Book ID: CBB113949248

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (2016)

unapi

Peters, Benjamin (Author)


MIT Press


Publication Date: 2016
Edition Details: Book Series: Information Policy
Physical Details: 313 pages
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Stephen Lovell (2018) Review of "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 668-669). unapi

Review Ksenia Tatarchenko (2017) Review of "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 170-171). unapi

Review Natalia Nikiforova (January 2017) Review of "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet". Technology and Culture (pp. 300-301). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB113949248/

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Authors & Contributors
Fidler, Bradley Reuben
Russell, Andrew Lawrence
Boldyrev, Ivan
Loring Robbins
Olessia Kirtchik
James L. Pelkey
Concepts
Technology
Cold War
Computer networks
Internet
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Technology and politics
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
Places
Soviet Union
United States
Russia
China
Hungary
Great Britain
Institutions
United States. Defense Communications Agency
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
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