Showing posts sorted by relevance for query CYBERNETICS. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query CYBERNETICS. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, August 05, 2021

PROJECT CYBERSYN


Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile - 
by E MEDINA - ‎Cited by 116 - ‎Related articles in Allende's Chile*. EDEN MEDINA. Abstract. This article presents a history of 'Project Cybersyn', an early computer network developed in Chile during the .... 9 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine .... by this new application of his work, invited Beer to visit him at MIT.


PROJECT CYBERSYN #SOCIALIST #SELFMANAGEMENT THROUGH #AI, #CYBERNETICS, #ROBOTICS,. WORKERS CONTROL OF PRODUCTION THROUGH #AUTOMATION IN THE #GRUNDRISSE #MARX POSTULATES THAT WITH THE ADVENT OF TECHNOLOGY FREEING PEOPLE'S TIME, AND HIS THEORY OF VALUE IS BASED ON TIME NOT SKILL, THAT IS SPENT IN PRODUCTION OF EXCHANGE VALUE.

 AS PEOPLE HAVE MORE TIME TO THEMSELVES WITH THE EIGHT HOUR DAY THE CONTRADICTION BECOMES NOT JUST THAT CAPITALISM IMPOVERSHIVES YOU ECONOMICALLY BUT IT STEALS YOUR TIME AS WELL AND USES IT AGAINST YOU INSTEAD OF UNEMPLOYMENT BY AI AND ROBOT WE SHOULD HAVE THE FOUR HOUR DAY, FOUR DAY WEEK, FORTY HOURS PAY IN FACT WE COULD ABOLISH MONEY WITH THE NEW FINTECH AND WE COULD FREE UP EVEN MORE TIME TO WORK ONLY TEN HOURS A WEEK FOR SOCIAL PRODUCTION FOR CREATING OUR COMMONWEALTH WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY CREATED COULD FREE US FROM TIME SPENT IN THE MACHINE, INSTEAD WE COULD WORK LESS AND PLAY MORE. BUT CAPITALISM PREVENTS THAT, IT SLOWS US DOWN AND INSTEAD OF FREEDOM WE GET UNEMPLOYMENT HERE IS THE SOCIALIST VIEW OF #TECHNOLOGY AS AN AID FOR SELF MANAGEMENT OF OUR WORKPLACES IT WAS AN EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED IN ALLENDE'S CHILE BY NORBERT WIENER AND STAFFORD BEER



 HERE IS THE PDF OF EDEN MEDINA'S BOOK 
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
However, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, offers one of the most-cited definitions. In 1948 he described cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.”14 Cybernetics often mixed metaphors from engineering and biology to describe the .

 HER PHD THESIS WHICH THE BOOK IS BASED ON ]The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile ... - Core
 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4403874.pdf The MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society generously provided three years of tuition and ... to Allende's Chile and several years later allowed me to teach this history to his undergraduate ...... Allende period. 8 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. 

 The Cybersyn Revolution -
 Jacobin 
Apr 27, 2015 - Project Cybersyn was a bold technological project tied to a bold political project. It emerged in the context of Chile's peaceful road to socialism: Salvador Allende had won the Chilean presidency in 1970 with a promise to build a fundamentally different society. His political program would make Chile a ... 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries | The MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries 
Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina ... 

 Andy Beckett: The forgotten story of Chile's 'socialist internet ... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile Sep 8, 2003 - In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most ... 

 Project Cybersyn - Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Science Fictions ... Video for project cybersyn
▶ 23:08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCO3vXyR-c4 Apr 20, 2012 - Uploaded by Malthus0

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions - A paper delivered at the 2009 Pacific Ancient and Modern ... Project Cybersyn: Chile & the Socialist Internet - YouTube Video for project cybersyn▶ 2:09:34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGTEoJI5-Y4 
Jan 31, 2015 - Uploaded by CybrSalon Cybersalon & Centre for the Study of Democracy 6th December - University of Westminster, London In Chile ... 

 Cybersyn: Control the economy from one central room - 
Video for project cybersyn▶ 22:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_ylHj-AUA
Oct 31, 2015 - Uploaded by Max Zamora Under Salvador Allende's socialist government, a project was under way called Project CyberSyn or Proyecto ... 

 Project Cybersyn: Chile 2.0 in 1973 | iRevolutions https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/ 
Feb 21, 2009 - My colleague Lokman Tsui at the Berkman Center kindly added me to the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholars working group and I attended the second roundtable of the year yesterday. These roundtables typically comprise three sets of presentations followed by discussions. Introducing Cybersyn 

 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Dec 7, 2009 - Cybersyn was a project of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and British cybernetic visionary Stafford Beer; its goal was to control the Chilean economy in real-time using computers and "cybernetic principles." ... The two computers supposedly used to run the ... 

 Project Cybersyn – A failed experiment in Big Data and Socialism in ... https://www.peerlyst.com › Explore › Posts Feb 21, 2018 - private, systems, free - I read about this a few months back or maybe a year, I read way too much to remember all the details. It is a story about a new governm. 

 Before '73 Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism ... www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/world/americas/28cybersyn.html 
Mar 28, 2008 - 
Cybersyn, a project that included a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines, was in the early 1970s a part of an experiment to help manage Chile's economy. What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn? 



What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn?
- Quora 
 https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-general-motivations-of-Project-Cybersyn Dec 10, 2016 - Cybersyn was an ambitious project in technology and design meant to help Chile's socialist economy succeed. It's objectives have an interesting backstory. President Salvador Allende had recently become president after a free election. Allende hope... 

 Good ideas that didn't pan out, part 2: Project Cybersyn
Sep 18, 2014 - Part 2: Project Cybersyn. Around the time the first email was sent, not long after ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was first connected, a group of high-minded computer scientists in Chile tried to run their country's economy by computer. In 1971, the Chilean government of Salvador Allende signed a ... 

 Project Cybersyn and the Origins of Algorithmic Life | Open Geography https://opengeography.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/cybersyn-and-algorithmic-life/ Mar 9, 2015 - One of the left's commonly accepted stories about neoliberalism is that it got some of its first real-world tests in Pinochet's Chile in the early 1970s. Following a coup and the violent end to socialist Salvador Allende's government (in which Allende took his own life in the Presidential Palace), probably with the ...

 Project Cybersyn | “At last, el pueblo” | dpr-barcelona https://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/project-cybersyn-2/ Aug 27, 2010 - According to the research project CYBERSYN, Cybernetic Synergy, internationally, the country was viewed with curiosity and mistrust, and in terms of internal affairs, different political groups wasted no time in planning a strategy to produce the debacle of the Socialist government, joining forces with the ... 

. Computers and the Internet: A global history. Chile — Project Cybersyn. Today. ▻ Review. ▻ Homeostasis: a fundamental cybernetic principle. ▻ Chile, Stafford Beer, and Project Cybersyn.

 CYBERSYN/Cybernetic Synergy
 “Dear friends, I should like to greet you personally to this place, in the development of which I have taken enormous personal interest, and for this reason I am asking you to take a special interest in it. What you see is the outcome of 18 months of hard work on the part of a group of extremely professional Chilean engineers ... 

Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 Santiago dreaming https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer Project Cybersyn Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 The Socialist Origins of Big Data | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine 
Oct 13, 2014 - The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile's top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically .... Norbert Wiener's classic “Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1948) discussed human behavior by drawing on his ... Writings on Norbert Wiener - Thinking Machines in the Physical World ... 21stcenturywiener.org/writings-on-norbert-wiener/ The writer's critical perspective regarding military technology leads to a co-biography supportive of Wiener but not of von Neumann. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile E. Medina (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2011). Wiener dubbed Stafford Beer the father of management cybernetics. 

Rethinking algorithmic regulation | Kybernetes | Vol 44, No 6/7 www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/K-02-2015-0052?fullSc=1 
A discussion of Project Cybersyn requires a discussion of Stafford Beer, whom Norbert Wiener described as “the father of management cybernetics.” Beer conducted ....

 M.I.T. Scholar's 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - The New York  Times
May 20, 2013 - The Machine Age,” an essay written for The New York Times by Norbert Wiener, a visionary mathematician, languished for six decades in the M.I.T. ... 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation.

 The Lost 1949 Essay That Predicted The Computerized World We Live In http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-lost-1949-essay-that-predicted-the-computerized-wor-509540334? [PDF]

The Machine Age, version 3, 1949 - Monoskop https://monoskop.org/images/3/31/Wiener_Norbert_The_Machine_Age_v3_1949.pdfPage 1 of 8. The Machine Age, by Norbert Wiener, version 3, 1949. Copyright Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Courtesy of MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries - 
P2P Foundation wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetic_Revolutionaries May 1, 2015 - Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile. By Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2011. URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries ... Computers that merely enabled factory automation were of little use; what Beer called the “cussedness of things” required human involvement. It's here that ... 



 Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the ... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybernetics-Second-Control...Machine.../B002XUKWLC Rating: 5 - ‎4 reviews Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press) eBook: Norbert Wiener: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store. ... Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press). Prodigy of probability | MIT News news.mit.edu/2011/timeline-wiener-0119 Jan 19, 2011 - Norbert Wiener gained fame as the father of cybernetics, but his earlier work on statistical descriptions of complex systems may prove more important. 

“Who believed in a second industrial revolution? 'the age of computers ... https://repub.eur.nl/pub/50302/Explaining-computers-v4-juli-13.pdf by D van Lente - ‎2013 for the second industrial revolution we could quote luminaries like Norbert Wiener, J.D. Bernal,. CP Snow and many others. ... computers and automation spread very quickly during the fifties and sixties, and one may expect that they raised ... Technology and politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Press 2011). 

 Towards a Rhizomatic Technical History of Control By Goffey, Andrew | New Formations, Summer 2015 |https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-435637263/towards-a-rhizomatic-technical-history-of-control 

 On Socialist Cybernetics, Accelerationist Dreams, and Tiqqun’s Nightmares 

 Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas 
 Algorithms Dec 18, 2016 - “One day, it's going to no longer be arbitrary to reframe 20th century proposal and its clever machines as a quest for the confident definition of blunders, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of ideas that must be understood of their cognitive, technological and political composition. it can be ...

  1. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE TRAUMAS

    https://library.oapen.org/.../978-3-95796-066-5-Alleys_of_Your_Mind.pdf · PDF file

    Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. ... Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas


 Norbert Wiener’s Vision: The Impact of “the Automatic Age” on Our Moral Lives 
Terrell Ward Bynum Southern Connecticut State University http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/bynum.pdf 
Foreseeing the Information Age During the Second World War, while working to design a new kind of antiaircraft cannon, mathematician Norbert Wiener and several of his colleagues developed a new branch of applied science — the science of information feedback systems — which Wiener named “cybernetics”. With impressive foresight, Wiener realized that this new science, when combined with the electronic digital computers that were being developed to support the war effort, had enormous social and ethical implications. Soon after the Second World War, therefore, Wiener began to write and lecture about the social and ethical challenges of the coming “automatic age”, which he also called “the second industrial revolution”


Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
 Front Cover Seb Franklin MIT Press, Sep. 4, 2015 - Philosophy - 211 pages 1 Review https://books.google.ca/books?id=j4OICgAAQBAJ&dq=MIT+CHILE+ALLENDE+AUTOMATION+NORBERT+WIENER&source=gbs_navlinks_s https://www.amazon.ca/Control-Digitality-as-Cultural-Logic/dp/0262029537/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522280369&sr=1-1&keywords=9780262029537&dpID=41gMUHsF2KL&preST=_SY264_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control, Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the "information economy" possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, Franklin names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, Franklin locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.


 How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
 Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS -- its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world. 

 Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the
 by B Peters - ‎2016 - ‎Related articles May 2, 2016 - MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-not-network-nation .... Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, concluding line ..... Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

Building the information society: A history of computing as a mass medium
 ProQuest


Folk Psychology as Mental Simulation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Introduction: The Mechanical Mind Philip Husbands, Michael Wheeler, and Owen Holland https://gpreview.kingborn.net/182000/98248e2a7b3a4326813d6ad7a7948ac5.pdf


Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue - Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences hsns.ucpress.edu/content/46/5/633.full-text.pdf 


 InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
 Slava Gerovitch* Taylor and Francis GHAT_A_304641.sgm 10.1080/07341510802044736 History and Technology 0734-1512 (print)/1477-2620 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 
244000000December 2008 SlavaGerovitch slava@MIT.edu This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s–1970s. It explores the mechanism by which these proposals were circulated, debated, and revised in the maze of Party and government agencies. The article examines the role of different groups – cybernetics enthusiasts, mathematical economists, computer specialists, government bureaucrats, and liberal economists – in promoting, criticizing, and reshaping the concept of a national computer network. The author focuses on the political dimension of seemingly technical proposals, the relationship between information and power, and the transformative role of users of computer technology 


 Definition of Cybernetics | Blog | Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan bernardg.com/blog/definition-cybernetics by B Geoghegan - ‎Related articles Ever wonder what cybernetics was? Or maybe is? It's a baffling question and even the leading theorists of cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s could hardly agree on the definition. In the last few years historians Eden Medina and Andrew Pickering, for example, have shown that the understanding, definition, and use of cybernetics varied tremendously from one context to another. Even Norbert Wiener, who is widely credited with founding cybernetics, offered varying and contradictory accounts of the field. Recently communications theorist BEN PETERS and I wrote up our own definition and introduction to the field for the forthcoming JOHNS HOPKINS GUIDE TO DIGITAL MEDIA AND TEXTUALITY, edited by Lori Emerson, Benjamin Robertson, and Marie-Laure Ryan. The editors have put together a stellar volume with entries by Simon Penny, Jay David Bolter, Matthew Fuller, Matthew Gold, Johanna Drucker, Jussi Parikka, Eduardo Kac and other notable theorists of digital media. Below is the rough draft of the entry Ben and I prepared. For the final, more polished draft, pick up a copy of the guide when it comes out. 

The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age 
by Ronald R. Kline. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 352 pp. http://issues.org/33-4/book-review-a-coming-of-information-age-story/ 
What was cybernetics? As Ronald Kline tells it in his new intellectual history, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, cybernetics suffered from being too many things at once: an interdisciplinary field of study, a philosophical worldview, a popular buzzword, an intellectual fad, and a theory of automation and control. That it could be all these things and not be wholly incoherent is a testament to the genius of its creator, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. In charting the rise, fall, and legacy of cybernetics, Kline attempts to prove, mostly successfully, that it was cybernetics that gave rise to the coinage and conception of our “information age.” 


 The Cybernetics Society
Web site of The Cybernetics Society, the UK national learned society and professional body promoting pure and applied cybernetics information archive news events. 


 Here Lies Project Cybersyn aedhgsa.ca/docs/Strata/Volume_7/STRATA_vol7_ROSE_CLANCEY.pdf
 by R CLANCEY - ‎Related articles Interrompu par le coup d'État qui mit fin au gouvernement .... President Salvador Allende sought to bring great change to Chile, and. Project Cybersyn was a part of his program for a modern, independent, socialist Chile. .... 19 See: Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine.

 the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener - WordPress.com
Apr 29, 2013 - sciences: the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener, Russian Journal of Communication, 5:1,. 31-43. To link to this article: ...... Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University ... [PDF]

Mechanical Mind in History - EPDF.TIPS
https://epdf.tips/download/the-mechanical-mind-in-history-bradford-books.html interest in the subject carried over into peacetime. In the early 1940s a circle of scientists intent on understanding general principles underlying behavior in animals and machines began to gather around the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Inspired by. Wiener's classified work on automatic gun aiming, ...

 EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
 By Orit Halpern Duke University Press
ISBN electronic: 978-0-8223-7632-3 
Publication date: 2015 
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption. 


 Human Control and Autonomy in Cybernetic Systems
 David Shen Georgetown University 
Abstract This paper is meant to question the idea that humans in cybernetic systems are autonomous in the traditional western liberal conception. Examination of the history of cybernetics reveals conflicts over the role of humans within human/machine systems over a larger period than is traditionally associated with the field of cybernetics. By comparing cybernetic systems from before the 20th century and through the Cold War, it becomes apparent how cybernetics served as an experimental testing ground for political ideologies to express themselves in the budding information age. Comparing cybernetics systems in this manner suggests that cybernetics as a discipline does not inherently support or contradict the ideals of freedom and agency, but rather, cybernetic systems become extensions of the organizations they serve and adopt their parent organizations beliefs. 


Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media
November 24, 2016 Abstract Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve (among others) two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts towards using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit merging the natural with the artificial: the nature of a ... 

 by AJ Malapi-Nelson - ‎2015 - ‎Related articles Abstract This thesis is concerned with the rise and fall of cybernetics, understood as an inquiry regarding the nature of a machine. The collapse of this scientific movement, usually explained by external factors such as lack of funding, will be addressed from a philosophical standpoint. Delving deeper into the theoretical core of cybernetics, one could find that the contributions of William Ross Ashby and John von Neumann shed light onto the particular ways in which cybernetics understood the nature and behavior of a machine. Ross Ashby offered an account of the nature of a machine and then extended the scope of “the mechanical”. This extension would encompass areas that will later be shown to be problematic for mechanization, such as learning and adaptation. The way in which a machine-ontology was applied would trigger effects seemingly contrary to cybernetics’ own distinctive features. Von Neumann, on the other hand, tinkered with a mechanical model of the brain, realizing grave limitations that prompted him to look for an alternative for cybernetics to work on. The proposal that came out of this resulted in a serious blow against the theoretical core of cybernetics. Why did cybernetics collapse? The contributions coming from both thinkers, in their own ways, spelled out the main tenets of the cybernetic proposal. But these very contributions led to cybernetics’ own demise. The whole story can be framed under the rubric of a serious inquiry into the metaphysical underpinnings of a machine. The rise and fall of cybernetics could thus help us better understand what a machine is from a philosophical standpoint. Although a historical component is present, my emphasis relies on a philosophical consideration of the cybernetic phenomenon. This metaphysical dissection will attempt to clarify how a machine-based ontology remained at the core of cybernetics. An emerging link will hopefully lead towards establishing a tri-partite correlation between cybernetics’ own evolution, its theoretical core, and its collapse. It will hopefully show how cybernetic inquiries into the nature of a machine might have proved fatal to the very enterprise at large, due to unsolvable theoretical tensions. 

 Claus Pias 
In Defense of Cybernetics. A Reminiscence
One cannot speak of defense without also speaking of cybernetics. From a historical point of view, it recommends itself as the science of defense par excellence, and in two respects. On the one hand, it owes its modern form essentially to the air defense systems of World War Two, i.e. automatic target prediction and enemy tracking. Peter Galison was right in particularly emphasizing this point and developing it into a broad contemporary-history diagnosis (Galison 1994). On the other hand, however, the question of system stabilization, the establishing of dynamic balances, can also be seen from the perspective of defense. After their being modeled, by which the relevant factors for their regulating activity is determined, cybernetic systems stabilize themselves through continuous defense against everything that might constitute a threat to their continuity. Cybernetic systems are constantly threatened with destabilization and constantly legitimized by defense. Hence, perturbation constitutes their right to exist, and defense appears as a positive force. Perturbation is what causes a permanent need for intervention, and defense is what permanently fulfills it. Therefore, cybernetics is to be characterized as a technical as well as a political science. And this brings back into focus that cybernetics – long before its neurologically and computer technologically inspired reinvention towards the end of WW II – has a double origin. In Greek antiquity, it means technology and politics at the same time: it designates both procedures of controlling missiles and procedures of controlling history; it names the control of material things and of historical events; it repels intruding enemies and adverse conditions, in both cases maintaining a paradoxical relationship with the future.


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Tuesday, June 01, 2021

Why the Soviets didn’t start a PC revolution
by Vilius Petkauskas
29 May 2021
in Editorial



Data processing workers with a Bulgarian ISOT EC 1035 in 1981.

First in space, Venus and Mars, the USSR did not lack engineering prowess. Why then, a revolution in personal computing happened westward of the Iron Curtain? Ideology played a role, of course, but computers were also just not cool enough.

Long before computers became phones, cameras, or TVs, their primary purpose was war. The power to calculate missile trajectories, nuclear impacts, and resource distribution within hours instead of months was, and still is, a crucial advantage over an enemy.

People in charge of the USSR were fully aware that the British and the Americans employed artificial machines to do their math for them. The official line on cybernetics was hostile, and computer science was denounced as ‘dehumanizing capitalism.’ Secretly, however, catching up was in full swing.
Mera CM 7209 in Chernobyl, Pripyat. Image source.

In 1962, President Kennedy’s top aid warned that if the Soviets manage to turn things around, ‘by 1970, the USSR may have a radically new production technology’ with self-teaching computers and concluded that without a change in pace on the American side ‘we are finished.’

As we now know very well, that did not materialize. So much so that there’s hardly anyone able to name at least a single Soviet computer brand. Understanding the benefits computing provides, it seems exceptionally odd.

According to Slava Gerovitch, science historian and director of the Program for Research In Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (PRIMES) at MIT, the history of computing in the USSR happened in waves. Computers were frowned upon, loved, and distrusted in 40 years.

“Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,” Gerovitch told CyberNews.

I sat down with Gerovitch to discuss how ideology might have affected the cyber race, how different Soviet computing was, and why the said socialist revolutionaries did not champion the digital revolution that benefited the West so much.


Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,Slava Gerovitch.

Looking back at the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union seemingly had technical capabilities to be on par with the United States. I’m talking about the rapid development of the atomic bomb, advanced aviation, and space capabilities. Would it be unreasonable to assume that the Soviets were not far behind the US, at least early on in terms of computing?

The first electronic digital computers were built in the US for the atomic bomb calculations in the mid-forties. The Soviets learned about them and started constructing their own. So, there was a definitive lag from the start.

With rocket development, the Soviets learned a lot from German scientists, so there was some technology transfer. There was a lot of ingenuity on the Soviet side, of course, but the Russians appropriated new technology, developed it, and improved it.

Also, the process of launching new technological initiatives was very different from the US. In the States, the military would present a problem and open funding for qualified academics to submit proposals to solve the problem using that funding. In the Soviet case, it was a top-down decision to assign someone to work on an issue.

So, there was little competition. Later on, as competition emerged when they had established institutions, there was competition among institutions, even in the Soviet system. But in the 1940s, like the work of Sergey Lebedev in Kyiv on the first Soviet electronic digital computer, the MESM machine, was initially his own initiative.
Mera CM 7209 terminal computer. Image source.

Essentially, using the resources he had personally under his control as director of the Institute of Electric Technology in Kyiv. It took a while before the proponents of electronic digital computers won the argument with the proponents of an analog computer in the Soviet Union and could get resources to launch a massive project of building a large electronic digital computer.

So even though the Soviets had had an Institute established for the development of large computers in 1948, initially, the champions of analog computer computers controlled the institute.

For two years, that Institute had had lots of resources. Still, they pulled all those resources into analog computing, and only in 1950, the proponents of electronic digital computing won that argument.

What you said paints a picture that there was a path dependency that started from the initial lag. Is it correct to assume this? Meaning the Soviets were always catching up instead of leading the race in computing?

In one sense, yes. The Soviets already knew that the Americans and the British had working machines, whereas they were trying to build the machines. But they did not know many details about the Western machines. So, they had a fair amount of room for their own invention rather than just coping Western machines. There was some room for interesting, genuine developments.


Cybernetics became a victim of the entire ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who are not in any way connected with actual computer development,Slava Gerovitch.

In your book From Newspeak to Cyber-speak, you talk about the Soviet refusal to accept cybernetics. You discuss how the computer in the Soviet Union was taken as a ‘giant calculator’ while the Americans saw it as a ‘giant brain.’ How did that ideological strain limit Soviet advances in computing, if they did at all?

There were two parallel developments. On one side, electronics engineers were working on new calculating machines for the military. This was a respectable activity, with a high priority for the defense industry, meaning the military provided necessary resources.

A parallel development, totally independent of this, was an ideological campaign in the Soviet media against all sorts of ideological targets in the West associated with American imperialism. That included academic theories developed in the West, including cybernetics.

Cybernetics became a victim of the ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who were not in any way connected with actual computer developments.

It became clear to the Soviet engineers who were working on computers that they should not in any way associate their work on computers with ‘tainted’ cybernetics. That led to engineers talking about their work as purely technical. Computers were essentially large calculators rather than machines capable of performing a thinking function. That would have put them in danger of being linked with ideologically tainted cybernetics.

While this helped them avoid ideological attacks, it limited their vision for applications of computers. They preferred not to seek contact with scientists working in various fields who might’ve used those computers for running computer simulations to advance other scientific disciplines. The need to avoid ideological complications led to the limited area of applications of computers in this initial period in the early 1950s.
Computers on display in a parade in Eastern Germany, 1987. Image source.

Another factor, maybe even more important, was that computers were available only in defense institutions. So, scientists who could have used computers for simulations either didn’t know about those computers or didn’t have access to them. In essence, engineers were not interested in attracting users from the academy.

That ideological lag ties into the fact that by the late ’70s, the Americans witnessed a revolution in personal computing, while the Soviets could not meet the same speed of change. The Americans had Commodore, TRS, Apple, and all other sorts of machines. There wasn’t anything of that sort in the USSR up until 1983. Does it mean that ideology hindered the spread of computers in the Soviet Union?

The ideological complications with cybernetics and the applications of computers beyond pure calculation ended in the mid-50s when cybernetics was rehabilitated. Instead, it was pictured as a communist science. At that time, it became ideologically very beneficial to be associated with cybernetics.

Cybernetics was mentioned in the 1961 program of the Communist Party. It became ideologically acceptable to use computers for symbol processing and computer simulations. Naturally, scientists were very interested in using computers. And it was a very popular field from the mid-50s to the early-70s.

So, the cybernetics campaign of the ’50s did not have a long-term negative effect. There were other factors at play. By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show for it.

Skepticism began to creep in among serious scientists about those early claims of the usefulness of computers. There also was skepticism because cybernetics became ideologically correct. Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it.

That way cybernetics became a term associated with government-imposed efficiency-oriented control and not with novelty and reform in the sciences. That was particularly evident in economics, where people saw computers being used at various factories to control information and monitor people’s performance more effectively.

\\By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show,Slava Gerovitch.

Focusing on personal computing, other factors were at play. Computers are communication devices. You can easily store, transfer, copy, print, and distribute information. That means a computer is a tool for autonomous communication, not controlled by the suspicious government. Therefore, the Soviet government was not terribly keen for personal computers to get into many people’s hands.

Another thing was that PC manufacturing requires a consumer-focused industry which was not a priority for the Soviet Union. So, the quality of parts and components that were produced was not high. Take the Soviet automobile: when you bought one, the first thing you did was starting to fix it.

It was the same with computers. You had to be an engineer to use it. The very concept of personal computing in the West was that it was for general consumers, not necessarily computer scientists or engineers. There were very different environments in which PCs were introduced and to very different audiences.

However, something did change during the mid-80s. With Perestroika, there was an explosion of Soviet-made PCs. Some models were even meant for export. Can the change be linked only to policy changes, or have the Soviet Union increased its technological capabilities?

With Perestroika, the government controls on small economic activity became looser. People could import computers from the West, and suddenly people were allowed to resell computers from the Western countries. They could also buy spare parts in the West, assemble their computers, or assemble their own devices out of Soviet-made parts.

There was room for less controlled economic activity that somewhat met the popular demand for PCs. With less control over communications, people started exchanging emails with the outside world. The need for communication devices and information processing devices rose, and it was met by import and local manufacturing.

A prototype of a home automation system. Image source.

But with the general decline of the Soviet industry and the early post-Soviet period, when the government stopped subsidizing prices, the production collapsed very quickly. From then on, Russia essentially relied on foreign-produced personal computers.

Earlier, you’ve mentioned the divergence in technology development and the notion of cybernetics developing independently from Western ideas. Are there any Soviet contributions to computing that still are noticeable today? For people born after the Soviet Union collapsed, it’s very easy to think that no innovation came from the USSR.

There were some interesting innovations by Soviet computer engineers and software developers. Some of them were the results of necessity and scarcity of parts when the Soviets had to solve complex problems with minimal technological resources. So, they tried to invent new computer architectures that might be more efficient than traditional ones.

For example, our usual computers have zeros and ones, two states for each cell in computer memory. But in the fifties, the Soviets developed three-value machines. This required a different type of programming, a different kind of software. It was a much more efficient use of computer resources.

Also, the Soviets had a tradition of very efficient programming in low-level computer languages, which required many mathematical skills in designing efficient algorithms. Working with low-level computer languages, essentially machine codes, assembler codes, allowed programmers to use computer resources very efficiently. However, it was a very challenging mathematical and logical task to write those programs, debug them, and so forth. It requires a lot of expertise from programmers.

The Soviet programmers are also well-known since, in those early years, they were able to pack compelling and efficient programs into computers that had very little memory. Due to efficient programming, the Soviets were able to solve the problems they needed.
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Saturday, October 25, 2025

Cybernation And The Transformation Of The Nation-State: A Postmodern Inquiry – Essay




October 24, 2025
By Dr. Azly Rahman

Introduction: The Cybernating Nation in a Globalized World

In the contemporary landscape of globalization and post-industrialism, the concept of a “cybernating nation” emerges as a critical lens for understanding how developing societies integrate advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet and telematics, into their socio-political and economic fabrics. Cybernation refers not merely to technological adoption but to a profound cybernetic reconfiguration of societal structures, where feedback loops between human agency, institutional power, and digital networks redefine national trajectories.

This essay expands upon a series of interconnected theses to explore the multifaceted implications of cybernation. Drawing from center-periphery dynamics, complexity theory, structuralism, and resistance paradigms, it argues that cybernation accelerates both integration into global systems and internal contestations of power, ultimately eroding traditional notions of sovereignty while fostering new forms of enculturalized discourse. These transformations, best illuminated through postmodern lenses, reveal the tensions between hegemony and subaltern agency in an increasingly wired world.

“The Enduring Grip of Center-Periphery Dynamics in Cybernation”

At the heart of cybernation lies the persistent center-periphery pattern of development, a framework originating from dependency theory that posits global economic and cultural flows as radiating from core (developed) nations to peripheral (developing) ones. In a globalized post-industrialist world, the development of a cybernating nation will continue to follow, to a degree or another, this center-periphery pattern.

Peripheral nations, eager to harness ICTs for economic leapfrogging, often replicate the infrastructural and ideological blueprints of the center—adopting Western-modeled digital platforms, data protocols, and innovation hubs—while reaping asymmetric benefits. For instance, investments in fiber-optic networks or the 5G rollout in nations like India or Kenya mirror Silicon Valley’s ecosystems but serve primarily to funnel data and labor to global corporations, perpetuating unequal exchange.

This pattern extends to the macro-level contestations of power, where hegemony between cybernating and fully cybernated nations defines global hierarchies. Fully cybernated centers, such as the United States or China, exert a gravitational pull through proprietary algorithms and standards, compelling peripherals to align or risk obsolescence. At the micro-level, however, power fractures along domestic lines, with contending political parties or groups vying for control over cybernetic resources—be it spectrum allocation or digital surveillance tools. Thus, cybernation does not dismantle center-periphery asymmetries but amplifies them, channeling peripheral creativity toward emulative models of success.

Complementing this, globalization theory underscores how creative consciousness in cybernating nations becomes centralized in business and the arts, patterned after triumphant global corporations. Entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral hubs, from Bangalore’s tech parks to Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah, cultivate a cosmopolitan ethos that prizes innovation and branding, often at the expense of indigenous epistemologies. This centralization fosters a hybrid cultural economy where local artisans collaborate with multinational firms, yet the fruits of such creativity—intellectual property and market access—flow disproportionately outward, reinforcing peripheral dependence.

“Complexity, Nationalism, and the Semantic Reconfiguration of Cybernetics”

Traditional historical materialism, with its linear dialectics of class struggle and productive forces, falters in explicating cybernation’s nonlinear trajectories. A purely historical materialist conception of change cannot fully explain why nations cybernate; the more a nation gets “wired,” the more complex the interplay between nationalism and internationalism becomes. Cybernation introduces emergent properties—unpredictable feedback loops where digital connectivity amplifies both centrifugal (globalizing) and centripetal (nationalist) forces. In complex systems, small inputs, such as viral social media campaigns, can cascade into regime-shifting upheavals, as seen in the Arab Spring, where Twitter’s algorithms intertwined local grievances with transnational solidarity.

This complexity manifests semantically and structurally, where the enculturalization of “cybernetics” itself becomes a battleground. The more a nation transforms itself cybernetically, the more extensive the enculturalization and transformation of the term “cybernetics” will be. Borrowed from Norbert Wiener’s foundational work on control and communication, “cybernetics” evolves from a technical term into a culturally laden signifier—recast in peripheral contexts as “digital sovereignty” in Russia or “jugaad tech” in India, blending foreign precision with local improvisation.

Structuralist semiotics reveals how these shifts in signifiers alter signified realities, embedding cybernetic logic into everyday discourses of governance, education, and identity. The political economy of this linguistic transformation is pivotal: the extent of the enculturalization of the concept of “cybernetics” will determine the speed at which a nation will be fully integrated into the global production-house of the telematics industry. Nations that swiftly domesticate cybernetic jargon—through policy glossaries, educational curricula, or media narratives—accelerate value-chain insertion, attracting foreign direct investment in data centers and AI hubs. Conversely, linguistic resistance, such as vernacular tech lexicons in non-English-dominant peripherals, can delay integration, preserving pockets of autonomous innovation but risking isolation from global standards.

“Authoritarianism, Resistance, and the Erosion of State Power”

Cybernation intersects with authoritarianism in profound ways, where regime strength dictates the scope and velocity of digital transformation. The stronger the authority of the regime, the greater the control and magnitude of the cybernating process. In a cybernating nation, authority can reside in the political will of a single individual or in a strong political entity, consequently producing the author’s “regime of truth,” to borrow Foucault’s phrase. Charismatic leaders in nations like Turkey under Erdoğan or the Philippines under Duterte have weaponized cybernetic tools—state-controlled firewalls and algorithmic propaganda—to consolidate power, crafting digital panopticons that monitor and mold public consent. This “regime of truth” naturalizes cybernation as an extension of sovereign will, masking its extractive undercurrents.

Yet, this centralization begets resistance, particularly as the Internet undermines state monopolies on narrative production. The advent of the Internet in a developing nation signifies the genesis of the erosion of the power of government-controlled print media. Universal access to the Internet will determine the total erosion of government-produced print media.

Subaltern voices will replace Grand Narratives. In cybernating peripherals, where state broadcasters once disseminated monolithic ideologies, platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram democratize discourse, amplifying marginalized groups—from indigenous activists in Bolivia to urban youth in Nigeria. This withering of the nation-state’s communicative hegemony fosters polyphonic publics, where Grand Narratives of progress yield to fragmented, user-generated counter-stories.

Resistance centralizes critical consciousness in arenas of political mobilization and personal expression, modeled after successful Internet-based groups. Emulating tactics from global movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, cybernating citizens repurpose social media for hashtag activism, doxxing corrupt officials, or coordinating flash protests. The more the government suppresses voices of political dissent, the more the Internet is used to affect political transformations. Suppression—via shutdowns or troll farms—paradoxically catalyzes circumvention, with VPNs and dark web forums becoming tools of subversion, turning digital repression into a feedback loop of escalating defiance.

“Imperialism, Deep-Structuring, and the Threat to Sovereignty”

Modern imperialism permeates cybernation, where external ideologies steer internal mutations. The fundamental character of a nation will be significantly altered with the institutionalization of the Internet as a tool of cybernating change. The source of change will, however, be ideologically governed by external influences, which will ultimately threaten the sovereignty of the nation-state. Platforms engineered in the Global North—Google, Meta, Tencent—impose neoliberal logics of surveillance capitalism, reshaping peripheral subjectivities from communal to consumerist. This neo-colonialism manifests in data sovereignty disputes, where peripheral governments enact laws like India’s Data Protection Bill, only to negotiate concessions with imperial tech giants.

At deeper levels, discourse embeds these shifts in language, eroding indigenous cores. The discourse of change, as evident in the phenomena of cybernation, is embedded in language. The more a foreign concept is introduced, adopted, assimilated, and enculturalized, the more the nation will lose its indigenous character built via schooling and other means of citizenship enculturalization processes. School curricula infused with STEM jargon supplant traditional cosmologies, while algorithmic biases in education apps perpetuate Anglocentric worldviews. This deep-structuring—akin to Gramscian hegemony—subtly supplants national mythologies with globalized cybernetic myths, hollowing out cultural sovereignty.

Conclusion: “Embracing Postmodern Paradigms for Cybernetic Inquiry”

Ultimately, comprehending cybernation demands paradigms attuned to flux and multiplicity. Postmodernist perspectives of social change—discourse theory, semiotics, and chaos/complexity theory—rather than those of structural-functionalists, Marxists, or neo-Marxists, can best explain the structure and consequences of cybernetic changes. Where structural-functionalism views society as equilibrated systems and Marxism as deterministic base-superstructure dialectics, postmodernism captures the rhizomatic, non-linear sprawl of cybernetic networks: discourses that fractalize power, signs that mutate meanings, and chaotic attractors that birth emergent resistances. In cybernating nations, these lenses reveal not inevitable decline but creative potentials—hybrids of center and periphery, authority and dissent—that could redefine global orders. As peripherals wire deeper into the digital mesh, the challenge lies in harnessing cybernation for endogenous futures, lest it consummate the very imperialisms it ostensibly disrupts.

Dr. Azly Rahman grew up in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in six fields of study: Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies, Communication, Creative Non-Fiction, and Fiction Writing. He has written 10 books and more than 500 analyses/essays on Malaysia. His 35 years of teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He is a frequent contributor to scholarly online forums in Malaysia, the USA, Greece, and Montenegro. He also writes in Across Genres: https://azlyrahman.substack.com/about

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Wednesday, September 04, 2024

 

How zebrafish map their environment



Spatial orientation mechanisms surprisingly similar to our own


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Tracking microscope 

image: 

A tracking microscop follows the zebrafish during their natural behaviour.

 

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Credit: Jean-Claude Winkler/MPI for Biological Cybernetics




Researchers are turning to zebrafish to unlock the secrets of place cells, which play a crucial role in forming mental maps of space, social networks, and abstract relationships. Until now, place cells have only been found in mammals and birds, leaving the question of how other species internally represent the external world largely unanswered. A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has now found the first compelling evidence for place cells in the brain of the tiny larval zebrafish.

When we explore an unfamiliar city, we use various cues – landmarks, a sense of how far we have walked in one direction, perhaps a river we cannot cross – to create an internal map of our environment. Deep in the brain, in a structure called the hippocampus, a set of place cells play a key role in building our internal maps of the external world. These place cells fire when we are at specific locations in space and can self-organize into an array of different mental maps.

That much is known for mammals, including humans, and even for birds. However, the existence of place cells in other species is controversial. A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (Germany), led by Jennifer Li and Drew Robson, has now found the first conclusive evidence for place cells in zebrafish.

Recording the entire brain during natural behaviour

The researchers recorded the brain activity of young zebrafish as they explored their environment. These fish are completely transparent when they are only a few days old, making it possible to look into their tiny brains, which contain only 100,000 cells. One can even make individual active neurons light up using fluorescent calcium indicators, since all neuronal activity is associated with fluctuations in calcium ion concentrations. An earlier key invention of Li and Robson was essential for observing brain activity during navigation: tracking microscopes that move with the freely swimming fish.

Using this experimental design, the team analysed what spatial information is encoded in each neuron in the fish's brain. They identified a population of about 1000 place cells in each fish, most of which only fire when the animal is in a specific location, while a few respond to more than one area. “Collectively, the place cell population encodes spatial information,” explains Jennifer Li. “From the firing patterns of the place cells, we were able to decode the location of each fish over time – with an error of just a few millimetres.”

Strikingly, most of the place cells were located in the telencephalon, an area of the zebrafish’s forebrain, whose precise function has been a source of debate for several decades. “The high concentration of place cells in the telencephalon potentially confirms the longstanding conjecture that this brain region is a functional analogue of the mammalian hippocampus, in miniature,” comments Drew Robson.

A flexible mechanism that integrates different inputs

However, Li and Robson needed additional evidence to conclude that the cells they had identified were indeed an analogue to mammalian place cells. The first feature to be tested was whether place cells use self-motion or external cues. In terms of human experience, a cue such as "I’ve been walking straight ahead at a brisk pace for about a minute" relies on self-motion, whereas "I can see the Eiffel Tower" is an external cue. In a series of experiments, the researchers manipulated both sources of information – taking the fish out of their environment and placing them back, removing landmarks, or rotating the behavioural chamber. They found that the fish integrate both external and self-motion cues to create their internal maps – just like we do.

Not only do the fish appear to refine their spatial representation map as they become more familiar with an unfamiliar environment, but they can also adapt to change: they use the same neuronal circuits to remember a second environment. When returned to their initial surroundings, they do not have to map it from scratch, but can partially recover the representation map they created previously. Thus, the place cell population exhibits a flexible memory system, a further hallmark of mammalian place cells.

An emerging model organism for a complex neuronal network

The authors of the study plan to use zebrafish as a new model organism to unravel the mysteries of place cells. In addition to their role in creating mental maps of space, these cells are also crucial for forming maps of social networks and abstract relationships, as well as for memory and planning. While mammalian place cells have been intensively investigated since their Nobel Prize-winning discovery more than 50 years ago, scientists still do not fully understand the neural networks that generate place cells or how they support such a wide range of mental functions.

The primary challenge has been the sheer complexity and size of mammalian place cell networks, which make it extremely difficult to study the entire network simultaneously. In contrast, the larval zebrafish brain is one of the smallest biological systems capable of generating place cells. Robson concludes: “Using this new minimal model, future studies can potentially trace all of the inputs to each place cell and create detailed models for how place cells acquire all their unique properties.”

A behavioral chamber under the tracking microscope

Credit

Jean-Claude Winkler/MPI for Biological Cybernetics

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-07867-2 

Article Title

A population code for spatial representation in the zebrafish telencephalon.

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2024

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