Real quick, before I get started, I just wanted to say, as of today, Saturday, I've got some 21 subscribers, and I'm very flattered. I'm very flattered by this. I don't know what to say. How are you liking it? Are you happy with the blue? Are you happy with the speed that I'm reading these texts? Do you get what I'm saying? Do we need more context? Feel free to drop me a line, you know. I'm very, very happy that all of these people came out. I know I know some of you you in ages, man. Are you okay? Ralph. Fucking Ralph Moodle if he's listening to this. Big fan. He's one of my generation's great musicians. This guy, this fucking guy. He's getting prizes from Tom Waits. Anyway, I'm going to get on with the show now. I just wanted to acknowledge you're there. And I'm very pleased about it. Enjoy the show. Chapter 2 Internet and Not Internet Content Warning Discussion of Torture and Violent Coup Arpanet was fundamentally a research project. The vision driving it was a very strong one. Licklider, JCR Licklider from the last chapter, spoke somewhat tongue-in-cheek of an intergalactic computer network, which conceptually was more or less the internet. But day to day, year to year, developments had to be made to arrive at the internet, right? Basically, the task at hand was to find a common language, right? To develop a common language, or in other words, standardized protocols for computers to communicate with one another. Among the first developed were Telnet, a protocol for remote access. I log into your computer. FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, which is a protocol for transferring files. And a bit later you had SMTP, or simple mail transfer protocol, which we just call email, right? All of these are, these protocols are little bits of software that survived, that are in use to this day, and in all likelihood are on your computer. and in all likelihood are on your computer. So the nodes in this network were government, largely, institutions, right? They were military, universities, public and some private research institutes across the USA. As the years progressed, with the aid of satellite technology, certain European institutions also joined the ARPANET. Throughout the 70s and the early 80s, these protocols were established and fine-tuned and voted and agreed on. And for the first time ever, the benefits of what was essentially cybernetic communism were becoming palpable in the world of academia. Email and mailing lists were especially popular. And let me quote from this handbook, MIT's booklet, Getting Started Computing at the AI Lab, to give you some insight into how these technologies were handled at the time. This is on email etiquette. MIT. It is considered illegal to use the ARPANET for anything which is not in direct support of government business. At the AI Lab, we use the network to talk to other researchers about all kinds of things. For example, personal messages to other ARPANET subscribers. For example, to arrange a get-together or check and say a friendly hello, are generally not considered harmful. This is one of the ways in which we adapt the network environment to our community. It is very clear that without that sort of freedom, the network could not have evolved to its current point of technical and social sophistication. Sending electronic mail over the ARPANET for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the government agencies which manage the ARPANET. This was 1982, by the way, so yes, that means that Ronald Reagan was the first online snowflake. But, joking aside, to get to the point, within the context of ARPANET, two fundamental networking protocols were developed. That is TCP, the transmission control protocol, and IP, the internet protocol. The military eventually split from the ARPANET to form its own network, MILNET. ARPANET itself was decommissioned in 1990 and then replaced by another similar network headed by the National Science Foundation, and it was called the NSFNET, the National Science Foundation. Eventually, it opened up to commercial use. This is the network that grows and merges with other networks and becomes the Internet. That's it. It's kind of anticlimactic. It's how the Internet happened. Of course, I made some omissions there, like how the French network Seagal introduced an important technology that was adopted into the internet, stuff like that. But I don't want to talk about packet switching. I don't want to get into the technical detail so much, this big picture, okay? Before I move on, though, let me point out that none of these technologies, none of these protocols were patented, despite generating immense value. Or, to look at it another way, because these protocols were free, networks were able to grow, and thus created value. Fundamentally, this was cybernetic communism. You might be wondering how the race to the net was going on the Soviet side in the 70s and early 80s. And as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the party and all its bureaucrats were just terrified of being made redundant. And so a unified nation-spanning network was just off the table. Instead, they eventually opted to develop highly complex computer networks with their own protocols that were based around government ministries, and they were specifically designed not to communicate with other networks. This allowed the government to maintain control in the South American country of Chile between 1971 and 1973. Chile had just elected Salvador Allende, a socialist reformer, into office. His administration hired the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer to help design and implement a nation-spanning network to collect and process industrial data to help with central planning. The name of this project was Cybersyn, or Cyber-Sin, which sin with a Y, not short for cybernetic synergy. Chile at the time was a very poor country, right, and subject to economic embargoes by the US. There were only 50 computers in the whole country. Four belonged to the government, and a grand total of one was made available to the C-Bedicin project. Now, a computer network comprising one computer might sound like a contradiction, but the people building this project were very clever. They may only have had the one computer, but what they had a ton of in Chile were telex machines. Telex machines were telecommunication devices that evolved out of the telegraph. You would feed them punch cards, and they would transmit the data in binary form to other telex machines. The great innovation here was hooking these devices up to a computer so that across the country, government-controlled industrial facilities were able to transmit data via telex to the capital, Santiago, where the computer then processed and displayed this data in a convenient, readable form in the Cibersyn control room which i mean just look at this that's the zeeverson control room if you're on the audio only version here i i would recommend you look this up independently but i'll describe it a little bit the control room this was actually inspired by star trek and the way that the main deck on the starship enterprise is set up But rather than having a central position for the captain, all the chairs, these spaced out retro futuristic swivel chairs, these seven chairs were set up in a circle, symbolically rejecting hierarchy. All the chairs had little interfaces, you see on the side there, which allowed for control of the screens and the screens themselves in fact the room was built in such a way that behind the walls of the room slide projectors slide projectors were set up and projected this data over slides to the back of the screen. Fake monitors, just big fake sci-fi monitors. These are an artist's rendering, but this is what it looked like. Pretty rad, huh? Stafford Beer wrote extensively about the project and societal systems and cybernetics in general. More recently, the computer scientist Eden Medina studied this special moment in history and wrote a book about it called Cybernetic Revolutionaries that was published in 2011. The Cybersyn project was pretty damn unique and many lessons can be drawn from it. But of course, there's no knowing what this network might have developed into, because in 1973, the US sponsored the violent military coup, in which President Allende killed himself before being captured, President Allende killed himself before being captured and was replaced by the tyrant Pinochet, who had no interest in the project. Pinochet had the Cybersyn offices destroyed and proceeded to wage a horrific war on the Chilean population. Here's a photograph from after the coup, where you had leftists surrounded up in stadiums to be tortured and or disappeared and all this was done in the name of capitalism here's henry kissinger with pinochet getting along splendidly so maybe after this you want to go you want to go listen to El Derecho de Vivir en Paz, or The Right to Live in Peace, by Victor Jara, the great Chilean poet and musician who was tortured and killed in just such a stadium. In the next chapter, to round off this discussion on the origins of the internet, I'm going to discuss the next big milestone in internet history, which is Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. Insistimos. See you later. Thank you.