This essay was originally published in Our Friend the Computer's zine.
“In our dreams we have seen another network, an honest network, a network decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live.”
—Zach Blas, after Subcomandante Marcos, from Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism).
There have been so many internets.
The computers and networks that we have today have such a monumental aura of inevitability in how they figure our collective conscious, it is almost impossible to see around them and through them, to catch furtive glimpses of the other internets that were and might have been. The computer and the network that seem so ubiquitous today are fashion accessory, family and friend, passport, pacifier, and instrument of social control, wrapped in sleek titanium and glass. “It could never have been any other way,” our devices and software tools whisper to us, soothingly.
It has been said before, but it is worth saying again, and cannot be said enough: this aura of inevitability is an ideological construct. Going back to the late 1960s, US military-funded research in computer science consistently prioritized central command and control and automation at a distance—which, in doing so, bolstered their vison for military defense while undermining the power of organized labor. More recently, investment dollars from the US sought to “disrupt” industries on a global scale. Homegrown platforms that served well the needs of particular peoples and nations around the world were outmuscled by imported alternatives, backed by a flood of investment, that could be managed efficiently and from afar—while gathering information about far-flung users.
In short, the “inevitable” technologies of the present are the heirs of decades of corporate and military influence, and it certainly could have been different. In this context, recovering histories of the computers and internets that were and could have been is a vital task. By narrating the multiplicitous history of technology, we can better understand alternatives that might still be viable, and we might find new inspiration to go against the grain of the monolithic internet, to behave within it in ways that open up broader horizons of social possibility.
As my colleague, digital folklorist and conservation specialist Dragan Espenschied, has argued, the history of digital culture can be thought of as a kind of embodied knowledge. Forms of embodied knowledge tend to be underrepresented in official histories and in formal archives, because this knowledge is not rendered in forms that are legible to such bodies–think, for example, of a family recipe, or a traditional dance. Similarly, the experiences of digital culture can be very difficult to grasp except from the perspective of the people who lived it. The obsolete flip phone may offer little more insight into technology history than your average brick, and the real history may often be found in conversations and informal history practices – such as a podcast called Our Friend the Computer.
At Rhizome, we aim to support the narration of digital art’s history by maintaining access to the legacy digital materials – software tools, websites, digital artworks, servers – that so deeply shape users' experience of the internet and, by extension, human society. (We don’t do much with hardware, though – for that, you’d have to talk to Media Archaeology Lab). This memory work is sometimes described as nostalgic, which is a term that sounds innocuous and navel-gazing. But to support the memory of digital culture is important work. We must remember how we got here, in order to understand how to get out.
There have been so many internets. Today, there are perhaps fewer than there have been. Let there be more, tomorrow.
On April 20, rhizome hosted the zine launch in our Discord—see documentation from the online event or read the zine on Our Friend the Computer's website.