How many times has the internet already died?

How many internets from the past are already gone that we did not preserve along the way?

And who benefits from our continued reinvention of what the internet is?

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Kevin Driscoll.

Kevin is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and a co-author of Minitel.

Welcome to the Internet with his colleague Julian Mayland, who is a professor at Indiana University. Kevin is also the author of The Modem World,

a prehistory of social media that will be published by Yale University Press. Unfortunately,

I don't have a date on that one for you, but I think we'll need to keep an eye

out for it. In this week's episode, Kevin and I have a great conversation about Minitel, the French

network that connected people all around the country to a system of digital services, many of which

will sound really familiar to users of the internet, even the early internet.

And that was made possible because the French state built out the whole network and offered

Minitel terminals to telephone subscribers for free that they could pick up from the post office,

which sounds pretty incredible. And naturally, because everyone could easily get a terminal

that created the network

effects to drive state enterprises and private companies to make their own mini-tale services

that could then be accessed to this system. So I think this is a really fascinating episode because

it gives us insights into this system that existed before the internet where all these people in France were connected up in a way that was pretty unique at the time.

And the network itself has some pretty unique features that we don't see in other networks at the time as well.

And that kind of breaks some myths, I think, about the state and kind of the innovative role that it can play and the ability of the

state to create open platforms that can promote different ways of engaging and communicating

...