How the Macy Conferences Shaped the Future
Read how getting people working on the edge of their disciplines together unleashed new thought paradigms, transformed entire disciplines and fuelled decades of innovation.
At the radical Macy conferences in New York in the 1940s, neuropsychologist Warren McCulloch’s job was to ensure that disciplinary boundaries were not followed. The idea behind the conferences was simple. Bring the best minds working at the edge of their disciplines to talk about our future. The Macy conferences influenced the internet and redefined social systems, psychology, neuroscience, and informatics for decades to come.
It was perhaps the first academic exercise in true transdisciplinarity.
How “Information” Was Born
The Macy conferences were set up to push the frontiers of medical research and develop a unified theory of the human mind. Invitees would not present their research or explore their domain expertise. Instead, they would discuss their work in progress and develop an epistemology that did not exist. The concept of “information”, so ubiquitous now, was born there.
Psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and mathematicians sat down to discuss what “information” meant to each of them in their domains and develop a common vocabulary to understand what the concept meant, and how it was changing over time. This allowed them to transcend disciplinary boundaries to develop new ways of seeing what was coming- the information revolution that was going to transform the world.
A Radical Theory of Regulation and Control
Using new terms such as “information,” “feedback,” and “analog/digital”, the participants tried to develop a universal theory of regulation and control, applicable to living beings as well as to machines, to economic as well as to mental processes, and to sociological as well as to aesthetic phenomena.
These concepts changed thinking in such diverse fields as biology, neurology, sociology, language studies, computer science, psychoanalysis, ecology, politics, and economy.
It created new methodologies in each discipline and opened space for interpretive inquiry in an interconnected system, something that was a result of putting the human next to the machine and interrogating both thoroughly.
This is how cybernetics and cognitive science were born twins.
Fusing Technology, Art and Design
Playing the role of a professional catalyst made John Brockman a superstar. Long before he joined the legendary MIT Media Labs, he was an established literary agent who brought together the worlds of the arts and sciences together, putting seemingly irreconcilable worlds in conversation(evident even today in the brilliant content that edge.org produces). He was buddies with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, known for going around circles that never otherwise intersected.
The story goes that Brockman was given a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics by Stewart Brand. Both read the book cover to cover in the following days. Brockman says that it changed his life. There were sowed the seeds of the “Third Culture” as a literary genre, along with science fiction as a new form of writing. He was called upon by MIT to organise meetings between those who did the arts and the sciences. He founded The Whole Earth Catalog, a collection of alternative products and innovative technologies that were cutting edge. What the MIT Media Lab would become as a center, full of diverse creative genius who did technology, art, and design under one roof and innovate far ahead than what the world could fathom, goes back to the fountainhead.
Impacting Apple to Postmodernism and Beyond
The conferences impacted people as diverse as Steve Jobs and Gilles Deleuze, the former drawing heavily from the catalog that Brockman started. The formative work available in the transcripts of the Macy Conferences was circulated far beyond its attendees and inspired a generation of American innovators late till the 21st century. Across disciplines, Norbert Wiener (the founding father of cybernetics) to philosopher Gilles Deleuze, to sociologist Jean Francois Lyotard, all owe their dazzling successes to the epoch changing shifts that Macy enabled. Thinking of information in systems through feedback, neural networks and the nature of information gave birth to Wiener’s path-breaking book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine that would create a new field of inquiry altogether. The idea was to arrive at principles of behaviour and information-feedback that would apply to organisms, machines and social systems.
Sociologist Jean Francis Lyotard traced the development and characteristics of the new information society that followed from industrial society in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He examined how for, the first time, whoever controlled data banks and communication systems would rule the world, years before businesses and thinkers hit the realisation. Gilles Deleuze became possibly the most radical French philosopher to write about societies of control that followed industrial society, worrying about issues such as surveillance in technologically advanced states.
It would be an understatement to say that the future was crafted at the Macy Conferences.
Lessons for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The “human” as we know it, is fraying. At the cusp of a new technological transformation as we grapple with questions of human/artificial, material/abstract, subject/object we can learn much from what happened in those ten years. We need to come up with methods and techniques of engagement that foster newer understandings of what makes us human, what is consciousness and how do we understand the world we are going to inhabit. As computer scientists and philosophers ponder on what “intelligence” and “artificial” mean, we need mathematicians, ethicists, designers, and psychologists to get together and create new forms of thought and praxis that pave the way for tomorrow. Macy seems like a good place to look back to look ahead.
Can we think and create the future together afresh, now?
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