bjp210

Precisely

Completely agreed. For anyone interested in the heyday of Soviet economics, please start with Spufford's fascinating and entertaining historical fiction! :)

Great lead. Glushkov's network ideas are definitely overlooked, but the parallel with the CDMA in weak. Perhaps a stronger parallel is with, say, Lashkaryov's p-n junction, which became an important innovation (semiconductor) but thanks to others elsewhere. Loren Graham's Lonely Ideas is a great book for more on the larger history of brilliant ideas and halting innovations.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/lonely-ideas

That's right. The network project was the means Glushkov envisioned for realizing both economic optimization and a series of other technical upgrades, both wild (like mind uploading) and mundane (like paperless office). Yes, Kantorovich, Glushkov, and the economic cybernetic regulation of market without the market (contra Kosygin-Liberman reforms) figure squarely into the central chapters.

Thanks! There's many. Here's a couple: liberal economic language gets the cold war wrong. Our policies are often at their best when we start by doubting inherited commitments to either markets or states. Mixed economies have long been the default. And Hannah Arendt got something right: the cold war is not so much about a clash of competing ideologies as it is the rise of parties that privatize social (network) power. Etc.

Excellent! I know the 1970s RAND review and am delighted to learn about the Cowles commission material here.

Sevensor, I'd LOVE to read more about this. Is there more in your diss?

One more author rant before the thread vanishes, here are a couple points from the book.

1. The Soviet internet is a sideways allegory for the present. The Soviet Union, once we work through its parade of horribles, helps separate us from and then rethink our current network values. General secretaries, whether state or corporate, have long been trying to privatize our information.

2. The reasons the Soviets did not develop a network are not the reasons we often like to think: it's not because networks are anathema to censorship and control structures (think cybersecurity and dictatorships today), it's not because of technological backwardness (que Soviet military networks since the mid 1950s), it's not exactly because their genuinely screwed up command economy was either too rigid or hierarchical (que the rest of the book).

3. The Soviet story is a tragedy of big science and state support gone wrong, as well as a cautionary tale for how we go about building the network future in those terms.

And a link dump: enjoy!

Review by David Strom

http://blog.strom.com/wp/?p=5287

Review by Michael Gordin in Nature

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v532/n7600/full/532438a...

Podcast segment with Kerri Smith (starts at 6:50) in Nature

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-2016-04-28.html

Conversation in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/us-res...

This is a reasonable instinct, although, as I argue in the book, it really only explains things after the 1975 KGB-advised decision to harness the Soviet IT industries to cloning western innovations. Before that decision, between 1959 and 1975, when the Soviet networks are getting their start, the Soviet computing industry is often pioneering and interesting. After 1975, Soviet deliberate technological just-behindness does not equate to technological backwardness. One of the takeaways of this story is that peerless imaginative foresight, technological wizardry, and political prowess are not enough to change the world.

Really interesting. "About what Russia is like" is the short story of this book, and there's huge room for more comparative work on the networks between these two giant socialist states without democracy on the Eurasian steppe. As best I can tell, this book may be translated into Mandarin before it makes it into Russian.

Thanks, catwell. Super helpful. Schafer's work comes highly recommended. I'll get to it!

MIT Press put out an e-book version, and the soft cover comes out later this year. (A pdf is probably out there too...)

Head nodding Totalitarian regimes all around the world seem to be handling un-free networks just fine. So does the NSA. Networks do not necessarily embody our values. (Pardon the author rant!)

Thanks, pjc50, for the helpful reference. This is the author of the book here. Your instincts are sharp. As it happens, I deal with exactly your last argument in the book, so let me gently suggest that if in fact there were "no way" for anything but central control, this book would not exist because there would be no story to tell. However, it does, and the three-decade Soviet story told here, whose protagonist is a leading theorized of in fact decentralized power, might deserve another glance...