Thanks! There's many. Here's a couple: liberal economic language gets the cold war wrong. Our policies are often at their best when we start by doubting inherited commitments to either markets or states. Mixed economies have long been the default. And Hannah Arendt got something right: the cold war is not so much about a clash of competing ideologies as it is the rise of parties that privatize social (network) power. Etc.
Edit 2: That's Cowles commission, not Charnes commission. Charnes might have been at the meeting (I forget off the top of my head) but it wasn't his commission!
Completely agreed. For anyone interested in the heyday of Soviet economics, please start with Spufford's fascinating and entertaining historical fiction! :)
One more author rant before the thread vanishes, here are a couple points from the book.
1. The Soviet internet is a sideways allegory for the present. The Soviet Union, once we work through its parade of horribles, helps separate us from and then rethink our current network values. General secretaries, whether state or corporate, have long been trying to privatize our information.
2. The reasons the Soviets did not develop a network are not the reasons we often like to think: it's not because networks are anathema to censorship and control structures (think cybersecurity and dictatorships today), it's not because of technological backwardness (que Soviet military networks since the mid 1950s), it's not exactly because their genuinely screwed up command economy was either too rigid or hierarchical (que the rest of the book).
3. The Soviet story is a tragedy of big science and state support gone wrong, as well as a cautionary tale for how we go about building the network future in those terms.
So, I'm getting the sense this is related to Glushkov's work on pricing right? My understanding, please correct me if I am wrong, was to try and track all items and use computer systems to optimize production and pricing. Was that integral to the network he envisioned? Do you touch much on the various economic debates in the Soviet Academy at the time on how to run a non-market system, like Kantorovich's ideas?
That's right. The network project was the means Glushkov envisioned for realizing both economic optimization and a series of other technical upgrades, both wild (like mind uploading) and mundane (like paperless office). Yes, Kantorovich, Glushkov, and the economic cybernetic regulation of market without the market (contra Kosygin-Liberman reforms) figure squarely into the central chapters.
Great lead. Glushkov's network ideas are definitely overlooked, but the parallel with the CDMA in weak. Perhaps a stronger parallel is with, say, Lashkaryov's p-n junction, which became an important innovation (semiconductor) but thanks to others elsewhere. Loren Graham's Lonely Ideas is a great book for more on the larger history of brilliant ideas and halting innovations.
This is a reasonable instinct, although, as I argue in the book, it really only explains things after the 1975 KGB-advised decision to harness the Soviet IT industries to cloning western innovations. Before that decision, between 1959 and 1975, when the Soviet networks are getting their start, the Soviet computing industry is often pioneering and interesting. After 1975, Soviet deliberate technological just-behindness does not equate to technological backwardness. One of the takeaways of this story is that peerless imaginative foresight, technological wizardry, and political prowess are not enough to change the world.
> After all, layered copying of Intel x86 CPUs also was 'pioneering and interesting'.
It was; at some periods I think Soviets were world leaders in electronics reverse engineering. Those techniques were rumored to get used well after USSR death in some Asian countries.
MESM -> BESM-6 machines I've heard had some abilities like a number of simultaneously supported IO ports (AS system for space program?) - which may or may not be considered pioneering. Another example is Setun ternary computer; of course that's providing we should consider some computers after ENIAC 'pioneering enough'.
That's the one that rings a faint bell, for me -- ternary systems. Although I've no background to speak of and suspect, based on their work in mathematics et al., that there is considerably more to the story, including and perhaps especially on the theoretical side.
Really interesting. "About what Russia is like" is the short story of this book, and there's huge room for more comparative work on the networks between these two giant socialist states without democracy on the Eurasian steppe. As best I can tell, this book may be translated into Mandarin before it makes it into Russian.
Head nodding Totalitarian regimes all around the world seem to be handling un-free networks just fine. So does the NSA. Networks do not necessarily embody our values. (Pardon the author rant!)
Thanks, pjc50, for the helpful reference. This is the author of the book here. Your instincts are sharp. As it happens, I deal with exactly your last argument in the book, so let me gently suggest that if in fact there were "no way" for anything but central control, this book would not exist because there would be no story to tell. However, it does, and the three-decade Soviet story told here, whose protagonist is a leading theorized of in fact decentralized power, might deserve another glance...
For a while (in the 70s and 80s) there were two competing, state-sponsored networks in France: Minitel, based on x25 and made by French telcos, and Cyclades, based on datagrams and made by French CS research labs. The telcos lobbied the government to cut funding for Cyclades, which they saw as a competitor, and it eventually happened (under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, probably neither Pompidou nor de Gaulle would have made that mistake).
There is a very good book (in French) about that story, called La France en réseaux, by Valérie Schafer. It is one of my favorite tech history books. I will certainly read yours and hope it is as good!
However, I saw it is only available as hardcover. Any chance you can make it available for Kindle?
