From Cybernetics to Cyberjaya

Cybernetics and the Idea of Cyberjaya.
by Azly Rahman

Malaysia’ s economic development follows the path of Western-styled developmentalism and can be characterized as Wallerstein (1981) would say, attempting to liberate itself from the shackle of dependency of the post-colonial system. The creation of the “MSC (Multimedia Development Corporation [MDC], 2003) is a testimony of the political leadership’s subscription to the Rostowian and many a laissez-faire theorist’s (see for e.g. Rostow, 1960) model of economic growth.

Castells and Hall (1994) also wrote about the developmental feature of states undergoing economic transformations as a result of the informational revolution, in what the authors term as the development of “technopoles” or new economic growth centers as a consequence of the computer revolution. The MSC is in fact, inspired by the success of the California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Highway 128 (Castells & Hall).

In the preceding paragraphs, I illustrated the notion of “inscriptions;” how the idea of “cybernetics” drawn from Quantum Physics, gets enculturalized onto the landscape of the Malaysian advanced developmentalist project called “Cyberjaya”—all these under the logical-positivist notion of human and national development.
The paragraphs above, by way of a review of a sensitizing concept, thus represent my early thoughts on the nature of cybernetics. Because my exploration in this dissertation concerns the concept of hegemony that is derived from cybernetics, a review of this nature is necessary.

The thrust of the movement is in the idea of technological, mainly technological literacy, as a vehicle of change and as a new definition of literacy. A key element of the production and reproduction of the ideology of cybernetics as it made possible the creation of the real estate of Malaysia’s MSC is education. Whilst Stanford University propelled the growth of California’s Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped to re-stimulate the growth of The Greater Boston Area (Highway 128), in the case of Malaysia, the establishment of Malaysia’s Multimedia University is designed to help the country achieve a similar impact, in an era the economist, Thurow (1997) would call “brain power industries.”