User Profile

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.

The book tackles the 3 questions Art Spiegelman was frequently asked and is wholly organized into sections to tackle them:

1) Why the Holocaust?
2) Why Mice?
3) Why Comics?

The first two sections talk about the writing (interviewing Vladek), researching the topic, getting the thing published and trying to simply deal and live with the aftermath (both the Holocaust and the Book's publication). And I must stress the amount of research must have been maddening. There is far more in these two sections that I am able to convey, the subject is that heavy. Here we also get the chance to read the rejection letters which were fascinating in their own right. Today it is weird to imagine all the hurdles to the books publication and the skepticism during it's initial reception.

In Why Mice section I learned that there was far more meaning and history to using mice than just a simple enough metaphor for being hunted. Also it brought a rather amusing trouble with taxonomy with many editors and librarians as to where to place the book, fiction or nonfiction, adult or children and so on.

In the final section Why Comics I thought simply well Duh, the guy is a cartoonist what was he going to make, a musical. Of course the answer was far more nuanced than that. In this section he shows us some difficulties he had with trying to fit it all into a comic book format, with some special focus on composition of individual panels. This section also shows us some of his comic book influences and what I found invaluable a two page spread of process of turning a page of interview transcript into a final page.

And finally the disc that comes with this book. I haven't yet had the chance to look at it's contents, my father's computer still has a CD drive in it so I will have to use that machine to grab that disc image before bit rot gets the disc. To think that after all this time the format that is most reliable to survive through the ages is still the humble book.

You've read Maus, You like comic books. No-brainer grab the book if you can. The day I saw this one in a book shop I had to grab it immediately, for I thought I would never be able to get my hands on it and it was only one of the two copies available.