The world in the network the interop trade show, carl malamuds internet 1996 exposition, and the politics of internet commercialization

It does so by examining the social practices and processes of the semi-annual "Interop" computer-networking trade show, and one affiliated "exposition." Beginning in 1987, and for nearly

The World in the Network:

The Interop Trade Show, Carl Malamud's Internet 1996 Exposition,

and the Politics of Internet Commercialization MICHVE

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE

B.A Anthropology

SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES

AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

June 2010

0 2010 Colleen Elizabeth Kaman All rights reserved.

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute

publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any

medium now known or hereafter crerad

17 May 2010Sia nature redacted

y:

Certified b

Accepted b

I

William Charles Uricchio

Professor of Comparative Media StudiesDirector, Comparative Media Studies

,-7 . Thesis Sufervisor

H'ny'Jenkins

III-Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, a Vd Cinematic Arts

Department of Communication, University of Southern California

Thesis Committee Member

Nick MontfortAssociate Professor of Digital MediaProgram in Writing and Humanistic StudiesSig

Thank you.

Slight cropping of page numbers at the bottom page margin.

One starting point of this study was a curiosity about the meteoric transformation of theInternet from an experimental research network into a global communications medium

Figure 1: "International Connectivity" in 1991 This map shows what

to electronic networks, including the Internet However, this map

quality of that connectivity

countries had permanent linksdoes not indicate the level or

Figure 2: "International Connectivity" in 1997 This map shows how dramatically permanent

international links to the Internet had expanded in just six years

Copyright 1991 and 1997 Lawrence H Landweber and the Internet Society.

Unlimited permission to copy or use is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

The World in the Network: The Interop Trade Show, Carl Malamud's Internet

1996 Exposition, and the Politics of Internet Commercialization

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the Internet emerged as a commercially viable global communicationsmedium This study considers the role that representatives of the military-industrial

research world played in the physical expansion of the Internet It does so by examining the

social practices and processes of the semi-annual "Interop" computer-networking trade

show, and one affiliated "exposition." Beginning in 1987, and for nearly a decade, Interop

operated as a forum that brought representatives from industry and the research and usercommunities into strategic alliance to tackle the practicalities of expanding the Internet'score networking protocols and assembling diverse networks into a global Internet The

period examined culminates with the Internet 1996 World Exposition Through that event,

technologist Carl Malamud drew on the rhetoric of turn-of-the-century world's fairs todemonstrate the value of faster networks but also argued for a conception of "the commons"

that could ideally be served by the rapidly privatizing Internet In the absence of a

comprehensive history of the commercial expansion of the Internet, analysis of thesepractices provides a pioneering analytic narrative of a crucial strand of this development.This thesis moves between levels of analysis, specifically between the Interop network, the

Internet 1996 Exposition event, and the perspective of Malamud himself By highlighting

these hitherto neglected practices, this examination deepens our understanding of theforces that proved critical to the Internet's commercial success

Thesis Supervisor: William Charles Uricchio

Title: Professor of Comparative Media Studies

2

I'd like to extend my deepest thanks to the many individuals who helped me along the way

CMS mentors William Uricchio, Henry Jenkins, and Nick Montfort provided intellectual

guidance and encouragement that greatly influenced this project as well as many otherendeavors

I am grateful to Glorianna Davenport, Lucy Suchman, Michael Fischer, Fred Turner, and

Stefan Helmreich, who helped along the way, and to Lisa Williams, whose sketches helped

me understand protocol layers and whose stories kept my spirits high

I would like to extend my thanks to numerous interviewees who generously gave of theirtime to speak to me about their experiences as well as the technical aspects of their work in

person, by phone, and over email These include Karl Auerbach, David Brandin, David

Clark, Dave Crocker, Tom Keating, Ole Jacobsen, Dan Lynch, Tom Keating, Carl Malamud,Howard Rheingold, Andy Lippman, Marty Lucas, and Marshall Rose Without theirpatience and assistance, this work would never have been possible

A special thanks goes to my entire family, who have always supported my various interests

and never failed to offer words of encouragement I am particularly grateful to Bridget andAnthony Barron who so generously offered their home for my numerous trips to the SanFrancisco Bay area Finally, thanks to Abdulrazzaq al-Saiedi, who kept me company andlistened to me ramble on about my thesis at all hours of the day and night

List of Figures

Prologue

Figure 1: "International Connectivity" in 1991

Figure 2: "International Connectivity" in 1997

Chapter One

Figure 3: Advertisement for the October 1, 1982 Launch of EPCOT Theme Park

Figure 4: The AT&T Network Operations Center scene, Spaceship Earth, 1984

Figure 5: AT&T's International Fiber Optic Cables, circa 1998

Introduction: The Commercial Sphere as a Site of Social Change

In 1994, Kevin Kelly information technology pundit and founding executive editor of

that the marketplace in the emerging networked society was the site of social change The

text, which was organized in a format similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, outlined deep

interconnections between the biological, the technological, and the social (Turner 2006,

200) Describing living systems in computer science terms, Kelly suggested that organisms

advanced by "hacking," or working-around, challenges that, over time, naturally led to

ubiquity and complexity Likewise, Kelly asserted that technology itself had evolved suchthat computer networks had transformed the corporation into a living organism,

"distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive." Such a process, Kelly believed,signaled the emergence of a global information system that naturally guided an economywithin which men and machines would be effortlessly integrated In other words, Kellydownplayed the physical aspects of the global economy, including the computer-networkinghardware and production lines as well as the physical labor and relationships embedded inthese objects

As Fred Turner has demonstrated, Kelly's argument synthesized influences that hadfirst formed around the Whole Earth network The emerging society he depicted integrated1960s-era countercultural ideals with corporate interests and the collaborative practicesand rhetoric of interconnectedness associated with the military-industrial research world

(Turner 2006, 199-206) According to Kelly, the emerging post-industrial economy was a

powerful demonstration of the deep integration of computers and computer networks insociety, revealing "a common soul between the organic communities and theirmanufactured counterparts of robots, corporations, economies, and computer circuits"

(Kelly 1994, 3) The world itself had become an information system, and with it, new forms,

such as the bee swarm (and with it, the "hive mind") and complex adaptive systems,emerged to replace the hierarchical logic of the previous era For corporate executivestrying to understand the technological and economic changes they faced, Kelly encouragedthem to "obey the logic of the net" if they hoped to succeed in the emerging economy, a

1 The WELL, or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, was founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry

Brilliant Many of the WELL's core members were previously associated with Brand's Whole Earth

Catalog, and like the catalog, quickly became a highly influential computer conferencing system and

virtual community

7

system in which the intangibles of the network would supersede the world of physical

objects" (1998, 160).

This countercultural worldview depended heavily on the cybernetic theories ofinformation management that drew connections between system social theories and objectsand systems; yet in the process of translation, the counterculture downplayed and evenobscured the physical aspects of the technologies built in the Cold War-era research labs.Still, the physicality of computer networks represents a critical aspect of the Internet andcontinues to be a site of conflict Those conflicts range from "Denial of Service" attacks, toedicts of national and international courts limiting the reach of information online2 and thecontrol mechanisms of corporate providers and national governments, to lagging broadbandinfrastructures that cause "information traffic jams" and fragment network connectivity.The scope and increasing severity of these conflicts surrounding the physical network haveled Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain (2008) to predict that the Internet isincreasingly likely to become a "closed" technology as aspects of the technological system

that encourage experimentation and exchange are replaced by consumer "appliances" that

offer little in the way of participation

What is it about the physical aspects of computer networks that have bedeviledidealistic visions of the networked society? External forces, such as commercial influences

or national interests, are not simply corrupting an exceptional technology and the idealsociety it promised, as many countercultural figures supposed Part of the answer lies withthe nature of the technology itself When the Internet and then the World Wide Web3 first

2 LICRA v Yahoo (2000) was the first successful international challenge to the Internet community's

argument that the Internet represents an exceptional technology that should be governed by

different means than by national laws, as are traditional communications technologies The case

examined whether it was illegal for a Yahoo! online auction site to sell Nazi artifacts in France

3 The World Wide Web, sometimes confused with the Internet by people who first encountered them

both at the same time (in the mid-1990s or later), was a system for making information widely

available that was conceived and pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen working at the

CERN research institute in Switzerland It consisted of 1) "web sites" (electronically accessible

"places") for storing text and images with a protocol for assigning each one a name (formed ofstandard alphabetic and typewriter keyboard characters)-termed a URL (for Universal ResourceLocator); 2) "hypertext," text with certain words appearing on-screen as underlined or differentlycolored and serving as "links" that when "clicked on" with a computer mouse, bring to the screen an

associated web site; and 3) a programming language, originally HTML ("hypertext mark-up language"), for giving each web site a standard, widely interpretable format for its information By

providing a network of physically connected computers on which web sites can reside, to be accessed

at any time, the Internet served as the communication infrastructure for the World Wide Web

Conversely, the World Wide Web, by offering ever richer information content, undergirded and

emerged into public view in the mid-1990s, enthusiasm for networked exchange anddistributed communities all but obscured the tangle of cables and "cyberspace-warping

wires" (Stephenson 1996) as well as the significance of networked computing's history Yet, the Internet had a history It is a distributed computer network created by linking together

previously existing smaller computer networks, of which the best known was the ARPAnet(the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) network for rapid communication amongDepartment of Defense-linked researchers) In other words, it has its roots in the military-research culture that emerged in the wake of World War II and the Cold War The networkwas developed to be independent of centralized control, flexible, and readily adaptable, suchthat the technology could withstand nuclear attack At its core, the Internet operatesaccording to a suite of protocols known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/InternetProtocol) that specifies how to structure, transmit, and receive information between

the modern Internet is based

Another physical aspect of distributed network technologies is their tangibleinfrastructure Since this technology often bootstraps onto existing telecommunicationswires and cables, the computer network becomes a point of conflict within existinginfrastructures, laws, and norms In the early 1990s, for example, large-scale commercialproviders (like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy)5 fought the organizational logic

of the Internet that allowed for peer-to-peer transmission of data packets regardless ofsource or terminus In contrast, they envisioned closed communities that offered easy-to-

motivated the improvement of the capabilities of the Internet far beyond its original function of relaying messages Each one, an enthusiast might say, sustained and nourished the other, in a

symbiotic co-evolution powered by human sociability and curiosity.

problem of connecting dissimilar "packet-switched" networks and earlier radio relay technologies By

used to describe an entire family of protocols known as the TCP/IP protocol suite For example, it specifies protocols for performing tasks such as file transfer (FTP or File Transfer Protocol),

electronic mail (SMTP or Simple Mail Transport Protocol), and remote access to a computer (telnet) The TCP/IP protocols are standards for formatting, addressing, fragmenting, delivering,

reassembling and checking transmitted information Any computer network, even a physically

isolated one having no connection to the Internet can use TCP/IP protocols However, many consider the public Internet synonymous with these protocols because it is a global TCP/IP network The Internet is, among other things, an enormous TCP/IP network.

5

For a period account of Prodigy, see Howard Rheingold's chapter, "Disinformocracy" in The Virtual

http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/.

9

use services for their customers that included managing online access, exchanges on public

forums and even e-mail By 1996, explicit regulations tempered the utopian assertions that

networked computing would (or could) challenge the legitimacy of institutions and

traditional governance structures A law passed by Congress in 1996 marked the first

legislative attempt to regulate speech on the Internet That same year, the WorldIntellectual Property Organization (WIPO) drafted the so-called "Internet Treaties" thatwould go on to play a major role in copyright disputes.6 In fact, some of the most powerful

legislation that govern the Net (what Internet legal scholar Lawrence Lessig (1999) calls

"West Coast Code" and "East Coast Code," respectively) - largely function as invisibleinfrastructures that appear as "natural" characteristics of the system and thus don't revealthe profound relationship between discourses around a technology and its physicalattributes

Continuing debates over the shape and limits of the Internet reveal deeper truthsabout modern communications infrastructures and their relationship to previouscommunications systems These debates also point to larger shifts between the relativepower of the State and private enterprise They reveal that these technologies did not

replace Industrial-era infrastructures so much as facilitate their reorganization, and then

build upon them a new distributed management system that carried with it its own set ofoperational logics These struggles suggest questions about the role that engineers andorganizations affiliated with the military-industrial research world might have had in thephysical expansion and commercialization of the Internet: How did they understand theirroles as architects of this emerging global infrastructure? How were they able to leveragethe cybernetic discourses and interdisciplinary, collaborative practices into strategicalliances and practical strategies for computer network expansion that worked to ensurethe global success of the Internet? Given what we already know about the military-industrial research world's contributions to the commercialization of the Internet, what dotheir efforts to construct the physical networks reveal about the organizational strategiesthat ensured the Internet's successful commercial transition?

6 These copyright laws include the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and

Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) In the U.S., these treaties were implemented with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 The DMCA outlaws technologies intended to

circumvent efforts to control access to copyrighted works

One network of individuals who focused on the practicalities of Internet expansion,this research suggests, were affiliated with the largely overlooked "Interop" computer-

shows company's associated publications and gatherings, were important for the physicalimplementation of the Internet's core networking protocols that made interoperabilitybetween distinct networks possible Interop founder Dan Lynch assembled a core group ofSilicon Valley network engineers, vendors, and entrepreneurs associated with the military-

industrial research world Beginning in 1987, and for nearly a decade, these engineers

engaged with a network of people and interests from the commercial and user communities,addressing the considerable technical and organizational challenges of creatinginteroperable hardware These network developers included engineers and entrepreneurssuch as Vint Cerf, David Clark, Karl Auerbach, Paul Mockapetris, Dave Crocker, and CarlMalamud, as well as representatives from Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Apple, and

Digital Equipment Corporation (hereafter, DEC) Out of these encounters emerged shared

understandings of the viability of the Internet community's TCP/IP core networkingprotocol, as well as how the interconnection of distinct networks might be accomplished.The Interop trade show became a sensation, becoming one of the few places that actuallydemonstrated functioning inter-networks: distinct networks that connected to one anotherbut also linked outward to the Internet, as well as products that functioned across thenetworks themselves Interop became one of the most respected and popular trade events in

the industry; by the early 1990s, the gathering had expanded from the U.S (largely

California) to international locations such as Sydney, Paris, and Tokyo

Lynch brought these different communities together in a series that since have been

described by scholars as (Turner 2006) "network forums." Comprising a series of

conferences, events, affiliated publications, and an informal membership of scientists andengineers, these network forums functioned as critical sites for the "translation" ofcomputer internetworking technologies that allowed the Internet to expand across physicalboundaries into new realms Successful exchanges between industry, academe, andgovernment extended the legitimacy of the Internet community's practices and processes

7 There are numerous explanations for the Interop trade show's relative obscurity today, chief amongthem the choices of the network developers themselves They have deeply influenced the popularhistory of the Internet, yet their accounts largely downplay the role of the Interop trade show and itsnetwork, perhaps because the commercial orientation and focus on the practicalities of

implementation didn't easily map to more strictly defined technical standards-setting efforts

11

more deeply into the realm of the massive economic and technological forces reorganizingthe global economy These actors shared an understanding of themselves as architects ofthe emerging networked society, freely integrating economic, technical, and social frames asthey envisioned a global system of interconnected computer networks crisscrossing theglobe, and what the society that supported it might be like With each "translation" acrossanother domain, the vision of the Internet attracted more allies The emerging project grew

to include previously established overseas university research relationships withinternational representatives like Joichi Ito (Japan) and Jun Murai (Japan) Together,they would not only create the first prototypes of the global Internet but also establish thecollaborative processes that proved critical for the mutual accommodation and adaptationrequired for the Internet's commercial success

The narrative reach of this study starts in the early 1990s, as the Internet's place asthe global standard seemed increasingly fixed and the Interop's show network was in highproduction It focuses on the Interop network's role in the standardization of the Internet,

and more specifically two projects affiliated with Interop, Carl Malamud's 1993 survey of the emerging global Internet and his Internet 1996 World Exposition The second project,

ambitious in scale and concept, constituted an "exposition" that drew on the rhetoric ofturn-of-the-century world's fairs - first, to demonstrate the feasibility of global inter-networking, but also to argue for a conception of "the commons" that could ideally be

served by the Internet, which was rapidly becoming privatized The 1996 exposition

launched just as the most influential engineers and entrepreneurs in the Interop networkbegan to drift away Although computer networks were still an "unfinished" technology -

they "broke down" with some frequency, were as yet unable to accommodate real-time audio

affiliates of the Interop network had helped to create the social and technical conditionsnecessary to fulfill a vision of the Internet as a global, commercially viable communicationsmedium

By recounting the history of the Interop network,8 this study considers how thetrade show network functioned alongside more explicit (and more researched) technical

8 Undoubtedly, Interop warrants a standalone analysis that might explore the trade show's role intechnical advances as well as its role in the eventual success of Internet standards in the TCP/IPversus OSI standards war Here, I focused on the network engineers and have not been able to

gather material on corporate projects from company archives

standardization efforts, and underscores the instrumental role that the military-industrialresearch world's culture had in the commercial expansion of the Internet Alongside theimperatives of developing and implementing computing technologies, this research culturefacilitated the development of deeply entrepreneurial and collaborative practices Thesepractices coalesced in the 1980s during the computer industry's debates over "opensystems" and the creation of particular information infrastructures At the core of thesedebates were battles over different versions of standardization, which were largely fought

between the Internet protocols and those stipulated by a traditional governmental

standards process For network engineers, as the catchphrase "rough consensus and

running code" (coined by David Clark in 1992) implies, these struggles became framed in terms of the "social and moral order of society" (Kelty 2008, 8).

Interop founder Dan Lynch was a former ARPAnet researcher and a member andindustry representative at the Internet Architecture Board (or IAB - it was originally calledthe Internet Activities Board), the core architectural leadership organization that guidedthe development of the Internet As these primarily research-oriented practices became

increasingly difficult to implement in the complex commercial and highly litigious

standards environment, Lynch and the other engineers affiliated with Interop reoriented

Internet standards-setting by applying these practices to the practical imperative of assembling functional links between networks By doing so, they fashioned a hybrid model

of network standardization that exposed the broader commercial community to the Internetengineers' manner of condensing the "process of standardization and validation into

implementation" (Kelty 2008, 173) and offered useful knowledge related to the practicalities

of linking networks Such instruction also "routinized" Internet practices: that is, Internetleadership imposed a kind of "system" for linking computer networks and developingproducts that would run on such networks that allowed them to achieve better control of

implementation and expansion processes (Yates 1993, xvii) In these ways, Interop

functioned as a critical intervention for an information technology industry in flux Thenetworking industry, as well as many companies, wanted to use the standards theythemselves had chosen, which were often proprietary, rather than accept the interoperablestandards that made interconnected networks and even open markets possible (DeNardis

2009, 38; Kelty 2008, 144) Convincing them to set aside their commercial rivalries and

build functioning, testable products that were also compatible with one another (as opposed

13

to creating competing, proprietary systems to "lock" customers into specific products and

associated support resources) was both a political and a technical feat Yet Interop's

approach proved persuasive because, in order to participate in the trade show, Interoprequired vendors otherwise uninterested in the success of Internet per se to connect theirproducts to the show network Lynch and the other researchers leveraged theirconsiderable influence to encourage commercial networking companies to work together toaddress substantial inter-networking challenges in an experimental research setting Forvendors the hybrid setting afforded them the privacy to take risks and make mistakes awayfrom the competitive pressures of the marketplace

A Note on Methodologies

This thesis builds on analytical frameworks that examine how people and things can be

translated into forces that shape society and technologies (Pinch and Bijker 1987; Turner

2006; Abbate 1999; Callon 1987), and focuses in particular on the social processes through

which a diverse set of interests can be recruited and brought into alignment By doing so,

this analysis shifts away from an emphasis on protocols and standards as purely technicaland instead considers the expansion of technologies across domains as a complex process of

"translation" that is as much social and organizational as technical Drawing on JanetAbbate's definitive history of the Internet, this study demonstrates how the "kinds of socialdynamics that we associate with the use of networks also came into play during their

creation" (1999, 4) In particular, this study traces the practices and processes, which

include demonstrations and trade show exhibits, that reveal the visions that bound various

actors working to scale technologies (Nye 1994; Flichy 2007), and also the organizational

achievements that helped coordinate new methods of management that established

processes of coordination between different actors (Callon 1986; Thrift 2005; Yates 1993).

Most significantly, this examination builds on Turner's concept, mentioned earlier,

of "network forums": texts and experiences where a varied set of players meet tocollaborate, exchange ideas and legitimacy, integrate new networks, and envisionthemselves as a part of a single (albeit distributed) community assembling a global,seamless, and fundamentally liberalizing information economy and accompanyinginformation society Turner's work traces what he terms the Whole Earth network, anintertwining of the military-industrial research world's culture and the American

counterculture that helped shape the public understanding of computers and computernetworks as tools for personal expression and the creation of new social frontiers To do so,

particular Star and Griesemer's "boundary-object" concept, referring to objects thatcirculate between several different social worlds but are independently meaningful for eachworld - as well as Peter Galison's "trading zone," sites where representatives from variousdisciplines come together to exchange ideas and collaborate, establishing "contactlanguages" that facilitate shared understandings and collaboration For example, Turner

argued that core members of the Whole Earth network came together to help create Wired

magazine, a prototype of the utopian society that networked computing would make

possible MIT's Nicholas Negroponte used Wired as a site to claim that the Internet was

about to "flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize

people" (1995) Turner has also argued that, by the late 1980s, the Whole Earth network

functioned as a vehicle that reinvigorated the influence of the cooperative practices andsystems rhetoric of the military-industrial research world's culture in the corporate sphere

In turn, this worked to more deeply integrate countercultural utopian visions with themassive economic and technological forces already reorganizing the industrial world

Expanding on Turner's framework, this study attends to the guiding visions thatmobilized multiple communities, persuading them to undertake the work of assembling thephysical networks necessary to transform the Internet into a global commercialinfrastructure As Wiebe Bijker has noted, a technology's successful expansion is as muchdependent on these shared visions as on any qualities or affordances that technologies

might themselves possess (1997, 15) Leo Marx (1964) has termed this a "technological

sublime," referring to the notion that from new technologies would flow social and moralprogress that would liberate the human spirit and improve society Others have written

about this imaginary; David Nye (1996) on the first transcontinental railroad, Carolyn Marvin (1990) on electricity, Susan Douglas (1986) on wireless and the invention of American broadcasting, and more recently Patrice Flichy (2007) on the early Internet and Chris Kelty (2008) on the practices of the distributed collaborative creation and distribution

of software source code.9 Kelty has suggested that proponents of these practices "mix up

operating systems and social systems" and are driven by "imaginations of order that are

9 These practices are generally referred to as Free Software, or the Free Software Movement

15

simultaneously moral and technical" (2008, 43, 9).10 Here, Charles Taylor's work on social

imaginaries becomes useful as it recalls "the ways in which people imagine their socialexistence, how they fit together with others [It] draws on our whole world, that is, our

sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others, and in history" (2004, 23, 28).

This research also examines the mobilization of network engineers as

"system-builders" (Hughes 1983),11 that is, they thought about their work constructing physical

networks not only in technical but also in social and economic terms They focused inparticular on "project management" styles that emerged from the highly collaborative andinterdisciplinary work style and entrepreneurial sensibility of the military-industrial

research world Through a variety of efforts, engineers enacted these visions by imposing

protocols, the internal logic of networks, and the expansion of those protocols throughflexible partnerships and a system of coordination Understanding this "routinization of

innovation" (Thrift 2005, 7) has been greatly helped by JoAnne Yates' (1989) work on the

ways in which the first data processing machines led to the development of communicationsystems She has suggested that normalization occurred as management conveyedprocedures and rules to coordinate processes at lower levels and as communication flowedupward in the form of data and analyses As Alexander Galloway (2004) has shown in hisresearch on protocols, the Internet's community's codification of these technical standards(which comprise the core functionality of the Internet) through the Request for Comments(RFC) process suggests the importance of also examining the operational logics at the core

of complex technological systems like networks In essence, the complex interactionsrequired to build such systems reveal the ways in which standards fully realized operate associally constituted values at every level

Roadmap

The Internet is a complicated tangle of technologies and practices that are under constantconstruction and defy easy analysis Its history is no less complex This study focuses on

what might be learned about the Internet's commercial transition by considering how the

10 Kelty has described this "social imaginary" as one that is shared between the individuals that

work to create and build Free Software and "defines a particular relationship between technology,

organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental) and the Internet" (2008, 12).

11 Similarly, these engineers have been termed heterogeneous engineers (Law, 1987)

network engineers and entrepreneurs, members of the Interop network, and many affiliates

of the military-industrial research world, focused on the implementation and expansion ofthe TCP/IP core networking protocols To do so, they forged strategic alliances withcommercial interests This study extracts one analytic narrative of the Internet'semergence as a global and commercially viable communications medium Sinceinfrastructural network development operates across multiple registers (Law and Callon

1992; Jackson et al 2007; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987), this examination links the

"micro stories" of individual actors to the teams of Interop network developers as well as tolarger social processes around the emergence of the Internet Carl Malamud provides athrough-line He was deeply involved in the construction of computer networks in the 1980sand 1990s and was an articulate promoter of the visions that helped drive networkconstruction, and also of a vision of the emerging networked society Even so, this analysis

is not intended to be a biographical account of Malamud, or to recapitulate the entirety ofMalamud's projects in the first half of the 1990s Many studies of the networked computinginfrastructures, and of the Internet, emphasize the innovations of Internet practices and

processes Since, in most cases, the individuals I interviewed are still actively working in the information technology industry (see Appendix A), and belong to groups that actively

maintain their own versions of events, some will doubtless disagree with each other, and

with the history that I have constructed.

Chapter One explores mobilizing visions as a critical element in the standardization

of the Internet Standardization is often primarily thought of as a technical, and thereforesocially neutral, process of change This chapter examines the more purely social and even

"commercial" aspects of achieving wider agreement on standards, focusing in particular onidealized visions around emerging technologies and on the challenges of enacting thosevisions in the midst of larger technological and economic reorganization in the globaleconomy To do so, this chapter explores the Epcot theme park's "Spaceship Earth," an

exhibit that presents a corporate futurism inspired by cybernetic visions of

interconnectedness It traces one aspect of the Internet's transition from a research

network into a commercially viable global infrastructure, driven by frames of connectivity

and modifiability

Chapter Two turns to the practices by which network engineers affiliated with the

Interop trade show assumed the role of "system builders" of the physical networks, and

17

thus architects of the emerging networked society and economy Mobilized by visions of

global connectivity and their imagined intellectual connection to the makers of earliermodern technological systems, they helped drive the consensus and collaboration requiredfor the construction and assembly of a global Internet

Chapter Three focuses on the Interop trade show itself, focusing in particular on thesemi-annual event's network, one of the most complex in the world, that functioned as ademonstration of the emerging global Internet This construction not only helped mobilizeengineers and vendors around Internet standards and practices but also functioned as ahybrid research and development site that coordinated collaboration and partnershipsbetween representatives of a range of interests, many of whom were also fierce competitors

Assembled by a core group of researchers with strong ties to the military-industrial

research world, Interop attended to the practicalities of implementing the Internet's coretechnical standards while also negotiating powerful commercial needs as well as the largereconomic and technological forces sweeping the industrialized world

In Chapter Four, the analysis shifts to an affiliate of Interop, Carl Malamud, and

the yearlong Internet 1996 Exposition that he conceived and produced with ample support

from the Interop Company itself This analysis opens with Malamud's growing interest inthe ways in which better connectivity and faster networks might lead to new services and

uses, and ultimately new communities of users and consumers A showman-intellectual in

the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, Malamud developed his exhibition in the spirit of a

"world's fair," a metaphor that reflected his preoccupation with the development of earliertechnological systems, especially railroad transportation, that promoted a particular visionregarding the latent tension between privately managed communications systems, publicaccess, and the "politics of the commons." This project was realized through a series ofoffline and online events, a website (http://park.org) aggregating numerous pieces of onlinematerial, and a coffee-table book chronicling the exposition from inception through thelaunch and conclusion of the event Paradoxically, although many people do not considerthe exposition to have been a success, commercially or otherwise, it can still be looked to as

an alternative vision of how the networks that comprised the Internet might havecontinued to develop and as a critical record of the models and discourses that existedaround Internet infrastructures

Together, these chapters attend to an aspect of Internet expansion andcommercialization that has been largely overlooked in historical accounts to date They takeseriously the challenges of translating utopian visions into commercially viable technologiesand infrastructures, and in the process, interrogate a widespread assertion that theInternet was largely developed in the academic world that existed apart from largereconomic forces The Internet represents significant technical achievements This studyfocuses on the degree to which technological systems must be consciously created in order

to be successful at scale At the heart of this research, then, lay questions about theinfluence of the military-industrial research world and how particular technical visions andpracticalities shaped the Internet as it transformed into a commercially viable globalinfrastructure How did the computer engineers and entrepreneurs building computernetworks employ organizational strategies and alliances that helped ensure the Internet'splace in the global landscape? How did discourses around testability and connectivityreflect their efforts to shape the emerging information landscape? How might the Interoptrade show have functioned as an important site of negotiation for developers who worked

to shape these critical discourses, and, in the process, ensure the commercial success of theInternet? This research suggests that the global success of the Internet should be attributed

to the reemergence of the collaborative work styles and systems rhetoric of the industrial research culture into the commercial sphere

military-19

Chapter One: As Our Thirst for Knowledge Grew, the World Began to Shrink: Epcot's Spaceship Earth as a Networked Utopia

Numerous theories of technological change have portrayed the form and function of

technologies as determined by the cultural values, interests, and interpretations of social groups (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Bijker 1995) Among the concepts introduced is

that of "interpretive flexibility," a process suggesting there is no one, or best, way toconstruct a technology Rather, a technology's design and use is flexible This viewemphasizes how different social groups examining the same technology will not onlyidentify distinct technological problems, but also present distinct solutions to theseperceived challenges In "Inventing the Internet," Janet Abbate suggests that the "TCP/IPprotocols, gateways, and uniform address scheme were designed to create a coherent

system while making minimal demands on the participating networks" (1999, 219) These

"minimal demands" gave the Internet, as a locally successful technological system, theflexibility to survive commercial and political pressures as the system expanded among newusers and into new geographic areas Yet Abbate also suggests that the very success of theTCP/IP protocols refutes the general assumption that technical standards are socially

neutral, establishing that "standards can be politics by other means" (1999, 179).12 In

particular, computer networks and inter-networks were designed according to varioustechnical specifications that revealed distinct operational logics The Internet's corenetworking protocols reflected the values of the social groups that emerged from Cold War

military research culture, an environment that fostered practices that were not only highly

collaborative but also interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial in spirit

These values continue to infuse the Internet today In fact, that networked

computing in the early 1990s often did not operate "as advertised" is an irony that reveals

the deeply social nature of protocols.13 Only as networked computing became tied up withutopian visions of empowered individualism and a meritocratic marketplace, did it becometechnically possible to redeem its promises Abbate's analysis of this process largely focuses

on technical objects, yet she might also have usefully examined the more purely social and

12 Abbate's work is a definitive account of the history of network protocols through individual

developers, U.S Department of Defense mandates, and international standards conflicts.

13 For a sense of the "state" of the Internet in the early 1990s, see the Computer Chronicles episode

on "The Internet." Computer Chronicles was hosted by Steve Cheifet and produced in San Mateo,

California by KCSM-TV http://www.archive.org/details/episode 1134

even "commercial" aspects of achieving wider agreement on standards These aspectsinclude, as we shall see, encounters at trade shows and exhibitions.

Paul Edwards contends that constructing and maintaining standards is a complexprocess interwoven with social practices:

Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no

matter where, what, or who applies them Most standards also involve

discipline on the part of human participants, who are notoriously apt to

misunderstand and resist As a result, maintaining adherence to a standard

involves ongoing adjustments to people, practices, and machines (2004,

827-828)

Thus, even the process of getting the core structures of the Internet to "work" elicited the

"ongoing adjustments" needed to create a coherent, effective research network TrevorPinch and Wiebe Bijker point out that the social environment shapes the technicalcharacteristics of technologies, and emphasize the critical role that social groups play in

defining and addressing problems during a technology's development A technology can be

considered stabilized once consensus emerges and "the social groups involved in designing

and using technology decide that a problem is solved" (Pinch and Bijker 1987, 12) Since a

technology is not a fixed object per se but rather emerges amidst interactions withnumerous social groups, this process of "closure and stabilization" occurs numerous times(and even continuously) as a technology is developed, expanded, and improved (Pinch and

Bijker 1987, 17-50) This characteristic suggests that although technological change may

appear to follow a linear path (even if appearing as a disruptive force), the process is in factmore nuanced The tools of standardization, namely the technologies, organizationalsolutions, and/or inter-connection protocols, also function as "gateways" that make itpossible to transfer technical as well as social, and cultural practices across otherwiseincompatible domains:

Standardization in its various guises (formal and informal, top-down and

bottom-up) is perhaps the leading example of a gateway technology on the

social/organizational side It is at this point of heterogeneous connection

among systems that the eventual power, scope, and world-building quality of

infrastructure begins to take shape (Jackson et al 2007)

This quality recalls another aspect of standardization: the degree to which it favors thepolitics and practices of a specific group of actors to the exclusion of another In otherwords, a technology has certain attributes because inventors design a technology to expresstheir personal visions and desires Understanding what is required to standardize a

21

technology becomes a critical part of tracing the technical, organizational, and politicalnegotiations and adaptations that were necessary for the Internet to become more widelysuccessful Many of the same qualities likely helped the Internet as it scaled beyond alocally constructed system and expanded into other domains, linking with other networks toemerge as a commercially managed global information infrastructure Deployingtechnologies required the mobilization of network engineers and technologists, such asthose affiliated with Interop, who shared a vision and collaborative methods of makingmeaning.

In the standardization and expansion of communications networks, technologieshave physical qualities that are central to how they operate locally or as part of largerinfrastructures Modern infrastructures are technical systems-say, transportation,telecommunications, or energy-that rationally engineer the world and order it in a waythat facilitates the circulation of goods and ideas They are also conceptual, cultural devices

that are powerful as a mode of regulating societies by "publicly performing the relations between the individual and the state" (Larkin 2009, 245) while at the same forging

architectures of the sublime that join the technological with our imaginations and notions

of progress The infrastructure of computer networks appears to function in anothermanner altogether, in a kind of chaos, an unpredictable structure without a center.Although the distributed and flattened organizational structures of computer networks

appear to resist control, they are in fact governed by a particular logic that functions as a

form of management These mechanisms, which are deeply imbedded in the free market,deregulation, and enterprise, drive partnerships with the promise of "openness" and

"connectivity" that occurs through the global integration of the networked informationtechnologies

To begin to explore the complex questions around technological change and theparticular visions that drove the physical construction of the Internet, it is worthwhile to

set the stage by visiting one part of a vast realm that is "commercially viable" while being

wholly a product of an alternative utopia "embodied" in the animated image of a talking

mouse Under his patronage, we are offered a view of a high-tech utopia dominated by

benign corporate sponsorship and the guarantee of technological progress

Spaceship Earth

Walt Disney's Spaceship Earth exhibit, located in Orlando, Florida's Epcot theme park,

presents an "Animatronic" tour of the history and future of communications The Disneyexhibit exists as a series of dioramas - a cinematic recycling of the past cast as iconicmoments of technological achievements - strung together as a narrative of progress that

draws visitors into a future that is already upon them Spaceship Earth and enterprise

computer-networking trade shows share little with one another in terms of operational

logics and visions, yet by way of this ambivalently defined relationship between

computational technologies, corporate interests, and individual agency, the two operate incritical tension with one another Each powerfully evokes the idealism and attention toward

social and moral progress that has infused technological innovations in the U.S since at

least the 1 9th century (Marx 1964)

The term "mobilizing utopias" will be used here to refer to the implementation ofidealistic models into experimental projects or prototypes, and even the practicalities ofbringing a technology to scale Epcot realized Walt Disney's vision of an "Experimental

Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT), a near-future world inspired by a faith in

the ability of cybernetic information systems and corporations to solve social ills andadvance society more effectively than individuals and democracies The iconic SpaceshipEarth sphere figuratively anchors the park It was also Epcot's guiding metaphor,14 a vision

equally inspired by popular science fiction and the cybernetic information systems of the

military-industrial research world Promotional material created for the park's launch in

1982 consisted of an illustration of a half-shrouded geodesic "planet" encircled by what

appeared to be a monorail track or the contrails of a rocket The image's intention is clear:

it presents a "usable future" that has moved beyond the polarizing Cold War andtraditional economics of scarcity to reveal the planet as a globally integrated system

connecting all living things to a future of ever more efficient technologies (Deese 2009, 1-2; Turner 2006, 56-58) (see Figure 1) The layout of the park itself is divided between "Future

World" and "World Showcase" pavilions, presenting spectacular displays of technological

innovations and cultural identities In a style that first became popular with the 1939 New

14 "Spaceship Earth" is most often associated with inventor R Buckminster Fuller, who published

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969; see also 1996 works by Barbara Ward and Kenneth

Boulding Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury wrote the original narrative for the Spaceship Earthexhibit

York World's Fair's "World of Tomorrow," Disney's simulated landscapes market the idea of

progress itself, brought by corporations whose "expertise would create a harmonious world" (Nye 1994, 213) Corporate sponsors support each exhibit, entertaining visitors with

glimpses of technology-infused prototypes of future worlds packaged for middlebrow tastes

(Bukatman 1991, 56; Nye 1994, 199-224).

Figure 1: Advertisement for the October 1, 1982 launch of EPCOT theme park A Buckminster

Fuller-inspired Spaceship Earth dominates this illustration, underscoring the cybernetic influence

on Walt Disney's futuristic visions of the ideal society

"Mobilizing utopias" as a concept also implies the complex and often contradictoryprocesses of transforming emergent technologies into everyday tools that support and evenshape modern lives The Spaceship Earth exhibit, like the Interop network, (re)negotiatesthe transition between the first stage of exploration, a period of innovation and glory, andthe next, when emerging technologies become familiar, practical, and even invisible The

term also suggests a future that is technologically intense, and inevitable - even already

upon us (Kelty 2008; Bukatman 1991, 59) In New Rules for the New Economy, one of the

most widely read business manuals of the 1990s, the executive editor of Wired magazine,

Kevin Kelly, celebrated a new order in which "the world of the soft-the world ofintangibles, of media, of software, and of services-will soon command the world of thehard-the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil." While Kelly expressed afaith in technological progress, he also took as a given that there would be losers in the

passage to an inevitable future in which "those who play by the new rules will prosper,

while those who ignore them will not We have seen only the beginnings of the anxiety, loss,

excitement, and gains that many people will experience as our world shifts to a new highly technical planetary economy" (Kelly 1998, 2).

In late 2007, Spaceship Earth underwent the first substantial renovations in more

the exhibit received new signage, an updated narrative including interactive video screensinstalled in the exhibit trams, and new scenes depicting computers and computer networks,

as well as a redesigned post-show exhibit space As it always has, the exhibit consciously

draws on metaphors and iconic moments propagated in popular society and repackaged by

a corporate entity The first half of the exhibit has generally remained the same since

Spaceship Earth first launched in 1982 Visitors board motorized trams fashioned as

"time-machine spaceships" in a fog- and lightning-filled "dawn of recorded time" before ascending

on a spiral track past dioramas depicting historical technological milestones as well asidealized near-future scenarios The first dioramas depict early man scrawling mammothfigures on cave walls; later ones, Egyptians creating papyrus scrolls and Greeksestablishing schools and the study of mathematics The ride skips forward to the invention

of the printing press and the subsequent flourishing of culture during the Renaissance,then to the Age of Invention and with it the telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures,and television Finally, it moves on to the era of space travel, satellites, and computingtechnologies

The Spaceship Earth ride takes visitors past a family sitting around a television setthat is showing Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the moon The enduring collective

' Martin's Videos blog Spaceship Earth 2007 -Ultimate Tribute http://www.martinsvids.net/

?tag=spaceship-earth

25

memory of this technological achievement dwells on American's global supremacy, andglosses over the Cold War politics and pervasive threat that infused this period To explorethe unknown geographies of space, the narrator explains, "Society had to invent a newlanguage" of computation, represented in the next tableau as the banks of blinking lightsand speeding magnetic tapes of a room-sized computer There is little sign of thegovernment-sponsored research that drove the invention and development of computingtechnologies; instead, the Spaceship Earth narrative places these achievements within

market logics "In 1977, young people with the passion for putting computers in everyone's

machines As computer networks have grown increasingly ubiquitous, the 2007 version of

Spaceship Earth suggests, humankind has become seamlessly integrated into the network,part of a truly global community Riders are driven onward into the future, through agreen-hued data stream tunnel, before arriving in outer space, suggesting the frontier of

the future Framed by an image of planet Earth on the horizon, visitors design their own futures by answering a series of multiple-choice questions on interactive LCD touch screens

mounted on the trams When the ride ends, visitors can enter "Project Tomorrow: Inventingthe Wonders of the Future," the post-show exhibit Here, interactive games showcaseSiemens technologies, including medical devices, transportation, and energy management

systems A "Spaceship Earth Online" website has also been added.

-both Epcot and the exhibit itself are nearly three decades old and -both offer visions oftechnological innovation that have always tilted toward the mundane - except that in thedays before the refurbished exhibit opened, one of the new scenes in Spaceship Earth

sparked interest On December 2, 2007, the technology blog Boing Boing reposted a rumor

that the renovations included a diorama of the California garage where marketing whizSteve Jobs and computer programming genius Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Inc in thelate 1970s, though showing only Jobs.17

As the rumor spread through the blogosphere, what seemed to arouse the curiosity

of a number of readers was not why this scene had been chosen but rather which history it

16Apple was incorporated in 1977.

17 Doctorow, Cory 2007 Steve Jobs (and not Woz) to come to Epcot's Spaceship Earth?? Boing Boing.

December 2 http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/02/steve-jobs-and-not-w.html

emphasized Many disapproved of Disney's apparent decision to include Jobs, the current

CEO of Apple and Disney's largest shareholder, and exclude Wozniak Some speculated

that Jobs had used his considerable influence to garner a top spot in Disney'scommunications exhibit One Boing Boing reader observed, "Jobs? Better then [sic]

[Microsoft's Bill] Gates, I suppose." Another commented, "Jobs never influenced anything

until later on when the first Mac was being made That's when the first of his visionsstarted to be seen (closed system, no expansion, etc.) Jobs influences products today and

does so with a near 100% record of success, but to suggest that he was the primary brain

behind the personal computer revolution (i.e., the garage intro of the Apple computer) is ahuge untruth and deceptive."19 When Disney reopened the exhibit a few days later, it hadindeed recreated many aspects of an early press photograph of the Apple co-founders,

except it was Jobs, not Wozniak, who was excluded from the scene A mechanical likeness of

Wozniak sat in a garage-turned-office in front of what resembled a prototype of the Apple IIcomputer, a machine that was evidently meant to stand in for a number of Apple's early

advancements that helped turn the start-up into a successful business Boing Boing posted

an update, yet few readers commented on Jobs' absence from the Disney exhibit.20

Jobs and his Apple engineers translated utopian ideals into computer design by replacing highly technical keyboard commands with a radically new graphical interface

that included easy-to-use point-and-click systems.21 Jobs' marketing genius helped producethe iconic "1984" advertisement that introduced the Macintosh personal computer,

18 The significance of the Wozniak and Jobs' different perspectives has been the subject of ongoing

discussions between technologists about the nature (and future) of the Internet, and generally

framed as a tension between technologies that encourage experimentation and exchange, and onesthat offer little in the way of participation but whose closed functionality makes them more

accessible - and marketable - to a wider public For example, in The Future of the Internet-And

How to Stop It (2008), Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain predicted that the Internet is

increasingly likely to become a "closed" technology, and used the "iPhone" as an example of what hedescribed as Jobs' determined effort to replace the personal computer with consumer "appliances

tethered to a network of control." (3) The release of the "iPad" in 2010 further inflamed tensions

between Jobs and the "Internet community."

19 Doctorow, Cory 2007 Steve Jobs (and not Woz) to come to Epcot's Spaceship Earth?? Boing Boing.

December 2 http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/02/steve-iobs-and-not-w.html

The technical history of personal computing is also obscured, both in the exhibit and in the reader

comments on Boing Boing For example, Apple's first personal computer with a graphical user

interface (GUI) was the "Lisa," not the "Mac" as one reader suggested.

20 Doctorow, Cory 2007 Animatronic Steve Wozniak comes to Epcot Center ride, animatronic Steve

Jobs nowhere in evidence Boing Boing, December 9

http://boingboing.net/2007/12/09/animatronic-steve-wo.html

21 This built on the work of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center

27

portraying the device's arrival as an unnamed heroine defeating the dehumanizingbureaucracy of the corporation Author Steven Levy later described the release of theMacintosh computer as one that moved digital worlds out of "the arcane realm of dataprocessing and science fiction After Macintosh, it began to weave itself into the fabric ofeveryday life Macintosh provided us with our first glimpse of where we fit into the future

[It] brought just plain people, uninterested in the particulars of technology, into thetrenches of the information age" (1994) Levy focused on the social and technical visionsinscribed into the computer itself, although this vision of an empowering and intenselypersonal technology was soon extended to include computer networks

Yet Jobs' rumored inclusion in the Spaceship Earth exhibit stirred controversy, inall likelihood, because technophiles actively and consciously maintain a utopian visionabout how the Internet came to have its present order and how it should be ordered in the

future (Kelty 2008; Streeter 1993, Abbate 1999, Turner 2006) Chris Kelty suggests that

these protective behaviors relate to ideas around openness and collaboration on theInternet,2 2

and that individuals work together to defend the network's "legitimacy andindependence not only from state-based forms of power and control, but from corporate,

commercial, and non-governmental power as well" (2008, 9) These social practices around

openness have also flourished outside of technical communities, informing shifts in

intellectual property, music, films, databases, and education One of the most powerfuldemonstrations of this ethos is "Creative Commons," an alternative method of issuingcopyright licenses that allows for sharing information Yet the assumptions implicit in

collaborate, share, create, and distribute knowledge-in a way that reorients power andknowledge-do not represent the only, or earlier, articulations of "openness."

As a number of scholars have noted, when the Internet first emerged in the 1980sand early 1990s, the most prominent mechanisms and logics emerging around networked

computing were intensely focused on openness as achieved through free market promotion,

deregulation, and privatization (Kelty 2008; Streeter 2003; Turner 2006) The rapid

integration of computing and telecommunication technologies into the international

22 Kelty defines Free Software as a "set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of

software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventionaluse of copyright law" that also "exemplifies a considerable reorientation of knowledge and power

with respect to the creation, dissemination, and authorization of knowledge" (2008, 2-3) Free

Software is also known as Open Source Software as well as FOSS or FLOSS.

economy had created a "new economy" that brought with it more flexible corporateorganizations and a greater emphasis on entrepreneurs and "knowledge workers" (Turner

2006; Thrift 2005) As we shall see in later chapters, these changes promised to transform

Through the likeness of Steve Wozniak, the 2007 version of Spaceship Earth

reframes these shifting technical visions to suit its more corporate one The exhibit

highlights Wozniak in 1977, the year that he co-founded Apple Wozniak is romanticized

among technophiles for hacking massive Cold War-era research computers and integratingminiaturized versions of them into everyday life The Animatronic version of the scruffyprogrammer reflects the hippie/hacker ethos of the 1970s Yet other aspects of the scenesuggest that it actually shares more in common with the techno-utopian politics andmarket populism that emerged alongside the Internet and then the World Wide Web in the1990s The exhibit designers accomplish this through an assemblage of iconic, andhistorically incongruous cultural markers The garage has become a well-known trope forSilicon Valley-based entrepreneurialism, championing countless individuals and corporateenterprises that helped to integrate computing and telecommunications technologies into

prominently displayed among the cans of paint, greasy pizza boxes, and hardwarecomponents in the garage The magazine, Fred Turner suggests, portrayed the Internet as

"a prototype of a newly decentralized, nonhierarchical society" and depicted computingindustry and telecommunications executives as the engineers constructing the social

infrastructures of this new world (Turner 2006, 208) In the end, Wired and the entire

garage scene become a chapter in the larger narrative of Spaceship Earth, which celebratesindividualized access to global networks

Conveniently (for the present study), the last substantial renovation of SpaceshipEarth was completed in 1994, in the midst of the same massive economic and technologicalrestructuring that the current version of the exhibit now references.23 Perhaps the twometaphors that best connote the massive shifts that occurred in this era are the terms

23 "EuroTraveler" blog, Remembering Walter Cronkite at Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney World.http://www.zimbio.com/Epcot+Center/articles/cJhlIF75ziA/Remembering+Walter+Cronkite+Spaceship+Earth

29

"information and control system" and "information superhighway." From the launch of the

Spaceship Earth exhibit in 1982 until 1994, the final scene of the exhibit depicted a control

room with a global map monitoring networks worldwide (see Figure 2) For much of thistime, signage within the Spaceship Earth scene identified this control room as the "AT&TNetwork Operations Center." AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications provider,sponsored Spaceship Earth for twenty years (1984-2004) The exhibit was designed to

reflect Cold War visions of the planet as a "closed world" (Edwards 1996), an information system bounded by the militaristic metaphor of global information and control This scene

deployed a version of this metaphor, tweaked to represent AT&T's vision of a single

corporate communications and computing empire (Warf 1998, 257).

Figure 2: The AT&T Network Operations Center scene from Spaceship Earth, circa 1984 This sceneillustrates the corporate giant's explicit reliance on Cold War-era framing that computingtechnologies promised global technological oversight

Likewise, the metaphor of the "information highway"24 represented the tensionsbetween mobilizing utopias, corporate interests, and government control First, there was

envisioned a high-speed, high-capacity fiber-optic network provided by established

telecommunications institutions to offer interactive television, movies-on-demand, and

telechat (Flichy 2007, 18-20) By 1991 the strategy to improve the country's

communications infrastructure was envisioned as a high-capacity, fiber-optic network thatwould drive future economic competitiveness as well as provide information and services to

citizens During Bill Clinton and Al Gore's 1992 election campaign and victory, the

"information highway" became a concrete program: the state would finance and build anational fiber-optic network while the private sector (under public sector supervision)

would provide the services (Markoff 1993) As it had in the construction of the interstate

highway system in the 1950s, the government would be a key player in the emergingknowledge economy, providing traditional investment in public infrastructures, as well as

additionally providing high-tech research programs that previously had been funded by military funding (Flichy 2007, 21) Within a year, however, the Clinton administration had

abandoned its grand technological vision; and the "information highway" becamesynonymous with the telecommunications liberalization of the 1980s According to Flichy,the vision had become reductive: "democracy = information highways = deregulation Inthis sequence of translations, the first relates to an idea of technical determinism (a newtechnique promotes democracy), and the second to a political choice (deregulation promotes

the construction of that technique)" (2007, 31) John Malone, chairman of one of the first

cable operators, suggested in a 1994 Business Week interview that the government should

be "mainly a cheerleader," that is, relegated to the sidelines.25

At the International Telecommunications Union Conference (ITU) in Buenos Aires

in 1994, Vice President Al Gore touted the Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII), a private

and international network that promised to bring all the communities in the worldtogether "We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmitsmessages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village onevery continent."26 In his presentation, Gore invoked Nathaniel Hawthorne's vision of

24 This metaphor, incidentally, has been around since the 1970s For one example, see Ralph Lee

Smith's article, "The Wired Nation", published in The Nation, May 18,1970.

25 Malone, John 1994 Business Week, January 24: 89, quoted in Flichy, 2007, 30-31.

26 Nash, Nathaniel C 1994 Gore Sees World Data Privatizing New York Times, March 22.

21

nearly one-hundred-fifty years earlier, that a global telegraph system would transform theworld into a vast "brain" whose "nerves" would link all human knowledge Gore continued,

"to accomplish this purpose, legislators, regulators, and businesspeople must do this: buildand operate information superhighways on which all people can travel."

In the wake of telecommunications deregulation in the 1980s, AT&T followed asimilar plan, expanding aggressively overseas, ventured outside of the traditionaltelephony market, and focused increasingly on global computing hardware andtelecommunications equipment like fiber-optic cable, switching and routing systems, and

computer chips (Warf 1998, 258) (see Figure 3).

In response to substantial social and economic shifts, as well as AT&T's focus onother markets, the simulated landscapes of Spaceship Earth now offered a boundarylessvision of the world Spaceship Earth had adapted to shifting popular visions of networkedcomputing AT&T no longer dominated the exhibit, although their corporate interestsremained central to the depiction of ubiquitous networked computing In the 1994renovation of the exhibit, the "Networked Operations Command" was replaced with severalnew scenes One featured a woman sitting in front of a monitor in a darkened office,revealing computers and computer networks as technologies that "integrate the individual

ever more closely into the corporation" (Shoshanna Zuboff 1988, quoted in Turner 2006, 2).

Another depicted an American boy communicating via video screens with a Japanese girl,their exchange linked via fiber-optic "highways" of light that leapt across cities and oceans

Gore, Al 1994 Global Information Infrastructure Speech Presentation at the International

Telecommunications Union, March 21 in Buenos Aires, Argentina

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-peole/99403/msgOO1 12.html

Figure 3: AT&T's International Fiber-Optic Cables, circa 1998 (existing or in progress) Compiled by

Barney Warf of Florida State University from data on AT&T website, http://www.att.com

Cultural theorist Scott Bukatman has suggested that Walt Disney World functions

as a kind of virtual reality that, behind user-friendly interfaces, conceals technologies of a

"fundamentally conservative and historically bound vision of 'the future"' (1991, 73) These

interfaces, Bukatman continues, are analogous to the structures of a computer system, fromthe rides and attractions, or files, to the pervasive transportation systems, or operatingsystems Bukatman's emphasis on the computational qualities of Epcot suggests thatSpaceship Earth can be further thought of as a content management system capable of, asthe exhibit website currently suggests, storing and organizing the history of "humanconnection and collaboration over 40,000 years."27 As such, the exhibit recasts disparatehistorical achievements within the modern technological era until finally humankind'svarious historical narratives function as nodes in a massive computer network Time,culture, and space collapse into a universal utopian present so that ancient Greeks, Islamicscholars, Western monks, and American scientists simultaneously work to advance globalcommunication systems, and, ultimately, networked computing The ride narration in the

2007 renovation suggests that Romans constructed a system of roads to move their armies

around, thus "creating the world's first World Wide Web"; ten years earlier the Romans'system of highways had been a metaphor for the "information superhighway."

27 Walt Disney World in Florida Spaceship Earth attract at Epcot http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/parks/epcot/attractions/spaceship-earth/

22

When the renovated Spaceship Earth exhibit opened in 2007 - "relaunched," in

changes to the exhibit constituted a substantial shift in Spaceship Earth's representation ofcomputers and computer networks "The old story of Spaceship Earth was the history ofcommunications The new story is each generation invents the future for the nextgeneration."28 In typical Disney fashion, Spaceship Earth presented this "new story" of

as humankind's forays into space and the public emergence of the Internet and the World

landscapes and future worlds were first built to replicate many aspects of the 1939 New York World's Fair (Bukatman 1991) Epcot's exhibits position technologies within a larger

narrative of historical progress such that the technology itself, as a consumer good andartifact of an ideal future, becomes "the last act in a scientific drama" (Nye 1994, 220) that

is an inevitable - and distinctively American29 - achievement As in previous versions ofthe exhibit (and indeed at world's fairs beginning in the 1930s), this narrative is a sanitizedone that approximates the anticipatory excitement of frontier exploration even as it lacksthe uncertainty and risk of invention Although Spaceship Earth's interactive screens inviteviewers to "invent the future" (as Zalk suggests), this effort actually casts visitors as

consumers that must be "cajoled into modernization" (Nye 1993, 221-222) This recalls Nye's description of corporations at the 1939 New York World's Fair that constructed a

technological sublime that "sought not to enlighten but to impress and pacify Thespontaneous crowd, which had been one important element of a sublime event, had beenturned into paying spectators, who were told in detail how to interpret the wonderspresented to them" (Nye 1994, 222) In other words, the users who have always activelyshaped the practices and processes of the Internet are nowhere to be found

For this study, Spaceship Earth's machine-aided futures are most interesting forhow they frame technological systems - the actors and the physical technologies themselves

28 Zalk, Bob 2007 Spaceship Earth Re Launches into the Future at Epcot Siemens AG promotional

material Orlando, Florida http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1144320/

spaceship earth re launches into the future at epcot/.

29 Based on my reading of David Nye, I suggest that the exhibit's reliance on sensory discontinuities

of the sublime as well as its reliance on technological achievements as "measures of cultural value"are distinctively American

constructions that networked computing would signal the arrival of an ideal societydisguises the exhibit's related assumptions about the profound relationship between theAmerican military-industrial research world, market economies (including deregulation,privatization, and open economies), and multinational corporate interests Thesestatements situate the rapid emergence of the Internet as a commercially viable globalsystem within histories of modern technological infrastructures that invariably lead to

dramatic social restructuring By drawing heavily on the vernacular elements of world's

fairs, Spaceship Earth underscores the importance of the symbolic dimensions anddiscourses (the metaphors, frames, narratives, and enactments) of emerging technologicalsystems

It is tempting to argue that the developers who helped transform the Internet into acommercially viable communications medium had little in common with Epcot From the

reorganizing knowledge and power (Kelty 2008) Yet, as we shall see, the network engineers assembling the global Internet were often mobilized by what Chris Kelty has

termed "openness through privatization." They understood themselves as architects of theemerging society and "new economy." This concept refers to the tension that existed in the1980s and 1990s between idealistic visions of a democratic free market and a concurrent

push toward "openness" and interoperability that was framed as "the freedom to buy access

to any aspect of a system without signing a contract, a nondisclosure agreement, or any

other legal document besides a check" (2008, 150-151) In other words, the Internet

developers in this era tended to have less interest in the freedom to copy and modify but

instead were driven by the practicalities of ensuring the commercial success of the Internet.

Chapter 2: Internet Explorers and Digital Worlds

Silicon Valley comprises sprawling suburbs dominated by corporate landscapes that

seamlessly fade into one another In the past four decades, this region has been best known

as a locus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and extraordinary economic growth Its successcan be attributed to the numerous forums that brought together individuals from differentcompanies and organizations, from the public and private sectors, and from academic andeducational institutions These encounters encouraged allies and competitors alike todiscuss common problems and consider solutions that often helped the interests ofnumerous independent firms These forums also encouraged individuals to form flexible,innovative partnerships serving a shared recognition of the need to assure the Internet'sglobal success This study explores a series of Silicon Valley-based forums affiliated with

the Interop trade show network, an enterprise with direct ties to the highly collaborative

and entrepreneurial Cold War-era military research world, and that network's role in thecommercialization of the Internet

Over the course of several months, beginning in April 2009, I visited the Silicon

Valley and San Francisco Bay area to conduct a series of interviews with individuals,almost all engineers, affiliated with the Interop trade show at the height of its influence In

our conversations, I focused in particular on the artifacts - trade show publications andresearch collaborations - that typified the Interop network at the height of its influence I

also focused on the particular visions that have mobilized programmers and engineers

The system builders involved in the conceptual and physical construction of theInternet devoted a lot of time to telling stories and writing about the impact that newtechnologies might have on society As with Disney's Spaceship Earth, these narrativeswere often a combination of fact and fiction that helped make sense of the present andorder the future in which the relationship between time, space, and progress would change.These stories also allowed individuals to legitimize their visions for the emerging utopian

society by making themselves into credible representatives of the communities that they

were helping to build Turner suggests that members of the Whole Earth network,

including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, did this by using their conversations to turn

"digital media into emblems of network members' own, shared ways of living, and evidence

of their individual credibility" (2006, 7) In her research on computer engineers, Janet

technical standards and documentation practices that had support within a large segment

of the computer science community (Abbate 1999, 178) Chris Kelty has described the kinds

of stories that computer programmers and engineers tell as "usable pasts" (Kelty 2008,

64-94) that reflect their ideas about the relationships between "operating systems and social

systems" (2008, 43) Kelty has argued that, for technical actors, these stories are an important process of "meaning-making" because they occupy a world "finely controlled by

corporate organizations, mass media, marketing departments, and lobbyists" even as they

"share a profound distrust of government regulation" (2008, 72) He writes about the

technical actors affiliated with Free Software, and the particular ways they havemaintained a space for the "critique and moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and

competition" (2008, 76).

In contrast, network developers in the early 1990s possessed a "double aspect." LikeKelty's "geeks," the network engineers affiliated with Interop often employed "usable pasts"that helped them understand their practices in relation to the technical and politicaleconomy of the early 1990s Yet these visions also focused primarily on the practicalities ofexpanding the Internet through the privatization of the physical networks (and later theestablishment of private services), integrating the Internet into the emerging networkedeconomy Like Disney's depiction of Wozniak alone in his office, shaping the future,network engineers held romantic notions of themselves as explorers crafting the prototype

of a future ideal society At the same time they worked as system-builders (Hughes 1983), adopting a "managerial ideology" (Flichy 2007, 6) as they operated across multiple

(technical, economic, political, and social) registers to assemble a global informationinfrastructure These resources included not only massive investments in labor and capitalbut also a diverse range of interests The assembly of diverse networks into a singularinfrastructure was a social and organizational feat as much as a technical one In their

struggle to "work out" their relationship to governance, the global capitalist economy, and

personal liberties, Interop's network engineers actively sought to place themselves inintellectual connection with the actors of previous technological systems They often focused

on stories about infrastructures and standardization, integrating their visions into largerquestions about governance and larger global economic flows

27

Exploring Global Connectivity

I met Carl Malamud in 2009.30 He was at the Tech Policy Summit, an event focused on

issues around regulation, spectrum policy, and America's lagging broadbandinfrastructures Malamud was in attendance to speak about the need for the greateraccessibility of information such as government data and public archives.31

Malamud has been an open access advocate for more than twenty years In that

time, he has taken on not only the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 32 but theSmithsonian Institution,33 the Government Printing Office (GPO), 3 4 and, most recently, the

U.S federal judiciary In early 2002, Malamud made unsuccessful bids to run the Internet

Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which handles the most crucial

functions of the Internet, pushing to run it as a public trust.35 For many years, Malamudwas also an author of technical resource manuals who also wrote for industry journals andInterop trade show publications, explaining complicated networking technologies to atechnical audience Malamud's projects have almost always been provocations - equal partspublic spectacle and demonstration - that highlight larger technical or social issues andthen offer "work-arounds" to address them These projects are prototypes that mobilizeactors to imagine themselves at the forefront of an emerging ideal society and offer tools to

manage that change (interview 2009; a list of all interviewees appears in Appendix A).

30 Malamud (born, 1959) had nearly completed a PhD in economics at Indiana University-where,

incidentally, he focused on the deregulation of AT&T-when he left to build computer networks in

the late-1980s The son of a Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory physicist, Malamud becameacquainted with the world of high-energy physics, mainframe computers and other computing

technologies, and international scientific research [Lausanne/CERNI at an early age

31 Malamud, Carl 2009 Tech's role in promoting greater government transparency and

accountability Appearance on panel at the Tech Policy Summit, May 11-13, in San Mateo, CA.

http://www.techpolicvcentral.com/media-vault/2009/06/2009-tech-policv-summit-podcas.php

32 In the early 1990s, Malamud took the SEC's corporate filings, which were public documents butdifficult to find, and made them freely accessible and searchable on the Internet When Malamud

later threatened to close the site, public demand forced the SEC to set up its own site.

33 In 2006, Smithsonian Business Ventures, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution,

sought to partner with Showtime to create "Smithsonian on Demand." Malamud protested and latertestified before the Senate on the matter The testimony is available here:

In the early 1990s, Malamud published a global survey of the emerging Internet,

Company had funded Malamud's travels, and his published account was distributed toattendees at the Interop93 conferences In his travelogue, Malamud provides an account ofthe various sites around the world that were gradually linking themselves to the globalInternet Casting himself as "one of the free-spirited aboriginal technologists on the new

frontier" (Fischer 1995, 271), Malamud recounted his travels around the world, crisscrossing the United States from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C to Chicago, Europe

from Prague to Geneva to Amsterdam, the Pacific from Honolulu to Tokyo to Hong Kong toKuala Lumpur, Singapore, Canberra, Seoul and various other cities In each of these places,Malamud discovered the heterogeneity of the actual hardware, wiring, design, andorganizations of various components of a global computer network infrastructure: fromCERN's global Internet hub; a Czech university's reverse-engineered network, made from

old IBM mainframes; and Torben Nielsen's local area network (LAN) made from salvaged

military aircraft material in Hawaii

Malamud's Technical Travelogue was emblematic, making manifest the global

connectivity that numerous network developers envisioned through the construction of afully-operational show network at the Interop trade show - and, likewise, the "correctness"

of their project, and their own role in the physical assembly of these far-reachingarchitectures Malamud celebrates their technical skills and showmanship He writes that

in the hours before the Interop9l event, a team of network engineers installed more than

thirty-five miles of cable-enough "to wire a 20-story high-tech skyscraper"-as well as fifty subnets, a microwave link, two different backbones, and a connection to the NSFNET 3 7 so

Interop-themed groups known as "Solutions Showcases" (Malamud 1993, 29-33) In the book's

foreword, Lynch celebrates these achievements, proclaiming that "this book demonstrates

36 Malamud's Technical Travelogue was also edited by Lynch, Ole Jacobsen, and Dave Brandin (vice

president of Programs at Interop) Malamud appeared as a speaker at Interop93 to discuss his book

37 In 1990, the U.S Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) transferred

to the National Science Foundation (NSF) control of the Internet backbone, which was subsequently known as the NSFNET The NSF was actively involved in the expansion and privatization of the network in this period In April 1995, NSF gave up control of the Internet Fred Turner has

referenced this transfer as a moment that facilitated "the interlinking of commercial, alternative,and government-sponsored networks and the mixing of for-profit and not-for-profit uses across the

system" (2008, 213).

38 These products included Frame Relay, SMDS, X.400, and SNMP.

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