Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Did Al Gore Invent The Internet?

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

Of course not. But also: it's more nuanced than you might think... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another week on bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. As I said on Friday, this is the time that I did a whole deep dive into the whole controversy surrounding Al Gore saying he invented the internet. Bet you think you know this story, at least as a punchline. But did he actually say that? And in fact, the whole truth surrounding Al Gore's role in the early internet is a lot more interesting than you might think. Please enjoy. I think it's something that we all just sort of know the idea that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet.

I remember it being a small political issue at the time of the 2000 election, but I honestly never cared enough to investigate the details. Last weekend, however, I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole, and so I decided to find out the truth. not because I'm a huge fan of Al Gore or because I'm looking to score points against him either. I was just genuinely interested, and I wanted to find out the historical truth, not the partisan-tinged conventional wisdom truth. And so this episode is about what I found out. As I've mentioned in a previous episode of this podcast, when the Clinton Gore ticket was first elected back in 1992, One of their big platform initiatives was the use of computers and digital technology to create new jobs and new industries that would help the country innovate its way out of the sharp recession it was experiencing at the time. Gore was very much put forth as the frontman for this new geek-based economy push.

In fact, just a few short days after the election of November 1992, the New York Times ran an article with the title, Clinton to promote high technology with gore in charge. The article stated that the administration wanted the government to finance research, quote, that will flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry, end quote. Indeed, the Clinton administration followed through with various bills to this effect, and in fact, Gore himself was often involved in many Internet and Web Firsts as a result of this.

Gore became the first Vice President to give a live interactive news conference on a computer network. The first ever White House website was launched as early as October 21st, 1994, two months, in fact, before Netscape Version 1.0 was even launched. As a part of Gore's high-profile project to streamline government bureaucracy, federal government agencies were encouraged to utilize the web and the internet to cut down on waste and redundancy. And then there was Gore's involvement in the infamous Clipper Chip Initiative, which, again, I discussed in that previous episode of the podcast. But it turns out, Al Gore has always been touted as a bit of a nerd. From his first days in Congress in the 1970s,

Gore tended to gravitate towards scientific and technological issues, sponsoring and co-sponsoring tech and science bills, as well as seeking assignments on congressional and Senate committees that oversaw such issues. Describing a young Congressman Gore, a later wired article said, quote, before computers were comprehensible, Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber optic networks to sleepy colleagues, end quote. And the book, Computer, a history of the information machine, said that the, quote, problem of giving ordinary Americans network access had excited Senator Al Gore since the late 1970s, end quote. In fact, Gore was often lumped in with a group of young lawmakers who were,

referred to at the time as, quote, Atari Democrats. The San Jose Mercury News defined Atari Democrats as, quote, smart young congressmen who sought to make the restoration of American business their issue, end quote. An article in the New York Times referred to Atari Democrats as, quote, young moderates who saw investment and high technology as the contemporary answer to the New Deal, end quote. An important thing to remember is that Al Gore was the son of a famous senator, Albert Gore, Sr., who was one of the principal congressional architects of the interstate highway system, which was begun during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. So when Al Gore Jr. began investigating the possibilities of nationwide computer networking systems, for example introducing S-2594, the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986,

it's probably natural that he saw echoes of his father's achievements linking the country together via roads. It's unlikely that Al Gore Jr. coined the phrase information superhighway himself, but he certainly popularized the phrase in speeches and bills he introduced in the 1970s and 1980s. His vision was that citizens around the country could be linked together via computer highways, just as his father had linked them together with automobile highways. And that brings us to the key event that ties Al Gore to Internet history for better or worse. In 1988, a group led by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, submitted a paper to Congress entitled, Toward a National Research Network. Kleinrock was one of the original creators of ARPANET, that predecessor of the Internet, as well as being the author of the very first scholarly paper on packet-switching theory.

The paper that Klein Rock's group was now presenting to Congress in 1988 envisioned taking the existing Internet to another level by creating a national collaborative research network, sort of what Tim Berners-Lee would eventually realize with the World Wide Web. Inspired by this paper, Al Gore Jr. would introduce the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. The bill was intended to funnel federal dollars towards the continued research in high-performance computing networks, and the legislation came to be commonly referred to as the Gore Bill. When the first President Bush signed it into law on December 9, 1991, he stated that the act

would help, quote, unlock the secrets of DNA, unquote, among other technological innovations. Among these other innovations, the Gore Bill helped fund important predecessors to the web, such as the National Information Infrastructure and the National Research and Education Network. For our purposes, especially key among these other innovations, was the funding for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. As you'll remember from the very first episode of this podcast, the NCSA was where the Mosaic Web Browser was created. So every single one of the engineers responsible for creating the Mosaic Web Browser were at the time receiving salaries thanks to the Gore Bill. In fact, none other than Mark Andreessen gave credit to Gore's Bill as a Kickstarter for web development.

in an industry standard interview from 2000 saying, quote, if it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened, at least not until years later, end quote. So does Al Gore have a case? Al Gore clearly did not invent the internet, but we can also clearly see that he has a case for A, being a visionary, interested in the technology that would eventually bring the internet into the modern, era, and B, shepherding technology-friendly legislation through Congress that led directly to key innovations such as the World Wide Web. In fact, none other than Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, two people who actually did help invent the Internet, later gave direct credit to Gore's legislation as being a major milestone in the Internet evolution and development, saying, quote,

there is no question in our minds that while serving as senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. As far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991.

This Gore Act supported the National Research and Education Network initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the internet beyond the field of computer science. End quote. So, Gore was clearly involved in internet development, or at least he marshaled legislation that aided the internet's development. But again, he clearly did not invent the internet. Why then did he say that he did? Well, that's where things get a bit complicated.

For one thing, Al Gore never actually said he's, invented the internet. The interview that generated the quote in question, the quote that would go on to spawn a thousand late-night television jokes, comes from this March 8, 1999 CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. I want to get to some of the substantive domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now. Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination, the process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate. What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this product? Well, I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. It'll be comprehensive and sweeping,

and I hope that it'll be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. but it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States of Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system,

during a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic. So let me read those key lines again. Gore says, quote, during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet. He goes on to say, I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives

that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, et cetera, et cetera. But again, the key line is, I took the initiative in creating the internet. By the way, a full transcript of the interview is, you can find a link to it on the post page for this episode on the website. So, yeah, we can get into the whole idea of politicians and their mealy-mouthed double-speak, but Gore doesn't actually say the famous, I-invented line. The problem is he seems to be claiming credit for fostering the Internet's development one way or another,

by saying, quote, I took the initiative in creating the Internet, end quote, it certainly sounds like he was the wellspring that made it all happen. I suppose, depending on your political bent, you could interpret what he says in one of two ways. One, he says, I introduce legislation that created the Internet, or two, I introduce legislation that helped foster the evolution of the Internet. But what is indisputable in terms of actual fact is that he doesn't actually claim to be the genius that invented the Internet or even Internet technology. So how does Gore get tagged with this famous line I invented the Internet? Well, that's where it gets interesting. Just last year, the Washington Post wrote an article entitled,

A Cautionary Tale for Politicians, Al Gore and the Invention of the Internet. They agreed that the meat of the quote I just read you, even allowing for the fact that, quote, people sometimes misspeak on live television, end quote, seemed to grab credit in a somewhat overly zealous way. Here's what the post said, quote, a gaff sticks if it somehow validates preconceived notions about a politician. Gore had a real story to tell about being one of the first politicians

to grasp the importance of interconnected computers, but with one awkward phrase spun up by opponents and misreported by the media, he managed to obscure his accomplishments and instead became a recurring punchline, end quote. And to me, that's the thing. The whole quote was spun to fit into a common media characterization of gore as, I don't know, I guess, smarty pants know it all, the snooty professor type or moral scold, which of course, the later movie Inconvenant Truth did little to alleviate. The whole brouhaha about inventing the Internet, though, really kicked off on March 11, 1999,

when Wired News published an article by the writer Declan McCullough, by the way, same last name as mine, but he spells it differently, so there's no relation, under the title, No Credit Where It's Due. McCullough said that Gore, quote, took credit for the Internet, end quote, and went on to point out that Gore was two young to have been around for the creation of ARPANET, and claimed, quote, Gore has taken credit for popularizing the term information superhighway, but the term data highway has been used as far back as 1975 before Gore even entered Congress, end quote. Of course, Gore didn't claim anything about ARPANET or the Info Highway, at least not in the interview in question.

nonetheless, within days, the tag of the bragging and possibly fibbing Al Gore stuck. This was in the days before blogs and long before the Twitter echo chamber, which today tends to pounce on every little political gaff or meme, and often reliably parses those facts, but also tends to bounce the debate back and forth ad nauseum. I think that the fact that the issue was initially picked up by Wired Magazine, Wired News was an important factor in the evolution of this meme. Again, this was a more technologically naive time, and lots of, quote, normal people would have taken Wired as an expert voice on internet matters. And so on the same day that the McCullough article appeared, House Majority Leader Dick Army issued a press release that was sarcastically titled, Army Applauds Vice President Gore for ingenuity, creativity, and imagination.

The press release said, in part, let me quote here, quote, if the vice president created the internet, then I created the interstate highway system. Both were begun during the Eisenhower administration, and I think Ike actually deserves a little credit here. It's common in Washington to steal an idea and claim it was yours all along. This strategy certainly worked for the administration

on welfare reform and tax cuts, but claiming credit for the internet insults its real creators whose hard work and ingenuity can never be stolen, end quote. This was followed shortly by a statement from then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, saying, quote, during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paperclip. Lott refused to answer questions about whether or not he was also the fifth Beatle. End quote. And so by that point, the meme was well and truly often running. The idea that Al Gore claimed credit for inventing the internet almost immediately became what

it's been ever since, a punchline for late-night comedians. It shares this distinction, I guess, with the questionable claim that Gore and his then-wife Tipper were the inspiration for the novel and movie love story. But as that's a bit beyond our purview here, I did not investigate the veracity of the love story claim. The now common joke even made it into the presidential debates of the 2000 election. During a back and forth about the calculation of HMO coverage in the first presidential debate of that year, then candidate George W. Bush zinged Gore with the line, quote, not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator, end quote.

Gore himself would often return to the gaff, many times trying to diffuse. it with humor like this, quote, I was pretty tired when I made that comment because I had been up very late the night before inventing the camcorder, end quote. Declan McCullough followed up with two more pieces in Wired News, covering the fallout from the media meme

that he himself had helped create. It all seemed to fit so well into the, by this point, firmly established narrative of Gore as the arrogant Braggard. Quoting from McCullough's third piece, quote, reinventing yourself and rewriting your resume is a form of high art in Washington. Then why the opprobrium heaped upon Gore? Simple. He was clumsy enough to get caught, end quote.

The problem is McCullough himself didn't investigate deeply enough to see that, in fact, Gore was responsible for some significant legislation that, in the opinion of quite a few internet pioneers, was quite useful in the medium's early days. In short, Gore kind of had a point, even if he stated it in a, shall we say, overenthusiastic manner. He kind of did have a hand in helping the Internet develop. In his most recent book, The Innovators,

Walter Isaacson says about this incident, quote, It's a mark of our political discourse that one of the significant non-partisan achievements on behalf of American innovation, he's speaking of the Gore bill, got turned into a punchline because of something that Gore never quite said, end quote. And years later, no less a partisan than Newt Gingrich, who, it should be pointed out, like Gore, is a well-known nerd and innovation policy wonk, is willing to let Gore off the hook

for the gaff, saying, quote, in all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on for a long time. Gore is not the father of the internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an internet. And the truth is, and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got to Congress, we were both part of a futures group. The fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the 80s began to actually happen, end quote. For what it's worth, Gore was actually. actually eventually inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, but he was inducted in the category

of global connectors and not in the category of pioneers like Vince Surf or Bob Metcalf, and not in the category of innovators alongside the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Andreessen, or even Aaron Swartz. So in conclusion, no, Al Gore did not invent the Internet. But technically, He never actually said that he did. In the end, based on what I've been able to piece together about this, it's clear that Gore made a sloppy statement that maybe you don't have to take too far out of context to come away with the impression he was claiming credit for bringing the Internet to life. But here's also the thing, at least in my opinion.

Most legislators, even to this day, have very little understanding of technology. They don't really understand how the Internet actually works. And I'm not just talking about things like the series of tubes, quote. I'm saying, our politicians don't have even a base level understanding of how things like software and hardware and networking and digital technology actually function in the real world. world. And so that's kind of why we have such terrible laws governing things like patents and copyright and net neutrality. Because since the legislators don't understand any of it on a very basic level, because it's all weird, geeky mumbo-jumbo to them, they end up just trusting the lobbyists to understand for them and write the legislation for them. So, again, I didn't research this

peace to exonerate or attack Al Gore. I don't actually care about what he said on a partisan level, at least. My interests are only historical. But I will make this one point. It's clear that Al Gore was an avid and early fan of technology and innovation, of technology's role in our society and the ways that government can help or hinder that innovation. So if we're being honest, don't you wish we had a few more politicians like Al Gore in Congress today, who at least cared enough about the technology to try to understand it better. I'm saying, we need more geeks in Congress. Democrat geeks and Republican geeks. More geeks.