Conversation

While the cybernetics movement did not survive, the data, informational, or network-based view of the world gained increasing ground. Turning points include the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, which made it possible to think of biology in terms of informational algorithms; the growth of neuroscience and cognitive psychology in the 1970s, which replaced psychoanalysis in the universities; and the development of the microprocessor in the 1980s, which made small portable computers, screens, and interfaces ubiquitous. Within the polycentric, market-oriented, media-permeated world that developed, ideas of depth and interiority gave way to ideas of network, image, and feedback and of signs, folds, and nets. Gilles Deleuze is probably the most influential single exponent of this shift.