User:Roelroscama/thesis

Hello World

Compilation of thoughts from first year

Started with questions regarding perceived contradictions within world wide web rhetoric. The internet is perceived as having certain promises, features it is lauded for, at the same time it shows us different realities. Especially the concept of a 'world wide web' versus the fact that most of the traffic and services are american. There is indeed the promise to connect to the world, and surf around it while in practice most things (now) happen on US clouds.

How can we have such positive liberatory notions about a technology that is essentially borne from US militaristic interests? Possible answer is to be found in the counter culture and the 'californian ideology' that emerged from it, as a dominant model of framing computer networks in a solely 'liberatory' and emancipatory way. This way of thinking eventually got embedded into the dominant rhetoric surrounding the internet.

Having read The Victorian Internet, on electromagnetic telegraphy, it's inception, spread, use and the surrounding rhetorics that suggests telegraphy as an analogue to the internet. It becomes very tempting to read the beginning of the not in the typical story of 70's darpa etc., the whole rhetoric of the internet as the unique invention from 70's california. But rather as the latest iteration of an ongoing process that started in 1850s colonial europe. In this sense the internet is just telegraphy with higher bandwidth.

In this regard the visual resemblance between maps of submarine fibre-optic cables and submarine telegraphy cables is not only striking but perhaps also revealing. The routes seem to be almost the same, with a heavy focus on hubs in western countries with some of the strongest links between european countries and their former colonies.

Structure draft

Intro:

This essay is going to be an alternative history of the internet. It is a story that doesn't start with American military think tanks of the Cold War, or the dreams and aspiration of Californian hippies. Instead, this story starts roughly one hundred years prior, in colonial europe.

By examining the history of telecommunications infrastructure, from telegraphy to internet, I will argue that, through incremental upgrade, the same set of interests have permeated and the same power structures have been maintained and reinforced.

From telegraph, to telephone to teletype

a history of telegraphy and the role of monopoly in it's development. arguing that the initial infrastructure was laid out according to the interests of business and colonial empire. the story of western union and eastern telegraph company.

from telegraph to telephone. on the story of the bell company, consolidation of telecommunications monopoly and the formation of at&t. in europe eastern telegraph company

telephone to teletype. fax data lines investment in fibre optics.

Literature overview so far

Blum, A. (2013). Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet Paperback. Ecco.

Galloway, A. R. (2006). Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. The MIT Press.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Malecki, E. J. (2002). The Economic Geography of the Internet’s Infrastructure. Clark University.

Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs.

Barbrook, R. & Cameron, A. (101AD). The Californian Ideology.

Standage, T. (2007). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. Bloomsbury USA.

Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Wallsten, S. (2005). Returning to Victorian Competition, Ownership, and Regulation: An Empirical Study of European Telecommunications at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press.