Not only did queueing theory—or the mathematical study of waiting in
lines that inspired packet-switching, the heart of Internet-style
distributed digital networks—resemble a Soviet way of life, it built
on the work of the early 20th century Russian mathematician Andrey
Markov (his last name means Carrot by the way). “Markov chains”
deal with stochastic, or probabilistic, processes for organizing event
sequences: they make thinkable instantaneous change across fixed
states in probabilistic systems and they precede Shannon's line "At
any given time either X = 0 or X = 1." Shannon, in turn, cites and
builds directly on Markov chains in his thesis work on electrical
modeling of information processes.
Even if it turns out the US military had the idea for a distributed computer
network first, the intellectual inheritance from and social resonance across
a spectrum of scientific fronts in Eastern Europe (Markov chains in
information theory, queueing theory, packet-switching, Kolmogorov’s
biology in Wiener’s cybernetics) already seems worth a story.
Round two: Is the Internet a Soviet Idea?
One more detail: according to American intelligence, the Soviet military may have been working on a “unified information network” as early as 1958, several years before the ARPANET project found traction in 1962 and went online in 1969 with the packet-switching computer network that eventually became the internet. I think it likely speculation that the Soviet “unified information network” would not have perfected packet-switching, an invention seemingly of Paul Baran at RAND in 1962, which Donald Davies coined and developed independently in 1965 (Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 2000). Still packet-switching, as I understand it at least, is an outgrowth of queueing theory and Leonard Kleinrock’s 1961 work on the mathematical study of waiting in lines. What could be more Soviet than information network built on waiting in lines?
Besides the potential for play here, the suggestion that the Internet was first a Soviet idea is worth more than just a curious correction to the historical record. The suggestion, too, carries rich overtones for cultural historians of the origins of online collectivist culture. Suddenly, it may be more thinkable that Cold War military initiatives in computer networks led to strains of revolutionary West Coast digital utopianism in the 1970s and 1980s. (Actually Fred Turner’s work From Counterculture to Cyberculture details that exact history. It’s fascinating, not sudden.) The origins of the idea of networked society were never inherent to the American military (nor to Soviet society). The suggestion also complicates the attribution genealogies of the Cold War technology races–we have the enemy to thank and admissions to make about our national security trumping plagiarism concerns (it’s unfortunate that the bilateral surveillance of military science had to be competitive, instead of cooperative as many scientists on both sides would have preferred). It may also raise perennial and pressing questions about the ethical practices of governments at war.
Is the Internet a Soviet idea? Did Soviets think of the ARPANET project first?
I cannot answer these questions, yet. A FOIA request and trip to Moscow may help clear up the matter some.
According to partially declassified CIA documents citing material previous to 1962, the Soviets came up with a project to build a “Unified Information Network” (ob”yedinyonnaya informatsionnaya set’?) intended to be a wide-ranging computer network. The ARPANET, care of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, picks up serious momentum to build the exact same thing in 1962 and go online in 1969.
A wild hunch: the Soviet military-industrial complex had the idea for a nation-wide computer network first. The American version got word of the project, got nervous about a Sputnik II, and managed to pull it off before the Soviets. (Thank you packet-switching!) It could be a classic story of Cold War technology competition: Soviet theory vs. American application. Reminds me of stories about brilliant Soviet programmers whose theories were (and still remain) cutting-edge but who had never seen a computer. Many did work on chalk boards.
Bonnie Honig in Democracy and the Foreigner suggests foundational narratives often draw on a foreign founder. The house of David has its Ruth, a Moabite; Oz has its Dorothy of Kansas; and now, perhaps, the Internet has its Soviet roots. As I argue in a recent article in the International Journal of Communication available here, Norbert Wiener became in part the founding foreigner for the Soviet tradition of cybernetics (the Russian kibernetika still embraces a much larger sense of the study of computers today). It is only fitting that the Soviets would return the favor.
More soon, above. (Blogs as chronological scrolls unrolling in reverse: how strange for stringing together topics yet how similar to the forward march of time!)
The Cold War Factor in the Cyber History of the Idea of Information: from Von Neumann to Lessig
Notes toward a Research Statement
My research explores the humanistic imagination for communication in creative social-material complexes of technology, policy, and culture. In it I focus large questions of how humans arrange, control, and create meaning with the historical and international lenses of Eastern Europe. For example, my dissertation looks to locate cyber law—or the contemporary study of Internet regulation—in a longer history of the idea of information and its Cold War intellects and contexts. Below follow a few preliminary project notes and a reflection on the study and stakes of history in cyber scholarship. In my reading, the term cyber history should be understood to encompass more than the history of cyber scholarship or cyber law; the subfield rather ranges across any relevant human attempt to collect, coordinate, and govern (cf. Greek roots of cyber) physical data into meaningful form.
Since at least World War II, scientists, policy makers, and critics have increasingly struggled to stay conceptually afloat the machine-enabled wash of information. What does the transition of the term information from the early twentieth-century sense of “relevant facts” to the early twenty-first century sense of “infinitely amassable data” mean for contemporary attempts to regulate the human use of information? Such attempts often face a paradox at once technical and post-modern: how do we rethink a form of information that can be gathered faster than it can be understood? How can we creatively reform our policies, our social relations, and ourselves? The economic and semantic livelihood of the information society will follow in part our wagers on these, and other, questions.
My work looks to address these questions through a history of the idea of information and its intellects in the “long” history of Cold War, from the World War II early cybernetics of Norbert Wiener to the post-Soviet cyber law of Lawrence Lessig. Key objects of study will include the life, work, and transatlantic relations of key information society scholars ranging from the Hungarian émigré, belligerent anti-Communist, and brilliant WWII mathematician John von Neumann; to the father of cybernetics, son of a Slavic professor, veritable Soviet hero and collaborator, Norbert Wiener; to the Austrian-American economist Fritz Machlup and his Cold War coinage of information society in the early 1960s; to the post-industrial sociologist Daniel Bell and the US foreign policy that turned his liberalism into neo-conservativism; to network theorists Manuel Castells and (his spouse) Emma Kiselyova’s record of their early 1990s explanation of the information-driven collapse of the Soviet state; to the first mouthpiece of cyber law in the late 1990s, constitutionalist, and (a less noted fact) Eastern Europeanist Lawrence Lessig. (As I hope to explore in interview with Lessig, his perspectives on the nature of code, law, and corruption since the late 1990s may or may not coincide with his experience living in early 1990s Budapest and Moscow, where roller coasters of shock therapy and the Russian constitution challenged optimism about unrestrained freedom of information.) Other select figures in cyber law, such as Yochai Benkler on samizdat, or late Soviet émigré legal scholar Eugene Volokh or (less likely) Judge Alex Kuzinski may too be interested to share the thoughts on the relationship between philosophical underpinnings and the complexities of transition information policies.
In addition to close analysis of work and biographical vignette, the project also looks to examine and foreground the causes behind the expansion of information institutions and policies to expand during the Cold War, including, among others, the Cold War as a war fought with information over diverging ideals about the proper information society; the evolution of the Internet itself from ARPANET, the 1960s US military project to reduce single missile strikes by decentralizing intelligence across a nationwide packet-switching network; a comparison of information freedoms in free market and centralized command economies, peer-to-peer and samizdat technologies, advertising and propaganda models of public persuasion, and others; and the tensions exacerbated in the global spread of copyright and the human rights of privacy and free speech. These and other points will fall into place with further research.
Why Cyber History?
I propose here five suggestions to why cyber law needs history: First, it is not, as George Santayana said, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it but that those who do history well are condemned to admit its ambiguity. In fact a craft of drafts rewritten every generation, history supplies no assurances about avoiding repeating the past. It may be at best a gauge for how little we know about ourselves.
Two, because revisiting ignored and untold elements of our contingent social genealogy can shake long-held assumptions, contextualize change, and challenge complacencies. Knowing what we do not know is strength, a weapon against sides too convinced of primogeniture and a precedent right to being right. For students of fledgling information environments like the Internet, there may be no richer streambed of insight for challenging centuries of accepted convention than that of new media history. All media, obviously, were once new. Moreover, since each medium was new before it was old, the history of new media actually predates the history of old media. A fuller spread of options for change awaits those who will critically examine the conjectural and constitutive moments in the novel past.
Three, because history occupies a rare kind of intellectual commons—a concern for what came before—shared among otherwise isolated fields. As all academic disciplines must make some claim to identify change or affirm continuity, even the most forward-looking scholarship gestures in form with literature reviews, panel data, or precedent toward satisfying the human curiosity for change. History also offers the best and perhaps only response to the moving-target problem puzzling students of the Internet in its ability to seek order not only in but across data streams of social change. My dissertation, for example, aims to coordinate and plot changes of the idea of information freedom online in a longer related story of information offline.
Not only do most fields employ remnants of historical study, many fields—cyber law among them—have ample space for the development of a historical subfield that, like legal and media history, roots itself in disciplinary substrata (art history, legal history, media history, science history, etc.). In part, then, my dissertation is an early essay in the subfield of “cyber history.”
Four, because history lets us tell stories that set the tone and trajectory for thinking about such subjects in the future. By this we mean not so much that history lets us peer into the future but that it lets us influence the way others in the future will think about us. The stories we tell about others will narrate those told about us. History must exist for its own sake.
Lastly, because history is fun, and those who agree are invited to join company in its cyber variant.
In sum, the stakes of history are many: a sharpened capacity for criticizing certainties, uncovering lost contingencies, pressing change, telling stories, and having fun will help cyber students and scholars address contemporary information problems. The project is as urgent as the history of information is long and understudied. Modern societies simply must do a better job caring for and sharing the rich stores and possibilities of mental work.
A Few Key Works
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society, 1989.
Boyle, James. Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information
Society. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Castells, Manuel and Emma Kiselyova, The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View from the
Information Society. UC Berkeley Press, 1995.
Cmiel, Kenneth. “From Knowledge to Information.” Unpublished article, 2005.
Edwards, P. N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War
America. MIT Press: Cambridge, 1996.
Lessig, Lawrence. Code, 2000, v. 2.0, 2006.
Machlup, Fritz. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1962).
Olson, Mancur. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships,
2000.
Pavlov, I. P. Conditioned Reflexes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927.
Peters, Benjamin. “Betrothal and Betrayal: The Soviet Translation of Norbert Weiner’s Early
Cybernetics” in the International Journal of Communication (www.ijoc.org) 2008.
Siegert, Bernhard. Passage des Digitalen: Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften,
1500-1900. Brinkmann & Boss: Berlin, 2003
Trogemann, G., A. Y. Nitussov, W. Ernst, eds. Computing in Russia: The History of Computer
Devices and Information Technology Revealed. Alexander Y. Nitussov, trans. Vieweg,
Wiesbaden, 2001.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the
Rise of Digital Utopianism. U Chicago P, 2006.
Von Neumann, John and Arthur W. Burks. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. U of Illinois
P, 1966.
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, 2nd ed.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1954 [orig. published 1950].
An Online Hypothetical: A Published Public Domain
An Online Hypothetical: A Published Public Domain[1]
Creative commons (cc) licenses help defend individual pieces in the public domain from private misappropriation. However, it is not clear how best to stake out or delimit the defensible boundaries of an online global public domain as a whole. There are important suggestions–such as a monthly blanket download license outlined in the final chapter of William Fisher’s Promises to Keep–arising as to how to shore up and marshal about the immense value of shared creative work in ways that account for the economic value of network effects. The seven-step thought below may not yet be important: but I’d like to offer it as an early thought toward such a solution in which profit follows cultural value (and not the other way around) and humans reward creative participation, not possession.
A: (Phase 1: Index Creation) Create a index repository of creative commons work[2]—a published public domain—and invite people to commit[3] their creative work to it. Search functions in the index allow contributors to find and use[4] other indexed material simply by linking to both the work and its contributor(s). It’s Google’s tools with the ownership structure of an opt-in, open trust that belongs to no one; a public domain whose resources are actually accessible and public.
B: Tag[5] and link every work to both contributing and resulting sources; display that information publicly, much as a scholarly article has citations (that in this case are also links). Contributors build reputation[6] as their work is used. A reputation economy—built on searchable, indexed public domain work and contributor genealogies—results.
C: (Phase 2: Shifting Value from Private to Public) Calculate and publish the value of all the presently indexed work with algorithms built to account for network effects.[7] That value—the sum total of all indexed work to every contributor—should quickly become immense.
D: When private hands misappropriate the work, public domain lawyers sue them—on behalf of the shareholders trust—for some reasonable proportion[8] of the network effects damages[9] done to the published value of the commons, plus court fees.
E: The public domain lawyers keep the court fees.[10] A lottery[11] distributes damages awards to public domain shareholders: i.e., contributors make money as work is protected in court.[12]
F: At some point, corporations[13] heavy in copyright liability realize they can make more money by defending their resources in a public domain and by increasing their public relations (i.e., the private shadow of a reputation economy) than as a private bundle of sticks.
G: A public production culture evolves where people (1) collaborate on a product, (2) post, index, and distribute the intellectual resource online, publicly, and for free (as in beer). Then, those contributors—as determined by the attribution index—can either (3a) have first rights to produce the material products themselves for private profit; (3b) sell the rights to the production of material goods to already existing producers; or perhaps best of all, (3c) open the resource to any producer contract with the condition that a certain percentage of profits be returned—by lottery—to the public domain.
[1] This idea kernel sprung from the alchemy of reading Jorge Luis Borges (cf. index, lottery), William Fisher, and Kembrew McLeod late this summer. Credit them for anything good. Thanks to Tim Wu for suggesting Shavell and Ypersele’s article Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights. I look forward to discovering more with help.
[2] Shareholders own the index as some sort of trust or multi-user contract: that contract is also a creative commons license and stipulates shareholders cannot privatize their ownership.
[3] Shareholders need to commit (by contract?) some specified portion of the work—including past work that is not currently licensed and future work—to the commons index. How exclusive should that commitment be?
[4] As is currently the cc case, shareholders’ access would be limited by conditions the contributor sets.
[5] The tag-link structure functions like genetic code: tags are directly imbedded into each linkable, usable work, so that new pieces of collaborative work automatically express their specific tag genealogy.
[6] Should there be a (A) reputation score or (B) not? If I use your work to build my work, you can find that out as well as possibly (A) have some reputation gauge be credited for my use. In fact, when a third party in turn uses my work, your reputation score could also be credited proportionally as well. This score/index reappears as a central mechanism in step 7. (B) Or, there need not be a “reputation score” necessarily. Genealogies of open use patterns may alone facilitate and streamline person-to-person collaboration.
[7] Total value calculations could be hard: perhaps the value of work could be derived from comparison to private market equivalents, multiplied by the number of public domain users; perhaps from e-Bay or auction equivalents; and when equivalents are absent—as would often be the case, since a public domain should create new products–perhaps from a new pricing structure, where the basic unit carries a very minimal cost affordable to all contributors—regardless their country’s economics—(i.e., 2 cents an article or song) or, as in William Fisher’s work, where total value calculations is entirely a function of the potential revenue of private fees from monthly download licenses.
[8] “Reasonable proportion” could be calculated by previous use histories of the works. If it’s used, it’s valuable.
[9] For example: one $1 song stolen from the public into private, for-profit production costs the public domain $1 x total number of contributors, plus the profit gained by private actors, plus the public domain court fees. It is interesting to note that—because of the network effect—this total value would quickly dwarf even the sum total of all private capital. The “excess capacity” (cf. Benkler) not accounted for in private economy is mammoth, not marginal: the public character of culture must defy private accounting schemes.
[10] Smart lawyers need incentives to work for the public domain as well; otherwise, the pecuniary-minded tend toward the side that does not share. The idea is to let lawyers make money protecting the public.
[11] Three notes on the lottery follow: (A) how to supervise it once in place, (B) different ways it could work, (C) what logic to avoid in building it (i.e., private profit), (D) what logic to encourage in building it (i.e., random profit).
A. The lottery system is locked open-source. The distribution process is subjected to external, third-party watchdog groups whose self-interest it is to find flaws and abuses.
B. How should it work? 100 random shareholder receive equal parts of the damages; a weighting system which favors valuable work contributors; every shareholder receives two cents; or, my favorite, a combination: each contributors starts with a minimal chance at reward, plus use added.
C. A reputation weighting ala Pagerank may invite work value manipulation (cf. search engine optimization). Caveat: structuring the logic of profit by malice into the public domain index would mean homeopathic cannibalization of the public domain to the private tools and thought it by definition resists. It must abstain from some level of private profit logic to sustain itself.
D. Random incentives discourages internal profit manipulation. An index whose total value is predicated on sharing network effects must also reward and recognize all contributors. The network increase in damages awarded helps compensate for the inefficiency of random rewards. And the incentive of random awards likely exceeds traditional copyright royalties incentives. Plus other real, non-monetary rewards of and motivations for sharing.
[12] “When their work is protected” means “when their work is stolen and returned” and some mechanisms would need to be introduced to minimize the perverse incentive of stealing work in order to lose in court. A major gap: How can proponents convince lawyers, law-makers, and judges that the public domain should be so protected at the cost of private industry?
[13] For instance, eventually Disney’s makes its IP public, its public relations improve, and profit streams shift from court cases to producing accessory goods (just as theatres make money on popcorn and services, not the film).
Here’s a link to the history workshop on intellectual property and new media that I put together at the 2007 OII summer doctoral programme hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, including a kernel of a conference proposal I am interested in developing at some point. It is notes all the way down.
Toward a more robust creative commons?
I just sent this out in an email to a legal thinker I really admire, Timothy Wu, and then thought, why not share it with the world (that, like me until a minute ago, doesn’t know this blog exists)? Check him out before you do this. http://www.timwu.org/
—–
I had an idea kernel a few weeks ago that I need to talk through, that I want to do something with. Until I’ve talked to some smart legal minds, I can only think of it as a thought experiment full of problems but, nevertheless, leaning toward a world in which copyright means the right to copy, and where the public commons can go on the offensive.
Creative commons is a first step but is only that. It gives the commons teeth to defend itself but there is still no incentive to actively stake out, or system to account for, the boundaries of a larger commons. We need a better way to shore up and marshal about the immense value of shared creative work in our present-day marketplace–a way to appreciate and account for the economic value of network effects.
So what about a payment system that does exactly that: rewards creators for simply the act of securing their work in the commons and punishes the misuse and for-profit expropriation of that work by private hands. And while we’re at it, is there a way for aggressive lawyers to make a buck defending the commons? (Otherwise, of course, the default for young lawyers with debate is to enlist with the side that doesn’t share.)
Create an index of creators who commit (at least a large portion of) their work to the commons, perhaps through a kind of contract, and thus become part shareholders in it. If private actors grab something from the commons, and refuse to return it, why not let commons lawyers take them to court, sue for the damages done to the commons (i.e., the sum value of that cost of that material no longer being available to everyone in the commons, which would not be insubstantial) plus court fees. The lawyers get their fees, and the damages get distributed in a kind of lottery system in which every commons shareholder–every person who has committed their work to everyone else–could receive damage payments. (How this would work–be it 100 random shareholder each receiving 100th of the damages, or a weighting system which incentives those who commit valuable work to the commons, or every shareholder receiving two cents–I cannot yet say. I think weighting would be very problematic.) The workings of the lottery system itself would best be locked open-source and even subjected to scrutiny by external parties, such as a private watch-dog groups, in whose self-interest it is to find flaws and abuses in the distribution of damages.
Imagine, for an unlikely first instance, if Disney decided to eventually become a commons shareholder, they would contribute huge amounts of value to the commons, and make it that much more valuable. They could even make more from damages distribution, to say nothing about the benefits their much more profitable accessory industries would make from public relations–than they do from royalties. The thought is that if damages can be calculated according to the network effects value of the loss of material seized from the public commons, then everyone–even the most pettily pecuniary among us, from private corporations to attack lawyers–would have some incentive to participate in a marketplace, a world, whose core values reward participation, not possession.
There’s more holes than anything else, which is why I’m glad as always for any thoughts from those who may know the world of law and economics better than I.
(Uncorrected proof) The Cybernetics of Nabokov’s Benefence
An uncorrected proof of my forthcoming article, “The Cybernetics of Nabokov’s ‘Beneficence,’” in Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University, edited by Marijeta Bosovic (New York: Columbia, 2007), is now available for comment and review here.
(Uncorrected proof) The Search Engine Democracy: Metaphors and Muhammad
An uncorrected proof of my forthcoming book chapter, “The Search Engine Democracy: Metaphors and Muhammad,” in Marcel Machill and Markus Beiler’s (eds) Die Macht der Such-maschinen/The Power of Search Engines (Leipzig, Germany: Herman von Halem, 2007) is now available for comment and review here.
Addendum to Nothing
In considering how best to use this blog, I’ve come to a few observations worth very little themselves but which may be of interest in the context of later entries. The first follows that the blog functions as something of a chronologically reverse scroll and therefore dances with both past and present traditions: the scroll and the cutting-edge. By emphasizing the top as the most recent entry, a premium is placed on the immediate and contemporary which by definition underemphasizes past entries. I hope to counter this in my files saved on our personal computer, where the notes will likely remain entered in the forward scroll fashion common to all standard document programs today. Feel free, I extrapolate into the future, to ask for the notes in full .doc form from me, Ben, at [email protected]. There is also the problem of organizing notes by appropriate class title rather than by the clumsy date of entry.
This makes blog management a little more complicated than I’d initially hoped. I’d like to use the blog as a chronology of thoughts, notes, and questions and as a portal toward openly sharing information with others. However, of course, if I’m to enter all the notes from one class on the day I attend it, the next class period’s notes will soon take precedence over the first, diminishing the likelihood that the cumulative momentum that could be gained by reading the entries chronologically will ever fully be enjoyed by the casual reader. Not that the casual reader will ever get the full effect of an idea evolving over a number of entries, but still to start with an idea in embryo would seem the most natural place to find out whether one has interest in following that same idea through its adolescence.
How ironic that, if this blog ever takes shape, very few people will both ever reading this entry, which, though inane and uninspired by itself, sets up a few of my initial concerns with the whole medium. As the Underground Man, I too stammer and stutter that I will never be read but write regardless.