Introduction 13
Chapter 5 chronicles the slow undoing of the OGAS between 1970 and- Neither formally approved nor fully rejected, the OGAS Project found
itself (and proposals to use computer-programmed networks to plan social
and economic resources, including those by the chess grandmaster Mikhail
Botvinnik) stalemated in a morass of bureaucratic barriers, mutinous min-
istries, and institutional infighting among a state that imagined itself as
centralized but under civilian administration proved to be anything but. By
the time that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Glushkov had died, and
the political feasibility of technocratic economic reform had passed. This
chapter frames how hidden social networks unraveled computer networks.
The conclusion reflects on and complicates the plain statement that is
the conceit of this book—that the first global computer networks began
among cooperative capitalists, not competing socialists. Borrowing from
the language of Hannah Arendt, it recasts the Soviet network experience in
light of other national network projects in the latter half of the twentieth
century, suggesting the ways that the Soviet experience may appear uncom-
fortably close to our modern network situation. A few other summary
observations for scholar and general-interest reader are offered in close.