No Result
View All Result
Friday, March 5, 2021
Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianJapanesePortugueseRussianSpanish
Near future
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Medicine
  • Society
  • Environment
  • Spazio
  • Transportation
  • Weather
  • concepts
  • H+
Near future
No Result
View All Result

Victor Glushkov, the man who anticipated the internet and the failed Soviet future

Victor Glushkov, the man who developed the internet long before the US by designing the failed Soviet future (and Cybertonia, a virtual country)

Gianluca Riccio di Gianluca Riccio
October 17, 2020
in The future of yesterday
Send to FacebookPin on PinterestSend on TwitterSend on Whatsappon Linkedin

Today it is natural to consider computer technologies as a product of capitalism: in the USSR in the 60s, however, some scientists and engineers saw computers as "machines of communism" and presented their vision of a global information network. Here is their alternative vision of the future, starting with the internet in a Soviet style.

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 create 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 Cybertonia look (then I'll tell you what it is), sorry, the USSR in early 1991? How would the Cold War have unfolded 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.

Maybe you are also interested

Clubhouse grows explosively, but security is creepy

When the app flops: 3 forgotten online innovations

Internet speed in Italy: growing everywhere! Here is the data region by region

Fortnite against Apple and Google. Because it can decide the future of big tech

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 Agusto 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 huge amounts of data it generated were difficult to process. It was clear that the tasks of the public administration had to be facilitated with computers and industrial control systems already widely used in military terms.

Victor Glushkov, the mastermind behind the cyber future of the USSR

future Soviet cybertonia
Victor Glushkov

Glushkov was a visionary mathematician and director of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It is he who has led the Soviet efforts to address looming economic stagnation. Thanks to him, the country has seen the emergence of new specialized institutes and departments within the main universities, all united by one goal: to train new IT specialists. A sort of embryonic Soviet-style version of Silicon Valley was born from his mind.

While the Stalinists opposed cybernetics, thinking it was bourgeois pseudoscience, cyberneticians like Victor Glushkov rose to prominence in the 60s when the growing bureaucratic demands of the centrally planned economy threatened to turn the Union into an absurd administrative state.

In 1959, the engineer colonel Anatoly Kitov he 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 the shot. He proposed the creation of the National Automated System for Computing and Information Processing. Virtually the Internet. Glushkov imagined thousands of local computers linked together via a regional server. The network would then be synchronized nationwide and connected to Moscow's main computing center. The main idea behind the project was to make managerial decision-making less partial and to significantly improve industry and transport 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 ended up being a vehicle for reform to a pillar of the status quo. In 1970, interest in the national computer network faded.

Glushkov's shocking predictions

Glushkov did not just “draw” the internet 12 years in advance on the American web (and 7 on Arpanet, its progenitor). He also reasoned about many other things, coming to predict much of the future that would come shortly thereafter. Think: Glushkov studied and theorized future televisions very similar to the present ones. He reasoned about multifunctional 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), he 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

Victor Glushkov, the man who made the internet (and cybertonia, a virtual country) before the USA, designed the Soviet future that never had the light.
A map of Cybertonia in a 1965 pamphlet

For a New Year's party, the employees of the Glushkov Institute invented “Cybertonia”, a virtual country governed by a council of robots. Cybertonia fans have organized regular activities in Kiev and Lviv, including lectures and children's parties. They issued brochures, 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? The bureaucracy. Instead of creating a collaborative research environment, several agencies and bureaucrats have been diligently committed to just their own agenda. The Soviet Union was unable to build its own Internet, not because it lacked technology or private property, but because it was impossible to get a project of this size 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. 

The capitalists behaved (for once) like socialists, while the socialists behaved like capitalists, and they failed. There is also to learn from the Soviet future that has never seen the light, this is little but certain.

tags: Internetussr
Previous post

Blendid, the robot that makes smoothies goes mainstream

Next article

A texture on the photovoltaic panels leads to + 125% the absorption of light

Gianluca Riccio

Gianluca Riccio

Gianluca Riccio, born in 1975, is the creative director of an advertising agency, copywriter and journalist. He is affiliated with Italian Institute for the Future, World Future Society and H +, Network of Italian Transhumanists. Since 2006 he directs Futuroprossimo.it, the Italian resource of Futurology.

Maybe you are also interested in:

picturephone, the grandfather of zoom
The future of yesterday

When there was Zoom 60 years ago: the history of the Picturephone

Yes, the Earth was flat: here is the long era without mountains
The future of yesterday

Yes, the Earth was flat: here is the long era without mountains

sinclair c5
The future of yesterday

C5, Clive Sinclair's 1985 ebike was years ahead of its time

Next article
A texture on the photovoltaic panels leads to + 125% the absorption of light

A texture on the photovoltaic panels leads to + 125% the absorption of light

Infinity Game Table, remotely play board games

Infinity Game Table, remotely play board games

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Collaborate!

We are open to visions about the future. Submit an article, disclose the results of a search or scientific discoveries, shows points of view on a theme, tells about a change.

Contact us
The last
  • Wolverine, Alphabet's secret project to create superhuman hearingMarch 4 2021
    Alphabet's most pioneering company secretly develops a device that delivers superhuman and selective hearing. After the first rumors, we await developments.
  • Pesticide "ghosts" haunt organic crops for decadesMarch 4 2021
    As in a Dickens story, "the ghost of past pesticides" continues to haunt the fields, even those of organic farming.
  • An implant in the inner ear restores balance to those suffering from vertigoMarch 3 2021
    The modification of an existing implant allows a Johns Hopkins team to counteract vertigo in those suffering from bilateral vestibular hypofunction.

Most read of the week

  • Levitating plastic discs

    Scientists levitate a plastic disc using only light

    62 shares
    Share 24 Tweet 15
  • M1, the huge 165-inch MicroLED TV vanishes into thin air when turned off

    60 shares
    Share 24 Tweet 15
  • World population growth will stop after centuries

    3128 shares
    Share 1251 Tweet 782
  • V90 Villa Edition, camper with terrace on the second floor

    225 shares
    Share 90 Tweet 56

Futuroprossimo.it is an Italian resource of futurology opened since 2006: every day news about the near future. Scientific discoveries, medical research, prototypes, concepts and predictions about the future for free.

Tag

Environment Architecture Communication concepts Advice Energy Events Gadgets The future of yesterday The newspaper of tomorrow Medicine Military Weather Robotica Society Spazio Technology transhumanism Transportation Video

Categories

The author

Gianluca Riccio, copywriter and journalist - Born in 1975, he is the creative director of an advertising agency, he is affiliated with the Italian Institute for the Future, World Future Society and H +, Network of Italian Transhumanists.

Collaborate! Are you interested in writing a post on Futuroprossimo? Click here for contacts.

Home / Author / IDEA / archive / Promo on FP

© 2020 Futuroprossimo - Tailored by Be Here

© 2020 Futuroprossimo - Tailored by Be Here

  • Home
  • Contact
  • archive
  • Technology
  • Medicine
  • Transportation
  • Weather
  • Society
  • Environment
  • transhumanism

© 2019 Futuroprossimo - Tailored by To be here

This site uses cookies. By continuing to read it, you consent to their use.