Indeed, Wiener gave scientific teeth to the idea that in the workings of history, politics, and society, ideas matter. Beliefs, ideologies, norms, laws, and customs, by regulating the behavior of the humans who share them, can shape a society and power the course of historical events as surely as the phenomena of physics affect the structure and evolution of the solar system. To say that ideas—and not just weather, resources, geography, or weaponry—can shape history is not woolly mysticism. It is a statement of the causal powers of information instantiated in human brains and exchanged in networks of communication and feedback. Deterministic theories of history, whether they identify the causal engine as technological, climatological, or geographic, are belied by the causal power of ideas. The effects of these ideas can include unpredictable lurches and oscillations that arise from positive feedback or from miscalibrated negative feedback. An analysis of society in terms of its propagation of ideas also gave Wiener a guideline for social criticism. A healthy society—one that gives its members the means to pursue life in defiance of entropy—allows information sensed and contributed by its members to feed back and affect how the society is governed. A dysfunctional society invokes dogma and authority to impose control from the top down. Wiener thus described himself as “a participant in a liberal outlook,” and devoted most of the moral and rhetorical energy in the book (both the 1950 and 1954 editions) to denouncing communism, fascism, McCarthyism, militarism, and authoritarian religion (particularly Catholicism and Islam) and to warning that political and scientific institutions were becoming too hierarchical and insular. Wiener’s book is also, here and there, an early exemplar of an increasingly popular genre, tech prophecy. Prophecy not in the sense of mere prognostications but in the Old Testament sense of dark warnings of catastrophic payback for the decadence