few of these critics had any access to primary sources on cybernetics: agapov's sources were limited to the january 1950 issue of "time"; the institute's criticisms were based on the 1949 volume of ""; and, among soviet articles on cybernetics, only the "materialist" quoted wiener's "cybernetics" directly. select sensational quotes of wiener and speculations based "exclusively on the basis of other [soviet] books already written on the same or similar subject", were used to characterise wiener as both an idealist and a mechanicist, criticising his supposed reduction of scientific and sociological ideas to mere "mechanical model[s]". wiener's gloomy speculations on the "second industrial revolution" and the "assembly line without human agents" were distorted to brand him as a "technocrat", wishing for "the process of production realised without workers, only with machines controlled by the gigantic brain of the computer" with "no strikes or strike movements, and moreover no revolutionary insurrections". according to slava gerovitch, "each critic carried criticism one step further, gradually inflating the significance of cybernetics until it was seen as a full embodiment of imperialist ideology".