The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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greater the number of inside - out controls that enable the network to
function as a network.
In both computer and biological networks, the primary function of protocol
is to direct flows of information. In this sense, the networks we have
described are not new but have their ontological foundations in cybernetics,
information theory, and systems theory research in the mid - twentieth century.
This should come as no surprise, for both computer science and
molecular biology have their common roots in World War II and
postwar technical research. 23 The MIT mathematician and defense
researcher Norbert Wiener defined information as a choice or selection
from a set of variables. His influential book Cybernetics, or Control
and Communication in the Animal and the Machine looked across
the disciplines from electrical engineering to neurophysiology and
suggested that human, animal, and mechanical systems were united
in their ability to handle input/ sensor and output/ effector data in the
ongoing management of the system. A central aspect to such cybernetic
systems was the role of feedback, which implied a degree of
self - reflexivity to any system. 24 Information, for Wiener, is a statistical
choice from among the “noise” of the surrounding world, and as
such it implies an apparatus with the ability to instantiate the very
act of choice or selection. 25 Wiener refers to this ability as “control
by informative feedback.”
While Wiener was doing cybernetic military research on anti -
aircraft ballistics, his colleague Claude Shannon was doing telecommunications
research for Bell Labs. Much of Shannon’s work with
Warren Weaver is acknowledged as the foundation for modern tele -
communications and can be said to have paved the way for the idea
of the ARPANET in the late 1960s. Shannon’s work, while much
less interdisciplinary than Wiener’s, resonated with cybernetics in its
effort to define “information” as the key component of communications
technologies (indeed, Wiener cites Shannon’s work directly).
Shannon and Weaver’s information theory emphasized the quantitative
view of information, even at the expense of all consideration of
quality or content. As they state: “Information must not be confused