Spoilers: the Soviets had an internet. It was used by the military to coordinate their nuclear (and anti-nuclear) defense systems (Peters 79). What the Soviets lacked was a civilian internet which, despite numerous attempts to have one built, never succeeded. Benjamin Peters argues that inter-agency conflict – meaning “the military, the corporation, and the [Soviet] state” – obstructed each potential path to building the Soviet internet (Peters 194). These agencies operated in a capitalist-esque state of internal “unregulated” competition for resources (Peters 2). Pushing, pulling, and elbowing each other out of the way, these agencies could not collaborate fruitfully in the creation of a civilian information network.
The motivation was there, though, and Peters’ account of the Soviet internet illustrated to me the role information infrastructures play in upholding systems of production. Specifically: the Soviets needed a civilian internet to meet the informational needs of their planned economy.
The Soviet Union followed a planned, command economy (as opposed to the decentralised, market-driven economies used in the capitalist West). The command economy meant that decisions around allocation of resources, production targets, and factory planning all occurred at higher bureaucratic levels. Factories reported to higher governmental organs, who coordinated economic life through a centralised planning system. Or, so it would work in theory. In reality, managers fudged numbers at every level of reporting, and ‘gamed’ the system accordingly. This is not to say that planners had no idea what was actually occurring at plant level, but that they were working with incomplete, often falsified data that was manipulated as it moved upward through levels of reporting.
Although Western propaganda enjoys depicting the Soviet Union as a dictatorial, hegemonic state with unflinching top-down control, this vision of a centralised and strict power operating with perfect information and ensuring total adherence to its whims is pure fantasy. Rather, Peters highlights the “nonlinear command and control [and] informal competition” endemic to the Soviet command economy (Peters 57).
Various theorists hoped that an internet could make this planning process more rational, efficient, and productive for the socialist state. They felt this way because it was immanently clear to Soviet economists that poor information flows obstructed effective planning at every level of economic decision-making. A civilian internet could allow for direct coordination between the factory and the central planning body: which would also mean direct reporting and decision-making. Specifically, Soviet cyberneticist planners wanted to use “decentralized computational and market mechanisms… to solve the incentive problem in a way that no factory would have a reason to act against the wishes of the center and the center would have no reason to compel the factory to act” (Peters 70). In other words, some planners thought it might be possible to create an internet and use algorithms and other computer programs to allocate resources logically. In doing this, they hoped to solve the central problem of any socialist command economy: ensuring factory compliance to the official economic plan peacefully and consensually.
I was rocked when I read this text, because it reminded me of the exact problems Socialist Yugoslavia faced when attempting to coordinate its non-market economy. Susan Woodward, in her masterful account of Yugoslavia’s political economy, pointed to this exact process wherein the central party and planners attempt to use market mechanisms to elicit workers’ consent in the socialist labour process (Woodward 261).
Seeing this parallel led me to ask: what role did information infrastructures play in Yugoslavia’s attempts to build a socialist economy? How did the Yugoslavs try to use information infrastructures within their own planning and decision-making systems?