From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch

Where the expectation in the west is that science is neutral and it is the use to which it is put which may create ideological issues in the Soviet Union ideology took precedence over all else, even to the point of expecting all scientific theories to be accepted a priori regardless of Western proofs to the contrary. This history relates, through the history of Cybernetics, the Soviet concept that the West must both be overtaken and surpassed in its science and yet the goal was to “criticize and destroy” Western scholarship in order to prove that Soviet scholarship was ideologically superior. As each adjusts to the other, both become less meaningful.

Each one comes to define the other in an almost tautological manner. The focus of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak is the history of how Soviet ideological language and the language of cybernetics are intertwined. Fluency in cyberspeak was a must in order to survive. According to the author, “Cybernetics unifies diverse mathematical models, explanatory frameworks, and appealing metaphors form various disciplines by means of a common language.” Gerovitch has limited his book to cyberspeak in Soviet science. In the case of Gerovitch’s work, cyberspeak is the newspeak of cybernetics. In newspeak, words can have any meaning that the speaker chooses to attach to them, enabling the speaker to be politically correct while still continuing to have discussions about research in any field. It follows the trend in Soviet politics of using newspeak, defined as political words that are devoid of meaning in and of themselves, as a way to allow discussion of many topics without actually giving concrete meanings to those words. This book is a comprehensive history of cybernetics in the Soviet Union from its inception as an ideologically unacceptable pseudo-science to its eventual acceptance as the status quo. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch