Where did the internet come from? Who gets left out of dominant stories about its origins? And what can history teach us about how to make the internet better?
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View a list of discussion questions related to this episode here.
Our guests
- Charlton McIlwain is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
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Annie Galvin, this season’s host, is the associate editor at Public Books and a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and her academic and public writing has focused on contemporary global fiction, visual culture, gender and sexuality, and popular music.
Episode notes
In our first episode, two leading scholars of internet history delve into the stories you might not have heard about where the technology came from. Yes, DARPA and IBM played formative roles, but what about back-to-the-land hippies in the 1960s, or a sprawling network of African American engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts who helped develop and popularize the web? And how did major decisions about the early internet’s design and usage lead to some of its problems today?
View a transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned in this episode
- Fred’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
- Charlton’s book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
- Scholars: JoAnne Yates, Mar Hicks, Nathan Ensmenger, Lisa Nakamura
- Charlton’s research on activism online and offline
- Fred’s articles and interviews in Public Books
Further reading
Charlton recommends:
- Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019)
- André Brock Jr., Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020)
- Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2018)
- Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)
Fred recommends:
- Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019)
- Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996)
- Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017)
This episode was produced by Annie Galvin and Jess Engebretson and is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0). 