Norbert Wiener, Visiting the Beekman Hotel. The Cybernetic Moment in Manhattan
Résumé
Norbert Wiener is the third and last guest in the book to explore the encounter between management and digitality. If James Burnham was an ideal point of exploration of management in the 40s, Wiener is an ideal point of exploration of digitality. Wiener is one of the founders of cybernetics, the science of feedback and control, a major and paradoxical contribution to the birth of digitality. From the 30s to the 50s, digitality became a rationalist, representationalist technique that equipped and weaponized managers. The manus of management merged with the fingers of digitality. The history of the Macy conferences in New York from 1942 to 1953 are used in this chapter as a specific point of exploration of this inception and shift from scientific management to digital management.