How not to network a nation

What Hacker News says

1. justincormackNov 2023
   The book How not to Network a Nation is good on this history
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2. decebalus1Jul 2020
   Fascinating stuff. If you're interested in this, you'll love 'How Not to Network a Nation' by Benjamin Peters [0].

   [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27310479-how-not-to-netw...

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3. fierycatnetAug 2026
   V. Gluskov designed OGAS to help with planned economy but for whatever reason it got denied funding. Decades later we're trying to make AI do just that on global scale.

   From WIKI:

   In 2016, a book dedicated to OGAS was published in the US, entitled How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, by Benjamin Peters, professor at University of Tulsa. Harvard University professor Jonathan Zittrain commented that the book "fills an important gap in the Internet's history, highlighting the ways in which generativity and openness have been essential to networked innovation".[15] A reviewer of the book at MIT wrote:[16] "Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists".

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4. gm3dmoJul 2022
   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS The book "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet" linked to in that article discusses many of these topics.
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5. kurrawongAug 2016
   A socio-technical history of the Internet that will definitely appeal to many HN readers: Ben Peters, author of "How Not to Network a Nation", discusses the history of Soviet cybernetics and computer networks on Sean's Russia Blog podcast episode "The Stillbirth of the Soviet Internet".

   In the interview, Peters states the reason the Internet appeared in Silicon Valley and not near Soviet Kiev was that "the capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists". This challenges conventional notions about the relationship between society and technology and contradicts the often-stated belief about laissez faire economic freedoms and capitalism being necessary for the high-tech booms.

   Peters also ponders what we might learn about current Internet state surveillance trends, such as the now-known NSA programs, by looking at the 1960's Soviet project called OGAS ("obshche-gosudarstvennaia avtomatizirovannaia sistema"). Its full title in English unashamedly gives away its intentions: "All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR".

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6. mrweaselAug 2016
   A little off topic perhaps, but the book, "How Not to Network a Nation", was a huge disappointment to me. It seems like the first third of the book is an attempt to convince the reader that "cybernetics" is actually a better word than "networking". It's extremely boring and don't seem relevant.

   It seems like the author either didn't have access to technical information, or opted to skip implementation details. That's really a shame, because I think that's the part that most of the potential readers would be interested in.

   In the end I skipped to the last chapter of the book, which is the only part that's sort of interesting. Maybe I'm just disappointed because I expected the content to something different, based on the title and abstract.

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