Reviews and News:
Why we need the Religious Right.
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Wittenberg today: “Wittenberg has become a city-sized shrine to Luther—and to his colleagues Melanchthon, Johannes Bugenhagen, and a few others. But mostly to Luther. It wasn’t always this way, though. Travelers of the 19th century lamented that Luther’s house was a dump, the university had moved to neighboring Halle, and the whole town was rather miserable. It’s clearly not what the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe expected to find when in the 1850s she visited what she and others deemed the ‘Protestant Mecca.’ For a long time Wittenberg lay forgotten, pieces of the true door notwithstanding. It never had been a great city like Rome or even nearby Leipzig or Erfurt. The only real fame it ever had came from Luther, from the fact that for a little while in the 16th century it was the center of the Reformation. In the past few decades the city, now renamed Lutherstadt Wittenberg after its patron, has been completely cleaned up, renovated, and readied for the throngs of visitors streaming in to honor Germany’s most famous figure.”
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Revisiting Orson Well’s War of the Worlds: “Coming at the end of the nineteenth century, The War of the Worlds invoked the dread that simmered beneath late Victorian triumphalism, not so different from the angst and terror that made the television series 24, created in the wake of the US victory in the Cold War, such a riveting show until the antics of its superhero became tiresome. Unlike Jack Bauer, however, Wells never declares it is going to be okay.”
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British book dealer killed for first edition of The Wind in the Willows.
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British A-level art history exam to end in 2018.
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Benjamin Peters retells the story of the Soviet attempt to build a national network—The All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning and Governance of the National Economy—and what its failure can teach us today:
“On the morning of 1 October 1970, the computer scientist Viktor Glushkov walked into the Kremlin to meet with the Politburo. He was an alert man with piercing eyes rimmed in black glasses, with the kind of mind that, given one problem, would derive a method for solving all similar problems. And at that moment the Soviet Union had a serious problem. A year earlier, the United States launched ARPANET, the first packet-switching distributed computer network that would in time seed the internet as we know it. The distributed network was originally designed to nudge the US ahead of the Soviets, allowing scientists’ and government leaders’ computers to communicate even in the event of a nuclear attack. It was the height of the tech race, and the Soviets needed to respond.
“Glushkov’s idea was to inaugurate an era of electronic socialism. He named the colossally ambitious project the All-State Automated System. It sought to streamline and technologically upgrade the entire planned economy. This system would still make economic decisions by state plans, not market prices, but sped up by computer modelling to predict equilibria before they happen. Glushkov wanted smarter and faster decision-making, and maybe even electronic currency. All he needed was the Politburo’s purse.
“But when Glushkov entered the cavernous room that morning, he noticed two empty chairs at the long table: his two strongest allies were missing. Instead, he faced down a table of ambitious, steely-eyed ministers – many of whom wanted the Politburo’s purse and support for themselves.
“Between 1959 and 1989, leading Soviet men of science and state repeatedly ventured to construct a national computer network for broadly prosocial purposes. With the deep wounds of the Second World War far from healed (80 per cent of Russian men born in 1923 died in the war), the Soviet Union continued to specialise in massive modernisation projects that had transformed a dispersed tsarist nation of illiterate peasants into a global nuclear power in the course of a couple of generations.
“After the Soviet Union’s leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult in 1956, a sense of possibility swept the country. Onto this scene entered a host of socialist projects to wire the national economy with networks, among them the first proposal anywhere in the world to create a national computer network for civilians. The idea was the brainchild of the military researcher Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov.
“A young man with a small build and a keen mind for mathematics, Kitov had risen through the ranks of the Red Army in the Second World War. Then, in 1952, he encountered Norbert Wiener’s masterwork Cybernetics (1948) in a secret military library, the book’s title a neologism coined from the Greek forsteersman and a postwar science of self-governing information systems. With the support of two senior scientists, Kitov translated cybernetics into a robust Russian-language approach to developing self-governing control and communication systems with computers. The supple systems vocabulary of cybernetics was intended to equip the Soviet state with a hi-tech toolkit for rational Marxist governance, an antidote to the violence and cult of personality characterising Stalin’s strongman state. Indeed, perhaps cybernetics could even help ensure that there would never again be another strongman dictator, or so went the technocratic dream.”
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Image of the Day: USS Constitution
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Poem: Karl Kirchwey, “Grand Canal”
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