@braunHowNotNetwork2020

[!info] - Cite Key: @braunHowNotNetwork2020 - Link: Full Text PDF - Bibliography: Braun, J. 2020 How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 64(2): 365–367. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2020.1718987.

Annotations¶

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Imported on 2023-04-05 12:31 pm¶

Definitions / concepts¶

[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight to use networked computers to manage the economy of the Soviet Union

This is similar to how US companies used computers to automate their industry. However the USSR saw this potential and used it much earlier starting in the 1950s

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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight the essential idea was to install and network computers in the nation’s myriad farms and factories, allowing regular and ultimately real-time information about their economic inputs and outputs to be monitored and coordinated by regional and national economic planners.

This is interestingly similar to industrial uses for the internet but communist of course. I'm curious to see how a consumer internet existed in the USSR if it did at all

Page 2 [[2023-04-05#12:14 pm]]

[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight human planners would ultimately yield their jobs to benevolent algorithms designed to optimize economic production and meet the needs of the citizenry.

This sounds grimly similar to what is happening to several jobs at the moment. Although of course we know now that algorithms are all but benevolent, ambivolent is more accurate

Page 2 [[2023-04-05#12:15 pm]]

[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In practice, the complexity of the state’s enormous economy was inevitably beyond the ken of the committees responsible for managing every aspect of it, resulting in infamous shortages that had to be worked around. This created a massive informal economy of logrolling and graft through which managers at different levels cut deals with one another to secure, off the books, the materials they needed. This horizontal network of wheeling and dealing existed alongsideand arguably dominated—the official vertical hierarchy that ostensibly underpinned the Soviet state.

So the failure in this system that also made it incompatable with a computer network system was the amount of under the counter shady dealings which are caused by human incentive. It would be interesting to see a Soviet Union run by a computer network with perhaps an algorithm managing allocation rather than humans. I would predict worse shortages and worse for everyone in general but it may be interesting to compare and contrast those differences

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Disagree¶

[!quote|#ff6666] Highlight the Soviets’ pursuit of cybernetics, a process of domestication rendering what had previously been derided as a Western pseudoscience into a dominant frame for Soviet scientific and economic policy.

I'm confused what this use of 'cybernetics' is describing. Perhaps it means it in the way Vannevar Bush conceptulized his memex as a tool for one's brain thus augmenting us in a way that would be considered cybernetic

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Agree¶

[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Why, then, did the Soviet “Internet” ultimately fail to materialize?

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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Officials for whom economic inefficiencies created fringe benefits in the form of bribes and influence were happy to espouse the importance of computerized management in public, but were privately unenthusiastic about—even vehemently opposed to—turning over their authority to algorithms designed to wring inefficiencies out of financial management and render their jobs redundant.

This is a morbid look at the human condition and seems to be a big reason to prefer the computer management system that could have been. However I'm still not convinced an Algorithm would necissarly improve the situation as well as is being stated

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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Second, while the architects of the Soviet Internet aimed to use networked computers to create a more efficient official economy, obtaining the government patronage necessary to get their vision off the ground often resulted in their being compelled to participate in the gray economy of favors and graft. This process ultimately gave those architects a corrupting stake in the very thing they’d initially hoped to eliminate.

This is tragic, also feels similar to how companies that try to be "ethical" ultimately end up being the thing they wanted to destroy through the push of capitalism

Page 3 [[2023-04-05#12:24 pm]]

[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight the Western Internet succeeded in part because the researchers who initially devised its workings collaborated in an egalitarian fashion evocative of the best intentions of socialism, while the Soviet Internet failed because those who oversaw its fate fell victim to craven self-interest evocative of the worst excesses of capitalism.

I strongly agree with this. I also find it very facinating how the features of the opposite's ideology manifested in their computer networks. I think this is because in the USSR the work was done by scientists under direct control of the state with specifically production efficiency in mind while as in the USA the internet was made partially for military communication but primarly by students and professors working in Academia where the capitalistic push is not non-existant but much less previlent. and I'd argue the flaws with the internet as it exist now is due to the introduction of companies and capitalism to the net

Page 4 [[2023-04-05#12:29 pm]]

[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight states as cybernetic metaphor—differ from their workings in practice.

I think this is true. I believe that the USSR system was disastorous but if they somehow got it run by an algorithm it would have also been disastorous just perhaps in new ways

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Questions / confusion¶

[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Peters argues that the responsibility for its demise lies in differences between the way the Soviet state and economy functioned in reality as opposed to on paper.

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