How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
Benjamin Peters
Abstract
This is the tragic story—presented for the first time in English in book form—of pioneering attempts to build nationwide networks for a range of civilian purposes in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1989. It advances and complicates the plain proposition that the first international computer networks took shape thanks to cooperating capitalists, not competing socialists. In particular, it chronicles and comments on the development of the cold war science of cybernetics, the rise of Soviet economic cybernetics for managing the command economy, and attending proposals and projects to bring abou ... More
Keywords: cold war, computing, cybernetics, history, internet, media, network, political economy, Soviet Union, technology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 | Print ISBN-13: 9780262034180 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: January 2017 | DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262034180.001.0001 |
