From Gutenberg to Google

The History of Our Future

Tom Wheeler

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780815735335
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Network revolutions of the past have shaped the present and set the stage for the revolution we are experiencing today

In an era of seemingly instant change, it's easy to think that today's revolutions—in communications, business, and many areas of daily life—are unprecedented. Today's changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call "networks"—the physical links that bind any society together.

In this fascinating book, former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler brings to life the two great network revolutions of the past and uses them to help put in perspective the confusion, uncertainty, and even excitement most people face today. The first big network revolution was the invention of movable-type printing in the fifteenth century. This book, its millions of predecessors, and even such broad trends as the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the multiple scientific revolutions of the past 500 years would not have been possible without that one invention. The second revolution came with the invention of the telegraph early in the nineteenth century. Never before had people been able to communicate over long distances faster than a horse could travel. Along with the development of the world's first high-speed network—the railroad—the telegraph upended centuries of stability and literally redrew the map of the world.

Wheeler puts these past revolutions into the perspective of today, when rapid-fire changes in networking are upending the nature of work, personal privacy, education, the media, and nearly every other aspect of modern life. But he doesn't leave it there. Outlining "What's Next," he describes how artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, and the need for cybersecurity are laying the foundation for a third network revolution.

Part I

Perspective

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

—Rudyard Kipling

One

Connections Have Consequences

The marriage of computing and communications was a shotgun wedding. This time, however, the shotgun was a nuclear bomb.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States relied on the telephone network to deliver commands to its nuclear strike forces. This meant, however, that the launch of bombers and missiles was vulnerable. Because the telephone network was a series of centralized hubs at which messages were switched from one path to another, all an adversary had to do was take out a few of those hubs and the nation’s ability to launch a retaliatory attack would be impaired.

The U.S. government commissioned a California think tank, the RAND Corporation, to develop a solution for this soft spot. RAND’s answer was a new network architecture that eliminated the vulnerable central switching points. The new network resembled a fishnet. If one knot on the fishnet was eliminated, there were multiple other routes the message could follow to reach its final destination.

The new network typology: centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks.

Source: Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” Memorandum RM-3420-PR (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, August 1964). Reproduced by permission.

The visionary behind this idea was a Polish immigrant named Paul Baran. In his 1964 paper, Baran proposed digitizing a voice phone call and then breaking that digital information into small packets of data. Instead of being sent over an end-to-end telephone circuit, the packets would be dispatched into a network of interconnected computers that would read the packet’s address and then pass it on to the next computer in the direction of its destination. If one computer was knocked out, the packets would work their way around the problem by being re-sent to other nodes.¹

It was an idea as big as the bomb itself.

Communicating computers handing packets of data to each other across a distributed network would become the hardware and software model driving our current network revolution. Contrary to urban legend, it was not the internet. However, digitizing information into packets in order to move the functions of the network out of central points and closer to the network’s edge is the technological concept that underpins the internet.

Paul Baran’s visualization of a new network architecture reconfigured network concepts that had existed for millennia. It started us on the path to the third great network revolution.

We are a network-centric species; the networks that connect us have always defined us. The most powerful external force in the human experience is the manner in which we link ourselves together. The most transformative technologies, therefore, have been those that changed the nature of that interconnection.²

The early networks were built around nature—rivers, mountains, even continents. Human social structures formed to exploit these natural networks, as well as to defend against network-based threats as diverse as starvation and war. As the basic technologies of life expanded, however, the flow of information remained limited by crude communication tools.

The first technology-based information network did not appear until the fifteenth century with the advent of the movable-type printing press.³ Its arrival hastened the end of the medieval world and the birth of the modern era.

For centuries, knowledge had been kept barricaded within handwritten manuscripts. A stable and secure container for cultural and scientific information, these records required a large, expensive infrastructure to be produced and maintained. To accomplish this, nobles and priests, who made up “the Establishment,” constructed a thick vault of high costs and mystic traditions around their priceless libraries. It was a system that not only protected the knowledge but also exploited it to perpetuate its owners’ position.

Johannes Gutenberg picked the lock that had kept knowledge confined for centuries. The result was an intellectual explosion that shook the foundation of the Establishment’s power and propelled a new inquiry-driven trajectory.

By reducing the cost of reproducing and disseminating information Gutenberg moved ideas from the protective vault into a commercial environment that promoted its dissemination. Merchant printers created an information network by moving texts among themselves for reproduction, distribution, and profit.⁴ That network, in turn, sparked the Reformation and spread the innovations of the Renaissance throughout Europe.

It would be 400 years before a new network technology disrupted the status quo once again. While Gutenberg’s technology unlocked information and allowed it to travel, the journey remained physically constrained. From the beginning of time, distance had created walls between groups of human beings equal to or greater than the barriers created by the jealous guarding of scientific knowledge and intellectual expression. Early in the nineteenth century the steam locomotive powered through those walls to allow humanity to overcome geography’s grip.

The iron horse dissolved the geographic isolation that had created independent, self-sufficient, local resource–based communities. By economically transporting high-bulk products, the railroad broke the connection between the location of the resource and the site of its consumption. In the process the railroad pulled both products and people off the land, feeding the pace of the Industrial Revolution. Towns that were once too far from rivers or the sea to engage in extensive commerce became hubs of activity tied together by ribbons of steel. The growth of the railroad transformed the landscape, remade cities, and disrupted the lives of millions.

As the railroad supplanted traditional pathways, the telegraph rode alongside. The two technologies experienced symbiotic growth as telegraph lines built along the railroad’s rights-of-way carried messages that not only managed railroad activities but also introduced instantaneous communications into other aspects of life and business.

Whereas the railroad compressed distance, the telegraph condensed time. From the beginning of history, the fact that information moved physically meant that it moved slowly, limited to the same speed as human travel.⁵ The telegraph separated the transfer of information from the transportation of hard copy. This virtualization of information further expanded the marketplace economy, brought forth unparalleled personal interaction, and laid the technological groundwork for the network that now defines the human experience.

As history’s first electronic network, the telegraph was the internet of its time.⁶ The only thing faster than a speeding locomotive, the telegraph controlled movement on the rails. But its impact was much more pervasive than managing train schedules. Information speeding faster than the wind made possible the creation of the Weather Bureau. News reports delivered from afar at lightning speed redefined both the nature of news and the news business. Electronic messages coordinated industrial production, created a new managerial class, and enabled the rise of powerful market-controlling corporations.⁷

The collective effect of these network revolutions was to gradually form an economy and a society of mass. The printing press created the first mass information economy. By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.⁸

The railroad then expedited the path to industrial mass production and a mass market. Before the railroad, production and processing activities were small operations distributed widely in locations adjacent to the raw materials. By making it possible to economically transport those raw resources to a central point for processing, the railroad fed ever-growing industrial complexes. Riding the rails in the opposite direction, the results of this mass production were delivered to a newly interconnected mass market.

The telegraph, and later its offspring, the telephone, tied together the new industrial activity. Mass production required coordination among the sources of raw materials, production facilities, and mass-market distributors. The telegraph was also the initiating force behind interconnected mass communications. When the newspaper publishers of New York banded together in 1846 to create the Associated Press, they were taking advantage of the telegraph’s ability to collect information quickly from afar. In the process, they built the twentieth century’s model of mass communications in which networks bring information to a central point for curation prior to its subsequent redistribution for mass consumption.

We may think we know the narrative of those earlier times, but our understanding is incomplete absent an appreciation of the linkage of that history with our lives today and, most important, our tomorrow. From a technological point of view, the earlier network breakthroughs are the roots from which grow today’s “new” technologies. Sociologically, the changes driven by the earlier networks echo in the dislocations we experience today.

The evolution of network technology mimics the step-by-step natural evolution of living things. When Charles Darwin wrote that “it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences … that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure,” he could have been describing technology as well as biology.⁹

New technology is an accretive process. While inventions are often described in terms of one person’s inspiration, in reality they are typically a new assembly of accrued knowledge in a heretofore unrecognized manner for a previously unappreciated purpose. As we will see, Gutenberg’s movable type was the coming together of a collection of known capabilities; the steam locomotive was a new way of dealing with a power understood since ancient times; and the concept of messaging through electromagnetic signals had been around for almost a century before Morse’s “What hath God wrought.”

“The process of technological development is like building a cathedral,” Paul Baran observed. “Over the course of several hundred years: new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundation, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along a historian who asks, ‘Who built this cathedral?’ … But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”¹⁰

This is a book about our cathedrals, about the continuum of both additive and repetitive technological and sociological progress that lays the foundation for our future.

The first two network revolutions began with a centralizing force that expanded outward to create secondary and tertiary centralized hubs of network activity. Printing presses were originally centralized in academic and commercial centers. As printing expanded, it dispersed into multiple centers of activity. Similarly, the railroads brought people and products to a central point to be switched to the track leading to their destination. As the rails expanded geographically, switching also moved to satellite transfer points. The same topology held true for the railroad’s partner, the telegraph, and then the telephone, with the switchboard performing the same function as the switching yard to route a call from one line to another.

It was the technological reiteration of the traditional pattern of networks. Historically, the initial impetus of a network was to create a central point from which its activity radiated. As it grew, that activity dissipated into decentralized hubs. The current network revolution is being driven by the ultimate expansion of network dispersal to further move activity away from central points to become fully distributed, ultimately right down to the individual.

While networks moved outward structurally, the economic activity they enabled moved in the opposite ...