An Unrelated RAND Study: ARPANET and Nuclear Mythographies
2024-11-26 26.11. / 12–2 pm / C40.530 / Talk with Daniel Nemenyi (Leuphana University Lüneburg) For those that would like to join online, there will be a Zoom option available. If interested, please contact Inga Luchs at inga.luchs@leuphana.de
In the histories of the internet written in the late 1990s, not least those of the Internet Society itself, a consensus emerged that the early internet's relation to the Cold War was at most one of an parasitical relation to US military funding bodies. The oft-encountered suggestion that the internet was invented to ensure America's capacity for nuclear retaliation should it suffer a devastating attack on its communication infrastructure, was the stuff of myth not history. More than just consecrating certain people and institutions to have been the 'true' inventors of the internet, this historiography established a narrative that despite the early-internet's funding by ARPA, it was born for civil ends and the universal good. That any other interests that may weigh on the internet today constitute a fall from an original grace. It also establishes that the internet represents a topological concept of internet implicit in JCR Licklider's better known memoranda.
Using archival material, this presentation will problematise this mythography. Specifically it will assess the justification and significance of the exorcism of the RAND Corporation's Paul Baran from the early internet's history, and his concept of a secure packet switching network fit for military use. Doing so it shall problematise contemporary narratives of the internet's downfall and the conventional topological concept of what constitutes the internet.
Bio:
Daniel Nemenyi is a Gastwissenschaftler on the Disruptive Condition research project at Leuphana Universität, formerly having been a 2023-2024 LIAS Fellow. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy with a thesis entitled, What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the Society of Control (2019).
Contact: Ina Dubberke (ina.dubberke@leuphana.de).