A Review of Cyburbia
Posted By Marc on June 2, 2009
Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own.
Little Brown UK
Alfred A. Knopf Canada
On May 2nd, 2009, I had the pleasure of hosting James Harkin at the Ottawa Writers Festival as he talked about his new book Lost in Cyburbia. As someone who has a strong interest in cyberspace, I would have read the book anyway and found it quite interesting. What I did not expect to find in it was its strong application to and discussion of military planning.
Lost in Cyburbia is, to quote Sarah Murdoch of the National Post, is “a fine book with an atrocious title”. As with all good books, it is a story; in this case, a story of how the efforts to develop a working anti-aircraft system in World War II has led to the world we now live in.
Unfortunately for the reader, the work starts slowly. Indeed, after reading the introduction, I put the book down and avoided it for several days despite the well done, and engaging, preface. Luckily things pick up as the book progresses, and each chapter introduces new characters and components of the ongoing soap opera that is life.
In the first chapter, The Loop, we are introduced to Norbert Wiener, the “Father of Cybernetics” who took the concept of feedback loops from engineering and attempted to apply it to social systems. The impetus for this was the German bombing raids on London during World War II, and the simple observation that the information feedback loop between a bomber pilot and an anti-aiorcraft gunner was too slow. After the war, Wiener applied the same concept of information feedback loops to a growing array of social problems and situations and, in the process, developed the science of cybernetics.
The second chapter skips forward in time to the 1960′s and the rise of both the counter-culture and the New Left. In it, we are introduced to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the key players in introducing cybernetics to the counter-culture in the form of peer-to-peer sharing networks. Chapter three stays in the same time period, but moves from San Francisco to Toronto and brings media guru Marshall McLuhan to the fore.
The peer-to-peer sharing of Brand and the media savvy of McLuhan are drawn in with the rise of the computer industry and silicon valley in chapter 4, the Network Effect, while chapter 5 examines the real network effect: peer pressure and herd behaviour as exemplified in Facebook. These two chapters spin out the effects of cybernetic theory in action in the civilian world, and describe the operation of Cyburbia.
Starting in chapter 6, Haskin examines the non-linearity effect of an increasingly cybernetic society ranging from the 2002, IDF Operation Defensive Shield through movies and theatre and compueter games. In part, this examination shows the strengths of non-linear thinking and the changes in social consciousness of the generation raised in cybernetic feedback loops. At the same time, he also lays the groundwork for the weaknesses of such thinking, weaknesses that become aparent in the final chapters.
Chapter 7, Multiplicity, tells the strange story of Dr. Abdur Chowdhury’s attempt to make search engine data available for study. In telling this story, Haskin illuminates one of the key realities of living in a cybernic society – we externalize our “thinking” and, in doing so, give up much of the privacy of our mind. Perhaps more importantly, by externalizing much of our thought processes to search engines, we are increasingly externalizing judgement of what is and is not “relevant” (e.g. Search engine order rank), “real” and “valid”. Chapter 8 tells several stories that illustrate the changes noted in the previous chapter. Interestingly enough, they also all play off on the dangers inherent in the mode of consciousness brought about by cybernetic thinking.
Of all the chapters in the book, chapter 9 will be of most interest to people looking at military planning and strategy. Network Failure opens with a story that I never expected to see in a purely civilian work: the story of Millenium Challenge and how General Paul K. Van Ripper brilliantly highlighted all of the problems of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) touted by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It then traces the story of John Boyd and the introduction of the OODA loop, up through the total failure of the 2006 IDF war against Hezbollah.
While not specifically about military affairs, Cyburbia is exceedingly germain to many of the discussions now underway. In its scope, it has certain advantages over more militarily focused works. For one thing, after the Introduction, it is highly readible and engageing unlike many academic works of social history. A second, and more important point, is that while not focusing on military affairs, it contextualizes them within the broader social changes that have happened over the past 40 years. By doing so, it in effect addresses many of the issues currently plaguing the military in the area of communications technology (e.g. Milblogging, IO, etc.), pointing to both successes and failures of different strategies. It is well worth the read.
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