From the Pentagon to VR Cats: Seven Theses on the History of the Internet

Matrix — a ForkLog podcast series in which we discuss how the digital environment is transforming with the arrival of VR and augmented reality technologies, and we talk about metaverses with pioneers: entrepreneurs, researchers and philosophers. How to write the history of the Internet without myths, what parallels can be drawn between Web3 and Web 1.0, and what decentralization enthusiasts should prepare for — explains Leonid Yuldashev, a sociologist, a member of the Internet and Society Enthusiasts Club, and an employee of eQualitie, which builds services for civil society.

1. Not everything about Web history can be found on the Internet. The first work on the history of Web was written in 1999 in the United States by researcher Janet Abbate. It was titled Inventing the Internet. In it is presented a version that today can be found in Wikipedia: American scientists took money from the military to connect more than a dozen university networks. A single large network ARPANET was created; it kept growing. It was handed to the National Science Foundation, then it turned out that it had commercial potential, the network was privatized and commercialized. Providers emerged that began selling access, while scientists were thinking about how to simplify the user experience. Thus, according to the official version laid out by Abbate, the Internet appeared.

But now we know that the history of the Internet is not limited to American ARPANET. In other countries there were their own network developments: in the Soviet Union, Chile, France, China. Even now, despite the infrastructure being similar everywhere, there remain significant local differences: for example, when registering on Thai forums, your first rule is a ban on insulting the king. Therefore, in Web history studies it is common to speak not so much about the Internet as a whole, but about computer networks. This gives us a much broader scope and pulls us out of the realm of myths: about the American origin of the Internet, about the Internet as a space of freedom, etc.

2. Not all of Web history can be found on the Internet. Diversity on the Internet was much higher until what researchers Barry Wellman and Lee Rainie call the “triple revolution.” It includes the spread of broadband access, social networks and smartphones with cheap mobile Internet. Indeed, if twenty years ago we sat on different forums and used providers with very different speeds to different resources, now everything has converged and equalized. But there are many similarities in how the modern decentralized messenger Element operates, able to run in a local network without Internet access, and how urban chats were arranged in the 1990s.

Many will be surprised, but the history of the Internet has to be studied offline as well. If you are interested in events from 25 years ago and more, you have to organise expeditions and consult archives. To uncover, for example, collections of Siberian conferences where in the early 1990s physicists and mathematicians discussed how to create their university networks. You won’t find this in digital form.

3. There are many interesting forks in the history of the Internet where everything could have gone differently. Thus, before HTTP won, the Gopher protocol was widely used. Here is a vivid and clear example: in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, the Comic Book Guy sits at a computer, with Usenet running on NNTP. It is hard to say how events would have unfolded if commercial support had gone to other protocols instead of HTTP. But this was a fairly important fork.

Before another fork we stand today. When Twitter began to lurch again, the decentralized federated application Mastodon rose to popularity, where literally anyone can set up a server with their own “Twitter.” Will we continue to rely on one Twitter or operate across different Mastodon servers—in other words, will decentralized federated apps win a broad audience? This is a historical choice we will have to make in our time.

4. The main problem with Web3 is how to reconcile the advantages of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web3 in its current form has many similarities with Web 1.0. Then there were no cloud services; sites were hosted on a server under the user’s desk and centralization in its modern form simply was not possible. Then the information display, which was Web 1.0, became interactive, and we started receiving content not from random anonymous people, but from our real-life or virtual acquaintances. It led to a shift to Web 2.0.

Then Mark Zuckerberg put forward the idea of one identity: avatars and nicknames are no longer needed, you should have only your photograph and your given name. A shift toward communities — we want to stay in touch with people we know personally. But soon it became clear that we do not want to share personal data with IT giants. The problem is how to reconcile communities, a friends’ feed and the anonymity of Web 1.0 in the face of corporations?

How Web3 handles this contradiction largely determines its appeal to users.

5. Some technologies are more prone to tyranny than others. Are technologies neutral? This is a fascinating question. Observers and activists often include in the timeline the gradual disconnect of Russia from the global network with measures such as anti-piracy laws and data-retention rules for users on domestic soil, although similar norms exist in other countries. Does that mean blocking pirate sites is a necessary prelude to blocking opposition media?

It seems that some technologies incline to a particular type of behaviour more than others. If you have cameras with facial recognition everywhere, it is hard not to become a “bloody dictator.” But when engineers say that technology is neutral — they truly believe it. Sociological interviews with providers and site owners confirm this.

On the other hand, they use this as an excuse. If something goes wrong, you can always say: well, our neural network thinks that people with dark skin and monkeys are the same, but that is not because we are doing something bad, but because it was trained with errors. Now we we will fix these errors, and everything will go well.

6. What to use now if you want to decentralize? There is a Wikipedia article Fediverse, there are many relevant links. And again it’s worth recalling the Element messenger — you can set up a server there, register on it, invite those you want to be in touch with, and with this account participate in discussions on other servers. And use a paid VPN, this is important.

7. Metaverses are not yet well studied, but in VR something is happening. Thus, Maria Yerofeyeva and Nils Klovait are studying how people in VR solve communicative tasks. That is, how interlocutors in a space where one is a ball-cat and the other is a clearly anime-like girl, who, if you trace some symbol in the air with a finger, leaves a silver-pink hue, manage to communicate. And these two beings must somehow communicate.

Erofeeva and Klovait study the physical resources that people employ: sounds, gestures, directions of movement. This work has large practical results, on the basis of which they advised various projects and conducted commercial research.

Bonus: what to read about Internet research?

• Internet Histories — you can simply browse article titles and dig into what interests you. There are many intriguing works: about computer clubs and about encryption protocols. For example, Ksenia Yermoshina and Francesca Muziani wrote an article about how Signal privatized some protocol solutions, which sparked a scandal.
• The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories. The authors of this intriguing book write the history of the Internet outside Europe, because there is already plenty about Europe.
• Leonid Yuldashev, «How to study Internet history. My work.