Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide web

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INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web is slowly returning to Earth and its entanglements: states, laws, cultures. Cyberspace, for a host of commercial and political reasons, is becoming many cyberspaces, some of which fit distressingly well onto the old political maps of nation-states. The web has even become a battleground for states’ wars. Why is this happening, and what will remain of the old, free, and anarchic web to take into the future?

Digital computing, the Internet, and eventually the web were invented and grew as part of a long line of government projects, mainly military ones, dating back to the First World War. But, beginning in the late 1960s, the Internet and geek culture split off from government, launching a period of spectacular innovation, excitement, and profit. The web became a place for enacting dreams of freedom.

Cyberspace was understood as extra-terrestrial, at once politically rebellious and apolitical, where you could have no identity at all and yet every identity was respected: the last of the great 1960s projects. No one can surpass the famous description by John Perry Barlow, who dashed off a declaration of cyber-independence while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February 1996, less than a year after the first easily accessible web browser, Mosaic, reached the public:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear . … Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion . …

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.¹

Barlow’s transcendent triumphalism complemented the more earthly triumphalism that flourished after the ending of the Cold War, the globalizing consensus optimism that Davos nurtured and celebrated. The web as a solvent of sovereignty had a very strong appeal, and was soon taken up by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, a fixture at Davos, in his 1999 bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The symbol of the Cold War system was a wall, which divided everyone. The symbol of the globalization system is a World Wide Web, which unites everyone . … In the Cold War we reached for the hot line between the White House and the Kremlin—a symbol that we were all divided but at least someone, the two superpowers, were in charge. In the era of globalization we reach for the Internet—a symbol that we are all connected but nobody is totally in charge.²

Not totally: the United States remained a good deal more in charge than any other power, which is what led French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, in pondering the singularity of America’s victory, to his rather bitter coinage hyperpower—like a superpower, only more so. In particular, the United States was in charge of the Internet, which had been developed, like so much else in the twentieth century, including (for the most part) digital computing itself, by the US military to serve US military purposes.

Then why did Barlow and Friedman, and nearly every other writer on the subject, not dwell on, or draw conclusions from, the World Wide Web’s terrestrial past? In part, it was because their boomer generation rarely chose to take lessons from their parents’ experience. In part, it was because something so exhilaratingly futuristic could only be dragged down by a consideration of its past, and the thrill of the post–Cold War period was in creating a future that had as little reference to the miserable past as possible. Besides, the Cold War victory had been military only in the very specific sense that one side’s military had out-spent and, most important, out-innovated the other side’s military; the rest of the victory, the bulk of it, was political and economic, not military. So what did it matter if the Internet had once been a military program?

But the strongest reason for neglecting the past of the Internet was that this old military project had in fact been superbly re-purposed by a trans-national engineering subculture that followed its own rules, and by a San Francisco Bay Area culture of the late 1960s and 1970s that was highly individualistic and even libertarian, unsympathetic at best to the demands of the state and sovereignty, generally pacifist, and animated by a One World view of its own. That is why it seemed as though the web might be the one 1960s project that could succeed in breaking free of the past and burying the nation-state system. You have no sovereignty where we gather … Our identities have no bodies …

Has the past caught up with the web? From Russian cyberattacks and the Stuxnet virus to chronic cyberthievery from China and industrial-scale invasions of privacy, the web seems to be returning to its roots in conflict and nation-state rivalries. Giant web companies both hasten this nationalization—as they tailor products to ever more specific markets—and rebel against it as a barrier to their trans-border ambitions. Meanwhile, anxious states, fearing their economic and military dependence on the web and the vulnerability of their digital information, devote funds and political capital to fighting cryptography, building Great Firewalls, and creating back doors.

Twenty years on, looking back on his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Barlow said, I could also see there was never a better system [than the web] that could inherently be extended for surveillance. Ever. I knew that. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to pretend that was not the future.³ That is unfair to the future. Without doubt, the web is and will be used for surveillance and for the projection of force, just as its forebears were. States and like-minded regions will assert control over it and most users’ experience of it will be locally inflected. At the same time, the web will continue to have a global infrastructure and no one state will be able to dominate it, both because the other states won’t let that happen and because the leading companies on the web will not abandon their drive for global growth. The web will be neither entirely united nor entirely divided. The web is a global private marketplace built on a government platform, not unlike the global airport system. That is more mundane than the early ecstasies of cyberspace, but it is more durable. And if the prophecies of cyberwar are someday fulfilled, at the end of the battle the airports will still be rebuilt. People will always want to fly.

  1.   John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.

  2.   Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 1999, chap. 1.

  3.   David Hershkovits, John Perry Barlow Talks Acid, Cyber-Independence and his Friendship with JFK Jr., May 2015, http://www.papermag.com/2015/04/john_perry_barlow_acid_cyber-independence_jfk-jr.php.

CHAPTER 1.  THE VIRTUAL REALITY OF MODERN WAR

The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all the procedure by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections it may be desirable to use a still broader definition, namely, one which could include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing this airplane).

—Warren Weaver, Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, in ­Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1949⁴

The web was supposed to be not of this world, but the web has also, and always, been in the world of physical power. The Internet’s alternative world was built by people in love with and in fear of machines, who wanted to see how machines might communicate with each other—forming, in a sense, one big machine—and how humans could communicate within and through this machine.

Such communication, as the computing pioneer Warren Weaver foresaw, included not only music and art and speech. It also included dominating each other and killing each other. The Internet, and the computers that made it possible, came from a rather dark place, much more missile than ballet, and they might yet return there. This book is about how and why that could happen, and what might be done about it.

THE PEOPLE COUNTERS

In most histories, the new world of computing and the Internet came into being in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the vision behind it preceded that war and was constitutive of modernity: the idea that nature and human society alike were mechanistic, enacting patterns of which the individual components were mostly unaware and which actual individuals had little if any power to affect; and the accompanying desire to rule machines rather than be ruled by them.

Most people in the industrializing world of the nineteenth century had to accept the newly obvious truth that people with machines, and the capacity to invent new machines, were much more prosperous and powerful than people without them or that capacity. Societies that mastered machines first had an advantage over those that had not: they were more productive, and they were more deadly. For the United States, the formative experience in this respect was the Civil War, which was the first modern war in that killing took place on what was seen as an industrial scale. Men were slaughtered in bulk thanks to machines. The industrial North was able to fight on a different scale and in a different, more thoroughgoing way than the much less industrialized South. The war machine had been born.

Industrialization did not lead to war, which had always existed, but it did change war, just as it changed everything else. Social sciences like economics, natural sciences like evolution, and the mechanization of pre-industrial processes like weaving, planting and harvesting, sailing, digging, and moving from one place to another: Most human activities, including war, were steadily taken out of the animal world into the countable, machine world. The new social sciences took human relations and lent them a rational structure that made the individual human parts increasingly interchangeable. Humans were becoming parts in the machine.

The development of computing as such occurred within this broader story of mechanization. The term computers initially, and into the 1940s, referred to people who performed mathematical calculations for a living; among the first people to lose their jobs to computers were computers themselves. (As late as 1944, the US Army had a staff of 176 computers at its Aberdeen Proving Ground just to calculate the best angles for firing guns.)⁵ Calculating machines as a means to save mathematical labor had existed from the humble abacus through the devices built by the mathematician-philosophers Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) to the Analytical Engine conceived and partially built by the mathematician-economist Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Babbage’s concept included a provision for memory (what he called a store) and a technology using perforated cards. The card idea had come from Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), who developed perforated metal cards that contained the information sequence needed by a loom to weave a tapestry in a particular pattern. The relationship between the holes and the distances between them constituted a set of instructions that the loom could read in sequence in order to know when to move the threads to reproduce a particular design. As Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of