Inclusive by Design: The Curious Case Of the Internet

Abstract

The Internet originated in a strongly hierarchical setting: the United States military. Way back in the 1960s, the Pentagon became seriously concerned about the vulnerability of its communication systems in the event of an all-out nuclear attack. It therefore commissioned a research programme aimed at ‘strike-proofing’ these systems. The answer the researchers came up with was to distribute the crucial communication functions across a non-hierarchical net, so that, like a spider’s web, it would retain its integrity even if holes were blown in it here, there and almost everywhere. To actually create such a network, a way would have to be found to get the computers to speak to one another without information having to pass through a central hub. This, as the many tellings of the Internet story all recount,¹ first happened in October 1969.