MIT, James Killian, sent the usual mollifying response. But this time Wiener was resolute. Whether his fear of usurpation were really the motivation, or whether, as has recently been claimed, his wife contrived the split by concocting bizarre tales of sexual impropriety, this time his resolution lasted. The rift proved permanent, and his erstwhile collaborators were devastated. Cybernetics disintegrated. Invention and his two volumes of memoirs were written amid the wreckage.57 When the crisis of information came, it arrived with an accusation of piracy that blew his community and hisvocation to shreds. If Pupin's book was a "cry from Hell," one may ask, what was Wiener's?

WHY, THIS IS HELL

We still live amid the legacies of these mid-century debates about science and society. We inherit their terms, and the culture of science that shapes our world is the one left to us by them. If we think "information wants to be free," then we voice a sentiment championed by Wiener, Polanyi, and Plant. And when we worry that the resurgence of patenting and commercialism in research maybe betraying science - as many do -we appeal to a quasi-Mertonian image of the enterprise that was itself framed by a debate about thosevery themes. Merton himself, not incidentally, seemed less sanguine in the late i98os about the chances of surviving the change than he had been in the 1940s.

What is happening to science today is in one light an example of what is happening to all other creative practices. But there is a very important difference. In all other realms, globalization is represented as replacing localisms of various forms: musical styles, literatures, fashions, and so on. In the sciences, something different is at stake. An apparently new, market-oriented ethos of universality is seen as replacing, not an accumulation of localisms, but an older-and, many think, nobler- form of universality. That older form was, on this view, real science itself: an objective, ideologically neutral endeavor, that yielded knowledge independent of the place of its creation precisely because it was kept apart from the mar- ket.58 It is this difference that lends critiques of patent-oriented scientific culture their real bite. It turns their complaint from one of deterioration into one of betrayal. What we are left with, apparently, is an empty simulacrum of a noble enterprise. That is the central contention behind the most angry, even violent, debate to swirl around the sciences today. It should be clear by now that the premises of that debate are poorly understood. In particular, the image of proper science that it appeals to is by no means historically adequate. Contrary to popular belief, there was in fact no quantum leap in scientific patenting in the i98os. In the 1930s, some research institutions sought patents just as avidly as the likes of MIT and UCSD do now. And as Steven Shapin has demonstrated in detail, industrial and academic practices of science in the mid-twentieth centurywere not in practice distinguishable on any such stark moral grounds.59 More to the point, the image itself is a relic of earlier conflicts precisely about the patenting of research and the enclosure of intellectual and technological "commons." In other words, it is not so much that pure science never existed, as that the idea that it could exist is one we owe to debates about intellectual property and piracy.