Nicholas Barnard
Modern Political Philsophy
Dr. Irving
The Internet: Stability from Anarchy
A fundamental basis of anarchy has driven the Internet's growth and has proven the strength of anarchy by development of many strong alternate systems of software development, information sharing, and commerce. Several important ideas in the anarchist roots of the Internet include the copyleft methodology; open source movement; the high level topology of the Internet; and the topology of peer-to-peer networks.
Inner Technological Anarchy of the Internet
The historical beginnings of the modern day Internet are usually traced to the Arpanet, a 1969 government research project that explored ways to create a computer network that would be resistant to being disabled by a nuclear bomb.
The researchers on the project developed a system where network traffic was routed dynamically, via the shortest route. In the event that that route was unavailable or overly congested the traffic would be routed around it, taking a longer path, but still getting to its destination. This system was unlike any network design that was in existence, and was substantiually more fault tolerant than the hub and spoke and token ring systems that were common.
The hub and spoke system that had every computer on the network was directly connected to a central computer. This system was the most un-anarchist system available; every computer depended on one central computer, which was the leader for all of them.
The token ring system, another dominate system, was designed so that every computer was linked to two other computers forming a chain, and the ends of this chain were linked together, forming a ring of computers. This system passed a piece of information called a token. If a computer had a piece of information to send, it would attach it onto this token. Then when the next computer received the token it would check to see if the data attached was for it, if so it would take it off, if not it would pass it on. The token ring system is leaderless, but every computer is equally dependent on the other computers, so if one computer failed, the whole network failed.
Both of these systems suffered from the fact that you could disable the network by taking out a single computer, either the hub, in the hub and spoke system, or any of the computers in the token ring system. The Internet's interconnected nature, practically the eliminated the ability of the failure of one computer to impair the functioning of the network. The network topology of the Internet also made it possible that individual networks, of different topologies could be connected to one and other via the Internet.
The Internet is governed by consensus whereas other network systems were handed down from various computer vendors. The standards that the Internet operates on is governed by working groups comprised of people from multiple different organizations and committees who discuss what is needed from a standard and then decide the details of a standard. These “standards” are in reality optional guidelines, but due to the benevolent charismatic qualities of the committees they are usually adopted. While most standards are adopted, there are also standards that are not adopted into common use.
Despite the committee system, which is supposed to build consensus, there are numerous fiefdoms of standards on the Internet. In many cases these develop out of a disagreement on how to implement a standard, or from a desire to compete in the case of the “browser wars” between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Information Exchange Beginnings
The pre-1995 Internet is marked my several examples of groups of people coming together to share information and build useful reserves and resources of information.
Many people joined in a disorganized rush to place as much information as possible on the World Wide Web. People placed lots of information online by recording sound clips from their favorite television shows, taking screen shots of interesting scenes from movies and television, scanning publicity photos, typing up interesting news articles, and even recording whole television shows. Much of this was driven by a desire to one up the other people on the World Wide Web. Despite the competitive nature of this information frenzy, there was cooperation. People who were unable or unwilling to create the content offered space on Internet servers from which to serve the content from. There was also sharing of Internet server space to provide mirrors of information so that files could be accessed faster by moving the data over more servers, and closer to the people who were accessing the data, which subsequently made the data faster to serve and more popular.
Despite the disorganized nature of the world wide web there are many free projects that were organized, and some are now commercial entities. Two representative projects are the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Project Gutenberg.
According to the IMDb history in the IMDb University, The IMDb has its roots in the rec.arts.movies usenet newsgroup. Several they created lists of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and within them created lists of people who worked on movies. “In October, 1990, these lists contained over 23,000 entries, covering nearly 10,000 movies and television series.” (IMDb History Page)
This collection of lists would have remained as such, except for Col Needham's decision to provide a set of programs to allow the lists to be searchable. While seemingly a miniscule improvement, this move eventually launched Needham into the position as a charismatic leader of the IMDb.
The IMDb continued its growth, adding additional information lists, eventually encompassing hundreds of megabytes of text over thirty-nine different categories of information about 312,032 different movies, and 1,125,399 different people. (http://www.imdb.com/database_statistics) No one person, or even a small group of people can claim responsibility for the information. While the information is organized by a team of dedicated people, the people who use the IMDb contribute it, there is no hierarchical system as to who can submit data, any user of the IMDb is eligible to submit data, which will be reviewed and added.
The IMDb currently exists as a quasi-anarchy. While technically it is owned by Amazon.com it is led by charismatic leaders, who obtained their positions first on a volunteer basis, and only have moved into paying positions as the IMDb has grown, and required fiscal backing to ensure the proper hardware systems were implemented.
Project Gutenberg in comparison to the IMDb is historically much older than the Internet, but it exposes the anarchical information sharing values of the Pre-1995 Internet. Project Gutenberg was started in 1971 by Michael Hart, who was seeking to justify his use of a $100,000,000 mainframe computer.
Project Gutenberg exists as an individual volunteer project that is produced by volunteers selecting and typing in texts within the public domain and providing them for to the central Project Gutenberg resource. This has yielded, during the 21 years of the project, over 5,700 different texts each available for free over the Internet.
While Project Gutenberg does have a centralized nature similar to the IMDb, it gives each volunteer control over the text that they type. Each volunteer is independent and following the charismatic leadership of Mr. Hart. Nothing prevents any of the volunteers from creating a duplicate of Project Gutenberg, but people have not chosen to do this, due to the inertia of the project and the charismatic leadership from Mr. Hart.
Commerce moves in
While there have been an innumerable different ventures into commerce on the Internet, there have been almost an equal number of failures. While it is hard to compare these Internet ventures to similar brick and mortar businesses due to the different product delivery methods, it is worth noting that successful Internet retailers have differentiated themselves from their mail order cousins by providing copious amounts of information on the products they sell, in much the same way as early WWW pioneers placed large amounts of content on the web.
CDNow, one of the first notable Internet stores selling any consumer media, quickly differentiated themselves by offering audio clips of music for potential buyers to listen to. These features combined with a great selection of CDs from around the world cemented CDNow as a significant Internet retailer that while pioneering was unable to retain its profitability and shine in the later years of the 1990s.
Amazon.com essentially duplicated CDNow's information heavy sales approach within the book sales industry. They provided extensive information of books, including cover images, editorial reviews, consumer reviews, and eventually actual page images. Amazon eventually became a traffic hub for book information in the same way that the IMDb became a traffic hub for movies: by collecting and organizing free or low cost information.
Amazon's success fundamentally came because the founders recognized that free information is the foundation of the Internet and set out to build Amazon into a destination for information about books that just conveniently happened to sell books as well.
Amazon's motivations for purchasing the IMDb are much the same as their book selling methodology. Amazon recognized that instead of attempting to beat IMDb, the information hub for movies, they would just buy them; being bought out was acceptable to the founders of the IMDb because the primary goal of free information about movies has been maintained, despite some commercialization to assist video sales on Amazon.com's main commerce site.
Online Music Sharing
While online music sharing via services such as Napster and Morphous have further pushed the Internet as anarchic medium. Napster and Morpheus both have the same goal. Morpheus has accomplished its goal without a central resource computer, whereas Napster has a central resource computer that maintains song title listings and locations. Morpheus has brought the information exchange methodology full circle, by reimplimenting a fully anarchic sytstem, which by definition will remain anarchic. There is no one computer on the morpheous network that is responsible for leading the network, while many computers become “nodes” on the network, providing interconnections among many computers, they do not technically have any more power than the other computers on the network. This is a parallel to Hobbes's ideas, that all of the members of the network, have an equal chance of becoming nodes, and taking a status over the other computers on the morpheous network.
Open Source Software
Software in the pre-1990 Internet was traditionally the domain of companies and/or individuals. These software programs, while sometimes designed with the input of users were in general dictated by individual programmers, or executives who dictated what features the software would have, and how they would function. This generally created major product cycles of one to two years, with semi-frequent updates in some software. This model persists within software development and is currently used by almost all the major software corporations.
An alternate system is a cooperative software development system that does not depend on direction being provided a single entity, but instead being directed by the customers who use the software. Around 1998 this movement came to be known as the Open Source movement. While there are hundreds of software packages distributed under the Open Source model, two notable products are Linux and Apache.
Linux is more closely related to the standard commercial model of software development in that Linus Torvald, a student from Finland, started writing an operating system “just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu for 386(486) AT clones.” Mr. Torvald has maintained fundamental control of Linux, but has encouraged other developers to add their fixes, and he maintains a policy of utilizing the best-written code, even if he did not write it.
Apache began in completely different way. Apache is originally an offshoot of the NCSA Web server, which was developed at the University of Illinois's supercomputing center. NCSA distributed the source code, and allowed users to modify the code, but did not reintegrate suggestions from users back into the main code. For a period in mid 1994, active development of the NCSA server was halted, and a group of webmasters decided among themselves to utilize the NCSA server base, and apply their personal patches as well as others, to create A PAtCHy server, which was released. These same developers realized the need to rewrite the core of the NCSA server and undertook that task, and also solicited input from other webmasters.
Development continued on the Apache server with the initial group continuing on as a central leadership, but recognizing the contributions of others, and rewarding the contributions of others by allowing them to work on more code. This system intuitively promotes excellence and cooperative participation within the development of the server.
The Apache Server is the dominant web server on the Internet, servicing 64.38% of active websites. Linux has also taken a dominate role on the Internet, running on a significant portion of the Internet servers, and posing a significant challenge to many of the commercially develop operating systems.
Conclusion
The Internet has demonstrated by multitudes of products of the strength of an anarchist system in creating new business opportunities, new ways of sharing information, and new networking methodologies. While it is often said that an archist society is not productive, the Internet has demonstrated how a system of anarchy can create strong systems to support useful innovations, and fundamentally change how people live their lives.
Bibilography
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The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. “Copyright History” 2002 Columbia University Press. <http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0857576.html> (accessed 5/2/2002)
Free Software Foundation, Inc. Catagories of Free and Non-Free Software March 9, 2002 <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html> (accessed 5/2/2002)
Free Software Foundation, Inc. Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding April 25, 2002 <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html> (accessed 5/2/2002)
Stutz, Michael, Timeline of Information Sharing. Feb 1, 2002 <http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/timeline> (accessed 5/2/2002)