Back to top
10.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
SF: Communication Company, March 1967. First edition, second issue, with bold illustration consisting of hand-drawn small animals and a photograph of a mainframe computer. Broadside. 28x21.5cm.
The choice of imagery may have been inspired by Norbert Weiner's book, 'Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine', in which he argued that the behaviour of all organisms, machines and other physical systems is controlled by their communication structures. Published in 1948, the book introduced the concept of cybernetics (a term Brautigan invokes three times in the poem), a formative influence on Stewart Brand that would later inform his Whole Earth Catalog.
Fine.
