From Network to Patchwork 99
the relations between people, but also in the interactions between man
and machine, as well as in the life of any organism.” He continued, “with
the enhancement of economic, technical, and cultural levels of society, the
amount of information necessary to collect, transmit, and somehow pro-
vide for all functions of the community of people grows faster and faster.
No organized form of activity is thinkable without information exchange.
Without information, planning and governance are impossible.”
Backlit by the stated universal need for information, Kharkevich justified
the network proposal by citing the “prominent system ‘SAGE’” computer
system in the United States and Canada as a parallel to his vision of a nar-
rowly applied, universal information system for antiaircraft defense. The
top of his pyramid, ESS network design, was meant to “fulfill the func-
tion of the dispatcher of the network,” or “the center will be constituted
by a large group of specialized calculating-logic machines, appointed for
the direct resolution of the many changing conditions of one single task:
the supply of increasingly favorable conditions for the appointment of all
currency flows of information.”^48 The Soviet Union did need not to stop
at antiaircraft defense, he said, concluding his “grandiose thought” of an
all-reaching, full-service ESS network with the observation that “creating
an all-state unified system of connection ... would only be possible in a
socialistic government under the conditions of a planned economy and
centralized government.”^49
Kharkevich’s article is remembered among some technologists today not
for proposing the ESS but for formulating what became known as Kharkev-
ich’s law. This law holds that the quantity of information in a country grows
proportionally to the square of the industrial potential of the country (N^2 ).
The original formulation of his observation in the article is perhaps less
elegant than information technologists might remember: “Given a large
number of factories, the number of paired links between them is approxi-
mately equal to half of the square of the number of factories.”^50 The law,
in effect, prophesies a power law connection at the macro level between
an industrial society and an information society. In 1965, the American
computer businessman Gordon Moore expressed a distinct exponential law
that has applied to the microscopic level of the compounding growth of
silicon chip production—that the number of transistors on an integrated
circuit doubles every two years (2N).^51 Both men foresaw in 1962 the emerg-
ing information sector or what Austrian American economist Fritz Machlup
called “the knowledge economy.” For Kharkevich, the amount of informa-
tion that a society processes can be expressed as a power law function of
the industries it contains, and for Moore, the amount of information that a