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:

Like many others of my generation I grew up alongside of internet.

For a long time it was therefor an unquestioned part of my life.

Following the media I believed it was a special thing.

Believed it would make society become freer, smarter and more democratic.

Because of the possibility to have access to all the knowledge, people would be more independent

Censorship, oppresion and dogmatism would be a thing of the past.

In short I had a very utopian vision for this technology

During the course of my studies, while using the internet more, studying it, I noticed that the internet can be just as much if not more the opposite of that utopian vision. It can also be a dystopian technology. This results in a paradoxical experience of the net that I want to understand. I seek to examine where this perceived paradox originates from, and whether it is a paradox at all.

Following Fred Turnet's From Counterculture to Cyberculture, I will describe where the utopian mainstream vision of computing and internet(working) originates from. Then borrowing Evgeny Morozov's concept of 'internet-epochalism' I will argue that the constant reinforcment of the uniqueness and radical newness of internetworking technologies combined with the utopian vision of technology as outlined by Turner has lead to a popular account of the internet's history that starts and exists in what could be described as more or less a historical vacuum. This in turn has facilitated a predominantly positive and optimistic narrative surrounding the effects of computing and networking technologies on societies and individuals, which has obscured more critical understandings of those technologies by mainstream audiences.

So if the popular account of the history of the internet exists in a historical vacuum that obfuscates more critical understandings of these technologies, what would then be a more inclusive history of the internet - one that would also facilitate more 'dystopic' readings of the internetworking technologies? I will propose a reading of history that considers the internet not, as mainstream has it, a unique technology with it's origins in the American Counter-culture of the 60's and 70's, but rather as the latest iteration of (electric)telecommunications technologies that first see the world in the mid-19th century. Doing so would help the reader better understand the tremendous advantage that some states have had over others to this day and explain the distribution of power on, and over the network, not solely as a result of the merit of individual technologists and visionaries from Silicon Valley, but rather as much as the result centuries of statecraft, empire and colonialism.

By examining mainly the physical infrastructures of telecommunications technologies I will argue that the same set of interests have permeated and the same power structures have been maintained and reinforced much throughout the history of telecommunications. By retracing the origins and histories of the large multinational corporations that are todays major player's in telecommunication's infrastructure for example, one can begin to see that the historical development, ownership and geographic spread of telecommunications infrastructure affects even the 'de-politized' aspects of the internet such as TCP/IP's supposedly neutral routing.

ch1

mainstream mythologies - a list of the californian myths and expectations - how these became mainstream narratives surrounding the internet and related computing technologies, through advertising, lobbying from wired magazine and the whole earth group etc -the thinking of mcluhan, buckminster fuller as the root for our way of talking about (this) technology intrinsically having certain positive properties

internet mythology starts in 60's 70's and is isolated from world history evgeny morozov's concept of epochalism to explain this the counterculture and freespeech movement did rebeled agains the giant of computing and state, but how did this giant of computign and state emerge

ch2

telegraph, telephone, teletype overview of the development of these telecoms technologies

Telegraph 1838 – 1881/1914

-telegraph started information age and informational governmentality, so it is a good start for the history of (electronic)telecommunications

- essentially the internet with lower baud-rate (victorian internet)

-I describe both the development in uk and us, because these are the most important countries

- within 30 years of morse demonstrating the telegraph it had become a tool for colonialism in GB and monopoly in US and the infrastructure was laid out accordingly.

- the rise of both the Western Union Telegraph company and the Eastern Telegraph Company

- the concept of 'natural monopoly'

- the utopian vs dystopian visions at the time (telegraph as a tool for international dialogue, telegraph as a tool to control and surveil mainly factory workers)

Telephone 1881/1914 - 1945 -development of telegraph and telephone went side by side in US > telegraph companies get swallowed by telephone companies. The Bell Company monopoly expands

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.

Headrick, D. R., & Griset, P. (2001). Submarine Telegraph Cables: Business and Politics, 1838-1939.

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.

Nye, D. E. (2014). Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer. The New School.

Richard Barbrook, A. C. 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.