CHAPTER 1.2: THE INTERNET'S FOUNDING MYTHS
The haze of nuclear anxiety that hung over America during the Cold War era heavily affected the way Baran imagined potential communication networks. As Hu states, Baran's network was never actually attempted, and ARPANET/Internet engineers did not build from his paper in any explicit form. With that said, the ideology of the paper did have a lasting effect, and it shaped how the engineers of these electronic networks thought of how power and information were related within their systems. Without there ever being a true, one-to-one duplication of Baran's ideas--without a genuinely decentralized and equal communication network even existing--the beliefs held by the engineers (and in time the public) about what these networks should be were strong enough to make it seem as if the myth was reality.In [his paper], Baran imagines how to maintain some continuity of government in the worst-case scenario [of nuclear warfare], and describes, as an example, a distributed network of congressmen scattered across the country. Some — many, even — are killed in a nuclear strike, but the surviving members of Congress may be able to cast votes from their home offices....
It is because of Baran’s 1960 paper that one of the most widely held beliefs about the Internet began to propagate. Yet by now, this claim has been well debunked; it comes out of a series of confusions, between Baran’s 1960 paper and a paper written two years later, and between the Internet and its earlier incarnation, ARPAnet....Baran's network was never built, and we are several generations removed from its nuclear logic.
If the Internet never had this nuclear-proof shape, then why do scholars continually tell or write this idea back into existence?....There is, in short, a collective desire to keep the myth alive despite evidence to the contrary. This desire, after all, is symptomatic not only of how media historians explain the Internet's origins, but is, more generally, symptomatic of our method. (10)
Then came the establishment of casual online interaction. By the nineties, gone were the days of restricted Internet communication between specific academic/military communities. The communication network was now available to a much wider range of people. With the general population now gaining access to the Internet, the myth of the equal, decentralized Internet was finally being challenged. This happened through many different avenues. One of the most familiar forms of inequality that arose through widespread Internet usage is the digital divide: the concept that due to socio-economic and racial inequalities, minority groups face much greater difficulty in achieving computer literacy and gaining access to computational devices in the first place. This brought the uncomfortable reality of socio-economic and racial inequalities to the Internet, and the struggle to narrow the digital divide is still a point of contention to this day. But the diversity in experiences with the Internet also applied to the content and interactions that were becoming mainstream.
The nineties and the early 2000's saw the rise of the Internet forum, its many permutations, and highly involved subcultures such as Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) players. Before social media platforms came to dominate the online landscape, forums and video game environments provided outlets for people to congregate around shared interests and interact with each other. This was a huge shift from the more linear and slower communicative form of e-mail threads. Through the ease of interaction that forum posts, instant messaging, and other forms of digital communication allowed, the Internet sprouted new cultures. With those new cultures came a wide array of content and viewpoints, all untethered from the original expectations for the Internet.
This would be years before infamous message boards like Something Awful and 4chan would even be created, and the concept of a social media platform was practically nonexistent. Despite the early Internet seeming relatively tame compared to the contemporary era's virtual landscape, the nation was starting to worry about how lawless the world online seemed to be. The myth of decentralized interaction was crumbling before the world's eyes. Near the end of the nineties the U.S. Government attempted to pass the Communications Decency Act, a law concerned with regulating the distribution of online pornography and obscene language. The Communications Decency Act resulted in an uproar among multiple communities on the early internet who were concerned for their autonomy and free speech. One of the more vocal attackers of the law was John Perry Barlow—an essayist, Grateful Dead lyricist, and a pioneer of the cyberlibertarian movement.
As a response to the Communications Decency Act, Barlow declared the whole web as a “new home of the Mind” free from the shackles of “weary giants of flesh and steel” (1996). Barlow found the act of physical sovereign powers meddling in the affairs of virtual space disgusting. For him, the virtual/physical divide was of utmost importance, and petty real world politics should not trespass into holy, digital ground. He goes so far as to call these government interferences “hostile and colonial measures [to] place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers” (Barlow 1996).
The irony of Barlow implicitly referencing colonial struggles in an argument trying to distance itself from the historicity of the physical world is never addressed. What Barlow might not have realized while drafting his declaration is that he inserts the very inequalities and historical baggage he wants to avoid into the Internet through simply existing. The identities and experiences that constitute an individual do not get washed away through going online. Ideology, inequality, and exploitation are played out in the virtual as well as the physical—not in the same ways, but they occur nonetheless. Otherwise, the far-right political movement in Brazil would not credit their success to YouTube radicalization pipelines (Fisher 2019), and the impact of ideological echo chambers and illegal data mining on social media platforms like Facebook would not be national points of contention (Cadwalladr 2019). Virtual networks and spaces are not truly sparkling new worlds for us to experiment in, probably because when we land in the realm of binary code and screens we forget to leave our luggage behind. It is impossible to separate the virtual from the physical because the boundary we attempt to draw never truly exists. They are constantly bleeding into each other.