Tech Won't Save Us - How Many Times Has the Internet Already Died? w/ Kevin Driscoll

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Kevin Driscoll to discuss the history of France’s Minitel system, the insights it provides about the modern platform economy, and whether the internet will one day be shut down too.Kevin Driscoll is the co-author of “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” with Julian Mailland. He’s also a professor at the University of Washington and the author of the forthcoming book “The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.” Follow Kevin on Twitter as @kevindriscoll, or find out more about his Minitel research at minitel.us or @MinitelResearch.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:In November 2020, Paris wrote about the potential future of the internet if the value of digital ads collapsed.Vice published an article about the artists on Canada’s pre-internet network, Telidon.In “The Internet Revolution,” Richard Barbrook wrote that he thought Britain would eventually import Minitel after experiencing it.Other resources mentioned: “The Computerization of Society” by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, and “The Platformization of the Web” by Anne Helmond.Support the show

How many times has the internet already died? How many internets from the past are already gone that we did not preserve along the way? And who benefits from our continued reinvention of what the internet is? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Kevin Driscoll. Kevin is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and a co-author of Minitel, Welcome to the Internet, with his colleague Julian Mayland, who is a professor at Indiana University. Kevin is also the author of The Modem World, a prehistory of social media that will be published by Yale University Press. Unfortunately, I don't have a date on that one

for you, but I think we'll need to keep an eye out for it. In this week's episode, Kevin and I have a great conversation about Minitel, the French network that connected people all around the country to a system of digital services, many of which will sound really familiar to users of the internet, even the early internet. And that was made possible because the French state built out the whole network and offered Minitel terminals to telephone subscribers for free that they could pick up from the post office, which sounds pretty incredible. And naturally, because everyone could easily get a terminal that created the network effects to drive state enterprises and private companies to make their own Minitel services that could then be accessed through this system. So I think this is a really fascinating episode because it

gives us insights into this system that existed before the internet, where all these people in France were connected up in a way that was pretty unique at the time. And the network itself has some pretty unique features that we don't see in other networks at the time as well. And that kind of breaks some myths, I think, about the state and kind of the innovative role that it can play and the ability of the state to create open platforms that can promote different ways of engaging and communicating and things like that. You know, especially in light of last week's episode with Margaret O'Mara, where we discussed the history of the state and state funding in US tech, this gives us another perspective on the role that the state can play in promoting and even creating technologies that change

the way that we engage with services, that we communicate with one another. So this is a fascinating conversation. It's a little bit of a longer episode than I usually do, so I'll keep the introduction short. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. Naturally, if you like this episode, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social

media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is free for everyone because listeners who can't afford to support the show do so. This week, we passed 200 monthly supporters on Patreon, and I just want to thank a few of those new members. So a shout out to Lucas Moran, Lane Livio, Oliver Lantwin from Zurich, and Joe, who's a member of the GMB Union, who is organizing Amazon warehouse workers in the UK. So thanks to those people. And if you want to join them by supporting the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Kevin, welcome to tech won't save us. Hello, happy to be here. I'm

excited to be joined by you and excited to chat with you about the Minitel system. When I heard about Minitel and read the book that you co wrote with Julian Malin, I was really excited to dig into this topic because it seemed really fascinating to me as this kind of like precursor to the internet, but not in the American context, right? And so I think that a lot of the listeners won't be very familiar with what Minitail actually is. I'm sure there'll be some who know something or maybe even are knowledgeable about it. But I think that for the most part, people probably won't be very aware of what it was. So I was hoping that you could start by kind of giving us an idea of what Minitel was and how it actually worked in France.

Yeah, when we talk about Minitel, we're usually using that word to refer to the way that people use it in everyday language, which is like just talking about the Minitel. And the Minitel is actually a system with many different pieces that reflected a kind of vision of what the future of telecommunications might be like. And so one way to think about that vision from the point of view of someone standing in 1980 would be a convergence of the telephone, the television, and computers or information technology. So the word Minitel originally just referred to the terminal equipment, the thing that a user would sit down at. And in many ways, like the terminal is this visual symbol of Minitel in France and beyond. And so I think

it's helpful to start there. And then we can like work our way into the network of other components. So the Minitel terminal is a small brown box, and it has a fold-out keyboard or a keyboard that slides out in a little screen. And in the back are two plugs, and one of them plugs into the back of your telephone, and one plugs into the wall to get electricity. One description of the Minitel is that it's a modem plus a keyboard plus a screen. So it's a terminal in the conventional sense of a computer terminal. And what the Minitel did was it created a portal into a platform that combined public and private services and made them available over the standard telephone line to anybody who subscribed to

telephone service in France. And to get a Minitel terminal, you could go to the post office and pick one up. They're free for anybody who was a telephone subscriber. And then to use the Minitel terminal, the very simplest versions of the terminals, you'd pick up your home telephone and dial a special short number, and then wait for the sound, put your telephone back on the cradle and connect with your Minitel terminal, and then text and graphics would start to appear on the screen. And for most of the time, when people are connecting to Minitel, the first thing that they would do is connect to some kind of gateway, and then they could type in a short code, which might be just a few letters, and then the system would route them to some service elsewhere on the network.

And the kinds of things that people did with Minitel ranged from very simple everyday activities like looking up a telephone number or an address, like the white pages was encoded and accessible over Minitel, or things that we think of now as online community activities, like chatting with strangers or getting into political debates, buying and selling a car, something like you might do on Craigslist. And then more esoteric activities like playing multiplayer games with people in dungeon crawler type games, or ordering food to be delivered to your house or groceries, or accessing computer systems you needed for your job. So a lot of industries

embraced Minitel as a way to experiment with telecommuting or other kinds of data-intensive activities. And then for people who are very interested in computers as a hobby, they might connect their home computer to their Minitel and then extend it further, building other aspects of the network from there. So all of these were sort of emergent applications of the system that started to really take root in French popular culture by the late 1980s. And so even if you were not a Minitel user, you would be aware of Minitel because just walking through the city, if you saw ads on the side of a bus going by, it might have a Minitel code attached to it.

When you're watching TV in the evening, some of the commercials would mention Minitel codes that you could type in, or they might be commercials for Minitel services. And even the plots of everyday television dramas like police procedurals might have a plot line that involved something occurring on Minitel. There's even popular music about people having affairs that began by meeting a stranger on Minitel. So in many ways, the activities that people are undergoing and kind of the cultural impact of Minitel by the late 1980s and early 1990s prefigure things that we now associate with the web or social media, but they come 20 years beforehand. So it does give us this kind of view of these very fundamental ways that people and organizations come together through data networks. But as I'm sure we'll get into in our conversation, the political economy and the

organization of the infrastructure is really different. So the terminal is the part that everybody sees, but other components of the system, which is more properly described as teletel, included defining the software standards that had to be installed at different places around the telephone network, and layering on a system for billing and accounting so that when you connected to services, the system could track who was connected to what services and for how long for billing purposes. And so there's lots of these components. And altogether, historically, we refer to that as Minitel. But for people at the time, they might only be touching one piece of that overall network. So in our research, we really wanted to think about what is this thing Minitel and how does exploring the history of Minitel help us think differently about platforms, networks, policy, regulation, political economy, and popular culture around computers and information systems now and into the future. I think you touch on so many fascinating points that I want to get to that I have questions about. But just to start, like, it really stood out to me, like, how you described that the French government built this network to connect everybody, and then offered

free terminals to anybody who had telephone service. Like if you wanted one, you could just go, you know, pick up a terminal, connect it. And yeah, you had to pay for service then, you know, as you accessed it. But just thinking about kind of the conversations that we're having today about equitable internet access and people not having good internet access. And, you know, especially during this pandemic, the difficulty of some people like not having a computer to be able to connect to like education and things like that during this pandemic. It's just fascinating to think about how we are having those conversations now and facing those difficulties. And one of the kind of early attempts to network populations were just kind of like, okay, naturally, we're going to connect

everyone and give everyone a terminal and then we can kind of start from there. Yeah, I mean, one really important part of the Minitel story is that it occurs within the context of the telephone network. It really is an outgrowth of telephony rather than from the computer industry. And when you start from that point of view, then communication is at the center of the story. And in other ways of telling histories of computing where you're focused on computing, you're in a context of information processing. And information processing isn't necessarily about communication in the same way. And so that organizational shift is quite different from the ways that a lot of people, say, in the United States encountered computers and computer networks in the first place. So one way to think about it

is that this is a project about advancing telecommunications, broadly speaking, within a French context. And in the early 1970s, people in France were very frustrated, both people in the political administration, in the engineering side, and on the user side, with the state of the telephone network. A simple statistic is that in the United States, someone asking to have a new telephone line installed might wait a few days to get the telephone company to come out and wire their office or their house. And in France, they might wait a few years. And so there was a widely accepted problem with the telephone network. And so once the state had committed to investing in improving the telecommunications infrastructure, it created the possibility to imagine how far they might go with that.

So should we improve this to meet the standards of our neighbors in Germany or the United States? Or can we imagine what a next step is? And you could think of it as like leapfrogging. Like we're going to upgrade our whole telephone network. What else can we add to it? And so a very influential text around this that helped galvanize support across different political factions is a report that is now known in English as the Computerization of Society that was originally commissioned by the state in order to make some of these arrangements, make some of these plans by Simone Nora and Alain Mink. And it was later published by the MIT Press in English with an introduction by Daniel Bell, who you may know as a post-industrial theorist. So it does have these ripples that go beyond just the immediate problem of updating the telecommunications system in France. And the outcome of that report,

if there's like one takeaway, it's a vision of telematics. And telematics is that convergence of different media forms. And so in some ways, Minitel is the implementation of this vision, this telematics vision of what the future might be. And telematics actually turns out to be a really generative concept for getting political and industrial support because you say, okay, we're going to build telematics, which is we're going to computerize these different aspects of our network, not just in the switching layer, but infrastructure layer, which is something that had been happening in the United States for

a couple decades, which was creating automated systems inside of the network, sort of invisible to the user. But here, it's going to go all the way down the last mile into the homes and offices of everyday people. At each stage of that, you're suggesting an opportunity to stimulate the domestic tech industry. So this conversation, as you suggested, is playing out against concerns about the hegemony of American tech firms, also British tech firms to some sense. And so if you're kind of imagining that, then you not only want to improve your own capacity for telecommunications, but also create industry

and opportunity for domestic innovation. So perhaps the systems can be run by French-made computer systems. These terminals can be produced in France by French labor and creating opportunities for innovation and development locally. So you can see how the Minitel project attracts a lot of support from different people who are kind of positioned politically in different cases. And indeed, the experiments with video tech and telematics begin around 1980. But the presidential election happens in 1981, the socialist candidate Mitterrand takes office. And in doing so, his victory is announced on TV using Minitel graphics. So Minitel is not lost in that

transition. And you can imagine how such a big experimental project might be left with the previous administration, but actually it continues to maintain and gather support over time. So there's this way that Minitel can be seen as like a project that rallies a lot of different people around a national project to increase capacity. And later, as we will later see Minitel kind of succeeds at rallying all that support, like a very popular magazine celebrated the year of Minitel. And people would talk a lot about like being on the forefront, being the most wired nation, having something that nobody else has. And that became a point of pride. So when you think about moments where politicians might want

to like rattle off their successes, the Minitel and the statistics around Minitel usage get to be one of those flashpoints. And that has a kind of positive feedback loop built into it. But of course, in order to start that positive feedback loop, people actually need to use this system. And you alluded to how folks might not have access to computer systems. And we definitely talk about inequities in access to information technology today. Well, in France, in the late 1970s, virtually no one has access to computers. And that's true in North America and throughout Europe and elsewhere. It's easy to project backwards that computers existed and therefore people must have had them, but really

they did not. And the vision of telematics predates even the availability of microcomputers or home computers or personal computers. So to build the Minitel as a terminal that accesses some central computer utility is very keeping in with the timesharing vision of computing, which was predominant in the 1970s. So what's kind of interesting about this point is people may not have even had experience typing, by and large. So there was a lot of discussion early in the design of Minitel how you should lay out the keyboard on the terminals. Some early versions of the terminal even had alphabetical layouts, just A, B, C, D, E, because they figured people are going to be

hunting and pecking. And eventually they arrived at AZERT as the layout, which is starting the top row, A, Z, E, R, T, because it was like, well, you're going to learn to type some way and maybe those skills will be transferable to other typing instruments of the kind. But even prototypes being made in that alternative layout shows you how wide open the space was then. That people bringing these terminals home are not putting it on the counter next to their Apple, Macintosh computer. They don't have access to computers or maybe even electric typewriters or word processing equipment of any kind. So this is a massive change for everybody involved. And yet it does create this interesting historical twist, which is within a few years for anyone living in France, the Minitel is mundane. It's like everybody's got it. And you

use it for very mundane activities like looking up a telephone number or buying a train ticket, or if you're a college student, you might register for class on it. And for anybody living outside of the country, it is like outside of your imagination, because nowhere else in the world is there a similar project to equip the population with this kind of information technology. So that creates that situation that you described where in retrospect, you think like, how could millions of people have been online doing all of these things in the 1980s? And it's not part of the global story that we tell about internet history. And it really does demonstrate something about how regional all of this development was at the time. What you're just talking about there about the lack of Minitel in the history, it reminds me in, I think it's the Californian

ideology, or maybe it's a different essay by Richard Barbrook, but he kind of says that when he went to France in, I believe it was the 80s, and experienced the Minitel system, he thought that the UK would end up importing that technology from France. But what we know actually happened is that it kind of imported the internet from California and from the United States later, right? But I think that gets to another point that I wanted to ask you about, in which you kind of mentioned there in your answer, was that there was also a concern in France about the development of these new technologies, computers, things like that, by the United States and to a lesser degree, the UK, and how like IBM and these other major companies could move in. And that would be kind of like a form of US or British power within France. And there was

a feeling that the French government needed to combat that by building its own French high tech computing industry, whatever you want to call it. Can you talk a little bit about that concern and how that kind of helped to drive some of the French policy on this? Yeah, it's a really good question. And kind of across the globe at the time in places where there is a computer industry developing, it often is developing in a very regionally specific, nationally bound sense. And even when the firms are private, they are often really tightly woven with government contracts. And so if you consider even like the global hegemon of computing in the mid 20th century, IBM, you know, IBM is also very closely tied to either directly with government programs or with industries that

are domestically tied to their governments in some ways. And the answer for that is obvious, which is like, who needs a computer? It's governments often. And so if you think of IBM and large computing of the mid-20th century as being about data processing, then you think about which human organizations are generating the kind of data that requires a computer to process it. Part of the emergence of timesharing as an industry is that more and more organizations are starting to become data producing organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. And so they don't need to own their own computer. They just need a few hours of computer time to say run payroll or update interest rates or something like that or update models. So there is actually like very few organizations and certainly

hardly any individuals that could say they needed computers until the 1970s. So that's the background, a little bit of why computer industry would be so closely tied to states. Another piece is since we're thinking about this as telecommunications, telecommunications systems were also defined often around national political boundaries. They had to, however, have an international orientation because people would want to be able to make calls internationally,

and there'd have to be a way to hand that off. I think it's helpful to think about the everyday experience of telephony in the 1960s and 70s for understanding the emergence of these systems a little bit, which is like very few people placed long distance telephone calls, like the telephone wasn't your primary method of reaching out to people who didn't live near to you. And so for example, in the United States, most people placing long distance calls prior to the 1960s would have to talk to a human operator to make the call go through. So if you want to place a long distance call, you called somebody and said, Yeah, I'd like to call St. Louis, and then they'd connect to an operator in St. Louis. Now you have three people on the line working together to make the phone call go through. It's only now that we

assume everything will be automated and a telephone number will work around the world. So all of that is kind of happening at the same time. And it's computerization inside of the telephone industry, but also the telephone industry producing computer technologies. So getting back to the specific case of France, they can see that French industry is by necessity buying lots of American technology, specifically IBM. So IBM is often seen outside of the US as like an encroachment of American, almost like technological imperialism. And IBM is rather legendary for doing sales and marketing outside of the United States and empowering regional representatives to build out local offices and expand IBM. This is especially interesting in cases like Brazil,

where just individual enterprising IBM employees set up whole field offices and created areas of industry that were not even visible to other tech firms. And so there were firms within France who were perfectly capable of producing computer technology of equal capacity as IBM, and they needed to have opportunity in order to make that happen. So one motivation for designing Minitel how it is, is to create contracts and opportunity for industry. Now, the specific decision to give away the Minitel terminal is one of the unique features

of the Minitel story. It also ensures demand for terminal equipment. And so the Minitel terminal is designed and defined as a standard, but actually multiple firms get contracts to produce Minitel terminals around the country. And so if you're a collector of Minitel paraphernalia, of which there are a few out there, they'll know subtle differences between like, oh, this one is produced by Matra or this one is produced by whoever. And they can see in the layout of the keys and small things, the ways that different terminals function from each other.

But that ensured like in the short term that there would be development. And in the medium term, it meant that enough people out of curiosity would bring a Minitel terminal home. And they may not use it very much at all because it is pretty expensive to go beyond the phone directory into some of the other areas of Minitel, but it created like a potential consumer base for building Minitel services later on. So a lot of this is about taking France and rethinking like from a national identity point of view, kind of like creating a new layer of identity that's based in high-tech and IT.

So I think what you're describing there, obviously is fascinating, about this kind of relationship and how these things kind of developed, right? And why France is so concerned with taking this route and promoting its kind of industry. But in the book, you also described how France is not the only country working on one of these video tech systems around the same time, it has neighbors that are doing something similar. And there's a particular, I guess, narrative, especially around systems that are developed by the state that, you know, it's top-down, it's centralized, you know, you're not going to get innovation from this, you know,

way of developing technology, right? But I think that one of the things that I found really interesting in reading the book is that you described that the Minitel system is particularly unique when compared to other video tech systems that are being developed around the same time and shows that like, yes, there is a centralized component to it, but it's not necessarily the case that there can't also be decentralized components. So can you talk a little bit about the differences between Minitel and other video tech systems that are being created in other countries around the same time? Yes. So I think in our previous question, we were talking about how France was looking outward and they could see the encroachment of IBM in terms of like French banks buying IBM computers, for example. But in the case of video tech, now it's a lot of countries

looking at each other. And within a couple of years, they're all looking inward at France. So video tech, the idea is spreading around. And by 1983, like tech journalists in the US are very well aware of Minitel. So much so that Byte magazine ran a special issue on video tech that was all about how awesome video tech is in France. And I should say also in Canada, because the Teledon is another example of a public network using video tech. Although for some important contextual reasons, it doesn't really launch in the same way that Minitel does. But it is very well known to tech journalists in the US. And they're saying like, well, it's America's turn, you know, like Canada has it, there's public data networks being built in different places.

So when you read back to that special issue of Byte Magazine in 1983, you get this feeling that it's like around the corner. And you can see it in all these other places too, like RadioShack produces a video tech terminal and sells it in their annual catalog that year. There's a cartridge for the RadioShack computers that has video tech compatibility. And lots of new commercial services are being produced in using the word video tech. So like the CompuServe, a very well known international online service is understood in the US as a video tech service. Newspapers in the US also launch video tech. Then in other places like in the UK, there is a similar system called Prestel that uses similar technologies. And all of these are in conversation with each other.

So the people building them and defining the software standards are in conversation. In each case, there's things that separate Minitel from these others. And these seem to contribute to why Minitel has such a long life, where the others kind of languish in experimentation. So we can kind of take them in turn. In one case, if you live in another country in Europe, you may be familiar with teletext. And teletext generally goes over broadcast channels, but it has some similar aesthetics to video tech because it's borrowing some of the same technology, but it's mostly non-interactive. So if you imagine like your broadcast TV spectrum, you can isolate certain parts of the channelized spectrum and send data over it. And then your TV receiver knows how to

show teletext. And there's lots of little things that you can put on there like weather and news and kind of like static pages of information. So that's like one way to implement this, which is just building on your existing broadcast infrastructure. But people don't have a lot of ways to like interact with that beyond calling in or maybe changing the channels, things like that. And then another piece would be building the infrastructure side, the packet networks. So I mentioned Transpac in France. Lots of other countries are building their own public data networks that use a similar protocol, which is called X25, but they generally don't make it accessible to the everyday public.

It's connecting institutions that already exist in the States, be it universities and industry and states and things like that. And then to some extent, those connect to each other through commercial packet networks, like the best known in the US is called Telenet. CompuServe sold its own infrastructure services around this time. In those cases, you're paying either per minute or per byte to get online and make these connections. And then there's like academic research networks that are often a little bit more informal, but also very tied to states. So ARPANET is the most well-known example of a research network that is funded through the US military. But there's also CSNet, it's a computer science network

that had cooperating nodes in Europe and elsewhere, NSFnet, EAN, like numerous networks. But for those, you have to be affiliated with a large university or research institution. So there's always these barriers to access. And then lastly, are real grassroots networks like Fidonet or UUCP that are run by individuals, but require a lot of technical know-how to get up and running.

So in Minitel, you have very low barriers to access to get on for your everyday person. They can get the Minitel terminal and it's pretty self-explanatory. In fact, if you look on Minitel.us in our archives, we have the brochure that came packaged with the Minitel terminal. And to get started, it's like three steps, like put the plugs in the wall, dial this number, turn it on, and then the instructions appear on the screen. But also on the side of building out the services. And this is something we really emphasize in the book. And to some extent, you have to talk through the rest of the network to appreciate what's happening here, which is

in the case of Prestel, which is a reasonable comparison with Minitel, third party groups could create their own services to run on the network, but they would install them in a centrally run hub, like a computer center that was run by the state. In the case of Minitel, they didn't dictate how the services were run. So while overtly it's to try to stimulate a French tech industry, there is nothing stopping you from getting your IBM computer or your Amiga or whatever, your Macintosh computer and writing software that was compatible with the Minitel standards, getting a connection to Transpac, the data network, and then starting to offer a Minitel service over the platform. So they didn't actually control what third parties did either on the side of providing services or on the user side. So I tend to think of that almost as this deeply hybrid structure where the edges of the network are privately owned and operated, and then the middle is run in, which is like the state doesn't design and build the cars, but it regulates who can drive them and where they can go. And then businesses can set up along or developers can build houses and things like at different points along that highway network. And people drive between those nodes in the network. And they can reliably assume that the

network itself, the roads will function and that they'll be well regulated. And people generally conform to like the width of the wheels of their cars will fit within the lines on the highway and things like that. So it kind of becomes a more apt comparison to like the information superhighway in some sense than the internet itself would be years later. As someone who does a lot of research on transport and technology, I love that comparison. I want to move on though, because I think what you comparison. I want to move on, though, because I think what you're starting to get to is the user experience, right? As you're talking about all these services that become available through the Minitel network, right through the system through these terminals. And so, you know, obviously, everyone had a phone, but now it

becomes really easy for people to gain access to the Minitel system as well, because you don't need to worry about purchasing a terminal, you just need to pay for, you know, the time that you're using these services, right? So what kind of effect did Minitel have on French people and French society when it started to roll out? And all of a sudden, all of these digital services that were previously not available were kind of at people's fingertips? That's a great question. The first one is that not everybody has a telephone. So the context of this was expanding the telephone network. And that project took over a decade. So the rollout of Minitel is regional. So like, Ede France and Paris has access to Minitel before maybe more rural areas, in some extent. There's a lot of like regional

control over how that happened. But as it is rolling out, it's also, as I mentioned, like appearing in popular culture and political discourse more and more. So there's this growing awareness of Minitel being there. So one of the immediate impacts of the existence of Minitel is that ambient awareness that there's something going on. And I think that's something we take for granted in terms of how much the internet is suffused within our everyday communications, that all of our everyday communication plays out against the backdrop of ubiquitous broadband. And that real structure of feeling of living among a world with this online component is the first major impact. And that's affecting people even who are non-users of Minitel. A second detail of that is many people got access to Minitel

in their workplace or in public before they did at home. And so public telephones like payphones could have a video tech terminal built into them. And in many public places like in a school or library, you might have video tech terminals installed to do various things. And people were often required to use Minitel for something at work. And so you might have to look up the prices of things in a database or track other kinds of information that was being provided to Minitel. And so once the infrastructure is in place, and you have a sense that people know how to use this and the terminals are installed, then new services that come online or new information applications can

make use of them. And that's one of the things that we know about network effects in adoptions of new technologies, that as the adoption of new technologies reaches a certain level within groups of people, then they start to make assumptions about who has access to it. So there's all these ways that people get exposed to Minitel through instrumental tasks that they have to do and practical things. Registering for the military or for school would happen through that. So all young people at one time or another would have to sit down at their Minitel and interact with the state. So things that we would later describe as e-government applications often are carried out through the Minitel. So just to say that even in families where nobody's using the Minitel for pleasure,

it's still there. And so it raises this baseline of who can use it. But I think what you're gesturing to is there is also a lot of interest in experimentation among certain groups of people of like the limits of what's possible in this space. So the most popular services and the ones that resound the largest in collective memory are the messangeries, which is kind of like a bulletin board system. So they would offer lots of different kinds of services because they're all very bespoke and there is no central control over how they're organized. But they tend to have services that would be familiar to us today. So like chat rooms and person-to-person email systems, discussion forums. For ones that are kind of oriented

towards computer geeks, there could be like file downloads or online games. Some of this is like very familiar to us now, but they would be coded by interest. So it's like, you can go to the football fans' misogyny and talk and argue about football players that you like, or go to talk about cinema and film, or discuss music, things like that. Some had more of a subculture affiliation than others. And all of these services come online and are accessible through those gateways that I mentioned before. So certain sequences of letters and numbers become familiar to people as signals that there is Minitel. So the best known is the 3615 and the 3615 service. It's not only indicating that that's the short code that you have to dial to get to the gateway,

but it also tells you how much it costs. So different prefixes on the Minitel numbers are attached to a kind of rate chart of how much you're going to pay per minute to be on those services. So the 3615 services cost a certain amount, but then there's like 3614, 3617, and they have different rates attached to them. So some are earmarked as like everyday entertainment activities. Some are more for professional and funny ways, like to look up a telephone number, the first few minutes of your connection are free. But if you're in the directory for too long, then it starts dinging you for how much time. So if you didn't find the number right away, you might just hang up and then dial back so that you'd reset the clock and be in the free time again. The tempo of payment, though, is different than the tempo of usage. So there's

an experience that a lot of people have who are longtime Minitel users of having the very first time when they got excited about it, running up a huge bill. Because you could use it for, let's say it's the start of the month and you're using Minitel every day for 30 days. At the end, when you get your bill, you're like, whoa, I use this many minutes online. And this all happened because the public telephone network is sitting and controlling all of those gateways. So the telephone network doesn't bill this amount of time talking about movies and this amount of time doing work. It just said telltale time, like how many minutes were you connected to telltale

and build you off that. And that had a unintended consequence of kind of masking people's online activities. So you didn't know who was spending what time doing what. And lots of people who worked in office environments, like white collar workers could exploit that by spending a little bit of time on official work stuff. And then a lot of time chatting with people online about whatever while they're at work. So this way of like workers kind of taking back some control over their time through their use, strategic use of computers, you see a little bit of that in the case of Minitel as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think what you're describing is just like so fascinating,

right? Like how this is all working and how it's kind of changing the way that people can interact with these different services. One of the pieces that I also found interesting, you know, you talked about the privacy piece there and how like, you know, on your bill, it's not going to list like every single service that you were using, right? But I think there's also probably an assumption that, okay, this is a state controlled service. So they are going to highly regulate the things that people can do when they're using their Minitel terminals. But one of the things that stood out, I thought when I read it was that, you know, there are using their Minitel terminals. But one of the things that stood out, I thought, when I read it was that, you know, there are these pink Minitel services like these chat rooms,

but then there are also people using the Minitel to organize protests and union actions and things like that. So it's not clear to me that the state is reacting in this way where they're trying to kind of shut down all these different things that they don't want to be happening. And instead, this is, at least in some ways, a rather open platform where people can engage in these kind of conversations that they want to have, I guess, still within certain kind of limitations, though. Yes, the stereotype of Minotaur outside of France among advocates of the internet as we use it today really did focus on the central control and assume that that means there's like a really tight kind of control over what can be done and what kinds of services can be made. There's a kernel of truth to that, which is

that in order to create one of those services where you got the short code, like 3615, whatever, you would have to submit to a process of prior authorization or prior approval. And in some cases, that was very simple, bureaucratic, like stamping as it goes through. In other cases, people got stuck in like a bureaucracy hell where they were getting to run around, there was some confusion about what was happening. And this system is censored in the sense that all of the services proposed to be added to the platform were subject to government approval. And there would be some evaluation of what those services were going to provide. And that evaluation is based on kind of an affirmative regulation of speech in France, that is some speeches protected and valued in ways that is quite different from the

ways that we tend to think about speech regulation in the US. So when we talk about censorship in the context of Minitel, you kind of have this image of like burning books and things like that. And it's not really so much that as it's a much more everyday form of censorship, which is to say they're seeing this as a publishing platform. And to get access to it, you're kind of like getting some privileges from the state to be able to use this as a publishing platform. And to get access to it, you're kind of like getting some privileges from the state to be able to use this public platform to publish. And in doing so, then you have to be approved by some regulatory authority. And over the life of the platform, there were some changes in how that happened.

But the general kind of thrust of how censorship was applied played out. And so what's striking is that perhaps the form of Minitel that is remembered most vividly is the Minitel Rose or the Pink Minitel services. Minitel Rose is just like a slang term for misogynies that are focused on adult themes, like chat rooms where you go to flirt with strangers and you have pseudonyms and you have some kind of like cyber sex sort of interaction with people. There's a lot of variation in what that was. But in terms of like advertising, you'd see like pictures of women in negligee that just say like 3615 Aline or something like that, or like really sexual imagery on television with just like a Minitel shortcode and no dialogue at all. And some people

reacted really negatively to that because they saw it as, you know, there's like accusations from very socially conservative groups that the Minitel had turned the state into a kind of like pimp that was selling these sexual services. But by and large, these didn't ruffle a lot of feathers. And they certainly didn't transgress any existing political regulation because the censorship was simply not concerned with sex and adult sexuality. Specifically, it was more about political speech, and it was about things that could be construed as crossing political lines. So it's easy to say this is no big deal, like, oh, France is so libertine and they don't care about sex, which is true within limits. So it was clearly forbidden to have a Minitel service that was for a solicitation.

Like you couldn't have a service that was about connecting prostitutes with johns, for example. Although that's like a natural use of such a platform that has this privacy component. And of course, like that's a common use of internet services and has been for a long time. And so some forms of human sexuality were subject to more closer scrutiny. Queer communities were kinky communities like BDSM services would attract greater scrutiny. But at the same time, the creators of services and the people who built communities were very clever about working their ways through these bureaucracies. And so we document in the book a number of examples of people who found ways to build communities that were outside of this censorship regime. And the key is that because

of the existing regulation of print publishers, the print and broadcast news organizations that predate the Minitel were very involved in lobbying the state for how the Minitel should be regulated. And one outcome of that lobbying activity is that preexisting print publications had advantages in getting access to the platform. And so if you were a big newspaper, then you could get a number of Minitel shortcodes and build services on them.

And so you could have a service that was officially for a newspaper, and then it has chat rooms and forums on all these different topics. And within that large online space, there's a range of activity that can take place without the overall service being seen as like a hangout for queer communities to meet one another. And this is similar to how people will appropriate from existing social media systems and turn them towards the needs that they have. Something similar is happening here. What's really different about the Minitel case from the way we think about speech on the internet today is that there isn't automated censorship of

the kind that we might see ex-ante on a site like YouTube, where copyright is enforced before there is any complaint, like there's automated detection of audio and things like that. I think that helps us to think about this regulatory system. So people who might have supported this censorship regime might have seen it as like a proactive form of approval that enabled the platform to exist. And then it also plays out in a transparent public forum, because this is not a matter of a single corporate entity having terms of service and internal policies, which are being updated all the time. And the kind of thing that we take for granted now that when you sign up for a service, you click through pages and pages of documentation. This is taking place in the public interest.

And so it has to be played out in the case of public policy. There's elected officials involved in public bureaucrats who, however they carry out their service, they are doing so out of an obligation to the public interest. That means that if there's a problem with the bureaucracy, the problem can play out in public discourse as well. A complaint can be made that is in public because these services and these administrations are supposed to support the interests of the public who use the platform. And so even when there are cases, which I think there are many, where the Minitel censorship regime or the bureaucracy failed different groups of potential users, it was always in the context of this transparent public platform. And I find that to be like a

continuing contrast with the kinds of things that I think animate a lot of discussions about regulation governance on online platforms today. A very interesting thing about the Pink Minitel is that Pink Minitel is really, really profitable and took in a lot of money. So in terms of just like minutes online, some of the most enthusiastic users of Minitel are going in the online chat rooms. And they're not necessarily having nonstop 24-7 cyber sex with people, but it's an adult oriented space. One enthusiast magazine talked about Pink Minitel as the return of the masquerade. It's like a fun place to be, but it is adult-oriented. It's like entering into an adult space the same way that children

aren't allowed to go into a bar or something like that. So one problem with that prominence is that you have a slight contradiction between the official narrative about Minitel and then the narrative as it played out in popular culture. So when you look at popular magazines, television shows, film, you see a lot of Minitel Rose, a lot of pink Minitel activity. When you look at the official statistics of the government, they had to come up with categories like community services or peer-to-peer communication, like ways to create categories that were inclusive of Minotaur Rose, but also went beyond them to include non-pink activities. And I should say, some of the people we've interviewed since who are longtime Minotaur contributors or enthusiasts are actually kind of frustrated that Minotaur Rose is often the only thing that people know

about the system because they think that it suggests that it's all porn. And that obscures the role of relationships and community that developed in some of these spaces and also the many different cultural spaces that developed outside of the explicitly sexual services. So I don't know. I think that Pink Minotaur is a nice story that cuts across all of these issues of politics and economics and technology. But I also think it's helpful to remember that it's just one piece of this like bigger, very lively online space. You were talking a bit there about how, you know, Minitel is in part interesting because

it is this public platform and it is accountable to the public in a way that a lot of the platforms that we rely on today are not right? And one of the comparisons that you make in the book is to Apple's App Store. And that's a comparison that I found really interesting because the Minitel example showed how something like the App Store could be managed with the public in mind instead of simply for the needs or the desires of a private corporation, right? So could you explain a bit about that comparison and what lessons it might hold when we think about modern platforms, whether it's the App Store or something else? Yeah, we took a little bit of a risk in our book to describe Minitel as a platform. I say that

it's a little bit of a risk because it's kind of an anachronism. People at the time in the 1980s especially would not describe Minitel as a platform. We're using a term from the present to describe a system from the past. And so we make that little historical transgression in order to encourage this comparison with platforms that would come later. So some of the economic theorizing around platforms didn't really happen until the 1990s in the US, especially around the antitrust case with Microsoft Windows and the browser wars and other things that happened around that. But a platform in its most kind of general form, a technological platform, is often organized as a multi-sided

market. So the platform is like a space for two or more groups to come together and have some sort of exchange. And then the provider of the platform takes some rents off of it. And so the Apple App Store is like a textbook platform. They run this service and people who make iOS apps can publish them on the platform. People who own iOS devices can come and buy or subscribe to the services on there. And then the platform takes some responsibility for making sure the apps don't have viruses in them. And they also crucially handle payments. They are the ones who process everybody's credit cards, and they keep everybody's credit card information. And they're not going to give my credit card information directly to the maker of the apps. Rather, they process the

payment, take their cut, they have some cut that they give to the maker of the apps, and it's all good. But the internal operation of the app store isn't subject to public scrutiny. It's not a matter of public policy. It's not something that gets debated in Congress. There isn't like a ministry of apps that's out there that determines what a fair rate is to pay developers. You know, we rely on Apple's beneficence to provide this. And if you're the user of an iOS device, you don't really have other options of places to go to get apps. There's a little bit of flexibility around Android devices, but it has a lot of barriers. It's not easy to jump from the Google App Store to some other App Store, regardless of whether they exist. So Minitel is a platform also in that same sense.

And I think the comparison with the App Store really works, where we had people all over France in the 1980s and 1990s building new services to run on there, you know, whether it's online games and chat rooms or a database that would be of use to some people, airline reservation service, something like that. And they have to apply to the administrators of the platform to get access. And so they are subject to that censorship regime. And then they're given their short code and they can go and start advertising to potential users. And then users come and the fees are taken in a really similar way, which is the gateway keeps track of how long people are on teletel and they know who you connected to because you had to type in the short code to get to it. And then the PTT or the telephone administrators kind of figure out how many minutes you spent

on which services. And then they can bill out to the service a certain amount and they can bill the users for a certain amount and they take their cut and everybody goes along. If there is a big complaint about the rates, then people can debate about that in public discourse. It becomes a matter for consideration in public life. So that's like the very simple way to think about the platform. One motivation for us to take that approach was because of the platformization of the internet. And there I'm borrowing specifically on

Anna Hellman's research about the changing character of the open web towards the enclosure in platforms like Facebook, Apple, and others. And in doing so, then we have something more of a clear apples to apples comparison that we can look at there. And people who've talked about platforms, they break them down in different ways. There's like the technology component, the economic component, the policy and governance component, and the cultural kind of symbolic component. And as we started to analyze Minitel through that lens, we kept seeing that there was this balancing of different interests at each of those levels.

So for example, just strictly looking at the technology, I think from the point of view of critics of Minitel, they often thought about it as being very closed. And yet when we looked at it through an archival lens, we were finding all this documentation that explained in great detail, like how to encode graphics so they could be seen. And we were able to recreate certain Minitel services just using the archival documents that were compatible with Minitel terminals. So in order to stimulate that kind of private development around the edges of a platform, it actually had to be quite open.

So the process of defining those standards was not open. That was run centrally. But the publication of the standards was. It was not kept proprietary. And so that enabled people to even build Minitel-compatible services that didn't use the central platform whatsoever. These would be called servers, RTC, or telephone servers, or microservers. and they'd be running around the edges. They couldn't take part in that billing component. They couldn't get any of the advantages of that, but they could just run over normal telephone lines. And a lot of the hardware that people built around Minitel took advantages of those. So there was like point of sale terminals for businesses who wanted to use the Minitel as their cash register of a kind. Or there was a few cases where you could buy a

computer that would just be a box, and it would use the Minitel as the screen and the keyboard and communicate with it through the serial port on the Minitel. So all of these things are possible because of a certain character of openness. So in the technology view, you can see the platform as being this balance of open and closed. And we kept seeing that, a balance of public and private, open and closed, centralized and decentralized. And it seems that in the case of Minitel, it hit a real sweet spot for the conditions in which it was created, such that lots of people were able to create services and experiment with using those services. And as a result, it lasted for a long time, like a lot longer than we kind of think of it. So the

Minitel didn't end until 2012. And so while we sometimes describe it as like a precursor or a forerunner, it actually ran in parallel with the internet for a really long time in the web. And some Minitel services even existed for a time in a hybrid mode where they had web interfaces and Minitel interfaces and users could be interacting with each other through different points of entry into those spaces. Most people going on Minitel services in the late 90s and after would be running like a Minitel emulator window on their laptop or personal computer. So these platforms really are running right alongside each other. I don't think that firms like Apple would appreciate a comparison with Minitel because Minitel had been seen for so long as like backwards, the wrong way to do it, a dead end. And yet they reproduced so many of the political economic characteristics of Minitel

with none of the public interest involved, like none of the appreciation for the users and none of the accountability or transparency that people using Minitel came to expect. You talk there about the evolution of the internet into, you know, a more platformized internet, right? Like some people talk about the evolution from web 1.0 to web 2.0. And even others talks about like the movement into a web 3.0, right? So we see these evolutions in how the internet is functioning and how things are taking place on it, right? And I think one of the kind of provocative questions of the book, as you talk about, you know, Minitel, the system was shut down in 2012. So it did exist alongside

the internet for a long time. But eventually, that network came to an end, because, you know, I think we can rightfully see that the internet has kind of dominated how we are all networked at the moment, right? But the book kind of presents this question of if Minitel ran for 30 years and was eventually sunsetted, we have had a while with the internet now. Will that eventually reach the same point, right? So I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that. Do you think that we are

eventually going to see the end of the internet and its replacement with something else? Or do you think that the internet has this kind of quality where it keeps evolving and might avoid that kind of fate or last longer than Minitel was able to? It's a great question because it forces us to ask, what is the internet? And I think that question is really hard to answer. Whereas in Minitel, you know, we no sense would it be familiar to the internet of 2003 and will not be in 2023. Whereas Minitel remained fairly stable over that period of time. So there's something that happens that's socially and culturally meaningful that we stick to the term internet. And you can see the thing that is called the internet changing in almost fundamental ways at different points in time. And so we called the book Minitel, Welcome to the

Internet, because we're using the internet in that colloquial fashion. And I think historians of technology will say, oh, that's not really the internet. I mean, I've had the experience of a historian colleague of mine. We're at a professional event and then afterwards hanging out in a loud bar and he's like, so about the title of your book, it's not the internet, right? But it is the internet in the sense of a computer mediated communication space that connects lots of different heterogeneous technologies and political regimes together. So we think about what is the internet to us in 2020, and we start looking back in time. Most people in the United States didn't have access to broadband connections until the

mid-2000s. And many people didn't start to use the internet for fun in any sense until they had it on their phone. And so that wouldn't be until 2010 and after. So the thing that we're thinking about as internet platforms and what, say, Hellman describes as platformatization is a phenomenon of the last 10 or 15 years. And yet when we think about the history of that, we tend to look at all these networks that came before like ARPANET and others. And I wonder if we're allowing that term internet from the present to do a lot of work in the past, that it's describing something that's pretty different in terms of what it meant for people using it. So for Julian and I, when writing this book and doing this work, we started to think about questions you could ask about any platform. Who can connect? Who can create things on that

platform? What tools are they allowed to use to create things? And what services can exist on that platform? And so if we're evaluating the openness or the life or the success of some platform or another platform, we should be able to answer all of those questions. And in the case of Minitel, lots of people can connect. Anybody who has access to a telephone network in their home can get the terminal or they can use it from school or work and things. But there is the barrier of costs, which is a very significant barrier. Similarly around who can create, what tools they can use, things like that. significant barrier. Similarly around who can create, what tools they can use, things like that. And so the openness around the edges of the platform gave it this strange afterlife, which was an unexpected part of the project.

So when the system was shut down in 2012, it seems like that's the end of Minitel. Your terminal doesn't work anymore. There's no more gateways for you to connect to, to go through and find directories and things like that. And yet we became connected into an international network of enthusiasts who were starting to mess around with the Minitel terminals. This is especially common in France because they had been like e-waste for 20 years at that point. There was almost no nostalgia about them at all. It was just something that people had, like an old landline telephone that was in their closet. You could get them for free. They were in the trash. In fact, when we started the site Minitel.us, Julian, when he was traveling back and forth to France, would bring a Minitel terminal in his carry-on

luggage because you could just get them for free. Now there's some collectible quality to them. So there's some secondary market on eBay and other places for Minitel terminals, but they're plentiful. So lots of people are cracking them open and starting to play with them. And by now there's a community of Minitel enthusiasts who have recreated their old services and are running them either through internet portals or on the actual telephone network. So they are recreating Minitel services, including simulations of the electronic phone book and things like that without any state approval. So from the official state narrative, Minitel is over and it has been for almost a decade. And yet if you go to like museaminitel.fr, you can click on the right column. There's like six or seven Minitel services that are

functional misogynies that you can access through your web browser. And while those are just like interesting things that people might be doing as a hobby, they do raise an interesting question about platforms. And so if I was going to append a question to my question about platforms, it might be who decides when this platform is over? You know, if we were to compare Minitel to Facebook, it's like Facebook will go offline one day. And when it does, what happens to Facebook groups? What happens to all my images? What happens to all the posts by people who have passed away? Like, what is the afterlife of a platform that is so centrally controlled as the ones that we see and use every day today?

They may not have afterlives in the same sense that this platform created in the public interest has had. It's something that we can kind of walk back in this history of platforms and see which ones have afterlives and not. The book that we've been able to write about Minotaur, I don't think we could have written about America Online because America Online has not had that same afterlife. We don't have the same material record. There was not a public mandate to preserve the materials as there is in the case of a state-sponsored system where there's state archives and you can go to them and see what they have. So I think, yeah, when we think about what will happen to the internet someday, one question we can ask is how many times has the internet already died? How many internets from the past are already gone that we did not preserve along the way? And who benefits from our continued reinvention of what the internet is? To what extent is the platformized internet of 2020 even the same network as the open internet of 1995? That's one that's open. Were the people who resisted the commercialization of the internet in 1995,

would they say that was a death? That there was a pre-commercial internet that had died and was not recoverable after the dot-com era. So the internet itself as a concept is maybe died multiple times. I can't say. Minitel is unique in its continuity and its stability alongside of that continually dying internet. I think that gives people so much to think about. I think that is such like a mind-opening kind of question to consider, you know, what really is the internet, and especially in the context of all the information you've just given us about Minitel. I think I want to leave it there to leave those questions in people's minds, so they can dwell on them themselves. And I want to thank you so much, Kevin, for taking the time

to fill us in on this history and to leave us with these big questions as we close. So thank you so much. Thanks. And if I was going to say there's one question for people to think about or to chat with us about on Twitter, it's can you imagine a more just internet? Can you imagine a future internet that you would prefer to exist in than the one that we have now? That was the project that faced the people who designed Minitel to imagine the future and build it. Kevin Driscoll is the co-author of Minitel, Welcome to the Internet, and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. If you want to find out more about Kevin and Julian's work, you can go to Minitel.us or follow them

on Twitter at Minitel Research. You can also follow Kevin at Kevin Driscoll. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about the other shows in the network at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us. Thanks for listening.