While it is common today to view computer technologies as a product of capitalism created with the backing of the Pentagon, back in the USSR of the 19

A Lost Cyber Utopia: What Happened to the Soviet Internet? — Strelka Mag

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2021-05-30 09:00:08

While it is common today to view computer technologies as a product of capitalism created with the backing of the Pentagon, back in the USSR of the 1960s some scientists and engineers saw computers as “machines of communism” and put forth their own vision of a global information network.

In her sci-fi video project After Scarcity , Iranian artist Bahar Noorizadeh tracks Soviet cyberneticians of the 1950s–1980s in their attempt to build a fully automated planned economy. Presenting this as an alternative history, she looks at the economic potential of socialist cybernetic experiments and their power to challenge contemporary financial worldview.

In search of alternative narratives of the future, more and more artists, speculative designers, and researchers from around the world are turning their eyes to the history of Soviet cybernetics. “How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias?” she asks in her film.

On one hand, this allows us to think about how this alternative internet could have changed the course of history. What would the Communist Party and the Soviet military have used the new technology for? Would the Soviet internet have created digital tyranny? Having its own internet, how would the USSR have responded to the drop in oil prices, Perestroika, and Glasnost? And how would the USSR have looked at the turn of 1991? How would the Cold War have unfolded if the internet as we know it had been rivaled by a Soviet alternative since the 1960s?