Netizenship/Origins

This chapter revises Internet 50th Anniversary/Brief History of the Anon Subculture. The matter that is dealt with by that article but is not covered in this chapter pretty much summarizes the 2ch Chronicle and the 4chan Chronicle.
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.--Abraham Lincoln

Where we're to think we're from (Conventional Narrative)

Forget everything you've learned from here. Put out of your mind everything you've discovered about the history of the Internet. Suspend your disbelief, and especially your ridicule, as you may need to excise a considerable bit of your real-life history knowledge and basic experience with people to truly digest this account. (Remember to store it somewhere you can get back to at the end, though; this paragraph is but a Rhetorical Device and is not to be taken literally.) Welcome to the corporate world of the Conventional Narrative, where justifying our rule is everything!

Our story begins in 1969, where some dudes working for the US Military invented something called ARPANET. Two decades later (nothing having happened in the meantime), Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet, which has a relationship with the World Wide Web we can't quite explain and isn't really important for users like you, anyway. When we created Windows 95, that gave people like you access to this beautiful, magical thing! We even invented MSN just so you could talk to ordinary people like you!

But bad people took advantage of all these wonderful gifts. They don't like the reasonable regulations we put on your use of the things we own. That's because the bad people want to hurt you and the regulations are there to protect you from them. So after all the work we put in, the "dot-com bubble" burst and we couldn't benefit you any longer. That was so sad because our entire purpose is to serve you!

Well we bode our time for a bit, until we came up with a wonderful new invention called the smartphone! So you could use our Internet anytime and anyplace you wanted! Better yet, we would have access to all sorts of cool information about you so we would always know what you need and want and do what we could to meet those needs and wants! But the bad people were jealous. They were jealous because we were coming up with even newer ways to serve you, and we didn't care about such old rubbish things as "free speech" or "privacy"! Now that's not fair!

The bad people were evil! And the worst of them came from 4chan and were called "Anonymous"! They attacked everything good and everyone who we were happy for because they were good! But, not to worry, we destroyed them! And we made even newer, shinier, and better goodies like Facebook and Twitter, which use fancy things called "algorithms" to predict what you want so you'll always see something you like! We want you to play with us every day and every night! Because we love you and Anonymous hates you!

Now the bad people are around again. They fight everybody who is good. And you know we treat good people well just like they deserve. So please, don't listen to them mumble about "liberty". They just want to harm you! We need to control radicalization and hate speech. Never mind the dirty rags they call "rights". That's just words written by some old farts on some old piece of paper and it won't get in the way of us stopping the bad people from harming you! So you just have to agree to these terms of use which say we can kick you off for any reason. Now, you know that would never affect you. It's for the bad people. Pinky-swear? Promise? Deal?

Inadequacies of this narrative

end laugh track

Okay, admit it. You laughed at least once, didn't you? The only difference between this and innumerable news articles on the same subject is this explicitly lays out what the beneficiaries of this narrative want you to feel after you're done reading, whereas the news articles simply try to nudge your brain into feeling the way they want. With the former approach, the intended effect on the reader can be drawn out into the open where it can be easily exploded.

You won't be laughing, though, once you learn that there are people who believe this myth. And why blame them for it? It's clear - you are good, but there are bad guys, thankfully there's a good guy protecting you. You don't have to do much - just do something easy for your protector and the bad guys will go. And, like all good stories, you've got a destiny and everything standing between you and it will be vanquished by your protector.

Why is this a problem? Well, every opinion needs an argument, consisting of reasoning and evidence. You can have all the reasoning in the world, but if the evidence is based on this narrative, it won't support the argument. Our mission - freedom of expression, privacy, preservation of history, and assurance that the last three things will continue permanently - quite simply cannot be sustained if it is preceded by evidence drawn by this narrative.

Periodization of Internet history

Historical analysis is easy compared to the gathering and reporting of historical facts. The difficult thing is getting others to adopt your analysis of history. Nevertheless here is my attempt at periodization of Internet history:

The 50-year history of the internet can be divided into four eras, each of which slightly exceeds a decade. A revolutionary period lasting about 5 years, give or take a year, ends one period and starts the next. They are:

1. Prehistory. This period includes everything up to 1981, the invention of the Hayes Smartmodem. It includes the technical and spiritual precursors of the Internet, as well as ARPANET itself, for back then it was solely a tool. There was no social or recreational use of ARPANET whatsoever. The social revolution began in 1980 with the launching of USENET, and ended in 1984 with the Hayes Smartmodem becoming the universal modem, thereby allowing BBSes to operate, beginning the:
2. Pioneer Age. This period lasted from 1981 to 1993, Eternal September. It featured the genesis of the Internet identity and culture. The Internet entered this age as...nothing. It left this age with its own inhabitants, with their own aspirations, communities, and interests. The popular revolution began in 1990 with the creation of the World Wide Web, and ended in 1995 with the US government's opening of NSFnet, making the Internet fair game for all. This began the
3. Community Age. This period lasted from 1993 to 2007, the invention of the first smartphone. Most people's memories of the Internet will only reach back to this age. This age marked the beginning of many Internet-specific forms of media and conversation such as forums and blogs. The convenience revolution began in 2006, with the opening of Facebook to the public, and ended in 2009, with its availability on smartphones, marking the
4. Corporate Age. The current age. The chief feature of this age is the proliferation of mobile phones. A few large technology companies dominated the Internet, marginalizing ideas and communities that first emerged in the Pioneer and Community Ages.

Prehistory

Precursors of the Internet

To truly begin painting the background for an Internet history one could conceivably start with the invention of writing, if not speech. But we shall constrain our preliminary investigations to the information revolution that preceded ours, namely, printing. The first societies to achieve majority literacy were probably in the early modern era. With the new art, what had previously to be laboriously copied by a scribe could be mass-produced by a printing press. This allowed for the success of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was not the first attempt to split from the Catholic Church. But Luther's was more successful because Lutheran ideas could be spread through printed books, unlike those of previous schisms.

Not to be outdone, the Catholics responded with the Counter-Reformation. After German peasants attempted to organize a Radical Reformation, the German princes, both Lutheran and Catholic, realized they had let the genie out of the bottle, and rushed to tightly regulate printing through an early precursor of copyright. With the Peace of Augsburg, and especially the Peace of Westphalia, the Lutherans themselves became the state church in many north German states not to mention Scandinavia. The first modern information revolution had ended with the victory of the powers that be.

The first widespread "telecommunications" were the telegraph, the telephone, and the radiotelegraph. Earlier systems of signalling using colored flags and such traveled, of course, at the speed of light, but were constrained by physical limitations at the sender, at the receiver, and between the two. These systems put the "tele" in "telecommunications" and allowed communication over long distances. It is not correct to say the companies won the fight to control them. This implies there even was one. There was none, not even the opportunity for one.

The same story unfolded largely in relation to radio and television. Except in the United States, where corporations dominated, governments operated broadcasting systems. The large capital investments needed made it impractical, if not impossible, for private individuals to run a radio or TV station in any way.

After World War II came telex, a service which connected teleprinters around the world. Teleprinters had existed long before the war, of course, and their purpose was to allow text to be sent faster over telegraph lines by automatically sending encoded text instead of relying on a human telegraph operator to manually tap out dots and dashes. A "teletype" device would type out the encoded text it received onto a mounted piece of paper - like a typewriter being controlled by the sender of the message. In turn, the receiver would type on their own typewriter, but the letters would be sent through the telegraph lines and appear on that of the sender. Hook this up to telephone instead of telegraph lines, and you've got yourself a modem.

Brevity was absolutely necessary with the telex, just as it had been with the telegraph. Just as telegrams were billed by the character, space was at a premium on telexes as well. So it is not inconceivable that some chat abbreviations could have diffused from telex writers to the general population, and carried by some of its members to the Internet. But, at this point, it is probably a fruitless endeavor to attempt to prove or disprove this bald assertion, and we therefore will not pursue it.

Technical precedents

Computers used to be big, expensive, and slow. Hopefully you knew this, if not now you do.

Modems

When I said "hook this up to telephone instead of telegraph lines", I was speaking figuratively. For people in the late 1800s were not stupid and even less inclined to spending money when they could save it, and if telephone and telegraph lines were compatible, they would not have laid out both. The truth is, of course, they are not. With a telegraph line, either it is transmitting a signal, or it is not. By contrast, a telephone line has to transmit a current with modulating (changing) amplitude and frequency to electrically represent the human voice and other sounds. Hence, although you may think the latter is more advanced than the former, and be right, the former is "digital" because it's either on or off and the latter is "analog" because it can be in states other than 100% power and 0% power.

But because telephone lines are cheaper than leasing telegraph lines and because of the aforementioned thrift of our forefathers, it had to be done anyway. As to what they were used for, read on to find out!

Time-sharing

"Multitask" is one of those words that have...always been there, right? If not, it's one counselors and elementary school teachers love, so it must have been invented by one of them, right? Wrong.

It's a computing term (what did you expect?). It means the ability to have multiple programs running at once. If you're reading this and also working on a paper or listening to music on the same computer, that's what you're doing. The first computer to have this feature was the IBM System/360 mainframe in 1965. Back then computers were used for, well, calculations, of the sort you wouldn't be able to do with a slide rule or an adding machine, especially complex equations. One person wouldn't always have two or more calculations to do at the same time. So time-sharing was developed to distribute the cost of using a mainframe among multiple users all of whom enjoyed its advantages.

With time-sharing, each user would have a computer terminal with a CRT screen that displayed in only one color, green, and a keyboard. Operating a terminal superficially resembled working at the computer itself; in fact, many people thought their terminals were computers, when in fact they were just the input and output mechanisms for ones. Users would type things on their terminals; this would be transmitted via the modem through telephone lines to the room filled with the processors of the mainframe, and the output would in turn display on the CRT screen.

Computers were not connected to each other at this stage; that would have to wait for an advance in transmission technology.

Different methods of switching

How exactly a message gets sent from A to B is important for all telecommunications networks.

The system used by the plain, old telephone service (POTS; yes, this is literally the abbreviation they use) is called circuit switching. In the earliest days of the telephone, you'd pick up the phone, say "Hello Central, please give me number <four-digit number>," and a human telephone operator at the telephone exchange would manually connect the jack where your line ended with that where your recipient's one ended and you would talk on a line just for the two of you.

By the time we're talking about, though, most systems used rotary dials. You've probably seen one in old movies and such, but here's how to use one. You pick the handset up, and you stick your finger in the hole that corresponds to the digit you want to dial, and rotate the dial until your finger hits the metal guard, called the finger stop. You then pull your finger out and the dial returns to its original position. While it's doing so, it opens and, about 50 milliseconds thereafter, closes the contacts along the way which send out pulses to the exchanges. There are different systems for different countries, but since our story mostly happens in North America, we'll use the North American system, which incidentally is the easiest to understand. One pulse represents the number 1, two pulses represent 2, etc. The telephone exchange will mechanically connect you to whoever you're calling based on the pulses. Repeat for every digit of your number (7 for local calls; 10 for long-distance). If you made a mistake, too bad; hang up and try again!

Even then, they were being slowly replaced by dual-tone multi-frequency dialing, how your landline and mobile phone work today. Instead of rotary dialing, you press buttons on your telephone. Each button plays a superposition of a high-frequency sine wave and a low-frequency sine wave. (You can hear the tones when you press a button on a landline or your mobile phone will simulate the tones for you when you press its keypad to call.) There's four high-freq and four low-freq sine waves, and so there are sixteen possible tones; ten of them are the 10 digits of our decimal number system, and the other 6 are *, #, A, B, C, and D respectively. (You don't find the last four on most keypads nowadays.)

You may wonder how all this technical information is related. Well, it will be needed when we get to phreaks, so for now, hold it in. But the important thing is, through these innovations, the essential principle of circuit switching did not change. And circuit switching was not sufficient for the new technology that was struggling to burst out of the womb of computer science.

An improved method was called message switching. Circuit switching was wasteful, because it established a connection directly between two devices. And with a computer network, you didn't need to communicate with the same computer all the time. So this new system was devised. Each message would contain the body of the message, and a header indicating the address to which it was to be passed. Every message would be sent to an intermediate node closer to its destination than was its origin. The intermediate node would store it until a path to get the message closer to its destination opened up, at which point it would forward it to a closer node, which would do the same until the message reached its destination.

From there on, it was not a big jump to conceive of packet switching, the quite literal fundamental principle of the modern Internet. Packet switching pretty much follows the same theory as message switching, except messages are split into smaller packets which are transmitted separately.

Laying the groundwork

All the ingredients were there. All that was needed was an idea and the whole thing would get started.

JCR Licklider

He's the first person in this whole history to have a whole (sub-sub)chapter to himself. The reasons he is given such a focus will become apparent as you read on. In the 1960s, computers were generally regarded as instruments of government control, the devices that allowed governments to monitor their citizenry. More than anyone else, he made it possible to envision a parallel universe where the computer was an instrument which empowered the common people and tend to the common good of humankind. Both views of the computer are right, of course, in their own way, depending on what we do. But he must be credited with even making the latter vision possible.

Looking through his papers, it's not hard to get a feeling that its author is a man whose role in the history of the Internet has been criminally underappreciated. He predicts some things that have come true. For example, "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable." He prophesies some things that have not yet come true. For example, "[a]n OLIVER is, or will be when there is one, an 'on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder,' a complex of computer programs and data that resides within the network and acts on behalf of its principal, taking care of many minor matters that do not require his personal attention and buffering him from the demanding world. 'You are describing a secretary,' you will say. But no! Secretaries will have OLIVERS." And he dreams of things which may never come true, such as the concluding sentence of the paper: "Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging."

Like all epic heroes, he died, Moses like, on the threshold of the Promised Land to which he had led the world.

Fundamental idea of the Internet

If you've ever tried to transfer anything from a Windows PC to a Mac, you know how much of a pain in the butt working with different operating systems is. At least, in this case, the developers of Windows and macOS know that their users will have to work with other computers of the same or a different operating system, and have put some thought into making their operating systems compatible with each other. Imagine what it must have been like for the Internet's first pioneers, who had to link together computers whose creators never envisioned would ever need to compatible with any other ones!

A university, company, or government agency would have one big mainframe computer all whose users would "time-share" on it. (See above if you don't remember.) If you needed to transfer a program from one computer to another, you'd physically take the punched cards or the magnetic tape and feed it into the other computer. Woe betide you if you tripped carrying a stack of punched cards and had to sort them back into the right order!

This sounds simple, but like almost everything in these days, it was not. Unless you got lucky, the computer you were transferring to didn't read the same language as the one you were transferring from. In fact, it had only been a few years since a standard system for representing letters (ASCII) had been agreed upon! So, most people would have just given up and coded the program all over again in the language of the target computer. It would have been a herculean, and most probably futile, effort, to make all these giant, slow mainframes compatible with each other.

Fortunately, an ingenious idea ensured that'd never need to happen.

The idea was simple: create a standard protocol for just the network. Have smaller packet-switching computers connected to each big computer in the network, that will convert things sent from the computer to this protocol. Each node will be responsible for the conversions from their own computer to the protocol.

The packet-switching computers were called Interface Message Processors or IMPs; the abbreviation was pronounced like the word "imp". They are the ancestors of today's routers, but you'd never guess that just by looking at them. They were the size of a refrigerator and taller than those who operated them. But without them we wouldn't have modems, and therefore not routers.

The IMPs were built by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, or BBN for short. They were a private company but they were referred to as "Cambridge's third university" - after Harvard and MIT, which gives you an idea of how well they were regarded. Four were built.