tbyfield on Fri, 29 Mar 2019 02:50:24 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> rage against the machine


Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear.

The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint. Hence the name.

Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts, because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes.

Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase. In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation was intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_ to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider usage. (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop shelves a "browser.")

Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money, etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew.

Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of the pilot with the plane is an ur-moment in human–machine hybridization.

Cheers,
Ted


On 28 Mar 2019, at 14:48, Felix Stalder wrote:

Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since
the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black
box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my
understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other.

In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a
(complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship
between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the
airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders
of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no
output at all, at least not during the flight.

There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics,
after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest
example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans
and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main
thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this
little detail irks me.

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