Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  Even the first successful test of the Internet-grade TCP/IP network, which took place on November 22, 1977, simulated a military scenario: using radio, satellite, and wired networks to communicate with an active mobile unit battling a Soviet invasion of Europe. An old GMC delivery van outfitted by SRI with a bunch of radio gear played the role of a motorized NATO division, driving up and down the freeway near Stanford and beaming data over ARPA’s radio network. The data were then forwarded over ARPA’s satellite network to Europe—by way of Sweden and London—and then sent back to the United States to UCLA via satellite and wired ARPA connections.68 “So what we were simulating was a situation where somebody was in a mobile unit in the field, let’s say in Europe, in the middle of some kind of action trying to communicate through a satellite network to the United States, and then going across the US to get to some strategic computing asset that was in the United States,” recalled Cerf. “And there were a number of such simulations or demonstrations like that, some of which were extremely ambitious. They involved the Strategic Air Command at one point where we put airborne packet radios in the field communicating with each other and to the ground using the airborne systems to sew together fragments of Internet that had been segregated by a simulated nuclear attack.”

  Cerf described working very closely with the military every step of the way and in many cases helping find solutions to specific needs. “We deployed a whole bunch of packet radio gear and computer terminals and small processors to Fort Bragg with the 18th Airborne Corps and for several years did a whole bunch of field exercises. We also deployed them to the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, and did a series of exercises with them. In some cases, the outcome of the applications that we used were so good that they became part of the normal everyday operation.”

  Of course, Vint Cerf wasn’t the only one working out practical military applications for the ARPANET. Congressional reports and internal ARPA documents from the 1970s are full of examples of the armed services putting the network to use in a variety of ways, from wirelessly transmitting submarine locator sensor data, to providing portable communication in the field, teleconferencing, remote maintenance of computer equipment, and military supply chain and logistics management.69 And, of course, all of this was intertwined with ARPA’s work on “intelligent systems”—building the data analysis and predictive technologies Godel and Licklider initiated a decade earlier.70

  This was the great thing about ARPANET technology: it was a general-purpose network that could carry all sorts of traffic. It was useful to everyone involved.

  “It turned out I was correct,” Ford Rowan told me forty-one years after he broke the ARPANET army surveillance story on NBC. “The concerns that a lot of people had were largely that the federal government was making one big computer that would have everything. One of the new things that came out was that you did not need one big computer. You could link a lot of computers together. That was the leap that occurred in the early 1970s as they were doing this research. We could figure out a way to share info across the network without having to actually have one big computer that knows everything.”71

  Part II

  False Promises

  Chapter 4

  Utopia and Privatization

  Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.

  —Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR,” 1972

  If you got hit by a bus and fell into a coma in 1975, and then woke up two decades later, you would have thought Americans had gone crazy or had joined a millennial cult en masse. Probably both.

  In the 1990s the country was ablaze with sweeping religious proclamations about the Internet. People talked of a great leveling—an unstoppable wildfire that would rip through the world, consuming bureaucracies, corrupt governments, coddled business elites, and stodgy ideologies, clearing the way for a new global society that was more prosperous and freer in every possible way. It was as if the End Times had arrived. Utopia was at hand.

  Louis Rossetto, the founder of a new, hip tech magazine called Wired, compared computer engineers to Prometheus: they brought gifts of the gods to us mortals that spurred “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire,” he wrote in his magazine’s inaugural issue.1 Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established. The mighty tumble, the once confident are left desperate for guidance, and the nimble are given a chance to prevail.”2

  It wasn’t just the tech kids pushing these visions. It did not matter who you were—Republican, Democrat, liberal, or libertarian—everyone seemed to share this single, unflinching conviction: the world was on the cusp of a technology revolution that would change everything, and change it for the better.

  Few embodied the early years of this new Great Awakening more than George Gilder, an old-school Reaganomics pundit who in the early 1990s reinvented himself as a techno prophet and investment guru. In his book Telecosm, he explained how computer networks combined with the power of American capitalism were about to create a paradise on earth. He even came up with a name for this utopia: the Telecosm. “All of the monopolies and hierarchies and pyramids and power grids of industrial society are going to dissolve before the constant pressure of distributing intelligence to the fringes of all the networks,” he wrote, predicting that the power of the Internet would destroy the physical structure of society. “The telecosm can destroy cities because then you can get all the diversity, all the serendipity, all the exuberant variety that you can find in a city in your own living room.”3 Vice President Al Gore agreed, telling anyone who’d listen that the world was in the grips of a “revolution as sweeping and powerful as any revolution in history.”4

  Indeed, something was happening. People were buying personal computers and hooking them up with screeching modems to a strange new place: the World Wide Web. A labyrinth of chat rooms, forums, corporate and government networks, and an endless collection of webpages. In 1994, a start-up called Netscape appeared with an exciting new product, a web browser. A year later, the company went public and surged to a market value of $2.2 billion by the end of the first day of trading. It was the start of a new gold rush in the San Francisco Bay Area. People cheered as obscure tech companies went public on the stock market, the price of their shares doubling, even tripling on the first day. What did these companies do? What did they make? How did they make money? Few investors really knew. More importantly: no one cared! They were innovating. They were driving us forward into the future! Stocks were booming, with no end in sight. From 1995 to 2000, the NASDAQ spiked from 1,000 to 5,000, quintupling before crashing down on itself.

  I was still a kid, but I remember these times well. My family had just emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. We left Leningrad in 1989 and spent six months bouncing around a series of refugee camps in Austria and Italy until we finally made it to New York, and then quickly relocated to San Francisco, where my father, Boris, used his incredible talent for languages to land a job as a Japanese translator. My mother, Nellie, retooled her Soviet pedagogical PhD and began to teach physics in Galileo High School, while my brother Eli and I tried to acclimate and fit in as best we could. By the time we got our bearings, the Bay Area was in peak dot-com hysteria. Everyone I knew was getting into tech and seemed to be making out like a bandit. The city was full of pimply kids driving convertibles, buying homes, and throwing lavish techno raves. My friend Leo traded his kiddie hacker skills into a high five-figure salary—real money for a teenager. Another immigrant kid I knew made a small fortune speculating on domain names. My older brother got a great job with a great salary at a mystifying start-up that pivoted half a dozen times in the span of a few years and t
hen folded without putting out a viable product. “We had some investors from the Midwest who had no idea what the Internet was, they just heard that you needed to invest in it,” he recalls. Computer games, the Internet, webpages, never-ending porn, remote commuting, distance learning, streaming movies, and music on demand: the future was here. I enrolled in community college and transferred to UC Berkeley, intent on pursuing a computer science degree.

  Two decades earlier, Americans had feared computers. People, especially the young, saw them as a technocratic tool of surveillance and social control. But everything changed in the 1990s. The hippies who protested computers and the early Internet now said that this tool of oppression would liberate us from oppression! Computers were the great equalizer! They would make the world freer, fairer, more democratic and egalitarian.

  It was impossible not to believe the hype. Looking back on it now, with full knowledge of the history of the Internet, I can’t help but marvel at the transformation. It’s as weird as waking up and seeing hippies marching for the military draft.

  So, what happened? How did a technology so deeply connected to war and counterinsurgency suddenly become a one-way ticket to global utopia? It’s an important question. Without it, we can’t begin to understand the cultural forces that have shaped the way we view the Internet today.

  In a way, it all started with a disillusioned entrepreneur named Stewart Brand.5

  Hippies at ARPA

  October 1972. It’s evening, and Stewart Brand, a young, lanky freelance journalist and photographer, is hanging out at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an ARPA contractor located in the Santa Cruz mountains above the campus. And he is having a lot of fun.

  He’s on assignment for Rolling Stone, the edgy house magazine of America’s counterculture, partying with a bunch of computer programmers and math geeks on ARPA’s payroll. Brand is not there to inspect computerized dossiers or to press engineers about their surveillance data subroutines. He is there for fun and frivolity: to play SpaceWar, something called a “computer video game.”

  Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI’s huge PDP-10 computer. AI’s Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen. Players seize the five sets of control buttons, find their spaceship persona on the screen, and simultaneously: turn and fire toward any nearby still-helpless spaceships, hit the thrust button to initiate orbit before being slurped by the killer sun, and evade or shoot down any incoming enemy torpedoes or orbiting mines. After two torpedoes are fired, each ship has a three-second unarmed reloading time.6

  Playing a video game against other people in real time? Back then, this was wild stuff, something most people only saw in science fiction films. Brand was transfixed. He had never heard of or experienced anything like that before. It was a mind-expanding experience. Thrilling, like taking a gigantic hit of acid.

  He looked at his fellow players squeezed into that tiny, drab office and had a vision. The people around him—their bodies were stuck on earth, but their minds had been teleported to another dimension, “effectively out of their bodies, computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, locked in life-or-death space combat for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friends and wasting their employer’s valuable computer time.”7

  The rest of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was straight out of science fiction, too. While Brand and his new buddies obsessively played the video game, one-eyed robots wandered autonomously on wheels in the background. Computer-generated music filled the air, and weird lights projected on the walls. Was this a military-funded Stanford computer lab or a psychedelic Jefferson Airplane concert? To Brand, it was both, and much more. He marveled at “a fifteen-ring circus in ten different directions” going on around him. It was “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.”8

  At the time, the atmosphere around Stanford was charged with anti-ARPA sentiment. The university had just come off a wave of violent antiwar protests against military research and recruitment on campus. Activists from Students for a Democratic Society specifically targeted the Stanford Research Institute—a major ARPA contractor deeply involved in everything from the ARPANET to chemical weapons and counterinsurgency—and forced the university to cut official ties.

  To many on campus, ARPA was the enemy. Brand disagreed.

  In a long article he filed for Rolling Stone, he set out to convince the magazine’s young and trend-setting readership that ARPA was not some big bureaucratic bummer connected to America’s war machine but instead was part of an “astonishingly enlightened research program” that just happened to be run by the Pentagon. The people he was hanging with at the Stanford AI lab were not soulless computer engineers working for a military contractor. They were hippies and rebels, counterculture types with long hair and beards. They decorated their cubicles with psychedelic art posters and leaflets against the Vietnam War. They read Tolkien and smoked pot. They were “hackers” and “computer bums… full of freedom and weirdness.… These are heads, most of them,” wrote Brand.9

  They were cool, they were passionate, they had ideas, they were doing something, and they wanted to change the world. They might be stuck in a computer lab on a Pentagon salary, but they were not there to serve the military. They were there to bring peace to the world, not through protest or political action but through technology. He was ecstatic. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics,” he told Rolling Stone readers.

  And video games, as out-of-this-world cool as they were, just scratched the surface of what these groovy scientists were cooking up. With help from ARPA, they were revolutionizing computers, transforming them from giant mainframes operated by technicians into accessible tools that any person could afford and use at home. And then there was something called the ARPANET, a newfangled computer network that promised to connect people and institutions all around the world, make real-time communication and collaboration across vast distances a cinch, deliver news instantaneously, and even play music on demand. The Grateful Dead on demand? Imagine that. “So much for record stores,” Stewart Brand predicted.

  The way he described it, you’d think that working for ARPA was the most subversive thing a person could do.

  Cults and Cybernetics

  Brand was thirty-four and already a counterculture celebrity when he visited Stanford’s AI Lab. He had been the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, a wildly popular lifestyle magazine for the commune movement. He ran with Ken Kesey and his LSD-dropping Merry Pranksters, and he had played a central role in setting up and promoting the psychedelic concert where the Grateful Dead debuted and rang in San Francisco’s Summer of Love.10 Brand was deeply embedded in California’s counterculture and appeared as a major character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Yet there he was, acting as a pitch man for ARPA, a military agency that had in its short existence already racked up a bloody reputation—from chemical warfare to counterinsurgency and surveillance. It didn’t seem to make any sense.11

  Stewart Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois. His mother was a homemaker; his father, a successful advertising man. After graduating from an elite boarding school, Brand attended Stanford University. His diaries from the time show a young man deeply attached to his individuality and fearful of the Soviet Union. His nightmare scenario was that America would be invaded by the Red Army and that communism would take away his free will to think and do whatever he wanted. “That my mind would no longer be my own, but a tool carefully shaped by the descendants of Pavlov,” he wrote in one diary entry.12 “If there’s a fight, then, I will fight. And fight with a purpose. I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty. If I
must be a fool, I want to be my own particular brand of fool—utterly unlike other fools. I will fight to avoid becoming a number—to others and to myself.”13

  After college, Brand enrolled in the US Army and trained as a parachutist and a photographer. In 1962, after finishing his service, he moved to the Bay Area and drifted toward the growing counterculture. He hooked up with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, took a lot of psychedelic drugs, partied, made art, and participated in an experimental program to test the effects of LSD that, unknown to him, was secretly being conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of its MK-ULTRA program.14

  While the New Left protested against the war, joined the civil rights movement, and pushed for women’s rights, Brand took a different path. He belonged to the libertarian wing of the counterculture, which tended to look down on traditional political activism and viewed all politics with skepticism and scorn. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a spiritual leader of the hippie-libertarian movement, channeled this sensibility when he told thousands of people assembled at an anti–Vietnam War rally at UC Berkeley that their attempt to use politics to stop the war was doomed to failure. “Do you want to know how to stop the war?” he screamed. “Just turn your backs on it, fuck it!”15