Orit Halpern
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Orit Halpern’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You could plan better.
You could manage the ecosystem better or the city.
And so there was a lot of interchange between the two.
And people like Buckminster Fuller, who was a really prominent kind of technologist and futurist, started imagining cities like New York City as sort of these metabolic systems.
And eventually this went all the way up to the planet.
in a famous report called Limits to Growth in the 1970s that started the contemporary environmental movement and was an effort to computationally model all the world's systems, its environmental one and human ones, and try to understand the impact of human behavior on the planet.
I mean, I can say that it was extremely influential because I think people have to remember that at the time, cybernetics was the kind of language for computing.
I think John already mentioned that it really established a way of thinking about media and thinking about technology.
It was also incredibly influential to many of the artistic and avant-garde kind of milieus that McLuhan often represented.
engaged with, and also because cybernetics was so invested in making it not just about computers.
You know, one of the most remarkable things about this movement is the way it moves into modeling social systems, brains, humans, that really very quickly established that idea that the medium is indeed the message, because the medium is anything.
It doesn't just have to be digital.
I do also want to mention the Cold War elements.
Cybernetics, in many accounts, also began losing its luster because of its appeal to socialist and communist causes.
Not just the cyber scene example, which is actually a potent example of an alternative visions of cybernetics.
There was also a Soviet cybernetics.
And in fact, the very use of the term artificial intelligence came up to get American military funding.
outside of the rubric of cybernetics.
And some of it is said to be that, you know, Marvin Minsky didn't like Norbert Wiener.
But outside of that was probably a more sinister problem that cybernetics did actually have these possibilities of social management and planning, possibly socialist bent.
Showing 101–120 of 133 · page 6 of 7
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