[ih] New Republic Article - "How We Misremember the Internet???s Origins"

[Toerless Eckert]

Karl, *:

The author seems to self-identify as an artist. Imho the article
is better understood as a modern form of expressionism. It certainly
does not read like a factual historical record or actual analysis
but as a collage of various bits & pieces that don't fit together
except as a spiritual travel advisory for california.

Looking at the article i particularily enjoyed her
condescending, pretentuous verbal warfare in fragments like these:

...intertwined with a landscape defined by evangelism, speculation, and the so-called pioneer spirit
...Californian crucible of nascent ex-hippie neoliberalism
...a region heavily shaped by libertarian conservatism and environmental racism

Attempting to refute lame memes about the origins of the
Internet by loading up on any imaginable meme about California
is just brilliant.

If i where you, i would wear this t-shirt:

          ITS ALL MY FAULT
	    The Internet
	  Poisoned Aquifers
	    Dead students
	   Mark Zuckerberg

Cheers
    Toerless

On Fri, Nov 01, 2019 at 09:42:56AM -0600, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> This got forwarded to me this morning:
> 
> How We Misremember the Internet???s Origins
> 
> https://newrepublic.com/article/155532/misremember-internets-origins
> 
> This article seems very screedy to me.  Yeah we all knew that ARPA was a
> branch of the US Dept of Defense.  And we all knew that in at least some
> minds (especially the group I worked for, the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
> survivable communications during nuclear war were a concern.
> 
> What rubs me wrong is how this article seems to try to paint people working
> on network ideas as somehow evil, somehow linked to the bad things such as
> the treatment of California indigenous peoples by the Spanish missionaries
> of the 18th century.
> 
> OK, yeah, it is true that some some, and I emphasize only some, of the
> motivations for the ARPAnet tributary stream that eventually merged with
> others to for The Internet, were military and not the most politically
> correct in today's world.
> 
> But there were a lot of other forces, motivations, and ideas at work.
> 
> For example, pretty soon after I worked with the JCS I also started to get
> ideas coming out of Dave Farber's DCS project.  The idea of restructuring
> entire computers and operating systems around networks was something
> revolutionary to me.  And we see that idea now fruiting in the web of APIs
> now available on the net to build applications.  AWS and Google Map APIs
> are, to my mind, a direct result of Farber's DCS.
> 
> The article fails to acknowledge those streams as well as the engendering of
> social networking via things like bulletin boards and Usenet.  And to me,
> that removes the foundation of credibility from the article.
> 
>     --karl--
> 

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