The Information Revolution: How Soviet Cyberneticists Built the Liberal Information Age

Join us for a talk by Aro Velmet (University of Southern California) on:

The Information Revolution:  How Soviet Cyberneticists Built the Liberal Information Age

Estonia is often portrayed as the world’s most advanced „digital state,“ where citizens can vote, do their taxes, and renew their driver’s license, all online. According to this story, after fifty years of Soviet occupation, Estonia understood the dangers of monopolizing information and chose to break with the Soviet legacy by building a state where information was transparent, available, and online. 

This talk offers a different perspective. It explores the role of Soviet cybernetics and late socialist reform movements in the construction of the first iterations of the digital state. Why did Soviet thinkers imagine information technology as the solution to political and economic stagnation? And what can the long history of the information processing state tell us about late modern politics?

Aro Velmet is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. He is a visiting researcher at the Davis Center at Princeton University and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social Studies at the University of Tartu. He writes about technological utopias and the history of science in a variety of imperial and post-imperial contexts. His first book, Pasteur’s Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020), looked at how bacteriologists reimagined imperial governance in early twentieth century France. His current project, The Information Revolution, looks at how computer engineers reimagined imperial governance in late twentieth century Soviet Union.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session and screening of the film, "Disco and Atomic War" (2009). 

"The film tells the story of a strange kind of information war, where a totalitarian regime stands face to face with the heroes of popular culture. And loses. It was a time when it was possible for erotic film star Emmanuelle to bring down the Red Army and MacGyver to outdo an entire school administration. It is a film about our generation, who were unknowingly brought to the front line of the Cold War. Western popular culture had an incomparable role shaping Soviet children's world views in those days. Finnish television was a window to a world of dreams that the authorities could not block in any way. Though Finnish channels were banned, many households found some way to access the forbidden fruit." – Warsaw Film Festival

Free and open to the public. Registration is requested.