IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2017 - 85

however, that this was written in 1929, so before the
mid-twentieth century's rise of fascism in Europe. It is
important, therefore, not to interpret it ahistorically,
even though the expression of some of the ideas is rather disconcerting to readers nearly a century later:
All those racially foreign inhabitants of a State
can, because of a strong feeling of racial identity,
remain closely connected with each other and
easily congregate communally, leading to the continuation of a foreign way of life within the State.
Even if the structure of such a way of life is loose,
the participants will support each other, leading to
a certain opposition towards other citizens. Such
racially foreign inhabitants tend to live in a state
of symbiosis, justified by the usefulness which
they bring to the State through their labour. [...] If
the State is attacked by an external enemy, symbionts play an important role in the national movement to demonstrate their identification with the
State. They become particularly pronounced in
their abhorrence of the enemy that threatens to
destroy the State, and do not shy away from the
greatest sacrifices of life and property to save the
State to which they are bound for good or ill. It is
quite different where parasites are concerned.
They thrive in a sick State, which can defend itself
only weakly against them. They seek, therefore, to
undermine the national feeling, demonstrating the
lack of their own State, finding a thousand excuses for the attacks of the enemy. They avoid sacrifice - exploiting, rather, the weaknesses of the
State and seeking to obtain decisive positions for
themselves. They are thus soon identified as parasites, and ultimately neutralised, once the State
regains its power of resistance.
Richard Wagner was another German biologist who
explicitly discussed feedback systems [7]. Following
medical studies in Munich and Innsbruck, he was professor at a number of Austrian and German Universities; he joined the Nazi party in 1938. From the
mid-1920s he studied control processes in living organisms, but later made some rather excessive priority
claims for certain cybernetics ideas, becoming somewhat marginaliZed in the German cybernetics community as a result [8].
Most interestingly for the present paper, however, is
the fact that he was the anonymous author of a short
1932 publication [9] entitled Unemployment and Deflation in the Body Economic from the Point of View of
Biological Law, even less well known than Von
Uexküll'sStaatsbiologie. In Wagner's intriguing text,
which has only recently been examined in detail,
DECEMBER 2017

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(a)

(b)

FIGURE 6. (a) An organism and its relationship to the

"innerworld" and its environment. (b) The English version in the
first translation (1926).

FIGURE 7. A closer look at the relationship between an

organism and its closed loop relationship with the environment.
he proposed solutions to the economic crisis based on
biological metaphors including feedback and control
loop structure. Beginning with an analysis of the late
1920s economic crisis, and with the aid of many biological metaphors and arguments based on the technical
notions of feedback and control loops, he attempted to
apply such ideas to economics, stating in the foreword:
The current shortcomings of the economic situation recall in many ways the effects of sickness on
a human or animal organism. Just as the biological
laws governing the cellular state are little known to

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