Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture (390-0-3)

Topic

Ecology, Cybernetics, and the Information Revoluti

Instructors

Hannah Glasson

Meeting Info

University Hall 312: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Ecology, Cybernetics, and the Information Revolution

This course traces the remarkable genealogy connecting the postwar science of cybernetics, the ecological counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the digital utopianism that shaped Silicon Valley and the early internet. Beginning with Norbert Wiener's foundational vision of communication and control in living systems, the course asks how a set of ideas about feedback, self-organization, and whole-systems thinking migrated from Cold War laboratories into the communes, catalogs, and eventually the server farms of the late twentieth century. At the center of this story stands a paradox: the same cultural moment that produced the back-to-the-land movement, deep ecology, and profound critiques of industrial civilization also incubated the ideology that would come to animate the most powerful technology industry in human history. How did countercultural dissent become entrepreneurial gospel? How did the rhetoric of ecological wholeness get recruited in service of market ideologies? And what were the political consequences of that transformation?

Class Materials (Required)

All readings will be posted on Canvas.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration is reserved for Environmental Sciences majors, Earth and Planetary Sciences major/minors, Science in Human Culture majors and minors, and Environmental Policy and Culture majors and minors..