I recently read Seigel's Bohemian Paris, and as I read it, I alternately wished I was Bohemian and another part of me raged that the entire "Life as Art" idea is a cop out and I just wanted to yell "poser" in my best seventh grader whine. What is ‘hip’ anyway, and what is art, and what did it matter. In so many ways, it was all devastatingly romantic to starve and be artistic and intellectual and Dadaist. In other ways, the inner capitalist in me wanted to scream, "Get a real job!" I was terribly disappointed in myself.

Then I read Norbert Wiener’s God & Golem, Inc. last night, and I wish I could articulate the revelations I had. Yes, I have been familiar with the "cyborg’s right to life" movement, and the age of spiritual machines etc. But to hear it from Wiener’s perspective from 1948 through 1964 was very exciting for me. He was speaking from a time when it was discovered that just as God created the Devil, and could actually lose to his own creation, so had man in making of the machine. Perhaps a simplistic realisation, but for me, it was still exciting. I remember at pop!tech when a speaker was discussing "at what point is a person no longer human, but more machine than human?" I was especially interested in the distinctions at that time.

I grew so terribly interested in Wiener that I just checked out one of his autobiographies, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. In the first chapter (Which is as far as I’ve gotten) he discusses how he finished high school when he was 12 and received his Ph.D. when he was 19 from Harvard. He is most interested in the moral difficulties that any prodigy has in integration into society, and fulfilment of expectations of society, and how easy it is for a prodigy to assume failure for himself after society has moved their ever-fickle interest onto the next prodigy. While I was never a genius in that sense, I was always rather smart and I always had high expectations for myself, and in a lot of ways, I’ve let myself down. My rising wasn’t as dramatic by any means to Dr.Wiener’s, but I do sympathise deeply

In addition, I have been keeping a post-it in Foucault’s Pendulum for two days for this quote:

And Diotallevi kept interjecting, sententiously: "Historia magistra vitae." To which Belbo responded: "Come on, cabalists don’t believe in history." And Diotallevi invariably answered: "That’s just the point. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter."

And then, From "What is Cybernetics" by G.T. Guilbaud:

The word is derived from the Greek kybernētikē, which means, literally, the art of steersmanship. It belongs to a big family of words for the arts, crafts and sciences (all embraced by the single Greek term technai) which incliude medicine, education, poetry, mathematics, and mechanics. The word occurs fairly often in Plato, both in this literal sense and in the metaphorical sense of the art of guiding men in society, i.e. the art of government.
From this root were derived such Latin words as gubernaculum, a helm, and gubernator, a helmsman. These too, frequently carried the metaphorical meaning, a polotical helmsman steering the ship of state, which in some cases, indeed, became the predominant significance of the word.