Duncan's Reflections

Few people would deny that the Internet has changed the media by which industries like the music industry distribute product. There are jokes about how young kids today haven’t ever used a CD (and what the heck is a record?). Until this week, however, at least I did not fully appreciate how completely the Internet has transformed not just the way we get our product, but the operation of the entire industry.

It’s not just the music industry. Newspapers, books, hotels, cars, and many more industries are being turned upside-down by the unprecedented efficiency granted by the Internet. I could spend all day delving into just one of these industries, but instead I want to focus on a couple of trends that I see spanning the affected industries.

The first is that Internet companies are not looking to hire a lot of people. One of the main advantages granted by the Internet is that more can be done by fewer people. When Blockbuster turned over to Red Box in Chicago, the 1323 employees of Blockbuster turned into 7 employees of Red Box, which was offering the same service. My question in class was “where are these workers going? Even if 7 of them get retrained to be Red Box employees, what happens to the other 1326?” The answer, it seems, is that the service industry is expanding. The opening markets sometimes create jobs. Think of Uber: someone has to drive the cars (at least until self-driving cars are developed further). Many workers, however, tend to get dropped into “Do you want fries with that?” positions. This creates a hollowing-out of the middle class, with a select few able to take advantage of the new technology and many of the working class getting the short end of the stick.

The second is that Internet companies know a lot about us, and because advertising is almost exclusively how websites make money, they will use our information to show us targeted ads. Originally, I had no idea why anyone would dislike this. Google or Facebook or whoever is going to show me ads no matter what, so they might as well be things that I might actually find useful. What’s the big deal? It’s helping me and the person trying to sell to me. The question someone posed, though, is “what if they offer you a higher price because they know you have more money or want the item more?” This doesn’t sit as well with me, perhaps because of society’s ingrained ideas of economic fairness and transparency. There’s certainly an argument that in a perfectly efficient market, companies will charge you more if they can based on your situation, and you’ll negotiate a better rate if you can based on the seller’s situation. The problem is as a consumer you don’t know the seller’s situation, so the idea of negotiation and perfect efficiency seems to go out the window. It looks more like a scam, when market vendors in foreign countries charge Americans more because we don’t know what their goods are worth.

I’m not certain about much with regards to what is right and wrong here. But these definitely seem like questions we should be asking about the Internet, rather than fighting over the privatization of domain name registrations.

I have thus far neglected to mention what source material we are reading in class. Over the past few weeks, the class has been reading “Where wizards stay up late: the origins of the Internet” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It was written in 1996, so at this point it’s twenty years old, but it’s mostly a history text. It doesn’t try to make a lot of predictions about the future of the Internet, so it has aged well. If it had tried to make predictions, it probably would have failed. In general, futurology is very difficult because there are so many variables that we \don’t even consider that will affect the future in surprising ways. Thus most people who claim they have the answer are grossly overconfident.

By the way, the name of the class is “What is the Internet, and what will it become?” Which is not to say that either of my professors is “grossly overconfident”. We haven’t gotten to the “What will it become?” part, and I imagine our goal will be to explore different plausible futures and leave the matter unresolved but with a better understanding of it, not to settle on a specific future that will definitely happen.

I see similarities between this approach and our other reading for this week, “End-to-end arguments in system design” by J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed, and D. D. Clark. The authors don’t do much to promote particular ways to design systems because the nature of your approach will be altered by what you want to maximize, the limits of your hardware, etc. Instead, they raise a number of ways to think about designing systems so that you can understand the task better.

The one hard piece of advice they do give is what is now known as the end-to-end principle: basically, make the network simple and the endpoints complex. This localizes most problems, splitting up the workload and keeping the network flexible and with room to grow. In the case of the ARPANET, rather than requiring each host to learn how to communicate directly with every other host, the system only needed the hosts to communicate with their IMPs, which all spoke the same language and could easily talk to the other IMPs. The endpoints (host-IMP interaction) were complex, while the network (IMP to IMP interaction) was simple.

The end-to-end principle has specific applications, but is very general and leaves room for adaptation. This is good on the part of the authors. Recognizing your argumentative limits is very important in the world, whether it be specificity of system design principles or the uncertainty of predicting the future or other situations.

That’s all for this week. Until next week!

I left off last week with the promise that today I would get into the initial approaches to and challenges of connecting computers. Unfortunately, the class moves quickly, and I only blog once a week, so instead of getting into the hardware of connection, I’m going to talk more about the beginnings of a network community.

Even in the early days, it seems that the computing community was very free-spirited and open. For example, when it came time to write the first host-to-host protocol, Steve Crocker entitled it “Request for Comments” (RFC). It wasn’t an order handed down from on high that everyone would have to conform to. It had much more of a spirit of “Hey, we’re doing this cool thing. Want to join?” Everyone was equals, everyone could contribute, and most importantly, no one was forced into anything. RFC1 tapped into the most fundamental of human motivations: laziness. It made people’s lives better by conforming, which made them a lot happier about hopping on the train than if they were being forced to.

I find it more than a little ironic that such an open and unstructured culture could grow out of what was started as a military project. The military is a very structured, hierarchical system where you’re supposed to stay in line and do what others tell you. The networking community, with its core values of free speech, equal access, idea sharing, privacy, etc. couldn’t be further from that design.

I may upset some people by saying this, but I think there are definite problems with the environment created by the early developers of the internet. It is said that too many chefs ruin a meal, and I feel like the free-for-all atmosphere on the net of everyone having their own opinion and arguing for it passionately caused people to take sides and devolve into extremism, to the detriment of efficiency. There were huge wars about things like in which direction a computer should read the bits of an incoming message: from left to right or right to left. This conflict, called the Big Endian/Little Endian war, is frankly ridiculous. Personally, I would program computers to read from left to right, but if someone above me told me to program the other way, I’d just do it. Instead, the fact that there was no central authority meant that the Big Endian/Little Endian war carried on until people got tired. The worst part is it wasn’t even resolved. Talk about a waste of time (and I’m not even getting into “flaming”, a type of abusive dialogue thrown around on the original virtual communities like Msg-Group). Other conflicts like the header wars (about the size of headers to messages) were approximately as trivial and came to no more complete a resolution. The central authority wouldn’t need to solve everything: I think the networking culture of collaboration is amazing. And I certainly don’t approve of the inefficiency of the military, where ego creeps into power and impedes the flow of good ideas. But groups function better with some authority. This is why we have government in the first place.

Perhaps the original Msg-Group and other online communities couldn’t function with a central authority. They were groups of academics after all, and used to doing their own things with only loose structure. Still, I feel as if the openness and lack of authority was taken to an extreme, and could have been tempered by more structure.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone! My name is Duncan Rheingans-Yoo, I am a freshman at Harvard, and welcome to my blog. This semester, I am taking the course “Freshmen Seminar 50N: What is the Internet, and What Will it Become?” taught by Michael Smith and Jim Waldo. This blog, published weekly on Tuesdays, will be a reflection on both the class and my changing perspective towards the Internet. I will assume no prior familiarity with the Internet; indeed I have very little idea of what it is and how it works going into this course. However, I will not necessarily give full and complete history lessons, only some things I’ve learned and my thoughts on them.

At the dawn of time—*ahem* I mean the 50s and 60s—computers were all different and disconnected. They were certainly useful for computation, but everything was self-contained. The Internet, in its most basic conception, was about connecting these machines.

The reasons for wanting such a network are varied. One belonged to Bob Taylor. Taylor one of the first Directors of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a government-funded organization dedicated to technological innovation). He saw that as computer research became more popular, the costs were growing exponentially. Everyone wanted their own computer, and any research done on one computer had to be completely redone if another group wanted to replicate the result. Taylor saw a network between the computers as a way to cut the costs and speed the pace of innovation.

J.C.R. Licklider had a grander view. A behavioral scientist turned computer geek, Licklider envisioned a future where humans and computers were engaged in a symbiotic relationship, with computers heavily integrated into everyday life. The coupling of human and computer brains would be able to think in ways humans never could on their own and process data in ways that computers never could on their own. Establishing connections between computers would be a vital part of realizing such a future.

Paul Baran’s motivation was probably the most grounded in the politics of the time. He knew that the US communication system was fragile, and in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, the US’ ability to counterattack could be compromised. He wanted to develop a robust, reliable network that could not be easily broken down, even by total nuclear attack. There would be no way for the Soviets to attack the US and avoid counterstrike. The second part of Baran’s vision was to give such a system to the USSR so that the US would also be unable to attack freely. This would cement the political state of Mutually Assured Destruction, and reduce the risk that nuclear war would actually occur.

Donald Davies was independently doing research that was similar to Paul Baran’s, but all he was looking to do was make something cool. He just wanted to create a new public communications network where someday one person could sit down at a computer and interact with a different machine in a different location.

This reminds me of Eliezer Yudkoswky’s essay “Why Truth? And…” which outlines three reasons for pursuing truth. While truth and the Internet are certainly not the same thing, they both channel an idea of building towards something greater: better beliefs and a network of computer connection respectively. The first reason Yudkowsky gives is curiosity, which seems to align with Davies’ motivation. The second is the pursuit of a specific goal, which corresponds with Taylor and Baran and Licklider, though all of their goals were different. The third reason is morality, that truth is a moral end in and of itself that should be prioritized, which I am suspicious of (and to be fair so is Yudkowsky). Carrying the metaphor, certainly few people would prioritize the Internet as a moral end in itself.

A second thought is that the existence of so many different people with different motivations for creating the Internet was probably very necessary for its creation. We have such a bias towards the status quo that changing the way people do something is hard. Even a few years ago, people complained about the removal of disk drives from Apple computers, unable to see that they were becoming obsolete with the rise of online Netiflix and HBO. The original idea of the Internet, for its part, was met with resistance by AT&T, who said it could never work and even if it did would never be useful for anything but hardcore computer network research. Only through the concerted effort of many individuals and the necessity of such a network on many levels could something like the Internet actually come to fruition.

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. Join me next week as I talk about the initial approaches to and challenges of connecting computers!

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