The first global computer networks emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative

socialists and not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and in this final episode of this month's history series, my guest is Benjamin Peters.

Ben is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and

affiliated faculty at Yale Law School. He's the editor of digital keywords and the co-editor of

your computer is on fire, and you might remember that I spoke to Mar Hicks about their contribution to that

a couple months ago. And he's also the author of How Not to Network a Nation, the Uneasy History

of the Soviet Internet. And that's mainly what we'll be discussing today. We have a really

great conversation about the proposals for national computer networks in the Soviet Union,

why they were never built, and what kind of obstacles they faced. You know, it's easy to look back at the

history and just say like, oh, the United States, you know, built the internet. So, you know,

the capitalist mode of innovation is superior to, you know, what was happening in the Soviet Union.

But that really misses a lot of the kind of nuance and intricacies of what was actually going on

and how structural barriers in the Soviet Union stopped a national computer network designed

for economic planning and to improve the planned economy, even while the state was

undertaking a number of other major innovations with regard to space and

weaponry while rapidly industrializing. Ben makes a really interesting point that I think

relates back to my conversation with Margaret O'Mara that in the case of the Soviet Union,

it was kind of the rivalries between the different ministers and ministries that kept these networking

projects from moving forward, from being implemented. Whereas in the United States, where you would

expect kind of capitalist competition, because that is kind of the narrative, the way that innovation

took place during this period was actually the state coming in and funding a lot of different

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