The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#41

Post by UweSchmidt » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

Culturally, the internet is very much an American thing though. Any computer network controlled by almost any other culture would probably be extremely boring.

The idea of registering a domain and "owning" it at the exclusion of everyone else is still wild to me and clearly a parallel to staking claims of land by American settlers. The boldness of collecting and presenting information in an unique way on a website, communities and forums emerging organically, are also processes that draw inspiration from a real or idealized past of starting from scratch with no authority around. The tolerance of occasional security breaches and (initially) rejection of centralization and censorship have been labeled the "Wild West" before.

A German internet surely would have come with red tape and a mere playground area for private citizens, and credentialed entities taking over content creation. Communist ideology would have made the thing centrally controlled, and judging how tightly controlled copying machines and telephones were in Eastern Germany as a means of communication nothing of cultural value would have come out of a communist internet in my opinion.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#42

Post by quercusgrisea » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #24

cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.

Should the novel be pro-soviet?

Do you think it's necessary for a novel to take a strong position on the Cold War? Propaganda from an enemy state is not a way to get a clear picture of what a place was like.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#43

Post by talideon » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

UweSchmidt wrote: post #41

Culturally, the internet is very much an American thing though. Any computer network controlled by almost any other culture would probably be extremely boring. The idea of registering a domain and "owning" it at the exclusion of everyone else is still wild to me and clearly a parallel to staking claims of land by American settlers. The boldness of collecting and presenting information in an unique way on a website, c…

You don't "own" a domain: you have a recurring lease on it.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#44

Post by keiferski » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #29

keiferski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949 Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the fou…

Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and throw scorn on technology. Stability is necessary for investment and the build-up of capital; it isn't necessary to make a painting.

Renaissance Italy was also a hotspot for the development of technology, far more than Switzerland at the time. A lot of this development was driven by warfare and enabled by achievements in the arts: perspective, for example, enabled far more detailed schematic drawings. Or, the numerous architectural innovations which enabled buildings like the Duomo to be constructed. Most of the best-known Italian renaissance artists were also engineers.

There’s something missing in our appreciation of the Renaissance, says Paolo Galluzzi, professor of the history of science at the University of Florence-something very important. While we rightly glorify this period as an extraordinary flowering of humanism and the arts, most of us have overlooked the engineering accomplishments that were just as much a part of the Renaissance as the “Mona Lisa.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/1998/01/01/237121/the-art-o...

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#45

Post by ZinniaZirconium » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #8

ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #4

It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop hearing about how people think firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will keep hackers out. Also a parallel internet built on something other than TCP/IP would promote competition to see which internet design is technically superior. But realistically nobody w…

We had other protocols. TCP/IP won exactly because it was technically superior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars

Is IPv6 winning yet??

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#46

Post by 082349872349872 » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #29

keiferski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949 Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the fou…

Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and throw scorn on technology. Stability is necessary for investment and the build-up of capital; it isn't necessary to make a painting.

He's also wrong about the cuckoo clock. They're from the Schwarzwald.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#47

Post by talideon » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #24

cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.

Should the novel be pro-soviet?

The opposite of anti-Soviet isn't necessarily pro-Soviet.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#48

Post by thescriptkiddie » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #20

vidarh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my pet theories is that economic growth is surprisingly poorly correlated to economic or social systems except for one thing: Stability. Bring stability, and people learn the mechanisms that works for their society, and overcome surprisingly large differences in type of obstacles. Be it dealing with the vagaries of the free market, or how to maneuver a Soviet-style bureaucracy. It's in fact almost depressing h…

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949 Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the fou…

The intricate mechanisms inside seemingly-frivolous curiosities such as the cuckoo clock, or more precisely the techniques used to manufacture them, led more-or-less directly to the industrial revolution. But then again, the cuckoo clock was probably developed in Germany, not Switzerland.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#49

Post by chupasaurus » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #38

mantas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and let them start private initiatives?!?

No problem there: an efficient planned economy would have no trouble whatsoever also planning for bullshit jobs, efficiently. Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were specific to the USSR, they are indeed everywhere .

Incidentally, any amount of both plans and bullshit jobs in USSR hadn't produced enough goods to supply the food deficit. There could be no efficiency in a system developed by parties with personal interest.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#50

Post by cambalache » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #24

cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.

Should the novel be pro-soviet?

So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a dichotomy? Sign of the times I guess.

To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes the soviet regime, that is OK and even needed.The big problem is the total lack of nuance which robs the work of any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov, Bulgakov) there is always criticism of the government in general and the individual in particular, to different degrees, but there is also a human side present, this human warmness. Yes, the bureaucrats suck and the party establishment are bastards, but summer in the dacha is fantastic, getting drunk with friends is a brotherly experience and there is Masha waiting for me hopefully to form a nice family. All of this is mostly absent or totally disfigured in western authors treating soviet themes, this work one of the worst exponents. The soviet union portrayed in Rocky IV and Ivan Drago are more credible and three-dimensional than any character in this work. The people are only corrupt, incompetent and bad to the core (meany meany commies) or helpless victims of the system with 0 agency whatsoever. It's painfully obvious the author has not clue about the actual psyche of a soviet citizen or functionary.