Who started the internet? No one. It actually began during the 1960s, long before any of us had personal computers. Many people think that the internet was created during the Cold War as a way for the United States Government to protect computer data from a nuclear bomb. Not so.
Russia became the world leader in technology in the Cold War “Space Race” when they launched Sputnik in 1957, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
The U.S. Defense Department responded to Sputnik’s launch by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. In 1967, they initiated a four-month long study that led to the formation of ARPANET, the first workable prototype of today’s internet.
Without Sputnik, we might not have the internet. Do you think it is a good thing or a bad thing? Or both?
Twenty-seven years later in 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day invite the mass collection of data on everything in society. Agre earned his doctorate at MIT in 1989, the same year the World Wide Web was invented. At that time, even among Silicon Valley venture capitalists betting on the rise of computers, few people foresaw just how deeply and quickly the computerization of everything would change life, economics and politics on our planet.
Reed Albergotti in the Washington Post wrote “A small group of academics, Agre included, observed that computer scientists viewed their work in a vacuum largely disconnected from the world around it. At the same time, people outside that world lacked a deep enough understanding of technology or how it was about to change their lives.” Not a new phenomenon.
Agre came to believe the field of artificial intelligence had gone astray, and that a lack of criticism within the profession was one of the main reasons. This reminds me of the regret expressed by Albert Einstein who believed the Germans would produce the atomic bomb first which spurred him to sign a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to support the Manhattan Project research into chain reaction. Einstein never worked on the development of the bomb itself because the U.S. government would not give him the necessary clearance.
However, years later, Einstein deeply regretted his letter to Roosevelt. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I would have never lifted a finger.” The brilliant theoretical physicist sought to control nuclear weapons and to develop institutions such as the UN that he believed could lead to peace. But the inventor can rarely maintain perfect control, and society will have its way. Nine countries now have nuclear capability.
In the early 1990s, Agre wrote that the mass collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few people could have imagined, as social media and other online networks have corralled human interactions into easily quantifiable metrics. Like being “friends” or not, or being a “follower” or someone who is “followed.” The data generated via the Internet has been used to further shape behavior, by targeting messages designed to manipulate consumers, voters and nations psychologically.
Putin’s attempt to destroy democracy in Ukraine militarily has invited a reexamination of the cyberattacks, disinformation, division, attacks on opponents, and installation of puppet leaders he used to gain control of Ukraine. This reexamination, in turn, has led journalists to note that those same techniques have poisoned politics in countries other than Ukraine … including America.
A flood of real-time videos on Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and Twitter has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side as it fights to defend its democracy from a military behemoth. In some ways, Ukraine is beating Russia at its own cyberwarfare game. Their tactics reveal how social media has opened a new dimension of modern warfare, revealing how the internet has become a weapon for real-world conquest.
In the long run, I don’t believe Ukraine can defeat the fierce Soviet onslaught, at least without the intervention of other fighting forces. But the information they’ve surfaced will help define how the world remembers this unprovoked war.
That said, I cannot fault Ukraine for using the very the same techniques used by U.S. conspiracy theorists, climate denialists, racist and other anti-societal campaigns of disinformation to fight for its nation’s very survival.
“Connecting the Dots” is published every other Saturday in the Recorder. John Bos is a contributing writer for “Green Energy Times.” His climate crisis essays have been published in many other regional journals. He is the editor of a new children’s book entitled “After the Race.” Questions and comment are invited at john01370@gmail.com.