[P2P-F] why the soviet internet failed

Thu Feb 20 21:49:00 CET 2014

http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/BenPeters.pdf

"Why wasn't there a Soviet equivalent to the US ARPANET? Building on fresh
archival evidence, this paper examines several surprising leads: one, that
the first
person anywhere to conceive of and propose a national computer network for
civilian use appears to have been the Soviet cyberneticist and Engineer
Colonel
Anatolii Kitov; two, that Soviet economic cybernetics tried repeatedly but
did not
succeed in building such a network; three, that the collective failure
comes in part
due to unregulated bureaucratic competition and infighting over resources
within
the Soviet state and academy (while the US ARPANET and French MINITEL
networks initially benefited from centralized state subsidy) and in part
due to the
untenably comprehensive and hierarchically decentralized design in vogue
among
Soviet cybernetists in the 1960s. The fact that cybernetics was a
discursive
vehicle for reform-oriented science in the early 1960s makes its failed
contributions that much more culturally poignant. These and other ironies
are
explored."

-- 
*Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

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