From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch

Proponents also saw it as a tool for the de-Stalinization of science and as a social movement for radical reform in science and society at large. Proponents of the new discourse believed it would become a universal language suitable for conceptualizing and setting the research agenda in all scientific fields. Gerovitch calls this new discourse 'cyberspeak,' a language involving concepts such as feedback, control, algorithm, machine intelligence, information, and communication. In the period of greater openness that followed Stalin's death, scientists sought to replace newspeak with a more objective and precise terminology for scientific discourse, drawing from cybernetics. Gerovitch proposes the interesting idea that instead of open conflict, Communist Party officials and scientists were often engaged in a symbiotic relationship, each maneuvering and skillfully manipulating whatever campaign was under way. These battles took place between the political and ideological overlords of the system and the scientific community, on the one hand, and within the scientific fields themselves, on the other.

$From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch$

They were employed to wage political and scientific battles in the last couple of decades of the Stalin period. Newspeak refers to the 'floating signifiers' such as cosmopolitanism, formalism, idealism, and mechanicism, which were of varying content and at times meaningless. The central story line of the book is the way the discourse in a number of scientific fields and the associated controversies shifted from 'newspeak' to 'cyberspeak' in the years after Josif Stalin's death. All these themes are brought to bear on what Gerovitch describes as the 'historical encounter between the language of cybernetics and the Soviet ideological language' (p. Slava Gerovitch's fascinating book extends over a variety of themes-the emergence of the science of cybernetics in the West and in the USSR, the development of Soviet computers, the language used in Soviet ideological and scientific debates, and the nature of academic controversies in biology, linguistics, physiology, economics, philosophy, and other fields.