Napoleon III, the nephew of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte, had years of experience using the telegraph and was convinced of its use in international affairs. Before America’s Civil War, Napoleon III was directing the Italian Campaign against Austria via telegraph from Paris. Having traversed the area via a secret railroad trip (also a new technology at the time), he subsequently directed the actions of his generals from his war room.

He also struck a deal with Paul Julius Reuter to transmit the text of his speech announcing the war against Austria to the London Parliament while he was giving it in Paris, marking one of the first times the telegraph was used as a political instrument. The 1859 offensive was so bloody, though, particularly the Battle of Solferino with some 6,000 dead and 40,000 injured, that not only was the Red Cross started and the Geneva Convention written, but a movement was initiated to try to harmonize international relations with the use of the telegraph.

The conference to coordinate European telegraphy convened in 1865. It consisted of some twenty European countries. Previously, several bilateral agreements had been reached between countries starting with a treaty in the 1840s between Austria and Prussia that set up a link between Berlin and Vienna.

The Treaty of Dresden created the Austro-German Telegraph Union in 1850 when Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, and Saxony agreed to coordinate their activities. In 1855, Belgium, France, Sardinia, Spain, and Switzerland formed the West European Telegraph Union. But the gathering in Paris was arguably the first veritable multilateral tradition that would pave the way for agreements to coordinate and regulate posts, railways, weights and measures, sea routes, and industrial patents.

Many delegates to the convention believed that the telegraph would lead to a new era of peace on the beleaguered continent. As they gathered in Paris, they quickly reached a consensus that coordination and cooperation were necessary. They began to examine the technical and accounting operations that would make a continent-wide telegraph system work. They also agreed on technical and accounting details. The Morse code and other specialized apparatus were quickly confirmed as European standards, despite Morse’s earlier experience of rejection when he traveled throughout Europe in the 1840s.[2]

Notes

[1] ITU quote from Armand Mattelart (2000) Networking the World: 1794-2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.7.
[2] The creation of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 1865 from Debora L. Spar (2001) Ruling the Waves: From the Compass to the Internet, a History of Business and Politics along the Technological Frontier. New York: Harcourt Press. pp.84-86.

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD was on the New York University faculty from 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global economics.

Chinese E-Commerce Group becoming a Global Power

Posted on | January 6, 2011 | No Comments

When Deng Xiaoping, the Communist leader who transformed China into state-run capitalism had his famous economic realization, “I can distribute poverty or I can distribute wealth”, he probably could not have imagined the power of the Internet and its e-commerce capabilities. Now, China’s Internet users has risen to nearly 620 million, twice as many as in the U.S. One of the earliest Chinese startups was the Alibaba Group, now considered its most dominant e-commerce player and a major force facilitating its international trade.

Jack Ma founded Alibaba.com in 1999 with 17 partners and quickly raised money from Softbank, Goldman Sachs, and other institutions to build the Alibaba.com site and brand. In a classic Internet rags-to-riches drama, Ma learned English by listening to the radio and created the company after he discovered the Internet while on a business trip to the US during the 1990s. The former English teacher and interpreter named the company after the main character in one of his favorite stories, the Arabic classic Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. For Jack Ma, Ali Baba was the kind son of a merchant who helped his village. It didn’t hurt that the name was easy to spell and a provocative name.

Since then, they have built an array of companies under the Alibaba banner, starting with Alibaba.com which was set up as a B2B (Business to Business) trading platform for small manufacturers to sell their products to each other. It has since expanded to offer a wide range of online services operating globally. Taobao.com, is the “online mall” with some 300 million customers that operates like a combination of Amazon and eBay, allowing approved sellers to auction or sell their goods outright.

Founded and owned by the Alibaba Group, Taoboa’s revenues reached US$29 billion in 2009 and are expected to grow significantly over the next few years. It deals in China’s currency, the yuan, and uses Alipay as the preferred payment platform. Alipay is an escrow-based online payment system which is owned by the Alibaba Group. The payment solution site has nearly 500,000 C2C, B2C and B2B merchants using its services, not including those on Taobao and Alibaba.

Based in Hangzhou, just inland from eastern China’s Shang Hai metropolis, the company focuses on three online opportunities:

– Using the www.1688.com site, the domestic business-to-business trade in China has been Alibaba’s financial base.

– The recent purchase of Vendio Services Inc. with its 80,000 merchants is a good indication of Alibaba’s global push. With recent funding from George Soros it brings together importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions with substantial English-literate populations. Alibaba UK focuses specifically on the retail marketplace in the United Kingdom.

– A new site (alibaba.co.jp) conducts trade to and from Japan. Yahoo Japan and Alibaba’s Taobao have connected e-commerce platforms. Yahoo Japan has opened a section in Chinese in its shopping section, carrying millions of products from China (in Japanese language) while Alibaba’s Taobao is offering wares from Japan-based companies on “TaoJapan”, a Chinese-language section on Taobao’s frontpage. Japanese telecom/media giant Softbank has a major financial interest in both Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

As the economic momentum continues to move to Asia, e-commerce will continue to be in the center. AliExpress for example, continues to position itself as a fast and increasingly reliable channel for wholesale transactions targeting small and medium-sized suppliers and buyers who all agree to conduct even very small orders. This is the future of global business. The question is, who is going to gain the most? Will it distribute Deng’s prosperity or beggar thy neighbor?

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

The Deal with Facebook

Posted on | January 4, 2011 | No Comments

Goldman Sachs’ recent $450 million investment in Facebook only intensifies the scrutiny into this social networking giant which recently surpassed Google as the most visited site on the Internet.

Goldman’s investment puts it first in line to win the lucrative deal for a future IPO of Facebook as well as manage the wealth realized by Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives that could amount to over $16 billion.

Facebook, now valued at some US $50 billion gains some valuable time to develop without the scrutiny of investors demanding to know about its finances and strategy.

An interesting sideshow is the role of DST Global, a Russian firm that invested $50 million in the deal with Goldman and has been an important Internet investor in Russia and other parts of the world. Yuri Milner, DST Global’s CEO has expressed interest in social networking business models, particularly those that can mine emerging countries with millions of people making micro payments.

Facebook, which tallied over 500 million users by mid-2010 derives its value from the people that have joined it and also its network effects. In digital media, network effects increase the value of the network as more people join it. The fax machine for example, became increasingly valuable as more customers bought a similar device and connected it into the growing network. Facebook is designed to increase the interaction between its users and allow them to share information and links. Each Facebook user now averages over 130 “friends” and offers 90 pieces of content per month.

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

E-Commerce and the Holidays

Posted on | January 3, 2011 | No Comments

By almost all accounts, it was a record holiday season for global e-commerce.

Comscore, one of the major trackers of e-commerce results recorded holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 56 days (November – December 2010) at $30.81 billion, a 13-percent increase over the same time period a year before. The week before Christmas was up 17 percent with $2.45 billion in spending.

CyberMonday, the first weekday after the Thanksgiving holidays reportedly experienced its first billion dollar day. While the day had never been a particularly lucrative one for retailers before the Internet, the increasing hype has actually made it into a major shopping day.

An IBM company, Coremetrics, reported that the individual online shopper spent an average of $194.89. This was up 8.3% from the $180.03 spent last year with richer shoppers driving the sales of luxury items up 24.3% over 2009 with jewelry doing particularly well. One trend worth watching is the use of mobile devices which were used for sales by about 4% of the digital shoppers. Some good news for employers concerned about a day of lost productivity was that shopping appeared to peak around 9am leaving employees to put in a full day’s work. Download their full report.

Factors driving the success included offers of free shipping, aggressive discounts and the ability to capture repeat sales by emailing customers from the previous year.

Projections for Asia were even higher with the Chinese expected to have a larger percentage of online shoppers buying online on CyberMonday than the US or Europe reported Retail in Asia.

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part III: NSFNET and the Atari Democrats

Posted on | January 2, 2011 | Comments Off on How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part III: NSFNET and the Atari Democrats

This is the third part of my argument about how the Internet changed from a military network to a wide scale global network of interconnected networks. In Part II I explained how the Japanese plan to create Artificial Intelligence (AI) struck fear into US policy-makers. While Part I discussed the impact of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars.” These two events invoked a policy response had propelled the development of the Internet.

Trade Deficits and Cold War II

Recapping the argument in this series, two strategic concerns sparked the transformation of the Internet from an obscure military network to a national academic/research network and ultimately a global system of communication and commerce.

In the early 1980s, the Japanese announcement of their intention to build computers capable of artificial intelligence (AI) raised concerns among the US Congress about its impact on rising trade deficits and international competitiveness. This was also a time when President Reagan was denouncing the policy of détente which had characterized the US foreign policy stance during the 1970s starting with Nixon’s trip to China and the signing of the SALT I treaty in 1972. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and amidst calls for a nuclear freeze, President Reagan instead made a dramatic and controversial announcement that the US was unilaterally pursuing an attempt to build a space-based defensive “shield” against nuclear attack called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more popularly known as “Star Wars”. These two concerns mobilized the U.S. government to take action during the 1980s to ensure that the technological edge in computerization and data communications stayed with American interests.

Taking the Initiative

Congressman and later Senator Gore was heavily involved in the 1980s sponsoring legislation to research and connect supercomputers. High-speed processors and new software systems were recognized at the time as competitive trade advantages as well as crucial components in developing a number of new military armaments, including any space-based “Star Wars” technologies. Gore, who had served in Vietnam as a military journalist, was an important member of the “Atari Democrats” and along with Senators Gary Hart, Ernest Hollings, and others; he pushed forward “high tech” ideas and legislation for funding and research. Robert Reich was also a rising star and would go to become Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration.

The meaning of the term varied but Atari Democrat generally referred to a pro-technology and pro-free trade “neo-liberal” Democrats. The term emerged in the early 1980s with the rise of Atari as a major video game producer and appeared in a number of major newspapers which linked them to the Democrats’ Greens and “neoliberals” as they discussed the tensions that emerged during the 1980s between the traditional Democratic liberals and the Atari Democrats who attempted to find a middle ground. The New York Times suggested they were “young moderates who saw investment and high technology as the contemporary answer to the New Deal.”

The NSFNET

Five centers were funded by the NSF by 1985 but it soon became apparent that they would not adequately serve the scientific community. Led by the Atari Democrats, Congress instructed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue to fund these developments so that U.S. researchers could at least maintain parity with the Japanese.

Gore produced the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 to direct the Office of Science and Technology Policy to study critical issues and options regarding communications networks for supercomputers at universities and Federal research facilities in the United States and required the Office to report the results to the Congress within a year. The bill got attached to the Senate Bill S. 2184: National Science Foundation Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1987 but it was never passed. However, the task got the attention of “The Office” and the study was conducted anyway.

The NSF took two steps to make supercomputing more accessible and in the process established the foundation for the Internet. First it convinced DARPA to expand its packet-switched network to the new centers leading to what soon was to be called the Internet. Second, it funded universities which had interests in connecting with the supercomputing facilities. In this, it also mandated the TCP/IP communications protocols and specialized routing equipment configurations. This action solidified TCP/IP as the dominant networking protocol and incidentally led to a small company coming out of Stanford University that began supplying the router equipment to universities and research centers. That company was called Cisco Systems.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2011, Jan 2) How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part III: NSFNET and the Atari Democrats. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-%e2%80%9cstar-wars%e2%80%9d-and-the-japanese-artificial-intelligence-ai-threat-led-to-the-internet-part-iii-nsfnet-and-the-atari-democrats/

Share

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

---

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, telecom policy and net neutrality, the cold war
Tags: Artificial Intelligence (AI) > Atari Democrats > Cisco Systems > DARPA > Gary Hart > Greens > National Science Foundation (NSF) > Office of Science and Technology Policy > SALT I treaty > Senate Bill S. 2184 > Senator Gore > Star Wars > Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) > Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 > TCP/IP

Two Great Debates on Net Neutrality: Cerf-Farber and Lessig-Gilder

Posted on | December 30, 2010 | No Comments

With the FCC releasing its latest rulings on Net Neutrality just before Christmas I thought I would go back to two very good debates about it. The first one at the Center for American Progress on Monday, July 17, 2006 featured Vinton G. Cerf, the creator of TCP and David Farber from the University of Pennsylvania. Vint Cerf is representing Google here but also making the case that he is speaking for a wide number of application and content providers on the Internet. David Farber, formerly of the FCC, makes the argument that the Internet is going through major changes and cautions against “hazy” legislation/regulation. The transcript can be found at The Great Debate: What is Net Neutrality?

I’ve also been reviewing some of my notes on George Gilder’s book Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance in light of recent developments on net neutrality and found this interesting debate between him and Lawrence Lessig. Gilder gained notoriety during the 1980s as one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite authors and particularly his Wealth and Poverty (1981) became a favorite of supply-siders at the time. I don’t really agree with his line of thinking but he entered a conversation about postmodern capitalism that I was interested when Jean-Joseph Goux of Symbolic Economies fame wrote a critique of his ideas which derived a significant amount from theories about expenditures, gifts, and sacrifices. He is known for his defense of Michael Milken and for his ideas about entrepreneurship.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford University and founder of the Creative Commons. His books include Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000), The Future of Ideas (2001), Free Culture (2004), Code: Version 2.0 (2006); and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008).

This debate on Net Neutrality was part of panel at the The 10th Annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference
TELECOSM 2006: The Telecosm at Ten
October 4 – October 6 , 2006
The Resort at Squaw Creek, Lake Tahoe

You might want to refer to the August 2005 Policy Statement by the FCC on Net Neutrality that is referred to in the discussion.

Things heat up a bit here when Gilder responds:

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

Category: global communications, global e-commerce, telecom policy and net neutrality
Tags: Center for American Progress > David Farber > FCC > George Gilder > Lawrence Lessig > Net Neutrality > Vinton G. Cerf

Neuromancing the Code: When IT Changed

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | No Comments

During the 1980s, a different sort of conversation about computers and data networking emerged. At the time, I was an undergraduate doing an internship researching Asian computerization at the East-West Center in Hawaii, and I remember the transition. The personal computer with its IBM clones was becoming popular, and the Apple Macintosh held most of the public’s tech attention with their associated meanings of personal empowerment and creativity.

Computers were emerging as popular artifacts for the masses and becoming more powerful each year. Information technologies (IT), in general, were going through dramatic changes and needed new languages and modes of understanding. This post discusses how the cyberpunk genre began contributing new forms of understanding to the “codes” that had linguistically determined what was called “IT.” In particular, the term “cyberspace” began circulating as a collector and conveyor of new meanings increasingly associated with the new data networks.

Concurrently, telecommunications went through a conceptual transformation. Long the linguistic domain of electrical engineers and Washington DC lawyers, the dramatic technical advances required new language and forms of understanding. Terms like telematics and informatics emerged. Both words recognized that digital technologies were changing the electronic environment, but telecommunications people preferred the former while computer people used the latter.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was also beginning to be popularized through movies like Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984). AI became a policy issue with the revelation that the Japanese were investing heavily in the “Fifth Generation” AI project. Also, it was recognized that advanced AI technologies would be needed for “Star Wars,” President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to defend the US against nuclear attack. The US response was the NSFNET, a 56K backbone network connecting supercomputers around the country. Also, it was recognized that advanced AI technologies would be needed for “Star Wars,” President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to defend the US against nuclear attack. Initially, an obscure research network called the ARPANET, with increased investment through the National Science Foundation and the concurrent mandate to use TCP/IP protocols, the connecting fibers would become the Internet.

By the decade’s later years, the notion of “cyberspace” began circulating. Its meaning varied, but the continuing developments and adoption of digital network technologies and the megacomputing abilities of the new microprocessors spurred its cultural motion.

Cyberspace was mostly connected with the “virtual reality” technologies that combined high-resolution goggles with various gloves, pressure suits, and other physical equipment to simulate the visual world and the haptic experiences associated with interacting with it. While some dial-up networking existed, it was still a few years before hypertext protocols enabled the World Wide Web, and people were unsure how interactions would occur in this new electronic environment. Cyberspace suggested at least a disruption of the traditional telecommunications environment – voice calls, emails, and television.

These simulated environments gained subcultural attention, mainly through the works of one author. William Gibson coined cyberspace to describe the electronic “consensual hallucination” that the characters in his award-winning novel Neuromancer (1984) used to participate in the networked “matrix,” another term he pioneered in his fictional narrative that posited a near-future scenario in which the new electronic spaces become dominant. He continued the exploration in two subsequent books, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

In the trilogy, “console cowboys” connect to the network by “jacking in.” Velcro-held “trodes” attached to their heads link their minds to the electronic telecommunications matrix. Somewhat like a flight simulator, the cowboy experiences a vast simulated space scattered with geometric shapes representing institutional databanks such as the “green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America.”[2] Their objective is primarily to participate in the “biz,” the combination of cyberspace and street economies of Gibson’s dystopic future scenarios.

The novels captured the spirit of the times and imagination of many of the technology-minded. Their popularity rocketed the author to special cult status, as evidenced in a cameo performance in the televised Oliver Stone mini-series Wild Palms (1993), a story roughly about the near-future use of virtual reality in the broadcast industry for political purposes. The actual William Gibson was introduced by Sex in the City‘s Kim Cattrall as the man who coined the term cyberspace. To which he replied, “And they won’t let me forget it.”[3] The scene is shown below.

As Gibson alluded in one of his short stories published in Cyberspace. First Steps by Michael (Ed). Benedikt (1993):

Assembled the word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceding any concept whatever. Slick and hollow–awaiting received meaning. All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices.[4]

In retrospect, Gibson’s articulation of electronic networks’ cultural and political dimensions seemed to have entered a discursive void where engineers, lawyers, and technocrats had dominated the only language able to talk about computers and telecommunications. Cyberspace, as a term, became a new way of conceiving the telecommunications network, one with artistic, cultural, and political dimensions. It soon rocketed to the status of a social currency.

Cyberspace, as a term, was elevated to a unique socio-economic position. As the commercial, entertainment, financial, and productive realms of diverse countries and regions began being woven together through the world’s new telecommunications grid, the term circulated as a new “symbolic third,” a type of money that found its way into discussions about IT and telecommunications. In doing so, it shined a new light on the problems and possibilities of IT. No longer just the domain of gigantic computer centers run by lab-coated technocrats, cyberspace suggested the possibilities of a new economy, a new democracy, and new ways for people to connect and maintain relationships.

Although its value deflated significantly after the Internet and its World Wide Web became popular, cyberspace terminology helped change the perception of a technological infrastructure that had been the domain of staid telecommunications (AT&T and the RBOCs) companies and Washington lawyers.

Soon, the Internet presented a new domain for cyberspace – global e-commerce. Business discourse and particularly the “dot.com” phenomenon that emerged with the WWW dominated the narrative. Cyberspace went further into the crevices of academic talk, arts, and political discourse. But it also migrated to the military where it found a new home. Cyberspace became a domain of international security.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2010, Dec 27). Neuromancing the Code: When IT Changed. apennings.com https://apennings.com/dystopian-economies/neuromancing-the-code-when-it-changed/

Share

Notes

[1] Quote from Cyberscribe. (1991) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Production. By Producer/Director Frances-Mary Morrison, Editor Jacques Milette.
[2] Part of a quote from William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer. (New York: Ace Books) p. 52. “Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.”
[3] Wild Palms was a Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. production which was aired in the US as a 6 hour mini-series the week of May 16-22, 1993. It was adapted from a long-running adult comic strip in the magazine Details.
[4] As part of William Gibson’s short story “Academy Leader,” in Benedikt, M. (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) pp. 27-29.

Share

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital economics, information systems management, and comparative political economy.

Category: books and films, dystopian economies, meaning makers, political economies in sf
Tags: Cyberspace First Steps > IBM clones > Michael Benedikt > Neuromancer > Oliver Stone > The Terminator > Wild Palms > William Gibson

« go back — keep looking »