The full title of Glushkov’s plan –
The
All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of
Information for the Accounting, Planning and Governance of the National
Economy, USSR – speaks for itself and its epic ambitions. First
proposed in 1962, the All-State Automated System, or OGAS, was intended
to become a real-time, remote-access national computer network built on
preexisting and new telephony wires. In its most ambitious version, it
would span most of the Eurasian continent, mapping itself like a nervous
system onto every factory and enterprise in the planned economy. Its
network was modelled hierarchically after the three-level pyramid
structure of the state and economy: one central computer centre in
Moscow would connect to as many as 200 mid-level computer centres in
prominent cities, which would in turn link to as many as 20,000 computer
terminals distributed across key production sites in the national
economy.
Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov in 1979. Photo courtesy Sputnik Images.
Consonant
with Glushkov’s greater life-work commitments, the network plans
reflected a deliberately decentralised design. This meant that, while
Moscow could specify who received which authorisations, any authorised
user could contact any other user across the pyramid network – without
direct permission from the mother node. Glushkov intimately understood
the advantages of leveraging local knowledge in network designs, having
spent so much of his career working on related mathematical problems
while ferrying between his home and the central capital (he jokingly
called the Kiev-Moscow train his ‘second home’).
The OGAS project
appeared to many state officials and economic planners, especially in
the late 1960s, to be the next best response to an old conundrum: the
Soviets were agreed that communism was the way of the future, but no one
since Marx and Engels knew how best to get there. For Glushkov,
networked computing might just inch the country toward an age of what
the author Francis Spufford later called ‘red plenty’. It
was the means by which the sluggish pulp-based lifeblood of the command
economy – quotas, plans and wrist-bending compendiums of industry
standards – would transform into the nation’s neural firings, moving at
the sublime speed of electricity. The project signified no less than the
ushering in of ‘electronic socialism’.
Such ambitions require
brilliant, committed people willing to throw off the old ways of
thinking. In the 1960s, those people could be found in Kiev – a couple
of blocks from where the Strugatsky brothers wrote their science fiction
by night and worked as physicists by day. There, on the outskirts of
Kiev, Glushkov ran the Institute of Cybernetics for 20 years, beginning
in 1962. He filled his institute with ambitious young men and women; the
average age of researchers was about 25. Glushkov and his youthful
staff dedicated themselves to developing the OGAS and other cybernetic
projects in the service of the Soviet state, such as a system of
electronic receipts for virtualising hard currency into an online ledger
of accounts – this in the early 1960s. Glushkov, who was known to talk
down Communist Party ideologues by quoting paragraphs of Marx from
memory, described his innovation as a faithful fulfilment of Marxist
prophecy of a moneyless socialist future. Unfortunately for Glushkov,
the idea of Soviet e-currency stirred up unhelpful anxieties and did not
receive committee approval in 1962. Fortunately, his grand economic
network project did live to see another day.
These
Soviet cyberneticists published tongue-in-cheek papers such as ‘On
Wanting to Remain Invisible – At Least to the Authorities’
These
cyberneticists imagined a kind of smart neural network, a nervous
system for the Soviet economy. This choice cybernetic analogy between
computer network and brain bore its imprint on other computing theory
innovations in Kiev. For example, instead of the so-called von Neumann
bottleneck (which limits the amount of transferable data in a computer),
Glushkov’s teams proposed ‘macro-piping processing’ modelled after the
simultaneous firings of many synapses in the human brain. In addition to
countless mainframe computer projects, other theoretical schemes
included automata theory, the paperless office, and natural language
programming that would let humans communicate with computers
semantically, not just syntactically as programmers do today. Most
ambitiously, Glushkov and his students theorised ‘information
immortality’, a concept we might call ‘mind uploading’ with Isaac Asimov
or Arthur C Clarke in hand. On his deathbed decades later, Glushkov
comforted his grieving wife with a resonant reflection: ‘Be at ease,’ he
soothed her. ‘One day the light from our Earth will pass by
constellations, and on each constellation we will appear young again.
Thus we will be together forever in the eternities!’
After their
workday, the cyberneticists indulged in a comedy club full of frivolity
and merry pranksterism that bordered on the outright defiant. No more
than a place to vent off steam, their after-hours work club also saw
itself as a virtual country independent of Moscow’s rule. They
christened their group ‘Cybertonia’ at a New Year’s party in 1960, and
organised regular social events such as holiday dances, symposia and
conferences in Kiev and Lviv, even publishing tongue-in-cheek papers
such as ‘On Wanting to Remain Invisible – At Least to the Authorities’.
Instead of event invitations, the group issued pun-filled faux
passports, wedding certificates, newsletters, punchcard currency and
even a Cybertonia constitution. In a parody of Soviet (council)
governance structure, Cybertonia was governed by a council of robots,
and at the head of that council sat their mascot and supreme leader, a
saxophone-playing robot – a nod to the US cultural import of jazz:
Glushkov got in on the fun, too: he called his memoirs
Despite the Authorities, even
though his official title was vice president of the Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences. Counterculture, understood in the scholarship of Fred
Turner as the power to count and counter other powers, has long been kin
of cyberculture.
All of this, though, required money – lots of
money, especially for Glushkov’s OGAS project. That meant convincing the
Politburo to give it to them. And so it was that Glushkov found himself
in the Kremlin on 1 October 1970, hoping to continue the work of
Cybertonia and bring the internet to the bedraggled Soviet state.
One
man stood in Glushkov’s way: the minister of finance, Vasily Garbuzov.
Garbuzov did not want any shiny, real-time optimised computer networks
governing or informing the state economy. He called instead for simple
computers that would flash lights and play music in hen houses to
stimulate egg production, as he had seen during a recent visit to Minsk.
His motivations were not born out of common-sense pragmatism, of
course. He wanted the funding for his own ministry. In fact, rumour
holds that he had approached the economic-reform-minded prime minister
Alexei Kosygin in private before the 1 October gathering, threatening
that if his competitor ministry, the Central Statistical Administration,
retained control over the OGAS project, then Garbuzov and his Ministry
of Finance would internally submarine any reform efforts it might bring
about, just as he had done to Kosygin’s piecemeal liberalisation reforms
five years earlier.
Glushkov needed allies to face down Garbuzov
and keep the Soviet internet alive. But there were none at the meeting.
The two seats left empty that day were the prime minister’s and the
technocratic general secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s. These were the two
most powerful men in the Soviet state – and likely supporters of OGAS.
But, apparently, they chose to be absent rather than face down a
ministry mutiny.
The first global
computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative
socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists
Garbuzov
successfully convinced the Politburo that the OGAS project, with its
ambitious plans to optimally model and manage information flows in the
planned economy, was too much too soon. The committee, after nearly
going the other way, felt it was safer to support Garbuzov – and the
still top-secret OGAS project was left to languish in review limbo for
another decade.
The forces that brought down OGAS resemble those
that eventually undid the Soviet Union: the surprisingly informal forms
of institutional misbehaviour. Subversive ministers, status quo-inclined
bureaucrats, nervous factory managers, confused workers and even other
economic reformers opposed the OGAS project because it was in their
institutional self-interest to do so. Without state funding and
oversight, the national network project for ushering in electronic
socialism splintered in the 1970s and ’80s into a patchwork of dozens
and then hundreds of isolated, non-interoperable factory local-area
control systems. The Soviet state failed to network their nation not
because it was too rigid or top-down in design but because it was too
fickle and pernicious in practice.
There is an irony to this. The
first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to
well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments,
while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network
efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and
institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global
computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative
socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists.
In
the fate of the Soviet internet we can glimpse a clear and present
warning to the future of the internet. Today the ‘internet’ – understood
as a single global network of networks for advancing informational
liberty, democracy and commerce – is in serious decline. If
Prince and the
AP Style Board
don’t convince, consider how often companies and states are seeking to
silo their online experiences: the ubiquitous app is more of a walled
garden for rent-seekers than a public commons for browsers.
Inward-looking gravity wells (such as Facebook and the Chinese firewall)
increasingly gobble up sites that link outwards (such as Aeon). So too
are the heads of France, India, Russia and other nations eager to
internationalise the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and
enforce local regulations for their citizens. In fact, hundreds of
non-internet networks have been functioning across corporations and
countries for decades. The future of computing networks undoubtedly
holds not one internet but many distinct online ecosystems.
In
other words, the future undoubtedly resembles the past. The 20th-century
features multiple national computer networks clamouring for global
status. The Cold War drama of what we might dub, with a wink, the
‘Soviet nyetworking’ or even, in the delightful title of historian Slava
Gerovitch, the ‘Soviet InterNyet’ helps to fill out the comparative
study of computer networks with a sort of internet -1.0 case study.
Weighed in the balance of many past and likely future networks, the
perception that there is only a single global network of networks is the
exception to the rule. Given that the Cold War irony at the heart of
this story – that cooperative capitalists outmaneuvered competitive
socialists – did not play out well for the Soviets of yesteryear,
perhaps we should not be too sure the internet of tomorrow will fare
much better.
The anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour once
quipped
that technology is society made durable, by which he meant that social
values are embedded in technologies: for example, Google’s PageRank
algorithm is deemed ‘democratic’ because, among many other factors, it
counts links (and links to sites making links) as votes. Like
politicians with votes, the pages with the most links rank the highest.
The internet appears a vehicle of liberty, democracy and commerce today
in part because it cemented itself in our popular imagination just as
Western values appeared to triumph in the wake of the Cold War. The
Soviet internet story also reverses Latour’s aphorism: so too is society
technology made temporary.
In other words, as our social values
shift, so will what appears obvious about technology. The Soviets once
embedded values into networks – cybernetic collectivism, statist
hierarchy and planned economies – that seem foreign to us; so too will
the values modern readers attach to the internet strike future observers
as strange. Network technologies will endure and evolve, even as our
fondest social assumptions about them pass into the dustbin of history.
Glushkov’s
story is also a stirring reminder to the investor classes and other
agents of technological change that astonishing genius, far-seeing
foresight and political acumen are
not enough to change the
world. Supporting institutions often make all the difference. This is an
express lesson of the Soviet experience and a media environment
continuously mined for digital data and other forms of privacy
exploitation: the institutional networks that undergird the making of
computer networks and their cultures are both vital and far from
singular.
While computer-networked projects and their promoters
will continue to pedestal brighter network futures publicly, private
institutional forces will, unless checked, continue to capitalise on
surveillance networks committed to making themselves privy to our lives.
(Perhaps that is what privacy is really about: the sweeping power of
information-omnivorous institutions to pry into our lives, not just
individual rights to protect against that privation.) The Soviet case
study reminds us that the US National Security Agency’s domestic spying
program and Microsoft’s Cloud partake in a longer 20th-century tradition
of general secretariats committed to privatising personal and public
information for their institutional gain.
In other words, we
should not take too much comfort from the fact that the global internet
first evolved thanks to cooperative capitalists, not competitive
socialists: the story of the Soviet internet is a reminder that we
internet users enjoy no guarantees that the private interests propping
up the internet will behave any better than those greater forces whose
unwillingness to cooperate not only spelled the end of Soviet electronic
socialism but threatens to end the current chapter in our network age.
