How Not to Network a Nation

312 pages

English language

Published Dec. 30, 2016 by MIT Press.

(3 reviews)

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists.

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like …

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists.

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists.

After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

2 editions

Kaslov reviewed How Not to Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters

That was unexpected

4 stars

In "How not to network a nation" Benjamin Peters covers all of the attempts to network the USSR spanning a period of over 30 years, of which project OGAS lasted the longest. In the early 50s inspired by the American SAGE computer system and the Norbert Wiener s Cybernetics the Madness began.

First in the early 50s, cybernetics had to be rehabilitated from their capitalist tendencies (whatever that was supposed to mean) after Stalin s death. Next their approach to the idea of networks was quite different:

To oversimplify, Baran foresaw a national state network simulating a brain without a body, while Glushkov (and Beer) anticipated a network nation simulating a body with a brain—a government in touch with its people.

Also because of this difference the project became much larger than anything the Americans had planned. Americans way of thinking was to just connect their military and scientific computers …

In "How not to network a nation" Benjamin Peters covers all of the attempts to network the USSR spanning a period of over 30 years, of which project OGAS lasted the longest. In the early 50s inspired by the American SAGE computer system and the Norbert Wiener s Cybernetics the Madness began.

First in the early 50s, cybernetics had to be rehabilitated from their capitalist tendencies (whatever that was supposed to mean) after Stalin s death. Next their approach to the idea of networks was quite different:

To oversimplify, Baran foresaw a national state network simulating a brain without a body, while Glushkov (and Beer) anticipated a network nation simulating a body with a brain—a government in touch with its people.

Also because of this difference the project became much larger than anything the Americans had planned. Americans way of thinking was to just connect their military and scientific computers and then figure out what to do with it, while the Soviets intended to use the network to take over their command economy.

Now, just because cybernetics were rehabilitated, that didn't mean that they were free of other ideological hurdles:

Fedorenko and Glushkov felt they had no other choice: they had to align their technical national architecture with the political system architecture.

Meaning to even suggest that in order to get anything done you had to go side vise and zigzag through the hierarchy would make them politically poisonous to them selves and others.

Followed by factory managers and middle managers distrust of the project, fearing that they might become obsolete, and not to mention entire ministries not wanting this system for them selves for they might get obsolete but also not wanting to surrender it to anyone else for fears that the ministry that takes it over might become more influential then themselves.

And the final nail in the coffin, they had interest but no direct support from the Kremlin to tell the military to stop hoarding their technology and share:

The biggest advantage that the United States wielded over the USSR appears to have less to do with the market independence of private commerce than the porousness of research, resources and knowledge flows between military and civilian projects.

This was a fascinating and enlightening read with a very fitting title, but I am afraid its academic style might put off most people.