Tech Won't Save Us - Why the Soviet Union Didn’t Build the Internet w/ Benjamin Peters

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Benjamin Peters to discuss the proposals for national computer networks in the Soviet Union, the challenges they faced in getting approval, and what lessons they hold for how we think about networks.Benjamin Peters is the author of “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” and the co-editor of “Your Computer Is On Fire.” He’s also the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor at the University of Tulsa and affiliated faculty at Yale Law School. Follow Ben on Twitter as @bjpeters.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:Ben summarized his research on the Soviet network proposals for Aeon.Support the show

The first global computer networks emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists and not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and in this final episode of this month's history series, my guest is Benjamin Peters. Ben is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and Affiliated Faculty at Yale Law School. He's the editor of Digital Keywords and the co-editor of Your Computer is on Fire. And you might remember that I spoke to Mar Hicks about their contribution to that a couple months ago. And he's also the author of How Not to Network a Nation, The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. And that's mainly what we'll be discussing today. We have a really great conversation about the proposals for national computer networks in the Soviet Union, why they

were never built, and what kind of obstacles they faced. You know, it's easy to look back at the history and just say like, oh, the United States, you know, built the internet. So, you know, the capitalist mode of innovation is superior to, you know, what was happening in the Soviet Union. But that really misses a lot of the kind of nuance and intricacies of what was happening in the Soviet Union, but that really misses a lot of the nuance and intricacies of what was actually going on and how structural barriers in the Soviet Union stopped a national computer network designed for economic planning and to improve the planned economy, even while the state was undertaking a number of other major innovations with regard to space and weaponry while rapidly industrializing. Ben makes a really interesting point that I think kind of

relates back to my conversation with Margaret O'Mara, that in the case of the Soviet Union, it was kind of the rivalries between the different ministers and ministries that kept these networking projects from moving forward, from being implemented. Whereas in the United States, where you would expect kind of capitalist competition, because that is kind of the narrative, the way that innovation took place during this period was actually the state coming in and funding a lot of different projects so this innovation could occur and didn't have the kind of constraints that the researchers, at least in the case of these network projects, faced in the Soviet Union. So I think this is a really interesting conversation. I think it's a great one to kind of end this month of discussions. And, you know,

before we get into the conversation, I just want to give you some updates on a couple other things. You might remember I was planning to have Richard Barbrook on the show last month. That episode will now be coming next week. So stay tuned for that. And as a result of hitting the new member goal last month, I said that I would be starting a weekly newsletter. So I'm really happy to say that the first issue of the newsletter will be coming on Sunday. You can sign up in the show notes, you can find the link down there. And I'm really excited to expand the podcast with the newsletter as well, where I can give some more critical insights on the things that are going on in the media in the day

to day outside of these kind of weekly discussions that I'm having with people on the podcast. I was hoping to have another surprise ready for the launch of the newsletter, but that's not ready yet. So you'll just have to wait a little bit longer. There'll be something coming that I'll be able to let you know about later. But still make sure to sign up to the newsletter so you can get it every week, and you can also learn about that surprise once it's ready. Now, with that said, Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are

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conversation. Ben, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. Delighted to be here, Paris. I'm really excited to chat with you. You know, obviously, you've written this really fascinating book on the proposals for networks in the Soviet Union, you know, around the same time that these ideas were proliferating in the United States and other countries around the world, you know, as I've talked to Kevin Driscoll about in the case of France and Ida Medina in the case of Chile. So obviously, I wanted to talk to you about the proposals for these networks in the Soviet Union. And also, you know, kind of the lessons that might come of that as we think about what we can learn from them today. But before we get into that discussion,

obviously, I want to set some of the context for listeners, especially about, you know, the Soviet Union and what was going on around these times, so that we can have that context when we actually get into discussing, you know, these networks and why they were proposed to look the way that they were, and, you know, what ultimately got in the way of their ability to be implemented, right. And so I wanted to start by getting into the early decades of the Soviet Union itself. And, you know, for a lot of people, especially outside the left, you know, that period is associated with gulags reflecting, you know, anti-communist narratives that have prevailed in the West for quite a long time, right? Of course, I'm not a Stalinist and I'm not trying to dismiss, you know, suffering that took place under Stalin's leadership, but I was also hoping that we could get a bit more of a

nuanced picture that outlined some of the achievements of the Soviet Union in education, science, technological development leading up to this period that we'll be talking about. So can you give us kind of an idea of what things were like around that time so we can get an understanding of what was happening in the Soviet Union? I'm delighted to. And let me begin, Paris, again, by thanking you for hosting this conversation and giving us a chance to not only set the scene for kind of emerging alternative network imaginaries and histories, but also just to be in conversation around such pressing contemporary issues as well. So with that, thank you. To set the scene, I think one thing that we need to begin by noting is that

the story of the Soviet Union is also a bigger picture story than we usually give it credit. In some ways, you could think if you wanted about the history of the Soviet Union as the short 20th century, 1917 to 1991. But in many ways, to properly understand this, and most of our comments today about early network proposals will be centered around the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But we also need to begin just a little bit broader and maybe tell a long 20th century story too. So we might begin by noting that before the Soviet Union became a global superpower and technological competitor, it was largely a tsarist empire of mostly illiterate peasants. And during a very tumultuous

series of revolutions, the former tsarist empire transformed very, very rapidly into something that to previous generations would have been unrecognizable. I'm actually speaking to you from Tulsa, Oklahoma, on what will soon be the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. And I'll just note a historical analogy here that modernity came to Europe roughly over 400 to 500 years. It came to Tulsa over the course of about five or six years. And in many ways, the Soviet Union is closer to Tulsa than it is to Europe in the sense that the forced modernization, the industrialization, the outlining of economic planning, which I hope we can get into, the electrification of the nation, the establishment of a union, a союз of republics that had a common goal, educational platforms that really brought, again, this illiterate peasantry into a modern literate world. Carlotta Chenoweth at West Point has this forthcoming book on this, on how early Soviet writers taught the illiterate to become semi-literate through picture books and all sorts of things. Anyway, there was an enormous amount of effort poured into transforming a nation over a very

short period of time. I think one way to really crystallize this point is to look at what happens during World War II, right? And this is complicated, and it comes eventually to my critical perspective on how we think today about networks and their planning mechanisms. But in many ways, the frame for a planned economy, before it emerges natively in the Soviet Union, and before it merges something that we might explore around something called economic cybernetics, it really only exists as kind of a forced military exercise, which is not particularly a good way to be designing sustainable economies. But if you think about the periods under Lenin and Stalin, the economy,

it's military-driven, it's command and control, and there's a lot of growth that happens. There's a lot of pain and suffering as well, because the state is in a crisis exigency mode. And I think that is the backdrop for what becomes a very different story that I try to tell in How Not to Network a Nation, where early networks emerge trying to find an alternative to what was initially like a German military economy model. But it's worth noting, just to hit upon some of the points that you made, that within two generations, 95% or more of the population is literate. Moscow, in many ways, becomes a kind of net exporter of pedagogical materials. And I think we often forget how genuinely international and multilingual the Soviet Union was,

reaching over 17 republics and dozens and dozens of major languages, and trying to build educational cultures and cultures that emphasized mental excellence in ways that I think is still captured in legacies of chess, ballet, you know, other kind of high art activities that the Soviet Union and today former Soviet Union traditions are known for. I think the way to begin thinking about it is that the early Soviet history is one of enormous force, turmoil, change, transition. It's often driven by the state, but the state here is, as I hope to show, is ultimately a bit of an elusive figure that needs to be kind of critically rethought through. It's not a singular monolithic entity, of course, but it's actually a much more interesting story. You know, I think that's a perfect way to set it up for us and to give us some background into the early Soviet Union and what it was actually dealing with as it tried to modernize and industrialize in a really rapid time period. And obviously, you talked about there how the Soviet Union had a planned economy. So a lot of work went into the process

of crafting the five-year plans and ensuring that the economy was able to deliver the goods and things like that that people needed. But as you explained, the planning process certainly was not perfect. There were issues in that process. So can you talk a bit about the difficulties involved in planning the Soviet economy on the local, regional, and national levels? Absolutely. You've already set it up very nicely in your question, the local, regional, and national levels diagram the three-level pyramid structure that the state is imagining itself to be, and that, by the way, the network proposals would then graph themselves onto, which sets a very different tenor, a kind of initial contour for imagining networks than we might imagine elsewhere. So there's a lot of really,

really interesting stories here to get into. And one thing that I was not expecting, I mean, to say this, when I initially thought to write this book, I intended to write a history of untold networks, to think about media technology and society, which it definitely does. But what I was not expecting to get into was what strikes me as like the least sexy possible topic in the world, which is Soviet bureaucracy. And it ended up being actually, for me, a totally fascinating discovery of the complex treadmill of change that the Soviet Union was undergoing bureaucratically and administratively. So it might be worth reminding our listeners and others that the Soviet Union, again, was not monolithic, but that

there's a kind of fractal experience for people on the ground. If you were a worker at a factory at the local level, your experience of the economy and of the planning would be very different than if you were a top economic planner, or perhaps in the regional level where you're a manager of those plans. So I think the basic reminder is that a planned economy comes with quotas, orders, assumptions of certain thresholds are going to be met within certain timeframes. Those orders work their way down the line until they come to the factory level where they're then fulfilled. And then the products are sent out and the quotas are met and rewards are distributed appropriately. With that in mind, again, the experience was diverse and interesting. If you were a factory worker, you might need special training to learn how to read certain types of these specialized orders. If you were a factory worker who was

struggling to make ends meet, you might get paid by your factory for the work that you did through the factory. This became increasingly the case in the latter half of the 20th century. You might have some kind of base Ludditism, a fear that technological innovations might replace them. And so there was a certain amount of resistance on the ground to some of the technological proposals that came down in the 50s and 60s. But I think it would also be worth noting that at the regional level, this was not at all simply like a case of copying and pasting, getting the orders at a mass level from on high and breaking them out into mezzanine or micro level orders and sending them out to local factories. No, a regional manager would often be engaged in complex negotiation, vertical bargaining up and down the chain of planned economies, you know, so that there would

be deliberate overestimation, deliberate underestimation, kind of managing expectations in ways that would advantage your local team, whether that's regional or local or national. And so this meant that there was a kind of complex economy of expectations that were always being negotiated. I mean, I think maybe the key point here is, it really is a story about humans. It's a story about our complex social relationships and how we go about delegating demand and desire. But at the same time, it's also a story about the file systems and the technological supports that we use to craft and navigate to negotiate those desires and demands. And in this sense, it's worth remembering that for most of the forced modernization, industrialization in the teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s, this has been done entirely by paper, as it would remain. So there is no other prospect for even thinking beyond paper. Imagine running an economy at the speed of the post office. And don't get me wrong,

I take the post office to be one of the great infrastructural innovations and triumphs of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. But just to get a sense for the timescale, there was always a sense of delay. In some ways, incentivized proper planning. Here, I'm not complaining. I'm not saying there's endless delays because that, of course, is the case. But it incentivized and framed a type of complex planning thought that would then go on to be native and vital to the later Soviet story. Just for example, one of the common stories told about the Soviet Union is the slow rise of technocracy, the strength of the engineering education. And in many ways, remember that it would be politically less problematic to major in technical or ostensibly, supposedly, technologically neutral field. And so what happened over the Soviet Union is an increasing number of leaders would be trained as engineers. And I think you see that story really being told, really finding its feet after the end

of World War II, where there's this complex, sudden scramble to try to figure out, okay, now that we have this complex apparatus for negotiating demand and desires across Moscow, major regional city centers, and then all the way down to the local factory and towns, how do we go about developing complex systems thinking? And it's precisely that kind of historical environment that Shepard in and ushered in economic cybernetics. I think it's really interesting that you describe it that way, right? Because in the book, one of the things that you point out is that in the Soviet Union, having a kind of engineering background was kind of the equivalent of having a law degree in Western politics, right? There

were a lot more engineers present in the way that we have a lot of lawyers who law degree in Western politics, right? There were a lot more engineers present in the way that we have a lot of lawyers who are involved in politics in the West. But, you know, as you mentioned there, as you set it up, cybernetics became really important as this thinking evolved, as, you know, it moved toward a more technocratic way of managing the economy and the state. But one of the interesting things that you described in the book was how cybernetics was initially taboo in the Soviet Union. And after Stalin's death, it started to be rehabilitated. And Soviet researchers even developed a specific idea of cybernetics that they called economic cybernetics, which obviously plays an important role in the network proposals that we'll be discussing in a minute. So before we get to those proposals, what was the trajectory of cybernetics in the Soviet Union?

And what makes economic cybernetics unique from, I guess, the ideas that were circulating in the West around cybernetics? Just broadly, I think one interesting story here is that the story of cybernetics is better known in many places outside of the anglophone West than it is within, which is one of the great dramatic ironies, of course, of the story of tech and its ultimately, I think, kind of Greek tragic failures, is that there's this fascinating meta-science that takes root in Latin America, the Soviet Union, Europe, and in Asia, having a broad intellectual influence, shaping the vocabulary of how we think about systems, control, communication, information processing, signals, and others. And in some ways, that legacy is still remembered a

little bit in the Anglophone West, but I think it's largely forgotten. So I really appreciate the question because it helps us think about intellectual traditions greater than any one language. So it's worth noting, as you noted, that there was some rhetorical opposition, ideological opposition to cybernetics as another kind of tired bourgeois pseudoscience under Stalin. But my reading, as well as that of Slava Gorojevic, the brilliant historian of science and mathematics at MIT, upon whose work much of my book is based, I should note. He's been very important to me and many others. particularly vigorous. It wasn't really clear on what grounds the ideologues were opposing it. And so once Stalin passed, and there was this kind of slow recuperation period, through a story that I describe in the book, the short line, the red thread here is a man named Anatoly Kitov. Kitov plays an important role in rehabilitating cybernetics as a discourse. And actually, I think the important thing to recognize about cybernetics in the Soviet Union

is how well it fit. It arrives with the glamour of foreign sounding words, right? Cybernetics is a Greek neologism for steersman or governance, but it arrives with kind of the varnish of outside intellectuals. But in many ways, it's most obviously a native fit because there's complex systems thinking going on across many fields already for decades. And it just kind of arrives not as a particular new innovation, but rather as a vocabulary for making sense of what's already present. And I think that's its grand success. And in many ways, that I think is true elsewhere outside of the Soviet Union too. So the contribution of economic cybernetics is in many ways distinctive to the former Soviet Union,

not exclusively so. But if you look for programs today or degrees in economic cybernetics, it's basically within the former Soviet Union. And I think there's good reason for that, which is it became a distinctive field for trying to craft dynamic complex planning across long periods of time, attending really carefully to limited resources and the optimization of those resources. It's not exclusive to the former Soviet Union, of course. Econometrics, in some cases, is a sibling science. Linear programming, which has its roots in World War II, again, and kind of how do we optimally distribute resources in a scarce and crisis environment? That kind of inspiring question goes on to animate a lot of broader questions. insight of these planning innovations, these mathematical tools for letting us cast ahead and optimize resource allocation, and do it in a way that will be socially sustainable,

that won't be driven by crisis or military need, but would rather be built off of social need, be built to meet people in a public where they're at. That kind of premise and that promise, that subtle shift from military crisis to social need is, I think, one of the great and, for me, sustainable promises of the Soviet project. How can we build an experiment in serving more people and their needs? That, in some ways, as I understand it, is the driving impetus for the emergence of economic cybernetics as a field. Yeah. If we're thinking about what we want these networks and what we want cybernetics to actually serve, the social good and the social need is obviously one thing that we would want it to be focusing on, right? So I think that's a really important point that you're bringing up there.

Now, you brought up Anatoly Kitov, and he is kind of the author also of the first important network project. And so, you know, you've brought up who Kitav was as someone who developed economic cybernetics. with his network proposal, and how that proposal that he made illustrates the difficulty that his proposal and others faced in bridging the civilian and military divide in the Soviet Union in particular. Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov initially was a young man, small build, Armenian background, of white Russian descent, actually, who had a keen mind for mathematics, who rose through the ranks of the Red Army in the Second World War and emerged as a kind of prominent and rising military researcher. It's in 1952, he then encounters Norbert Wiener's masterwork, Cybernetics, in a military library, and then begins this three, four-year process of slowly recuperating and building the political capital to reclaim cybernetics within popular discourse. So at the time, it was still under kind of for Bolton to praise cybernetics, but he clearly saw that there is a lot here within cybernetics that could be translated into a robust Russian language approach for developing self-governing systems, communication, and control with computers across the whole society.

And so he does this, by the way, I'll note, with the help of Alexei Lopunov, who's one of the great polymathic cyberneticists of note and intellectually renaissance man, as well as Vladimir Sabalov, who is politically vital since he is the researcher with his hand basically on the nuclear bomb. And that gives him a lot of political capital, not with the readers and not with the scientists, but with the people who are governing the editorial decisions about whether or not to greenlight cybernetics talk. But in any case, for Kitov and others, it became a supple systems vocabulary. It was going to equip the Soviet state with a high-tech toolkit for rationalist Marxist governance. And it would also do so, by the way feel the allure of kind of the promise of this technocratic dream to avoid strongmen. And I think it's worth kind of acknowledging and crediting, but also surely it's a preferable

alternative to strongmen. But on this other hand, it's also one of the kind of, again, dramatic ironies and failures of the story. So in 1959, this is now like after cybernetics has been full-throated, rehabilitated, and there's now growing enthusiasm across the sciences. And one of the extraordinary things about cybernetics, which is just a stunning potential growth. It never goes that far. The really serious ones are only for a quarter. But still, almost every field could have the adjective cybernetic appended to it. And it's in 1959 that Kitov is the director of a secret military computer research center. And he begins to turn his attention to what he called the, quote, unlimited quantities of reliable calculating processing power towards better planning the national economy. And so here he's not initially an economic cyberneticist. This has already been kind of cooking in the background for four years or so, but he's positioned to be able to see a solution. He said, well, why don't we allow civilian organizations to use the already functioning military computer complexes to do economic planning during the harness the military's computational surplus and adjust for economic plans in real time, tweaking the plan nightly if needed. And so this initial military-civilian nationals computer network he called the Economic Automated

Management System. And it is, as best as I can tell, the first proposal for a public interest national computer network in the world in the fall of 1959. I can say a little bit more about this, but the premise of a technocratic solution is probably obvious. If you're dealing with trying to calculate complex senses and economic needs over time, there's going to be handmade errors. A handmade error in 1959 had goofed the population prediction by several million by 1962. And so there was a will and the might and the way to try to correct and avoid such problems going forward. And he wrote all of this down in what he called his Red Book Letter, appending one of his own books. And he sent it off to Nikita Khrushchev, the General Secretary at the time,

saying, hey, let's do this. Let's combine forces, military-civilian. Khrushchev sends two letters. The first is successful. In the first, he proposes just letting economic planners use local centers that would not be connected to solve planning problems. That is well-received. His mail goes goes straight through and he's kind of heralded for it. But in the second letter that he sends, his military supervisors intercept this letter before it can reach Khrushchev. And they're incensed, basically, that he would propose sharing military researchers with civilian economic planners, resources that he also dared to describe as falling behind the times. And as a consequence, a secret military tribunal was convened to review his transgressions.

And he, for the audacity of proposing that military share its resources with others, was promptly stripped of the Communist Party membership for a year and then dismissed from military leadership permanently. Kitov spent the rest of his career working in medical cybernetics. And so thus ends the first national public computer network ever proposed. I would note that Kitov is an interesting enough character that he remains, and he's basically the last coda to the Glushkov proposal that would follow after him. In some ways, Kitov is the shortest story for telling the beginning and the ending

of this kind of tradition of early public interest or civilian-oriented national computer networks in the Soviet Union. Yeah, you know, I think that gives us a really good introduction to at least how these conversations were kind of starting in the Soviet Union and, you know, some of the difficulties that they were already running into, right? Like what you described there is the difficulty of having a civilian network that is using military resources and how the military wanted to maintain a clear divide between the military and the civilian. And I think we'll talk a little bit about the difficulties that these proposals also faced within different bureaucratic ministries in the Soviet Union, in the Politburo itself, that we'll get to as we discuss this further. But, you know, as you were talking about there, Kitav also goes on to work on another proposal, which kind of forms the main proposal that you discuss in the book. And obviously,

you know, there were more than just these two proposals, but these seem like the main ones to discuss in this interview. And so that project was the All-State Automated System Project, or OGAS, led by Viktor Glushkov. And obviously, this project goes through a number of iterations over a couple of decades. But what was Glushkov proposing? And what did he hope the network would achieve in the Soviet Union? So let me just note on your first comment there, one of the really interesting things here about why the military and the civilian silos feel so divided

is in part because, ironically, it's a question of economic planning, right? Like many of the military triumphs of the Soviet Union, the rocketry, the nuclear power race, and others come because of well-structured, highly subsidized, direct and deliberate state funding. Whereas what often happens in the case of the civilian and public interest is that there is not the very thing that these people are calling for, which is like robust and reasonable economic planning, right? Ones that distribute resources in sustainable and maintainable ways. And so I think there's a kind of like secret irony, effectively, to the story we're telling about the military-civilian divide, which is that, in many ways, the civilian project of the Soviet Union is consistently seeking to

find better ways to maintain its fundamental idea. It's running into problems again and again and again, as basically the military refuses to be socialist. It's narrowcasting its projects. It's holding as an idol questions of national security, but doing so at the cost of national prosperity or even sustainability. Now to the more specific story that you raised. Exactly right. Kitov is not the founder of the proposal that Glushkov brings, but he ends up being an advisor to Glushkov. Glushkov, who lives in Kiev at the time, hears about Kitov's proposal and he's like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, why don't we talk about

that? And he invites Kitov to come consult and advise. Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov is an extraordinary story himself. But I would note just as these stories often tend to go, the two became close enough that decades later, their children would marry. And so still to this day, Nikita's Glushkov family is interwoven. So the full title of Glushkov's plan, The All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR, I think tells its own story about how grandiose and ambitious it was. This all-state automated system is, for me, the preeminent example of sustainable, plausible... I mean, I have plausibility issues with it, but it's the closest, I think, that the Soviets came to developing a public interest national computer network.

And it was first proposed in 1962 and endures even after Glushkov's death in the early 1980s. Kitov writes to Gorbachev in 1985 asking, look, we've still got an opportunity to reform the economy. It's not too late. You're bringing about all these perestroika and glasnost and uskarenia, these reforms to the government. It's still possible for us to try this technocratic reform. Because basically, what I'm saying is that the Glushkov plan was a smart tech update

to the national economy. And I think this is a very different kind of network imagination than we're used to thinking in the West. The OGOS network was to be a real-time remote access national computer network that would build on new and previous telephone wires. It was going to span the Eurasian continent, mapping itself like a nervous system on, again, that three-layer pyramid that we had discussed previously onto every factoring enterprise at the local level, but then also into the regional prominent city centers, and then all the way up into a central planning facility in Moscow. In its most ambitious vision, there would be one central computer center in Moscow, 200 mid-level computer centers in prominent cities,

and as many as 20,000 computer terminals distributed throughout key production sites in the national economy. In many ways, it's a very different story than Eden Medina's, but it's similar in the sense that there's a kind of core economic planning attempt here to use computer technology to reform a national economy and to produce political viability. I have plenty of questions about the proposal itself. So one of them that I did want to focus on was the culture that formed around, I think, the group that was developing this proposal with Glushkov. You talked about a cybertonia that was kind of proposal with Glushkov, you know, you talked about a

cybertonia that was kind of being created in Kiev, I believe, where they were developing this proposal. And I think that it helps to illustrate that, you know, the Soviet Union wasn't just this really kind of repressed environment where people couldn't engage in creativity and, you know, thinking differently than the ideas that were kind of approved by the government. So could you talk a little bit about what this Cybertonia was, and what it suggests about the people who were creating these ideas? So this is one of my favorite moments. It was such a delight to discover this, precisely for the reasons you outlined. So much of my kind of ethnography and historical research

is based around the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev in Ukraine, where Glushkov was the director from its founding in 1962 until his death. cyberneticians would gather and imagine, design, build, theorize grandiose, ambitious, innovative, interesting projects in the name of some larger state project, right? So just before we go to Cybertoni about the after hours and what they did in the informal, it's worth noting that they're not just developing mainframe computers, but imagining totally new models for computing, right? Micropiping processing, which would be modeled after the simultaneous firings of the many synapses of the human brain. Imagine a computer architecture designed to process not through one kind of bottleneck, but many, many a soup of connections,

or theorizing about what automata could realize, or in a theory that I think is equally fit for both the bureaucrat and the businessman today, the kind of paperless office, which I think is a promise that's probably been sold to the benefit of the paper industries for decades. Or developing natural language programming that would respond to humans semantically, not just syntactically. One example would be that a computer would be able to recognize that the phrase, the chair sits on the ceiling, is nonsense, but not because it's syntactically wrong, but because there's something wrong about the meaning there. And so this is like the ambition of the workaday formal intellectual environment at the time. Largely young, creative people who are finding opportunities within the Soviet educational system, and they're trying to develop it. In fact, I think the pinnacle, the most bold vision of this is something that I think extends back to what has since been called Russian cosmism, this tradition of imagining immortality. It's kind of a transhumanism, but a century longer. So Glushkov and his students imagine,

without the benefit of Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke in hand, something they call information immortality. The idea is that we would upload our minds to a dynamic memory network, and our memories would live on in this kind of material recuperation of our most meaningful connections after life. I think that's just kind of a gorgeous moment for thinking about how secular dialectical materialism and cosmism can kind of flow together into formal work. And that's just during the day. During the evening, the same cyberneticists built Cybertonia, which is a comedy club marked by its frivolity and kind of quiet, merry pranksterism. They vented steam. They had an after-hour work club that kind of imagined itself as an independent country.

They christened their group Kibertonia or Cybertonia at a New Year's party in 1960, and then held regular events, holiday dances, symposia, conferences in Kiev and Lviv, publishing papers for the next eight years. By about 1968, the trail runs dry. But yeah, the group was full of punsters. They issued faux passports instead of event invitations or wedding certificates full of formulas, newsletters that parodied the local Kiev newspaper. They had a currency made out of punch cards, the programming of the time. They even had their own Kubertonia constitution.

And in parody of the Soviet or council, had their own Cybertonia constitution. In parody of the Soviet or council, Soviet means council, governance structure, Cybertonia was governed by a council of robots. At the head of that council was their mascot and supreme leader, a saxophone playing robot, which I think is an interesting sideways nod to the US cultural import of jazz and science fiction being blended in the richest terms. Just for what import of jazz and science fiction kind of being blended in the richest terms. Just for what it's worth, science fiction in English is rendered научная фантастика in Russian, which means science fantasy. I think you can capture how resonant that fantasy is here in some of the work of Cybertonia. This is a kind of

a microcosm of a counterculture that is also part of a cyberculture with a nod to Fred Turner's work. Yeah, I think that's a fascinating example, especially when we consider how, you know, so much of the tech culture and especially the narratives around tech that we have today in the United States come out of that particular kind of countercultural period and are inspired by these ideas that came out of it, to see that there was something similar from which some of these network proposals came from in Soviet Union, just seemed really fascinating to me when I was reading that and kind of making that comparison. Absolutely. And I mean, I think it's worth just stressing here that the network proposal for the OGOS that's worth really kind of focusing on is interesting because of how everyday it is.

Yes, it's bold. Yes, it's ambitious. Yes, it's probably and possibly grandiose in the kind of like scale that it brought about. But I think you're exactly right. Like, I mean, it speaks to very basic, very practical, very everyday questions. Like, how do we actually get the quotas and the plans and the Risbendian compendiums of industry standards aligned and transformed? And how do we really lift an economy that has modernized super, super quickly into a sustainable socialism?

And I think one of the premises is the kind of sublime speed of electricity and the scalable power of computation. And so it's this premise of electronic socialism that I think really kind of galvanized and motivated a lot of their daily work. I should note, by the way, that Glushkov, who is known to talk down ideologues by quoting paragraphs of Marx from memory, described the Orgas as a kind of faithful fulfillment of Marx's prophecy in the sense that it would bring about a moneyless socialist future, that all hard currency could be transformed into a series of electronic receipt transfers, basically. And so this is 1962, 1963. This is decades before we have the ideology to imagine a PayPal or e-currencies, but they're doing it in a way

that I think fulfills a very different but still resonant set of ideas. So I wanted to discuss the difficulties that the OGOS and that Glushkov experienced in trying to get this proposal implemented, right? Because it seems like we were discussing before about the difficulties of planning such a massive economy and how there are these three levels and that presents the idea of, you know, a hierarchy from the national to the regional to the local, but how, you know, the actual functioning of the economy and of the planning process, I think kind of got in the way of the attempt to rationalize it through this technological means, through this

system of planning, right? So can you discuss a little bit about how the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the kind of rivalries between the various agencies or ministries that existed within, you know, the bureaucracy and the Politburo kind of got in the way of Glushkov being able to get his vision of the OGOS implemented. Absolutely. I'll tell you a story in a second about a man named Vasily Karabuzov. But first, I want to just stress what you've just outlined really nicely, which is there's an implicit kind of tension between the OGOS proposal and the state upon which it's going to work or the practical ground. One is that the network, even though it's mapping itself onto a hierarchy, is doing so in a way that's deliberately

openly designed to be decentralized in the sense that once you have permission from your supervisor to communicate on the network, you would be free to do so with anyone that you have permission to communicate with. So it wasn't just only top-down, but there would be an opportunity for everybody at every level, at every input or output, to upload feedback for factory workers and managers and other people to share complaints, to make comments, to make recommendations. And so this would become, I mean, many things, it would become a kind of automated system, not only for optimizing the balance of supply and demand and predicting market equilibrium before they happened, which is in many ways the goal of economic cybernetics, but it would also be a vast portfolio of human-worker relations. Some people might wonder, it could also be a state surveillance apparatus. But I think for there, we should really comment about how surveillance is

never an explicit goal in the work here. The goal of Glushkov is to make the workers' economy work better. In any case, it's with that kind of decentralized, how do we make this technocratically sustainable goal that I think the Orgas project runs into its greatest barriers. So this brings us to when Glushkov encountered Gorbachev in the Kremlin on the 1st of October 1970, which is the date probably the closest to which the Soviets came to funding a national computer network. The Minister of Finance, Vasily Gorbachev, did not want an optimized, decentralized computer network governing or informing the state economy. Instead, at the Politburo, the second highest committee in the state, he called for simple

computers that would simply flash lights or play music in henhouses, thus speeding egg production, such as he had seen during a recent visit to a farm in Minsk. He countered Blushkov's very kind of bold, ideologically tight, technocratically ambitious proposal with a much more modest proposal. And it appears that he framed this counterproposal as a sense of common sense pragmatism. It's just where we're at in the 1970s technologically. But it's also the rumors hold that he wanted the funding for his own ministry. And the reason he opposed the OGOS was not because of any concern about the project not working technologically, but rather out of a kind of private interest that he had as minister of finance. Rumor holds that he had in fact approached the prime minister, Alexei Kosygin,

in private before this meeting and had threatened him that if his competitor ministry, the Central Statistical Administration, retained control over the OGOS project and its massive funding streams, then Gorbuzov and his Ministry of Finance would internally submarine any economic reform efforts that it might bring about, which, of course, the Ministry of Finance would have a hand in. Which is, by the way, an actionable threat threat given that he had done just pretty much exactly this to Kosygin's piecemeal liberalization efforts five years earlier. I think it's this precise moment where you see a ministry mutiny. I'm not against bureaucracy. I'm against bureaucracy that

doesn't behave like bureaucracy. It strikes me that Karabuzov is looking out for himself. I outline in the book a much broader argument that basically outlines this thesis. The first global computer networks emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists and not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists. Karabuzov is a prime example of a kind of politically driven bureaucrat who is creating, backbiting, and internecine competition that keeps him and his colleagues from realizing their own stated public interests. And, you know, instead of a kind of civilian-oriented project that could have brought about, maybe could have, I don't know. I really don't know. When people ask if this would have happened, would it have changed history? But it ultimately ended up, the committee decided against funding OGOS in 1970, and then the proposal was left in review limbo for a decade, which meant that by the time it became public knowledge, 1982,

it was basically over. In fact, it was only talked about publicly as a way of signaling that the project was not going to be implemented. I think that's just another example of how, in many ways, the Soviet state was anything but. It has this important, viable public interest project, and yet when you look at it in practice, it's regularly interfering with its own best ambitions. So I think what you have described there is so important, right? Because it gives us a picture of how, you know, what Glushkov was proposing, this kind of hierarchical network that would also provide, you know, as you were saying, decentralized access to help to plan the planned economy was maybe not reflective of how the

economy was actually working and how these relationships were working out, especially when it comes to the Politburo and the inter-ministry rivalries that were happening as these ministries sought to maintain their power over the economy and over the pieces of the state that they were in charge of. To that point, there's a part in the chapter that you wrote for Your Computer is on Fire, where you talk about the goals that are kind of designed into these networks, and how they might not always reflect the practice of the network or the reality of what is happening around them. And you know, I discussed this with Eden Medina last week as well on how Stafford Beer had these certain ideas

of how Project Cybersyn would work. But then obviously the government was facing a very different set of challenges as it sought to try to, you know, survive as it faced a coup attempt and things like that. But, you know, in the chapter you discuss how, and I'll read a quote here, perhaps we can say that if the Soviets never agreed on how to build the OGAS network, no one has yet agreed on why the US built the internet. So the US was able to build the internet, as you said, because there was not this competition, and they were just able to go ahead and do it, whereas the Soviets were disrupted in just getting the network itself off the ground. And I know this is becoming quite

a large question, but I guess, what do you see in the proposal for the OGAS network in terms of what the design was planned to be and why it struggled? And I guess, how do you compare that network to what was happening in the United States and what we have seen with the ARPANET and how that has become the internet? I mean, you've put your finger precisely on the pulse of what I take to be the main pulse of comparative network history today, which is, in my view, that network design values do not match practical outcomes. And there's an important distinction that we need to make between how networks are designed and how, if at all, they function. And the lessons that we can learn from the difference between design values and have built on it for over a decade. But just to note how some of our best intentioned hopes for networks are not how they work out. In fact, in some ways, a network,

as we imagine it, is not a network in practice. That is the thing that we draw out, the map, the connections that we diagram, and we say, oh, look, this is a highly centralized network. That must be good for command and control or surveillance. And then we look at another one that's highly distributed, where peer-to-peer nodes are connecting to their neighbors. We say, oh, well, that looks democratic and kind of properly fit for a liberal democracy. In fact, it's precisely that design value where we go wrong. And there's a number of surprises. It's not a surprise, as we've just described, that the Soviet state imagines itself as a hierarchy, but in practice functions as a

heterarchy, a treadmill of competition and unregulated backbiting, in some cases between kind of status quo inclined bureaucrats. But in the Chilean-Cybersyn situation, you know, it's built with social economic reform on the one hand, and in many ways, it realizes that in its design values, but it's unable to appropriately and understandably compensate for the technological and historical conditions in which Chile under Allende is existing. And so again, there's that important beyond technological design story. And then in the US ARPANET, initially, it's designed to survive a nuclear attack or kind of inspired to at least share data among scientists. But then it becomes ambiguous and

conflicting. And ARPA, the top research laboratory at the Defense Department, will take money from Congress promising that this is for national security motives, but then will turn it around and spend it on basic research. So there's this kind of Janus-faced ambiguity happening within how funding flows within the US state too. And ultimately, I would note that nobody was planning to create mass surveillance with these networks. And yet, the very distributed peer-to-peer network that we have heralded as the bringer of democracy and commerce in the 90s and aughts has brought precisely a kind of mass surveillance today. And so I think there's a lot to be learned from the ways that our imagination and best intended design values continue to disappoint and surprise.

Just to briefly follow up on that before I ask my final question, you know, there's also a piece in that chapter where you discuss how, if you are predicting how we'll look back and see the internet, you know, the internet as we know it today, it would be to acknowledge how the kind of global expansion of that network provided power to people who spoke the dominant language and were able to kind of use the dominant code that was existing on that network. Can you talk a little bit about power in relation to the rollout of that network? I hope there's many kind of takeaway lessons from the Soviet internet story. I mean, one I'll just note as a way to get there is that I think

it's a misnomer and we do ourselves a significant disservice when we think about the internet as a singular mother of all networks, the network of networks. What I hope instead is suggested here is that the future of the internet is likely to resemble the past, which is to say the past is full of many different network projects clamoring for attention and funding. And it's very much the case that so will be the future. It's also the present, which is interestingly multifaceted and fractured. There's many networks that I think we just simply do not attend to in our imagination of the network as this communal, public-interested project, which I think is lovely and redeemable and wonderful.

There's also just this implicit forgetfulness that there are corporate networks and private networks and all sorts of networks that have concentrated power all under the guise of, hey, this is a tool or a technology that's built for sharing power, when in fact, its main goal has been to concentrate. A second maybe lesson is to learn just to fundamentally rethink our vocabulary and our language going forward. It is evident to me after writing this book and other things, particularly after the most recent election and other things, that we simply do not have the vocabulary in Anglophone West to be able to properly imagine a robust and sustainable future. If we're constantly falling into the Cold War,

lame divide between capitalist and socialist ideology without acknowledging that they are deeply intertwined into one another. And that in some ways, the power-concentrating functions of capitalism have kept us from having a vocabulary that even lets us talk about the subject properly, into one another. And that in some ways, the power-concentrating functions of capitalism have kept us from having a vocabulary that even lets us talk about the subject properly is one lesson to take. I mean, what does the word privacy mean today? It's like the most narrow, emaciated vision of a word that we could have. It's like the individual right to protect against privations from the outside. When in fact, probably a better way of understanding it would be the concentration of private power, right? Which is in many ways a story about the parts of the

Soviet Union, despite its public interest project, right? It's a story about Microsoft Cloud. It's a story about the NSA Domestic Surveillance Program. It's a story about many, many parts of our lives. And I think that once we rewrite our vocabulary and our language, we'll see not only the present and the future, but the past that got us here in a very different light. I don't see the Soviet Union in America as like ideological opposites, you know, black hat, white hat in a duel, but instead that they're common actors on a stage that we ourselves have yet to really understand. Maybe a third and final takeaway point is just a reminder that it doesn't matter how much enthusiasm we may have for the next technological innovation. Glushkov was as technologically innovative and his team

as anybody. Politically acute, they would strategize and were aware of all sorts of political questions. They were foresightful with all the buzz and interest that we could imagine out of the best of Silicon Valley or DC or whatever we might look to in tech today. And yet, his project did not come to be. And the reason I argue that that did not come to be is not because of the main things that we associate with tech today, innovation or foresightedness, but it's basically that the institutional practices were wrong or did not cooperate. I think it's at that very basic level of when we think about how do we work as communities, how do we build more public,

forward-facing, other-oriented technologies, environments, platforms that can really serve others, that we begin to encounter the important questions. The questions that are going to buoy us not just from avoiding the problems of a Soviet internet that failed, but from our own kind of chapter of networked capitalism that we're in at present. Yeah, I think those are essential points. And I want to end with one final question. And that is, obviously, the story that we often hear about these networks is, you know, the ARPANET is created and then, you know, that kind of grows over time and the NSF net is created and then eventually it's privatized and we get the Internet as we know it today. That sort of evolves to the particular formation that it takes in the present. But obviously, the story that you tell is showing us one alternative proposal for what these networks could have looked like if the conditions were different.

And, you know, this had been able to have been built and to thrive. And, you know, the work of Ida Medina on Project Cybersyn and of Kevin Driscoll and Julian Malin on Minitel and a number of other scholars on other networks show us that there were alternatives that died or failed along the way. But that doesn't mean that just because they are not still present today, that there's nothing that we can learn from them, that there aren't important insights that might come of that. So what do you think is the importance of looking back at the history of these networks that don't exist today, especially as we seek insights into what might come in the future and what alternatives could exist to the way that

networks are designed in the present. Well, in addition to some of the points I've just touched upon, rewriting our vocabulary, rethinking the institutional practices central to how projects work or not, I think I just want to resonate and enthuse with what you're saying. The past is not past, and history remains, if anything, the most renewable resource we have available to us. Graveyards are often some of the most verdant, lively places we have available to us. The history of so-called failed networks ultimately becomes a site, not just of rebirth, because I don't think the life cycles are a particularly useful metaphor here, but of finding pathways not yet taken or pathways once attempted. If nothing else, at some really basic,

almost cosmic a priori level, the point of history is that it doesn't foreclose against possibility so much as it opens it radically and suggests that our own projects, the things that you and I treasure so dearly, will in 50, 500 years, 5,000 years, be marked in the dustbin of history in really interesting ways. How can we prepare for that? Well, one thing that we can do is acknowledge with a sense of humility and temper the triumphalism, the stubbornness of our own leaders and most ambitious campaigns today to be like, no, hold on. The things that we think are obviously native about a network, that it's good for democracy, that it's good for commerce, that it's a natural fit with a market or something like

this, that those are artificial and will pass into the dustbin just as quickly as others. You know, that once appeared totally native to Soviet cyberneticists, cybernetic collectivism, statist hierarchy, you know, shared resources, public interest projects, these are also thinkable possibilities. And I think history is continuously renewing our newest media. They're showing that the history of new media is in some ways older than the history of old media, because they're always compelling us to rethink the present. And I love how, for me, the story of the Soviet network is not just a story about how the Soviets so-called failed, but rather it's also a comment about how we in the Anglophone West have not designed a

network. How not to network a nation is also a story about America. It's a story about how we have designed unthinkingly, unaware of a broader project, unaware of the comparative possibilities and the endlessly renewable resources of the past and the present, a kind of networked infrastructure that serves increasingly few data holders and has fundamentally failed the notion of public, right? In English, for example, that the word public so often flips into something like publicity instead of something like a space where voices and actions can be realized is an indictment of how we have not networked our nation properly. I think that we are entering this period where the narratives that we have had around the internet for a long time are really coming into question. And that's why I think work like yours, work like Eden Medina's, work like Kevin's and Julian's is really important in helping us to

kind of take a step back and think a bit more broadly by using that history to understand what is actually happening with these networks and how they might be able to be constructed and used in a different way if we want different outcomes and things like that. So Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time to fill us in on this history. Thanks so much. Paris, it's a delight. Thank you so much. Benjamin Peters is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. He's the author of How Not to Network a Nation

and the co-editor of Your Computer is on Fire. You can follow Ben on Twitter at at BJ Peters. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network. You can find out more about that 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 and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.