The advent of “Big data” (Mayer-Schonberger, Cukier 2013) raises new questions about the cyber-utopia of a brave new open cyberspace. In this talk I propose a genealogy of the network starting from cybernetics: the idea of concentrating on the special case of communication represented by control– suggested by Norbert Wiener in his seminal book of 1948 – left only a little hope that cyberspace could allow a special freedom experience, with respect to real life. Big data represent the realization of Licklider's dream and Wierer's nightmare: obtaining patterns of correlations between data without a theory and only by algorithmic analysis of the quantitatively enormous amount of information. The availability of such a big amount of data on people social habits is made possible by the advent of Content Management System (CMS), which was one of the crucial technologies of the so-called Web 2.0. It represented the key feature for organizing all the users' free content in the rigidity of a database, whose data set now constitutes the gist of the Big data “revolution". This structured organization of information reproduced the Laplacian machine within the network, with the aid of cloud computing and the methods of machine learning.

Mayer-Schonberger V., Cukier K. (2013) Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.