Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Why You'll Love This
The ideas behind the internet, cults, military AI, and crypto-anarchism all trace back to one mathematician in World War II — and almost nobody knows his name.
- Great if you want: intellectual history that connects tech, counterculture, and Cold War power
- The experience: dense but rewarding — each chapter opens a new, stranger rabbit hole
- The writing: Rid builds arguments like a scholar but writes scenes like a journalist
- Skip if: you want a linear narrative — this is ideas-first, not story-first
About This Book
The word "cybernetics" may sound dry and technical, but the ideas it unleashed helped shape nearly everything about how we live with machines today — and Thomas Rid's account of that transformation is far stranger and more human than you'd expect. Beginning with Norbert Wiener's wartime obsession with feedback loops and extending through hippie communes, military research labs, and the early internet's crypto-anarchist fringes, Rise of the Machines traces how a single intellectual vision gave birth to decades of utopian dreams, paranoid fears, and world-altering technology. The stakes are nothing less than understanding why we relate to machines the way we do — with hope, unease, and a persistent sense that they're somehow alive.
What distinguishes Rid's book is the depth of its primary research and his gift for making abstract ideas feel embodied in real people making real choices. He writes with the pacing of a journalist and the rigor of a historian, moving between characters and eras without ever losing the thread. The prose is clean and confident, and the structure rewards readers who stick with it — each chapter reframes what came before, leaving you with a genuinely richer picture of the present.