Isn't this article missing the point of the internet?
It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes.
But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked any network.
The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build anything physical. You could link up several existing networks in any which way you want, despite involving disparate organizations, systems, and infrastructure.
How would one link up two existing networks with different systems and infrastructure?
What I can think of is either installing a couple translating routers, which do speak TCP/IP as well as their network's internal protocol, or making them, by repurposing existing machines with software-only modifications. Is that what you had in mind as not really counting as installing something physical, or did I miss something?
Modern "Internet" is about about making everything tcp/ip based. Interconnection between networks with different protocols was a real thing long before tcp/ip conquered our planet:
"An amusing side note on the VNIIPAS connection: while the author of this paper was in Havana, he
connected to a VAXNMS system at his home via the following path: PAD program on Unix microcomputer
at CENIAI in Havana goes over X.25 board local to that system; X.25 line from Havana to Moscow, via
satellite; VNIIPAS X.25 data switch receives call, routes to international Sprint network via Western
Europe; Sprint carries call through some number of cities and links to Reston, Virginia where it conveys
call to Columbus, Ohio, to CompuServe's X.25 gateway; CompuServe carries call from Columbus, Ohio
to Tucson, Arizona, where it gets translated from X.25 formats to internal DECnet format and passes over
the University of Arizona DEC net network, through Ethernet, fiber optic, 56 Kbps synch and asynch
19.2 Kbps TCP/IP lines to author's home over another Ethernet from gateway to workstation, returning
with the prompt "Username:" The miraculous thing about this call is that it was done with a single X.121
address at the Havana end." - this is how it was in 80s.
I'd say the kernel of that was the idea of encapsulation and separating functions by layer (really the same idea, from packet and flow perspectives, respectively).
I'd say the core is that anyone could link up and start talking with other parts of the network; the arp/ip technology was the stepping stone of course, but a key differentiator from previous machine networks[1] is that you can just hook up to the internet, it was truly decentralized from its ideation.
[1] ie. stock tickers, terminals of time share mainframes, or see plan 55-A for a wider interconnected switched network
this russian idea
It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop hearing about how people think firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will keep hackers out. Also a parallel internet built on something other than TCP/IP would promote competition to see which internet design is technically superior. But realistically nobody wants two internets that are incompatible. We already have IPv6 which is incompatible with the rest of the internet and that's enough trouble as it is.
Poetically, this universe you've created reminds me of the story of the Berlin metro during the Cold War.
Prior to the division of the city, the metro system spanned the whole city, and was rebuilt to functioning capacity in the aftermath of WW II. Once it became necessary to construct a controlled border between the NATO and Soviet sectors, they eventually erected barriers on the tracks; creating two disconnected transportation graphs.
Except! There were some lines that began and ended in "West Berlin", but needed to pass through a couple of stations in
"East Berlin;" these were allowed to continue operating, but the train conductors were not permitted to stop at the "Easte Berlin" stations under any circumstances. The Geisterbahnhöfe (ghost stations) were patrolled by armed guards. This system persisted from the early 1960s until 1989.
Both sides made improvements to their respective pieces of the U-bahn, to service the local populations. But they never made any changes that would make a reunion impossible (for example, changing the track widths, or signalling technology). When the wall came down, the system united into a fully-functional whole remarkably quickly.
Imagine if the internet partitioned between "east" and "west"; but, in order for the internet backbone to reach India for example, it would first need to pass through Russia or China. I wonder if something similar would happen!
Editorializing, it's fascinating to see how these systems, that are designed to (more or less indiscriminately) connect people, behave when they are suddenly coerced to instead keep people apart in unnatural ways. It never seems sustainable, and the separation seems to revert so easily once the coercion is lifted. It's kind of a hopeful story for humanity, I think.
I think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is simply "yes".
Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time.
However, if you integrate the motivation function over the entire time of separation, which is one way of reducing the complexity, the primary result is to keep easterners from escaping. In the early days of widening division, there was a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person carried a multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect of the border was to halt this flow.
There were easterners who sincerely viewed this differently, and wanted to keep westerners out (especially the "spies"!); however, their perspectives were definitely a minority, and don't survive the integral.
The thing that really drove this home for me was the way the wall was built literally overnight with no warning to the public to prevent people from fleeing.
This fact, that "the wall was built literally overnight", also reflects how ad-hoc and dramatic the decision to raise the wall actually was. At the time, people had no idea how "real" the newborn borders were going to be, because something like that had literally never happened before, there was no precedent.
If you're interested in the topic of the east/west German border's materialization over time, I'd recommend you to Edith Sheffer's excellent book on the subject [0]. It focuses on adjacent villages in Thuringia, and how they took turns coping with, helping create, and profiting from the existence of the border.
It's a great illustration of Simpson's paradox [1]: something that looks kind of simple on the surface (of course there would be a border between NATO and Warsaw Pact), becomes more complicated when you glance at the details (the people living on either side were mostly German citizens, with ideas and ambitions and fulfilling lives).
Then, you zoom in on the details (individual people, families, towns, neighborhoods), and again you're presented with something comprehensible. For example, a mayor can get special funding from the Marshall Plan, by emphasizing the propaganda opportunity of building attractions near the border; to get this money, it's helpful to sell the idea of a fundamental difference between east and west; once the attractions are built, there is now a real difference between east and west, whereas before it was imaginary. When you zoom out, it's these little independent assertions of autonomy and appeals to authority that motivate the creation of a border. Super fascinating stuff.
Don’t forget keeping spies at bay. Berlin was a notorious hotbed of espionage, for obvious reasons, and East German authorities had already enough trouble controlling the existing checkpoints without having to add new ones.
As the parent comment referred to the Geisterbahnhöfe as in East Berlin, it stands to reason that they were patrolled by East German guards, hence discussing the reasons for East Germans to keep them closed.
(As an aside, why do you feel the need to be so confrontational...?)
I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well into the 2000s.
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated:
> "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed."
> …
> One result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
The apparently out of place reference to the iPhone in this article from 1996 is actually referring to the IPhone, one of the first internet appliances.
No, it won because it could be carried over all other protocols. It had a simple design and real world use cases too, which helped. A classic example of "worse is better".
Depends what you're looking at, on mobile it absolutely is. Not sure what the situation around the world is but in the US pretty much all LTE connectivity is via v6. T-Mobile at least doesn't even dual stack, if you need to go somewhere that's v4 only they do NAT64
Having used early Soviet computers - before they gave up on trying to design anything and just copied or used Western schemes - I can say the USSR internet would definitely be different but there's no way the design would be technically superior but for some improbable accident.
They would just have gateways that translated between the two protocols. Think changeover in railway gauges. Realistically, one would become the standard and swamp everything else. Look at how slow IPv6 adoption has been.
IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a scale that massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and when the designer is well ahead of the state of the art like this it doesn’t stand a chance.
ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked in and become nearly impossible to correct.
It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in the 1980s, everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop culture). '95-99 was when the internet popularized the idea of barely controlled anarchy leading to success that we take for granted today.
On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to do, and then execute that plan. So for example, nearly all federal services that we used to depend on are failing. The Post Office is being crippled because it's seen as a price ceiling against UPS and FedEx, not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally counted. The IRS has been defunded by the far right and liberals who have sold out to Wall Street, because they don't want rich people or corporations to be audited, because that might reveal widespread fraud. NASA hasn't been properly funded since Challenger, and technically lost its funding when the public lost interest in moon missions. We can argue various fake news interpretations of these trends, but the truth of them is self-evident from an academic standpoint.
What's my point? That maybe we could use a little more top-down planning. I'd rather see the spirit of socialism succeed (the elimination of wealth inequality), rather than what we have now, which is survival of the fittest on steroids. A top-down internet might have had some basic security measures in place, such as HTTPS everywhere. Also some bells and whistles like the free hosting that university students enjoy.
This may all seem quaint, but the loss of confidence in central government planning in the US is another way of saying that our republic is in decline. It's the central conflict in the Republican Party, half of whose members are old enough to remember when American ingenuity was once second to none. Now we can't even temporarily nationalize, say, N95 mask manufacturing. Sad.
Govermment spending as a percentage of GDP increasing substantially since the 1950s.
The financial surveillance state growing rapidly in scope, with OFAC, FinCEN - only created in 1990 - and other financial crime/surveillance agencies becoming far more substantial in their impact on banking and finance.
Healthcare regulations have become significantly more burdensome since the 1950s:
The bright spots in the economy, in terms of providing more value for less cost to the consumer, are all bottom up, whether it's the internet and digital industries, consumer electronics, or the food industry. These are heavily dominated by the private sector and relatively unhampered by government regulation, and consequently, very competitive.
USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network, but it had nothing in common with public packet-switching networks like in the West.
Such networks were build in USSR only in late 80s - early 90s, some of them by western companies.
Even PSTN was unreliable, mostly analogue, SS7 was never implemented on 99% of intercity links.
Glushkov never produced any working model of his "network", they had no protocols, no software, no hardware.
I think this is interesting. The value of tcp/ip was the ability to form logical networks over and across existing physical/electronic networks. That only makes sense if you have an abundance of physical networks to start with.
Glushkov was never about packet switching, he had an idea to build new dedicated physical network for this project, he estimated that this project will need more resources than nuclear and space program combined (!). It was actually a waste of materials, resources and completely incompetent. And access to that network was planned as very secure, even the project itself was partly top secret.
In real world, we in USSR had very basic X.25 network (built by VNIIPAS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS) in late 80s, with 2 links to Europe (via Finland and Austria) and X.25 network for universities (Akademset). They were many years behind even European networks and were built on very unreliable hardware.
TCP/IP came to Russia only after 1991, no one actually used it before even for LANs (although it was available in stolen source code from BSD Unix).
Actually it appeared a little before 1991, in 1989. There was first Internet connection to Finland in Demos institute (their demos.su domain is still operational) and I can remember reading their Usenet posting about communist coup d'etat in 1991.
Demos got their international UUCP connection only in 1990. In 1989 they were playing with Moscow-only UUCP network. Everything was dialup based.
In 1991 they played with local TCP/IP in Moscow, in 1992 started to make dialup calls to Finland with SLIP instead of pure UUCP. Only in 1993 several permanent TCP/IP links from Russia (Demos, SOVAM Teleport, etc) to the West were finally established.
It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.
It's good that it antisoviet, isn't? Soviet Union was responsible for millions of deaths. In Soviet Union, you will be prosecuted as American spy just because you have account on HN.
Not really. In Soviet Union it was possible to have connection to the outside world only in case you were completely trusted (checked by KGB many times).
No one was prosecuted in SU for unauthorized access to western computer resources because they had not a single chance to get it without state permission.
If we are talking about the same time period as the book (which opens up in the 30's, I believe) then you would absolutely be persecuted for having contacts with the West. And by contact, it could be something as innocuous as you were happened to a tailor who worked on diplomat's clothing.
The law was written to make it illegal to be suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So it's the burden is not to prove the crime, just to prove the suspicion of a crime.
Well, the USA was also responsible for millions of deaths in countries around the world, but don't suppose you think being anti-US is good on that account.
I don't feel being anti-Soviet is bad, unless it means misleading people to serve your goals (as the comparison to Voice of America and by extension to propaganda implies).
I guess you mean some aspects of Soviet Union were mischaracterized, or presented in a more negative way then they should have been.
Did you feel that's what the book did? I'm curious what part?
The book takes place during Stalin era, yet hardly mentions Stalinist atrocities.
It is as if someone wrote an anti-US book that takes place in antibellum South and never mention slavery.
I'm not saying that every book set in a certain time period must delve into the worst parts of that period, but it could hardly be called anti-that country if it doesn't.
Do you think it's necessary for a novel to take a strong position on the Cold War? Propaganda from an enemy state is not a way to get a clear picture of what a place was like.
So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a dichotomy? Sign of the times I guess.
To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes the soviet regime, that is OK and even needed.The big problem is the total lack of nuance which robs the work of any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov, Bulgakov) there is always criticism of the government in general and the individual in particular, to different degrees, but there is also a human side present, this human warmness. Yes, the bureaucrats suck and the party establishment are bastards, but summer in the dacha is fantastic, getting drunk with friends is a brotherly experience and there is Masha waiting for me hopefully to form a nice family. All of this is mostly absent or totally disfigured in western authors treating soviet themes, this work one of the worst exponents. The soviet union portrayed in Rocky IV and Ivan Drago are more credible and three-dimensional than any character in this work. The people are only corrupt, incompetent and bad to the core (meany meany commies) or helpless victims of the system with 0 agency whatsoever. It's painfully obvious the author has not clue about the actual psyche of a soviet citizen or functionary.
It sounds like Spufford fails to see the Soviet citizens as real humans.
For an example how to not do that, all one must do is read any of the authors you mention (or Tolstoy, Chukovskaya, Gogol...) Tolstoy in particular has a knack for painting the interior psychological worlds of his characters fluidly and from a place of deep empathy.
That is definitely not the impression I got from reading the book. I can mostly only recall accounts of ordinary people trying to make the best of the absurd situations they faced.
They don’t even compare. USSR was the empire (a country plus its occupied territories) people literally were losing their life trying to get the hell out of.
Red Plenty absolutely does not rob the Soviet people of their humanity. If anything, it emphasis their humanity and juxtaposes it against the inhuman absurdities of a command economy.
Oh come on. It was a three way vote tie and there was a constitutional process. He was displaced by a junta, and they slaughtered innocents, and you want to complain about Allende's election?
Allende wanted Cyberdyne as a way to bypass the informal, distributed signaling networks of the economy that mediated supply and pricing, which were by definition managed by those owning the means of production. In the end, though, Cyberdyne's only significant success was circumventing worker strikes--truckers, specifically--protesting Allende's mismanagement of the economy. (And like with Trump, blaming opposition and protesters for sabotaging your reform plans is a cheap excuse.)
And the CIA never overthrew Allende. Chile was never a banana republic. The myth the CIA held the strings is just an American conceit. IIRC, Allende's overthrow was orchestrated by the Chilean Senate, where Allende supporters only nominally held power, and only until Allende's expropriations became intolerable to moderates.
The truth is that for better or worse, Chile was too conservative for both Allende and socialism. It's like the U.S. that way--a relatively conservative society where liberal factions only enjoy sporadic (albeit crucial) successes.
Props to the author for using the definite article with the ARPANET. I usually see it strangely written as “Arpanet” as if it were a thing that had a name. It was just the net, just as the local big town is referred to as “the city” wherever you happen to live.
Case in point - Bulgaria. Overstaffed state administration consisting of more than 400 thousand people spread throughout the whole country, for a population of 6.5m. All that staff are regular hard voters for the currently ruling party, in exchange for promises for pay increases and bonuses. There is also strong resistance to introducing any effective electronic governance because it might render these people unemployed, and that would also compromise the whole power structure.
We're neighbours and I understand. One thing to be mindful of though: we have to phase out state jobs slowly. Mostly waiting for the aging buraocrats to die. Doing it too fast means you have to support a lot of unemployment which strains the already weak economy.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Russia. What was in it for the United States to drop 108,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia? What is in it still for the US to continue having troops in Afghanistan?
Powerful countries have agendas. I cannot think of any entity that names itself a "country" that does not.
Not the same, and it’s plain to see. Russia publicly was (and still is) the friend and sustainer of every crackpot psychopathic dictator on the planet.
So a bit like a capitalist entrepreneur who needs to have a brilliant idea and be a great salesman, the scientists in USSR had to have a cunning social skills to push their ideas through layers of un-interested bureaucracy. A Sisyphian task that would just cause them to become disengaged. That's how that society got its alcoholics, poetry evenings and other sublimation hobbies.
One of my pet theories is that economic growth is surprisingly poorly correlated to economic or social systems except for one thing: Stability.
Bring stability, and people learn the mechanisms that works for their society, and overcome surprisingly large differences in type of obstacles. Be it dealing with the vagaries of the free market, or how to maneuver a Soviet-style bureaucracy.
It's in fact almost depressing how little effect even quiet massive political changes appears to have on growth on "just" national level relative to the effects of larger global trends; but an alternative view is that it shows humans abilities to work around messed up political limitations.
The 70s and early 80s is the USSR were universally regarded as the period of stability. So much stability that the official name of the period is "stagnation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation
This era ended by the USSR assuming the most stable position possible, i.e. dead. So I wouldn't over-promote the value of "stability" as such. Being stable is good if you're in a good place, otherwise it's deadly.
GDP per capita in the Soviet Union continued growing until the end with a couple of minor drops - the collapse in Russian GDP per capita first accelerated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The 70s and 80s provided slower growth, sure, but still growth. As far as I can tell there was no drastic decline in GDP per capita growth for the Soviet Union until towards the very end of that period, when the rapid changes from Brezhnev to Andropov, to Chernenko, to Gorbachev disrupted the already weak growth.
It's not that I'm suggesting everything will grow the same irrespective of regime or system, but that the correlations are much weaker than most people will assume.
"Disrupted" is a bad word to use here, it's like saying a surgeon "disrupted" a body of a dying patient. Gorbachev had no choice - the Soviet economics was dying. There are many books and doctoral theses written by now about how exactly and why it happened, but what you describe as "slower but still growth" was the process of slow economic collapse. Nothing worked properly by the time he took over, basically. He tried to deliver some CPR and defibrillation by introducing sort of NEP 2.0 (hey, it worked for Lenin!), and "acceleration", and "perestroyka" - but it was way too late. By then, the collapse was inevitable.
And it's not like the top Party functionaries didn't know that - they were aware of it in the early 80s (in 1984 they started introducing kinda sorta markets between state enterprises - see Khozraschyot) and by the late 80s they were in panic - that's why Gorbachev had to "disrupt". Because they had to do something to try and save the collapsing economy. Unfortunately for them it was impossible.
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
- Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949
Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the foundations of Western civilization.
Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950.
It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and throw scorn on technology. Stability is necessary for investment and the build-up of capital; it isn't necessary to make a painting.
It may be useful to distinguish between Orson Welles, the man, and Harry Lime, the antagonist of the movie, played by Welles. I don't think it's terribly reasonable to make an assertion about what a person thinks by the lines of their character. Especially when their character is hardly to be considered a model of anything good or reasonable.
Renaissance Italy was also a hotspot for the development of technology, far more than Switzerland at the time. A lot of this development was driven by warfare and enabled by achievements in the arts: perspective, for example, enabled far more detailed schematic drawings. Or, the numerous architectural innovations which enabled buildings like the Duomo to be constructed. Most of the best-known Italian renaissance artists were also engineers.
There’s something missing in our appreciation of the Renaissance, says Paolo Galluzzi, professor of the history of science at the University of Florence-something very important. While we rightly glorify this period as an extraordinary flowering of humanism and the arts, most of us have overlooked the engineering accomplishments that were just as much a part of the Renaissance as the “Mona Lisa.”
The intricate mechanisms inside seemingly-frivolous curiosities such as the cuckoo clock, or more precisely the techniques used to manufacture them, led more-or-less directly to the industrial revolution. But then again, the cuckoo clock was probably developed in Germany, not Switzerland.
I think your oversimplifying here. I think economic growth is strongly tied to stability but it's also strongly tied to mechanisms. Pricing as a vehicle for measuring supply and demand simply outstrips everything else we've tried. Even this article mentions how difficult it is to centrally plan supply and demand and how large the bureaucracy needs to be. Perhaps some technocratic socialism could create a computerized bureaucracy large enough to solve this problem somewhat well, but I still think computer models are going to be inferior to actual markets. While markets do have plenty of imperfections they are kind of like democracy, the worst system for supply and demand except for all the other ones. As for why having good systems of supply and demand affects innovation dramatically the short answer is that it forces innovation to conform to an approximation of useful (creating demand) rather than just novel (which is what happens in a lot of purely academic projects). Non-capitalist systems have also done poorly at creating competition and competition seems to be a central force in generating quality (in fact the biggest failure mode of capitalism seems to be anti-competitive monopolies).
Of course I'm oversimplifying, but there are plenty of examples.
E.g. compare the UK and France over the last 20 years, and try to spot when France cut working hours.
Or look at China under Mao, with the frequent political changes, vs. under Deng. It's tempting to think the growth under Deng happened because of his economic reforms, but the growth started before the reforms. Just like growth started every time things settled down under Mao too, only to be severely disrupted again and again.
Look at Africa, and match GDP growth against peace vs. war in different countries.
Also, I did not speak about innovation. I spoke specifically about economic growth. Economic growth is affected by innovation, but it can go very far with little innovation.
[EDIT: Also to your mention of 'technocratic socialism' vs' markets, the two are not contradictory; many socialist ideologies favour markets as the primary resource allocation mechanism over planning]
North Korea seems like a pretty stable country that hasn't seen much economic growth. On the other hand, they are perhaps the very poorest of stable countries, and still wealthier than some less stable countries like the Congo.
I also suspect that rather being merely inefficient, their leadership might be actively opposed to economic growth and could be suppressing it deliberately to keep their population poor and hungry.
Markets are democracy for the rich. They are only democratic when everyone has roughly equal purchasing power, a condition which is nearly immediately undone by a market. The whole idea that founded the Soviet Union is that markets are deeply undemocratic and they were trying something different. You can criticize their attempt, but it's important to at least understand that.
There were plenty of markets and black markets in USSR. Most of the time the only reliable source of meat and poultry for ordinary citizen was a "Farmer's Market" (Колхозный Рынок).
It wasn't just the scientists, literally everyone had to do it.If you wanted something unique or just unusual ( compared to whatever the norm is set to in Moscow). Smart politicians from the occupied countries used to come up with some creative ideas on how to convince Moscow to give green light for projects and etc.
The article made me think that the guy who rejected the proposition rejected it because it would have lessened the importance of his ministry as most of the job within could have been automated if the project turned out to be successful.
I'd also say that great social skills are just as important today. Society is not meritocratic, you can have best idea, the best solution to a problem if you can't sell it or react appropriately to criticism (even to you coworkers) you're going to be frustrated. I'd that sometimes include being "cunning" if the person you're talking to is not being honest you don't have to be either.
I don't understand why are you being downvoted. You are factually correct - which I can confirm as a first hand witness (and a participant) of what you have described here.
The only major difference I see is that the entrepreneur aims to make money from the innovation as opposed to trying to improve society. Money was clearly a better motivator though.
The major difference is there're multiple investors in capitalist society. Essentially they compete with each other and more successful investors get to invest in more stuff.
Meanwhile in SSRS-style society, there's a single point of approval. There's no market of ideas/thinking. It's set by power games, usually not related to the subject at all.
Yeah, the "individual motivation" bug still really hasn't been fixed in most pure non-capitalist economic system proposals IMO. That's why I think a blend works best -- like what you see a lot in Europe.
Good
I think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is simply "yes".
Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time.
However, if you integrate the motivation function over the entire time of separation, which is one way of reducing the complexity, the primary result is to keep easterners from escaping. In the early days of widening division, there was a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person carried a multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect of the border was to halt this flow.
https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/whatsapp-web-scan.html?m...
It really doesn't matter which group of people or what state "invented" the internet. Humanity is better off now with it.
It's also incorrect to assign all credits to the origin, since it involves all the people who have worked to improve it incrementally.
Except that its origins in the U.S. have had fairly significant knock-on effects like the dominance of English online. The perceived censorship-free nature, receding as it may be, perhaps can be attributed to its origins in a country with a constitutional prohibition thereof.
Unfortunately it’s not so clear humanity is unambiguously better off with it. Social media is certainly stress-testing society.
Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform itself into capitalist oligarchs by seizing and privatizing the state enterprises instead of creating an open, democratic and scientific economic planning system. Trotsky was right.
Quite the opposite: soviet bureaucracy didn't want to transform anything, they were more concerned with maintaining the status quo for as long as they could. This is why the system turned out to be too rigid to withstand the pressures of the modern world.
On the other hand, think about how much the planned economy would benefit from the wide-spread automation and access to modern computing and communications.
If socialism and planned economy could ever work, massive automation, networking and computerization would be the way to do it, otherwise planning is plain impossible, especially on humongous scales USSR has to deal with. It seems to be the case that it can't work even then, the inherent deficiencies in the system are just too fundamental for the automation to fix, but it was certainly a valiant attempt and thinking to the right direction. Just not enough, because it never could be enough. Just as if you want to go to the moon, jumping is going the right general direction, just would never be enough.
What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and let them start private initiatives?!?
Incidentally, any amount of both plans and bullshit jobs in USSR hadn't produced enough goods to supply the food deficit. There could be no efficiency in a system developed by parties with personal interest.
the issue has always been that there are far more people than you expect who wish to only consume hence why these states only worked for as long as they did because authoritarian governments have little in the way of limits when it comes to compelling people to work.
you would need an excessive abundance to accommodate the large numbers of people who do not believe they must contribute. I am not saying they won't work and produce wealth, those that do will only do so for themselves
I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would solve the problem of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no efficient distribution of resources.
Private companies are interested in getting real statistics, it was not like that in USSR.
Even on largest auto-factory (AvtoVAZ) programmers were creating software with intentional bugs, so they can fix it later, during pre-programmed outages and get some bonuses.
No one was interested in sending real statistics to Moscow, from head of local shop to head of large factory.
To be fair to those programmers, I've seen the same thing (or similar) in the US. It wasn't intentional bugs, but intentional delays in addressing them. That is, they sandbagged. They knew the fixes but didn't apply them so that they could hit monthly/quarterly/whatever targets. Or they knew they could knock out 100 features in a week, but that one feature would take 3 months. They'd mete out those 100 easy features over the three months so that they didn't appear stalled (they weren't, but management couldn't tell the difference between a stall and a hard problem).
For more than 10 years thousands of party members from soviet republic of Uzbekistan were sending fake data to Moscow (this included corruption on many levels across the country) about production of cotton.
Everyone was involved, from top to bottom, I don't see how creation of any network would help with that.
In fact programmers across USSR were putting tools into the software for state companies to produce "fixed" results for central planning committee. And in central planning committee they were also corrupt :) (my relative worked there in 80s and I know how it was organized on basic level).
Prices did exist in USSR all the way till it eventually failed. But prices, just like currency exchange rate or salaries, had little connection to actual costs. Black markets meanwhile...
Apparently those prices were determined mainly by bureaucratic means. Prices encapsulate production costs and demand for a product therefore in a socialist commonwealth bureaucrats and even supercomputers would have to base production on market information using data from capitalist era.
By the fall of the SSSR the black market of illegally imported goods constituted a huge chunk of the soviet economy.
Also I find intriguing how I got downvoted just by questioning. Makes you wonder how wisely those mod powers are being used.
Let me know when you find an efficent planned economy. It certainly couldn't occur under all of the communist economically illiterate assumptions of a universal fair price as an implication of their labor based value fallacy. Treating dynamic supply-demand feedback as fixed moral imperatives is a reciepe for disaster. It seems that fixed assumptions of "always right" is the surest path to insanity and travesties.
Snark tangent aside, the issue with the USSR wasn't so much the bullshit jobs as the squandering of the labor of those performing actually important jobs via lack of support. They took labor for granted as a free input and neglected efficiency, exactly like slave owners and feudal lords they accused capitalists of being.
I read a while ago that in communist society there is usually a shortage of everything including labor (that also why females were encouraged to work soon after giving birth)
Nope, women were given a generous 3 years off work after birth. In general since all work was equally paid (sort of) and you could just choose your profession, it's possibly harder, more dangerous jobs had issues with filling up positions and you couldn't solve it in a capitalistic way of just paying more (or increasing immigration for cheap, slave labour). Too many people wanted to be writers, artists, etc.. and since there was no invisible hand of the market to force them into more needed profession the labour market was broken.
Not actually 3 years: 1,5 years since 1982 and 112 days before that. And if you stay at home you'll get only 30 rubles per month, it was a very problematic financial situation for many families.
3 years (1,5 years with payment and 1,5 years without) came only in 1989, when you had to spend many hours in long queues to buy anything for your child.
Well, I wasnt thinking about givin time off. Let me be more specific: while in West Germany it was common for females to stop working for more than 18 years (paid by the family), in East Germany there seems to have been social pressure to go back to work after 1 year (or slightly more). (This is annecdotal evidence, but I think it was rarer in East Germany for the wife to completely stop working)
More dangerous and less comfy jobs were paid much more and/or given extra benefits.
Apartments queues were much shorter in small purpose-built industrial towns in the middle of nowhere
Dangerous jobs in bumfucknowhere (far north etc) were paid $$$$$
One couldn't be a writer or artist without attending university. And spots at university were limited. State needs X writers or artists in 5 years so that's how many spots are available this year. On top of that, being jobless was a crime. So you couldn't just pursue artsy stuff and leech off society either.
Same for the rest of the labour market. Central planning wants to kickstart XYZ factory in 5 years? Suddenly related universities get spots in XYZ next fall. You want to do ABC instead? Tough luck. Either study XYZ or do some unskilled job for years till few spots in ABC become available.
The bureaucracy wanted to maintain the status quo (and his privileged position in it) but in the long run their interest as a caste were directed to restore capitalism, as they sat on a contradictory position (e.g., no inheritance rights). There was a big Trotsky-Burnham debate in late 1930's about this. The common idea of the soviet bureaucracy wanting only to keep the status quo made many in all sides of the ideological spectrum to be surprised by the USSR fast turn to capitalism.
Culturally, the internet is very much an American thing though. Any computer network controlled by almost any other culture would probably be extremely boring.
The idea of registering a domain and "owning" it at the exclusion of everyone else is still wild to me and clearly a parallel to staking claims of land by American settlers. The boldness of collecting and presenting information in an unique way on a website, communities and forums emerging organically, are also processes that draw inspiration from a real or idealized past of starting from scratch with no authority around. The tolerance of occasional security breaches and (initially) rejection of centralization and censorship have been labeled the "Wild West" before.
A German internet surely would have come with red tape and a mere playground area for private citizens, and credentialed entities taking over content creation. Communist ideology would have made the thing centrally controlled, and judging how tightly controlled copying machines and telephones were in Eastern Germany as a means of communication nothing of cultural value would have come out of a communist internet in my opinion.
No, I think you'll find that if you read your registration agreement, that is not the case.
I spent about a decade of my life as running the management systems of a domain registrar, with all the fun of dealing with ICANN, the various gTLD and ccTLD registry operators, other registrar, and so on. One of the recurring issues that got registrants into trouble repeatedly was the fact that they didn't understand that they didn't actually own the domain and that the terms of the agreement/contract actually mattered.
It's not just a matter of not paying. You're dealing with a recurring payment for something with a private entity covered by a contract. That is a lease.
I "own" a few real properties, some of which I lease to tenants under fairly traditional terms for real property.
I have the option of changing those terms to give my tenants effectively all ownership privileges except responsibility for some official correspondence with the city, e.g. property taxes.
If I fail to pay quarterly property taxes, the city will have a different opinion about who "owns" the property. They will divest me of all ownership and operating privileges, and I will not be free to offer them to others. My feelings on the matter are irrelevant, because they have guns and prisons.
I "own" several domain names. In fact, I also lease one domain name to a lessor under fairly traditional terms for domain names. I have given the lessor basically full operating rights to the domain, except responsibility for official interactions with the registrar.
If I fail to pay annual domain registration fees, the registrar/foodchain will have a different opinion about who "owns" the domain name. They will divest ... etc, see above. My feelings on the matter are irrelevant, since they have control of the administration of the .com TLD.
Your point, I think, is that you do not "own" a domain name. Because registrar agreements, ICANN oversight, court decisions, obligatory lease payments, etc.
I agree. But you seem to misunderstand how real estate property "ownership" works (in the US). It's not meaningfully different. I might even have more ownership privileges over domain names (I can serve autoplaying videos with loud audio all day long) than I have privileges over my real property (I cannot play loud music without being financially and legally censured).
Not necessarily. For it to be a type of intellectual property it would have to be unique, distinctive, etc., which many domain names aren't. You can't really bring a claim to a domain name outside of trying to prove trademark infringement.
It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes.
But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked any network.
The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build anything physical. You could link up several existing networks in any which way you want, despite involving disparate organizations, systems, and infrastructure.