Who Invented the Internet?

Capitalists, we’ll often hear. Just about any discussion of distributism on the Internet will, at least once, involve the phrase, “I can’t believe you’re attacking capitalism on the Internet, one of the greatest of capitalism’s inventions!” Take, as a typical case, the example of John Clark, from the distributism debates of 2002:

Seeing an attack on capitalism appear on the Internet is like hearing a sermon on the evils of flying from the cockpit at 40,000 feet. Using capitalist tools to spread anti-capitalist thought is a strange irony.

This argument lacks merit in any case; it’s like saying that fighting a war against the Chinese using gunpowder is a strange irony. But leaving that aside, is it true? Is the Internet one of the vaunted “capitalist tools,” an invention of private enterprise operating unstinted by the interference of evil government?

Before we begin to examine this historically myopic claim, let’s define what the Internet actually is. It is not the World Wide Web, which is only a part, albeit a large one, of the Internet. The Internet is, in fact, simply a global network of computers connected via a computer communications protocol called TCP/IP. It operates by a very simple server-client system; the client (like the computer you’re reading this on right now) asks the server (where the document resides) for a given file (like this one), and the server responds by sending that file to the client. There are some complications to this description, some of them significant—we haven’t even mentioned server-side and client-side scripting, for example—but for our purposes, this description is accurate enough.

Where are the servers for “the Internet”? Everywhere and nowhere. Servers all over the world are responsible for answering clients’ requests for various files; requests are sent to the appropriate servers—that is, the ones that actually have the requested files—via a complex system of routing that we don’t really need to worry about here.

The Internet has no government. There is no entity that controls the Internet or makes sure that it’s working properly. However, there are some organizations that make sure things don’t go completely crazy. Various standards organizations ensure that the protocols and languages used on the Internet are standard; that is, conform to a given specification in order to ensure that everyone will know what to expect when they use them. Most importantly, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is in charge of making sure that names and numbers are kept unique and orderly; its board is made up of members from across the spectrum of private enterprise, voluntary organizations, and academia. The United States federal government is still more or less in charge of ICANN.

Notice that I said “still.” I said this because the United States federal government has always been “in charge” of the Internet, insofar as anybody has been (and strictly speaking, nobody is). In other words, insofar as anybody keeps the Internet running, it’s the government, not private enterprise. Hardly a capitalist tool. But moving beyond that: who invented the Internet? Is it a creation of capitalist ingenuity, as so many assert?

In its earliest incarnation, the Internet was invented by the United States government’s Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA. In an attempt to ensure that we stayed ahead of the Russians in every field of technical endeavor, the government funded ARPA, which in turn funded a variety of programs, including the one that led to what we now call the Internet. The first connection in this network, originally called the ARPANET, was made on 29 October 1969, between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. (You may also hear the ARPANET referred to as the DARPANET, formed from adding the “Defense” to the beginning, which gives you an idea of what it was originally designed for.)

Still no profit motive involved here; this is merely the government funding programs which it deemed useful for itself. ARPANET continued to grow, going international for the first time in 1978. It utilized “IP,” or “Internet Protocol,” for its communications. This still isn’t technically “the Internet,” however, because by definition the Internet uses TCP/IP, as we mentioned earlier. However, it’s definitely the precursor to the Internet, and as yet private enterprise has had no significant role in its development.

The TCP/IP protocols were developed in the mid-1970s at Stanford University; their specification, RFC-675, was the first time the word “Internet” was used in reference to a global TCP/IP network. In 1983, the entire ARPANET was placed on this protocol. In 1985, the National Science Foundation started its own network, NSFNET, which elected to use the TCP/IP protocols of ARPANET. Already at this time the bedrock of the Internet was in place. People had email and could work on and contact other computers around the world. Once the NSFNET was connected to the ARPANET, the Internet could, for the first time, really be said to exist. And still private enterprise had had no significant role.

Indeed, commercial use of the Internet was strictly forbidden; it wasn’t considered appropriate to allow private corporations to profit from a publicly funded international network. Private enterprise wasn’t involved in the Internet until 1989, when the commercial MCI Mail was added to the NSFNET. Usenet arose about that time, along with the first of the Internet service providers (ISPs), including the recently defunct Compuserve. But the fact of the matter is that the Internet was conceived and developed entirely by non-profit entities, not by capitalists engaged in private enterprise attempting to make a profit.

Well, what about the World Wide Web, then? Surely that must be credited to capitalism?

No. The World Wide Web is that subset of the Internet which is governed by a weblike system of interlinked pages, largely written in HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. The “hypertext” part refers to what we now mostly call “links,” which keep documents linked in to one another. HTML and the World Wide Web were developed primarily by one person, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the French name of which becomes CERN). CERN is itself a governmental laboratory with many member states contributing to it; this development, too, cannot be credited to capitalism.

Nor was the popularization of the World Wide Web a capitalist phenomenon. The Internet, already widely used by academia, governments, and to a lesser extent hobbyists, was accessed through a number of different means prior to the development of the World Wide Web. Computer old-timers (and even not-so-old-timers like myself) will remember the old gopher system (also developed by a public organization, the University of Minnesota), along with many others. The Web, however, with its hypertext system, made all of this much easier and more manageable. But it needed a browser, capable of displaying and following hypertext links, in order to function properly. The Internet therefore really took off among hobbyists and other private systems with the development of the Mosaic web browser—another creation of a government entity, this time the University of Illinois. Its development was funded by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, sponsored by Al Gore. (Incidentally, sponsoring this act was the source of his infamous comment about taking “the initiative in creating the Internet,” which is hyperbole at the very best.) None of this is even remotely capitalism at work; as late as 1993, when Mosaic was released, private enterprise had still had little role in the development of the Internet at all, much less a significant enough role to justify calling it a “tool of capitalism.”

Only at this point did private industry begin to get involved, and even then governments and voluntary, non-profit agencies continue to play an enormous role. Indeed, such non-profit organizations govern the Internet. Standards organizations like W3C and ISO make sure that the protocols, languages, and other structures at use on the Internet are well-defined and universally accepted. The United States government plays a large role to this day in ensuring the orderly operation of the Internet as a whole. All in all, this can hardly be counted a great triumph of capitalism.

Indeed, capitalism didn’t create the Internet, nor did capitailsm perfect it. Capitalism swept down on a fully formed and fully functional Internet, developed and supported by the efforts and money of the community as a whole, and turned it to their own personal profit. While utilizing the work of others to benefit oneself is perfectly acceptable at times, it’s the height of vanity to them appropriate that work as one’s own and call it one’s own tool.

Now, of course, large portions of the Internet are commercial, large portions are government, and large portions are neither, which is really as it should be. But the Internet certainly wasn’t created by these commercial interests; it wasn’t popularized by these commercial interests; it wasn’t perfected by these commercial interests; and it’s not maintained by these commercial interests. All of these things were done by governments and government-funded organizations, supposedly the antithesis of all free enterprise.

Does it still seem incongruous to use the Internet to argue against capitalism?

Praise be to Christ the King!

Drying Clothes

It’s long been a matter of public knowledge that almost every “homeowners’ association” in the United States forbids its members from hanging their clothes out to dry. Hanging clothes outside? Allowing the sun to dry them? Surely only the riff-raff engage in such foolishness. Use an electric dryer, or move to a trailer park!

Well, maybe not; some trailer parks don’t allow it, either. I suppose those trailer parks have a different class of riff-raff; the upper crust of the lower crust, if you will.

The theory is that hanging clothes will decrease property values. After all, we can’t have those dryerless hoi polloi in our neighborhood; if we’ve got those people here, then clearly this isn’t the type of neighborhood we thought it was. A neighborhood, by this theory, is better, and thus the property values higher, the richer the people who live therein. Rich people have dryers. So we simply must keep out the people who don’t have dryers, or our house won’t appreciate, and we won’t be able to flip it for twice its price in three years when we move to a still better neighborhood with still richer people living in it.

The distributist has to ask himself: what sort of people have we become? It’s bad enough that we’re so inorganic we refuse to rely on nature for anything ourselves; have we really become so antiseptic, so privileged that we refuse even to live next to people who might have a little less than, or choose a little differently from, ourselves?

We’re not talking about someone amassing large quantities of dead cars to rust in his front yard; this doesn’t involve a dog barking all night and bothering the entire neighborhood. It’s not even a particularly unsightly paint job. This is people drying their clothes. This is people performing one of the daily and necessary tasks of existence, and using God’s own dryer to do it. Granted, it doesn’t match well with the chemical lawns and shiny SUVs that mark American’s suburban wastelands, but surely hanging clothes out to dry is natural and good, a necessary function of life for those who choose not to buy an electric dryer.

Are there not many good reasons to choose to forgo this luxury? Dryers are expensive; perhaps a family’s broke down, and they determined it was better to hang their clothes out than to go into or further their debt repairing or replacing it. Perhaps they decided they didn’t want to waste the energy required to run such a power-hungry machine. Perhaps, most admirably, they wanted to increase their independence from power companies and appliance manufacturers and repairmen, trying to stay closer to God’s nature than a complex machine performing such a basic task would allow. Why should anyone want to insert ordinances or regulations into such decisions? Aren’t independence and frugality things we should be trying to encourage?

Still, while forbidding the hanging of clothes may be obnoxious, it’s hardly pernicious. But these regulations don’t stop there; they go well behind mandating a minimum wealth and consumption standard in order to actively discourage independence and production. Take, for example, the small-scale raising of livestock. Many single-family lots are sufficient to support a goat or two, or a few chickens, in a sanitary and beneficial way. This would provide families with valuable milk, eggs, meat, or even wool, all commodities which are constantly increasing in price. Producing food is a basic and everyday economic activity; indeed, it is the most basic and everyday economic activity of all. Nothing could be more conducive to economic independence. Yet in most urban and suburban areas, local ordinances prevent nearly all useful animals from being kept by citizens.

Generally our leaders cite sanitation as grounds for preventing citizens from exercising this kind of economic independence, just as aesthetics are cited as grounds for preventing citizens from hanging their clothes to dry. But why not then forbid unsanitary keeping of animals? Wouldn’t this fit the purpose, without preventing the vast majority, whose animals would be kept in a sanitary and cleanly manner, from performing such a basic economic task? Don’t we want to encourage our citizens to be productive and independent?

The answer, sadly, is no. Our society does not want productive and independent citizens; it wants consumptive and dependent ones. It wants us to depend on our bosses, to keep us laboring for others to make the money that we’ll spend on ever-more-expensive necessities and ever-more-numerous luxuries. Luxuries like, for example, the electric dryer. A clothesline? That couldn’t have cost very much! How does that help the economy?

As citizens subject to such intrusive and unjustified laws and regulations, we should voice our objections to our local and state leaders. Let’s change our laws to encourage production, action, and economic independence, rather than mere consumption, passivity, and dependence. But more importantly, let’s buck the trend and begin to actually produce some wealth, rather than merely consume it. Distributism, like all real reform, begins in the home.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Postscript: It appears the link about trailer parks forbidding hanging clothes out to dry, once publicly available, as been restricted by the Gray Lady. Apologies. Essentially, it recited a story about a trailer park resident who wanted to hang her clothing out to dry in order to use less energy, but was forbidden by the local regulations.

Racism and Genetic Similarity

Racists will often argue (see the comments on this post for a typical example) that people naturally prefer to be around—and to marry—those who are genetically like themselves. This, they claim, is not really racism; it’s just a natural and undeniable tendency of mankind.

To claim that this affinity of like for like is nonexistent would be to greatly overstate the case. It clearly does exist. However, it’s absolutely false that a desire for like is the primary motivation in choosing a marital partner. Indeed, scientific research proves precisely the opposite.

This was first noticed in the plant world; many plants simply don’t pollinate with other plants that are too like themselves. Apples are an excellent example. As a gardener myself, I know that keeping different types of apples near one another is vital, because apples will not pollinate their own varieties. Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Brown observe, in Mendel in the Kitchen, that plants “prefer—they are ‘anxious,’ say the botanists—to mate with plants that are genetically unlike themselves.” (The book is a defense of genetically modified foods, but the quoted statement is one of simple botany.)

This same principle has found to be operative in mice and rats, as observed by Claus Wedekind and Dustin Penn at the University of Utah. That same paper noted studies of significant sample size confirming that human marriage patterns statistically correlate with genetic dissimilarity along a certain axis; namely, that human beings tend to prefer to reproduce with those who have dissimilar MHC genes, which helps ensure stronger immune systems in the offspring. Interestingly, taking oral contraceptives reversed this trend, leading women to choose men who, all other things being equal, would combine with them to produce offspring with weaker systems. Given that oral contraceptives work by wreaking complete and utter havoc on the hormonal system of a healthy female, this reversal of the natural order is totally unsurprising.

Now, men choose wives and women choose husbands for lots of different reasons; unconsciously noticing specific genetic dissimilarity in the smells of their spouses is not an overriding determinant. However, the studies explored in Wedekind and Penn are significant, and hard to explain without concluding that this genetic dissimilarity is at least relevant. The effect is subtle, but it’s pretty clear that, statistically, the effect is there. It is healthy and good that the effect is there; it helps to ensure healthier children. Only a fool would choose to reproduce with someone without considering, at least briefly, the children who would result.

The bottom line for racists is that people don’t prefer genetically similar people, at least for marriage. They prefer exactly the opposite. Preferring genetic dissimilarity prevents the problems of inbreeding and helps ensure healthier offspring. People do, of course, quite sensibly prefer culturally similar people, for marriage and otherwise. This cultural similarity may or may not extend across genetic dissimilarities. But absent trained biases concerning the allegedly intrinsic value, or lack thereof, of given races, people don’t deliberately seek out those who are genetically like themselves.

This is still more evidence that it is culture, not race, which is really important. This is the natural order of things. If we have been trained to think otherwise, we ought to conform our thoughts to nature, and not claim that nature conforms to our thoughts.

Praise be to Christ the King!

On Genealogy and its Software

Yes, another grandiose title with a not-so-grandiose post. In any case, I went to visit my dear old grandfather in Fort Worth, Texas this past weekend, and it renewed my ever-flagging interest in genealogy. I’ve mentioned a bit about my family’s recent (very recent) history on this blog, but it goes back much farther than all that, praise God.

It may surprise you all to know it, but there’s some noble blood in my veins—noble both literally and figuratively. (Welshmen may recognize it as similar to the arms of the Williamses, sheriffs of Caernarvon; these are kin to the Goodmans of my line.) My grandfather has spent years, both in America (where the first of our line, Benjamin Goodman, debarked in 1673) and in England and Wales, researching our long family history. By God’s grace, many of the records are intact; he’s even found the gravestones of many of our people. And I’ve decided that it’s high time that I familiarize myself with the history of the family that produced me.

Sadly, my dear grandfather, who keeps incredibly copious documentation, decided to do so in the Family Tree Maker brand of software. This software is proprietary and closed, and it saves in its own strange file format, suffixed with FTW, rather than the standard GEDCOM format. (Yes, I know it was developed by Mormons. But nothing’s perfect, and it is the standard.) So I needed to get this ginormous (16M, all but its onesome) FTW file converted into a standard format that some free software genealogy program could recognize (namely, GEDCOM).

There are, as usual, many excellent choices for genealogy software in the free software world. The one I ended up choosing was the GNU GPLed Gramps program, which is GTK+ based and seems quite good. It understands GEDCOM (using its own, better XML format internally) and can produce reports in a number of different word processing formats, not to mention plain text, HTML, pdf, and even the mighty LaTeX. All in all, a superb program that I’m excited about getting to know better.

But it can’t understand FTW files. And who can blame it? FTW files are proprietary; Family Tree Maker won’t tell anyone how to read them. Of course, Family Tree Maker would be more than happy to save the file in GEDCOM—but I need to install a trial of an old version in order to do this. (It appears they no longer offer a trial version, though clearly they once did; fortunately, Grandpa had sent an old one along with the enormous file.) They only make the software for Windows. I don’t run Windows. What to do?

Enter wine, an incredible program which enables many Windows programs to run on free systems. Because the Windows API is closed, wine sometimes has trouble mimicking it well enough to make things run well (though often things run perfectly). That’s fine, for my purposes; it doesn’t have to run well, or even for any significant period of time. I’m going to remove it as soon as I’ve installed it, opened the FTW, and exported it as a GEDCOM file that a better program can use. Surely wine will be able to do that.

So I save it to my ~/.wine/drive_c directory, install the trial version, and run “wine SETUP.EXE”. Sure enough, it runs. It doesn’t run well, and it doesn’t look pretty. But it runs. It opens the heinous FTW file. And it allows me to export it to a GEDCOM file. All without any tweaking.

That 16M FTW file took a good six hours to convert to GEDCOM, but all was well in the end. I was able to import it to Gramps’s better XML format, and I can produce great reports about my ancestry in a variety of formats. We’ve got pretty iron-clad evidence of my ancestry back well over three hundred years (pretty good for a non-noble family, as we certainly were by then). Here’s a listing of them down to 1730, when the last listed was born; the various wars they fought in; and whether they were firstborn sons:

• Donald P. Goodman III (me)—firstborn
• Donald P. Goodman II—firstborn
• Donald P. Goodman—firstborn; veteran of Korea and Vietnam
• Charles Goodman—youngest son; veteran of WWI, wounded
• Samuel Goodman—firstborn; veteran of the Civil War; officer, 3rd Texas cavalry
• Claiborne Goodman—firstborn
• William Goodman
• Benjamin Goodman—firstborn; veteran of War for Independence; murdered by British soldiers after having surrendered after a long and grueling battle at Hayes Station, South Carolina

Yes, this is more than enough to get me into the Sons of the American Revolution, of which I am a member.

It’s also deeply moving to realize just how very close we are to the great events and conflicts of the past. My grandfather’s grandfather was a veteran of the Civil War. He listened to his grandfather tell stories about his heroic father, Benjamin, murdered by British soldiers. (Yes, murdered; killing in battle is not murder, but killing after a battle is.)

Furthermore, I’m struck by how closely connected I am to my ancestors in place, now that I’m officially a Virginian. (I’ve got an accent, a vegetable garden, am descended from a Confederate veteran, and enjoy little more than biscuits and gravy for breakfast followed by a lunch of chicken-fried steak with pinto beans and cornbread. What would you call me?) My most distant of American ancestors was Benjamin Goodman, most probably deported to Barbados, though he stayed there for less than a year, for some crime the identity of which is uncertain. He debarked in Maryland in 1673, then proceeded south to Virginia, specifically New Kent County along the James, where he dwelt the remainder of his life. My ancestors were Virginians for a hundred and fifty years, living in New Kent County; Hanover County; and elsewhere, and fought with Virginia in the war, until Claiborne Goodman traveled to Tennessee, and his children to Texas. And here I am, living barely two hundred miles from where my ancestors lived and worked and died so long ago. It’s quite moving.

Now, that’s just my father’s line, understand. My father’s mother was of French extraction; her line is only traced back to her grandparents, Justin Paul and Marie Berlureau, and even then only to their debarkation at Ellis Island off the St. Louis in 1908. This lack is largely due to lack of funds, time, and energy from anyone in the family to go to France and dig this information up. Perhaps one day. Until then, I’ll keep learning about my family. They are, after all, my blood.

Praise be to Christ the King!