Terms like ‘Big Data’ have been all the rage lately, not least in the digital humanities. Whether the ‘Big’ in ‘Big Data’ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to ‘Big Brother’ is not quite clear, but the implications of the ‘age of the complete’ (Nicolas Temple) for everyday lives are obvious: every movement (in real life or in the virtual worlds), every interaction, becomes data, becomes capital, becomes power. Recent debates, such as Geert Lovink's scathing attacks on social media, use a rather neo-Marxist approach to draw parallels between the deprived working-class members of the nineteenth century and today's IT users. Interestingly enough, there is also a countermovement that is pretty much in the same camp though, for example Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto (2014), which attempts to use, or suggests using, Big Data to fight for social and political change, such as combating climate change.

This tension is not new, and Orit Halpern reminds the reader of this with her account of the cybernetics movement in the 1950s and onwards. Authors such as Peter Galison and Paul Edwards have pointed out that IT and cybernetics were children of the Cold War, and that protagonists like Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush learned a good deal of their trade in the Second World War as part of US military science and engineering departments. Cybernetics, therefore, was imbued with the idea of control and structure right from the start.

Like Big Data now, cybernetics was regarded as the silver bullet in the 1950s to rid society, as much as science, of its woes. As Halpern summarizes, Wiener's and others' vision was ‘a world where there is no “unknown” left to discover, only an accumulation of records that must be recombined, analysed, and processed’ (p. 12); also, ‘Cybernetics is thus a science of control or prediction of future events and actions’ (p. 25) that bears much resemblance to current Big Data promises. Furthermore, cybernetics permeated all strands of science in the 1950s, most prominently cognitive psychology – a relationship which gets much attention in Halpern's book. Even reactionaries like Martin Heidegger couldn't help themselves pondering the implications of cybernetics for thinking; in an interview with the weekly Der Spiegel in 1966, for example, Heidegger stated that cybernetics had taken over the place of philosophy.

Another strong point of Halpern's book is her connection of cybernetics (or science and computing in general) with visualization. Science has become quite a visual subject in its use of, if not reliance on, charts and diagrams. Halpern, on the other hand, links the visual aspect of cybernetics with art and particularly with architecture. The nature of cybernetics was one of control and structurization. Likewise, architecture in the 1950s and 1960s had a very structural and functional aesthetic, and just as cyberneticists looked for ways to describe and steer society by mathematical means, urban and social planners sought ways to (re)structure society by (re)structuring cities and the way people live. This is yet another spectre of the past, just as many of the recent debates on Big Data are a revival of cybernetic ideas of old: the recent idea about ‘smart cities’ is essentially a return of this architectural cybernetics, and Halpern elucidates this. She also does not fail to outline these visual aspects of cybernetics in their different manifestations (engineering, architecture, cognitive science, etc.), although this point could have been made somewhat more strongly. These visualizations came to develop a life of their own, insofar as the use of diagrams or structures came to be appreciated for their aesthetic, rather than functional, value. Architects started designing buildings as artworks, not as something that would serve a social purpose, such as improving the living conditions of those inhabiting these buildings. Likewise, cyberneticists became obsessed with creating diagrams and structures to describe and construct ‘systems’, regardless whether these delivered any new insights.

Aside from some more debatable points, such as her assessment that Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russel, Alan Turing and others were on a quest ‘to find a structural and theoretical objectivity a priori of human sense perception’ (p. 149), there are some minor, yet visible, errors in the book. For example, on page 243 Ricky Burnett is referred to as ‘lead planner for the city of London for the 2013 Olympics’; on page 151 it is mentioned that Warren McCulloch studied philosophy and psychology at Haverford College and Yale University during the First World War, and that among others Turing had inspired him in those years. Alan Turing was born in 1912. Apart from these rather negligible oversights, the main criticism towards Halpern's book is probably that she is trying to cover too much ground. In her prologue to the book she is trying to outline a plan to guide the reader through this tour de force; this, however, is already an indicator of the (too) many topics being discussed: cybernetics, smart cities, Big Data, cognitive science and visual representations. It is understandable where this motivation of such a broad approach stems from: to show and analyse how far-reaching the impact of cybernetics on various disciplines has been. Such a broad analysis would help one gain an understanding of cybernetics as not just a scientific, but also a sociopolitical, phenomenon. This, after all, is Halpern's mission: to argue ‘that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality’, which she links to ‘a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information’ (backmatter). One wonders whether the inclusion of so many areas in her account does help to further this agenda, or whether less would have been more. Overall, however, this is quite an interesting read, illustrating how a single idea (cybernetics) can permeate all walks of life, at least for a time.