by Yasha Levine
2. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking Adult, 1998).
3. Rich Karlgaard and Michael Malone, “City vs. Country: Tom Peters & George Gilder Debate the Impact of Technology on Location,” Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995.
4. “Task Force to Focus on Information Revolution,” Deseret (UT) News, September 15, 1993, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/309821/TASK-FORCE-TO-FOCUS-ON-INFORMATION-REVOLUTION.html.
5. I attempted to interview Stewart Brand for this book, but he declined. “I have to pass,” he told me by email on May 28, 2015. “Working too hard on totally other subjects. May your book thrive.”
6. Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Frantic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).
11. This chapter was greatly influenced and inspired by Fred Turner’s pioneering work on the ties between the military and industrial worlds that spawned the Internet and the hippie culture of the 1960s. Turner is a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. I recommend that anyone who wants a better understanding of the utopian ideas that undergirds so much of our Internet culture today read his fabulous book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. It shows very clearly that what we consider to be new developments are really warmed-over ideas and notions that originated in the 1960s. Indeed, in that sense, Internet culture is not so different from the rest of American contemporary culture.
12. Quoted in Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 41.
13. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking Adult, 2005).
14. Bruce Shlain and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 155–156.
15. Ibid., 109.
16. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4.
17. Ibid.
18. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.
19. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 71–72.
20. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (London: BBC, 2011), documentary series.
21. The founder of Synergia would go on to lead the Biosphere, a project to create a self-sustaining ecosystem inside a giant glass bowl, which was financed by Edward P. Bass, an oil heir from Texas who had been a member of Synergia in the 1970s. William J. Broad, “As Biosphere Is Sealed, Its Patron Reflects on Life,” New York Times, September 24, 1991.
22. Quoted in ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Theresa Hogue, “Cult Survivors Share Experiences,” Corvallis Gazette-Times, August 4, 2005, https://www.culteducation.com/group/1289-general-information /8651-cult-survivors-share-their-experiences.html.
25. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 97, 101, 109–111.
26. “The Demo,” MouseSite, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4 /sloan/MouseSite/1968Demo.html.
27. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, chap. 5, “From his platform behind the audience…”
28. According to Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Engelbart described himself as “very empathetic to the counterculture’s notions of community and how that could help with creativity, rationality and how a group works together” (109).
29. Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (San Francisco: Communication Company, 1967).
30. Quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 128.
31. “Bio… Stewart Brand,” The Long Now Foundation, http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Bio.html.
32. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 135.
33. Michael Schrage, “Hacking Away at the Future,” Washington Post, November 18, 1984.
34. Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (Arlington, VA: PBS, 1985), short film.
35. Stewart Brand, “Keep Designing,” Whole Earth Review, May 1985.
36. “The advertisements appeared after a Harris poll, the I.R.S. had begun testing the use of computerized life-style information, such as the types of cars people own, to track down errant taxpayers, while an F.B.I. advisory committee had recommended that the bureau computer system include data on people who, though not charged with wrongdoing, associate with drug traffickers.” David Burnham, “The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy,” New York Times, March 4, 1984.
37. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road. The kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: stay hungry, stay foolish. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself,” said Steve Jobs at a commencement speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.
38. By some accounts, BZ was deployed in Vietnam to psychologically paralyze North Vietnamese fighters. It was also tested on American soldiers, whose harrowing experiences later inspired the cult classic horror film Jacob’s Ladder. Bruce Shlain and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
39. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.
40. “That is, it was his role to commercialize the Internet and get the government out of this business. So he did that,” Phil Dykstra, a scientist at the Army Research Laboratory, said during a 1996 US Army symposium on the history of the Internet, “50 Years of Army Computing.”
41. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.
42. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
43. Karen D. Frazer, NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking (Ann Arbor, MI: Merit Network, 1996).
44. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 463.
45. Mary Linehan, “NSFNET Boost Under Way,” Network World, December 14, 1987.
46. Mary Petrosky, “NSF T-1 Net Links Schools,” Network World, March 30, 1987.
47. America’s Investment in the Future (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2000), 10, https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/.
48. “Physical Initial NSFNET Topology,” Center for Cartographic and Spatial Analysis, Michigan State University, http://internethalloffame.org/sites/default /files/nsfnet_topology.gif. The NSFNET was a civilian academic network, but the entire initiative had heavy military and defense involvement. On a bigger level, most computer science researchers—the principal users of the NSFNET—were funded through military grants. But it was even more specific: many of the network providers were tied to military agencies, contractors, engineers, and key government insiders who had played pivotal roles in developing the ARPANET, and s
everal of the biggest regional network providers were actually run by military contractors, among them CERFNET, which linked universities in Southern California and was operated by a division of General Atomics, a major military contractor based in San Diego and best known today as the US government’s premier supplier of drones.
49. Less than a year later, in 1989, the National Science Foundation was already pushing to expand backbone capacity to a T-3 line, which would increase total bandwidth by a factor of 30.
50. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 463.
51. Ibid., 463.
52. This chapter’s discussion of the privatization process relies on the work of Jay P. Kesan and Rajiv C. Shah, who did an amazing postmortem analysis of the National Science Foundation’s privatization of the NSFNET. See: “Fool Us Once Shame on You—Fool Us Twice Shame on Us: What We Can Learn from the Privatizations of the Internet Backbone Network and the Domain Name System,” Washington University Law Review 79, no. 1 (2001): 91–220.
53. Ellen Messmer, “IBM, MCI and Merit Look to Sign New NSFNET Users,” Network World, October 1, 1990.
54. The consortium was being paid $9.3 million a year to run the backbone ($9.3 million in 1989 is equivalent to $18.3 million in 2017 dollars). See Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 123.
55. “Although few understood, he meant that the NSF was now buying its NSFNet service as a portion of ANS’s private network, rather than paying him to operate the NSF’s network,” William Schrader, president of NSFNET regional provider PSINET, said in congressional testimony during hearings on the management of the NSFNET. “After the agreements which the NSF had signed creating ANS, and providing it with exclusive commercial access, were released in December of 1991, it was clear that ANS’s president was correct, the T3 had been privatized. This occurred without public discussion or disclosure, and was effectively hidden for a year” (“Management of NSFNET,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Science of the Comm. on Science, Space, and Technology, US House of Representatives, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. [March 12, 1992]). From then on, the NSFNET backbone ran as part of a larger private network owned by MCI and IBM.
56. John Markoff, “Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear,” New York Times, December 19, 1991.
57. Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 122–123.
58. Ibid. “ANS took advantage of the public in several ways. First, it relied heavily on support from the government. Second, ANS did not find new customers, instead it attempted mainly to convert customers from the government-subsidized regional networks. Finally, ANS’s decision to create a for-profit subsidiary raised questions as to ANS’s responsibility to the NSFNET and to the public interest. At the time of ANS’s creation, it depended on its only customer, the government, for its operating revenue of $9.3 million.… In effect, it could be suggested that the federal government funded a competitor to other commercial backbone providers. Some of ANS’s national competitors included Sprint and PSI,” wrote Kesan and Shah.
59. Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 89. “Might telcos become dominant? Of course there is such a danger. Be careful when you begin to dance with the elephants. But remember if they employ illegal means of increasing market share, we have laws against anti-competitive behavior. I doubt that they would do something questionable and walk away unchallenged,” Wolff said in a 1994 interview.
60. “The decisions made by the NSF affected issues such as security, privacy, innovation, and competition. Through these decisions, the NSF essentially regulated the Internet. It is important to note that although the NSF consulted with the affected parties and limited their intervention to broad technical issues, the intervention was not insignificant and did constitute regulation of the Internet.” Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You.”
61. Ibid.
62. And despite the danger that a handful of powerful players would dominate an unregulated privatized Internet market, smaller regional networks like PSINET balked at having the government regulate the budding Internet service provider industry. Instead, they pushed for an early version of “net neutrality”—a market-driven self-regulation scheme that would enforce a level playing field among competing Internet service providers. Resolving this conflict was the first real lobbying effort by the newly created Electronic Frontier Foundation. Despite the market power of national carriers like IBM-MCI’s ANS to restrict competition, EFF wanted the government to stay out of any overt regulation of the industry. Mitch Kapor, cofounder of EFF, testified before Congress to push for a self-regulatory scheme: “To avoid government involvement, Kapor suggested the use of binding agreements between the commercial backbone networks to interconnect.” Ibid.
63. PSINET offered another example of the NSFNET privatization process. It was founded in 1989 by the board of directors of NYSERNET, a regional provider that had been set up in 1986 to connect universities in the New York area to the NSFNET. A few years after setting it up, NYSERNET’s directors—led by William Schrader—realized that they could make money by personally buying up the network assets of this federally funded nonprofit and transforming it into a private company that sold commercial services on a network infrastructure subsidized by the federal government. “A year or two after NYSERNet took over it became apparent to some people that there might be a commercial opportunity in its technology. They proposed to NYSERNet’s Board of Directors that they buy the network assets from the corporation and operate it as a for-profit corporation. This commercial spin-off from NYSERNet was called PSINet, formed in 1989,” Ben Chi, director of NYSERNET, said in an interview in 2003 (“Talking with Ben Chi of NYSERNet,” Ubiquity 2003 [September 2003]: article no. 7). From then on, the NSF regional provider NYSERNET bought network services from PSINET, the privatized component of the old NYSERNET, and sold them to the NSFNET (Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 197–198). “To provide these services, PSINet bought out NYSERNet’s infrastructure. NYSERNet became a broker of network service rather than a provider, buying service from PSINet and selling it to NSF-sponsored users. Since the network infrastructure was no longer directly paid for by the US government, PSINet could also sell its services to business customers for additional profits. PSINet proved to be a successful business venture, and other spinoffs of regional networks quickly followed along the same lines,” writes Abbate.
64. Michael Margolis and David Resnick, Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000).
65. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.
66. Keith Epstein, “The Fall of the House of Schrader,” Washington Post, April 7, 2001.
67. These budding Internet service providers wanted the government out of the networking business, and soon enough they got their wish. In 1993, after several years of acrimonious spats and conflicts, meetings, and congressional hearings, the National Science Foundation finally addressed the demands of the regional providers by unveiling a new privatized NSFNET design. The original ANSNET backbone would be retired, and multiple market-driven commercial backbones would be allowed to take its place, opening the market to unregulated competition between old NSFNET regional providers and anyone else who wanted to get into the business.
68. Wolff continued: “It was clear to all of us that NSF support for such things [the NSFNET] would not go on forever, and we saw that our job was to compensate for that in the best way that we could. So what we did was to provide for the privatization, that is, to stop funding the network, but at the same time give the money that we had been spending while we still had it, to the regional networks so they could buy the connectivity from the commercial providers.” Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.
69. Consider Al Gore, the Democratic senator from Tennessee. In 1989, a few years before he became vice president of the United States, Senator Gore introduced a bill to finance a program to support the development of a national computer network—which would be developed with federal funds but privatized
as soon as “commercial networks can meet the networking needs of American researchers.” Gore’s bill eventually morphed into the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided $495 million for the creation of a high-bandwidth fiber-optic educational computer network and expanded funding for computer and networking research. The act led directly to the creation of Mosaic, the first modern web browser created at the University of Illinois and a legend among early computer start-ups. Mosaic started as a government-funded research project but was immediately spun off by members of the University of Illinois research team as a private company called Netscape. Even more important: Senator Gore’s bill explicitly called for the privatization of the government-funded NSFNET backbone. During discussions of the bill, Gore repeatedly stressed his intention to support the privatization of the network. Under pressure from telecommunications companies, he had to make it loud and clear that he did not support the government operating a public network—even if the American people had financed its development.
70. Hostility to government regulation of networking ran deep and wide. Even the military scientists and contractors who helped bring the technology into being portrayed government regulations of commercial networks as a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Ithiel de Sola Pool, the longtime ARPA contractor who worked with J. C. R. Licklider to create counterinsurgency computing technology for the US Army and who dreamed of creating computer systems that could surveil and control entire societies, suddenly took to calling computer networks “technologies of freedom.”
71. Steve Behrens, “Inouye Bill Would Reserve Capacity on Infohighway,” Current, June 20, 1994, https://current.org/wp-content/uploads/archive-site/in/in412.html.
72. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.
73. The law was backed by telephone, cable, and broadcasting companies and had deep bipartisan support, but it was spearheaded by a resurgent Republican Party, which had just won a dual majority in Congress (Dawn Holian, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Telecom Industry Front Groups and Astroturf [Washington, DC: Common Cause, March 2006]). Leading the charge was House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican congressman from Georgia. His Progress and Freedom Foundation, which was a principal mover and shaker in this deregulatory fervor, was funded by major telephone, cable, and broadcast companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, T-Mobile, Sprint, Clear Channel Communications, and Viacom. According to its mission statement, the organization was set up to promote telecommunications reforms “based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.”