How Women Were Pushed to the Margins of Cybernetic History

In the ten Macy Conferences held in New York between 1946 and 1953, many of the ideologies and ideas associated with contemporary cybernetics and computer science—neural nets, von Neumann architecture, biofeedback, and quantitative definitions of information—coagulated in a series of fantastically interdisciplinary presentations and provocative talks. Contemporary information society owes an enormous amount the Macy Conferences, which sparked the first generations of AI research, new methodological approaches to observational systems, and transformations in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, business management, and communication. To say that these frequently contentious speeches on cybernetics, which was captured and crystallized by the Macy Conferences, significantly shaped the current contours of our globalized information society is no exaggeration.

In the above photo from the 1952/3 Macy Conference (there is evidence documenting that the archived photo has been incorrectly dated), the woman standing on the second tier, second from left, is identified as "Janet Freed Lynch," the personal secretary to Frank Freemont Smith and administrative assistant to the Macy Conferences more widely. She was instrumental in organizing the conferences and recording their presentations, but in almost every narrative about the Macy Conferences and their legacy, she is strikingly absent, as N. Katherine Hayles explains in How We Became Posthuman.

Where Freed Lynch is not absent, she has been spliced into two people, bifurcated by a misspelling of her middle name: in some context she is referred to as Janet FREED Lynch, in others FREUD. There is not enough evidence to implicate one spelling as wrong, but that is not the point: The point is that Janet F. Lynch's name has been corrupted, and little documentation exists to confirm the correct orthography of her surname.

What does this single letter substitution, F for Freed/Freud, suggest about her relationship to her colleague-superiors, and does it intimate a deeper entanglement between communication, labor, and power? N. Katherine Hayles speculates as much. What Hayles alludes to but does not ask, however, is this: Does the substitution of one female identity for another say something about the perceived interchangeability of a particular type of embodied labor, and the undifferentiated female laborers that were processual ciphers to their male employers? I think so.

The puzzle of documenting Janet Freed Lynch's identity grows more complicated when you consider that one of the on-going struggles of the Macy Conferences was the attempt to articulate a new type of systems theory and pin down the role of the individual's involvement in it. Pre-Macy Conference, the prevailing view of systems positioned the engineer/scientist/observer outside, monitoring its processes with a third-party objective detachment. First order cybernetics promoted a different view: that of a system in which the Observer was implicated, inextricably embedded in the systems they described. See the model that Gregory Bateson sketched, below:

The second model overturns the first because it points out that an observer always shapes a system through the process of observation: An unobserved system falls out of discourse and remains invisible, while an observed one is captured—possibly changed—by the process of being surveyed, measured, commented on, and quantifiably or visually apprehended by the senses. The second model might suggest that Janet Freed Lynch, as the women who was tasked with organizing and recording the Macy lectures, ought to be comfortably inside the feedback loop, with documentation to support her central role in observing and preserving such a system as the Macy Conferences.

But the Macy Conferences—or, specifically, the cultural and political dimensions governing the production and maintenance of its own record—flatly rejects Janet Freed/Freud as a central figure and condemns her to the invisible marginalia of history. The sole surviving record of Janet Freed Lynch's involvement are the ghosts of her stenography, the archive of transcripts and diagrams and letters that can be traced back to her invisibilized labor. She haunts the written accounts, her words stamped or spilled on pages testifying to a very real, very embodied presence. She has written herself out of the experiment, refusing to include herself by name in the Macy Conference experiments even though her observational position testifies otherwise. Perhaps her erasure signals a failure to be seen, rather than a failure to see—one look at the photo above and you'll notice a striking disparity in the number of male to female scientists. (Margaret Mead was an anthropologist, a field her methods coming under frequent criticism from her colleagues.) Did they have trouble thinking of Freed Lynch as a scientist, a documentarian in her own right?

In any case, Freed Lynch's erasure is surprising when you consider that the Macy Conference talks survive in such detail due to her efforts. It was Freed Lynch's unyielding insistence at an editorial meeting that resulted in speakers delivering written drafts of their work ahead of the conferences, as opposed to relying on her live transcriptions. Prior to Freed Lynch's suggestion taking effect, most conference contributors did not provide notes or drafts of their delivered talks ahead of time, making live transcription of their spontaneous orations difficult for Freed Lynch due to the ambient noise in the conferences rooms, the difficulties spelling unfamiliar terms, and the challenge of faithfully relaying information from speakers who had a tendency to ramble circuitously, speaking in unfocused feedback loops of dense interdisciplinary complexity.

One can only imagine what the conference contributors thought Freed actually did, if she was not going to transcribe their talks on delivery. N. Katherine Hayles, in her imaginative depiction of Freed Lynch's role, writes one possible version of the relationship between Freed Lynch and her employer, Frank Freemont Smith:

"Take a letter, Miss Freed," he says… A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction…because he is not the one performing the labor. Miss Freed has no such illusions…On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied." (82-83)

In this conception, Janet Freed Lynch is not herself, but "a woman," an undifferentiated specimen of her gender, ready to receive input to enact the order of her employer. She is a receiver and producer of information: woman as information processor, computer, typist, recorder, transcriptionist, receptionist, black box. Perhaps, erased by her own hand, Janet Freed Lynch prefers to remain an undetectable enigma, balancing on the bounded edges of a cybernetic archive.

Author's note: Prior to publication, I reached out to the Macy Foundation, an organization whose mission has departed from the cybernetic focus of the mid-century Macy Conferences. They declined to comment.

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