Wiener's “Continuism” in Cybernetics and its Social Implications

Norbert Weiner preferred continuous processes and functions to discrete ones. Despite his very early proposal for a digital computer, Wiener's stochastic functions and prosthetic devices involved continuous (though often non-differentiable) functions. The contrast between continuous and discrete has pervaded all fields of science. Atomism, both ancient and modern, has had association with competitive social individualism. I suggest that the discrete unit model that pervades most contemporary theory of computation tends to be associated with social individualism. Wiener would have looked askance at the libertarian individualism and lack of a sense of communal cooperation characterizing most of the rise of the internet.