In the decades after World War II, the term “code,” loosely indexed to fields like cybernetics and information theory, served as a conceptual relay in knowledge production across the natural, technical, and human sciences. My recently published book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory reconstructs these relays and their place within a network of US scientific philanthropies that mobilized interdisciplinary research around cybernetics, computing, and information theory as part of a program of planetary social reform that spanned the 1930s through the 1960s. This movement swept up the thought of myriad scholars in research that furthered and contested this agenda. Theorists from anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and the celebrated cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall invoked code to expose the hidden logic of everyday practices (Figure 1).
