Today it is natural to consider information technologies as a product of capitalism: in the USSR of the 60s, however, some scientists and engineers saw computers as “communist machines” and presented their vision of a global information network. Here is their alternative vision of the future, starting from the Soviet-style internet.
I think about how Victor Glushkov's work could have changed the course of history. What would the Communist Party and the Soviet army use the new technology for? Would the Soviet Internet have created a form of digital tyranny? Having its own Internet, how would the Soviet future react to falling oil prices, Perestroika and Glasnost? And how would the USSR have looked at Cybertonia (I'll tell you what it is later), sorry, at the beginning of 1991? How would the Cold War have played out if the Internet as we know it had been rivaled by a Soviet alternative since the 60s?
Exploring this cultural heritage allows us to imagine whether the ideas of this unrealized digital socialism could still have an impact of some kind on our contemporary life.
Cyber Socialism
The USSR was not the only country to explore the possibility of “cyber socialism”. In 1970, with Salvador Allende, the Chilean government commissioned the English expert Stafford Beer the development of a computer system known as Project Cybersyn. A vision later abandoned due to the violent military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, which dismantled the whole project.
In the Soviet Union it was the economic boom in the early 60s that led to the birth of the idea of Soviet communism with an electronic face. The ever-growing economy was now more difficult to manage, and the enormous amounts of data it generated were difficult to process. It was clear that the tasks of public administration had to be facilitated with computers and industrial control systems already widely used in military terms.
Victor Glushkov, the mind behind the cybernetic future of the USSR
Glushkov was a visionary mathematician and director of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It is he who led the Soviet efforts to address the looming economic stagnation. Thanks to him, the country has seen the emergence of new specialized institutes and departments within major universities, all united by a single goal: to train new IT specialists. From his mind was born a sort of embryonic Soviet version of Silicon Valley.
While Stalinists opposed cybernetics, thinking it was bourgeois pseudoscience, cyberneticians such as Victor Glushkov rose to prominence in the 60s when the growing bureaucratic demands of the centrally planned economy threatened to transform the Union into an absurd administrative state.
In 1959, the engineer colonel Anatoly Kitov proposed the creation of a “unified automated management system” for the national economy that would connect large computer networks in factories and government agencies. The project, however, never received the support of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Three years later, in 1962, Glushkov adjusted his aim. He proposed the creation of the National Automated System for Processing Calculations and Information. Practically the Internet. Glushkov imagined thousands of local computers connected to each other via a regional server. The network would then be synchronized nationwide and connected to the main computing center in Moscow. The main idea behind the project was to make managerial decision making less biased and to significantly improve industry and transportation efficiency.
It failed because it was a tool, and as such it depended on who intended to use it. In the hands of the government, for example, it has gone from a vehicle for reform to a pillar of the status quo. In 1970, interest in the national computer network waned.
Glushkov's shocking predictions
Glushkov didn't just "design" the internet 12 years ahead of the American web (and 7 years ahead of the Arpanet, its progenitor). He also reasoned about many other things, coming to predict much of the future that would soon arrive. Think about it: Glushkov studied and theorized future televisions very similar to current ones. He talked about multifunction phones, programmable washing machines, paperless documents and correspondence, computer games. He imagined a type of language-based programming (the prototype of personal assistants like Siri or Alexa), theorized electronic magazines and newspapers, and even a cryptocurrency (a Soviet electronic currency project was proposed by Glushkov's team also in 1962).
In his Fundamentals of Paperless Computing, published posthumously, wrote a visionary prediction:
Soon there will be not enough paper books, newspapers and magazines. Each person will have an electronic notebook, a combination of a flat screen and a mini radio transmitter. No matter where you are in the world, if you type a specific code into the notebook, you will be able to conjure up texts and images from giant remote databases. This will forever replace not only books, newspapers and magazines, but television as well.
Victor Glushkov
Birth and death of Cybertonia, the Soviet virtual country
For a New Year's party, employees of Glushkov's institute invented “Cybertonia,” a virtual country governed by a council of robots. Cybertonia enthusiasts organized regular activities in Kiev and Lviv, including conferences and children's parties. They published pamphlets, issued their own currency. Together they also drafted the constitution of Cybertonia, turning everything into a speculative design project. Glushkov's team imagined a Soviet Union of the future, which never saw the light.
Who killed the future Russian? Bureaucracy. Instead of creating a collaborative research environment, different agencies and bureaucrats have worked diligently only for their own agenda. The Soviet Union was unable to build its own Internet, not because it lacked technology or private ownership, but because it was impossible to get a project of this scale approved by all the necessary agencies, whose interests sometimes conflicted.
Ironically: the world's first civilian computer network was developed by cooperative capitalists, not competitive socialists.
