The Closed World:

Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996

The Closed World explores three histories — the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture — through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

The Closed World received Honorable Mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 1998.

Reviews

The Closed World has been reviewed in Nature, Isis, Business Week, The Nation, American Historical Review, Computer-Mediated Communication, First Monday, Choice, The New Scientist, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, and many other publications. Reviews have appeared in Norwegian, German, French, and Greek. It has been translated into French (excerpt) and Japanese (full book).

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