How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a
national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to
behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists
and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation-to
construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts
succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the
Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor
to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network,
with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the
American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation,
Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues
that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state
subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet
network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among
self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The
capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved
like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of
cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the
emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters
complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various
Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing
on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses
on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State
Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter,
Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS-its
theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy
managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and
the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers
the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked
world.
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