Legends of the Ancient Web

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This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.

Legends of the Ancient Web

Possibly my favorite technical work is a book that predates information technology by 2300 years, the Book of Ecclesiastes.

If you're not familiar with it, Ecclesiastes is a rant by an angry, elderly atheist that through some editorial oversight found its way into the Bible.

It is full of wisdom about technology, and how it interacts with human folly.

The author of Ecclesiastes had this to say about technological progress:

"There is no remembrance of the former generations; neither shall there be any remembrance of the latter generations that are to come, among those that shall come after."

Today I want to talk about one of those forgotten generations, secure in the knowledge that no matter how bad my talk, it won't be remembered.

I want to talk about the political history of radio.

If you didn't know radio existed, the whole thing would sound like a bunch of pseudoscientific hokum.

So-called "radio waves" are invisible, transmit energy, easily penetrate matter, including stone walls and human bodies, and can be heard hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away if you prepare the right occult configuration of metal wires.

Right.

Radio was predicted in 1864 by James Clark Maxwell, who showed that a wiggling magnetic field could conjure up a companion electric field, and that the two would kind of egg each other on and sustain each other, propagating away at a constant speed.

That speed just happened to be the observed speed of light. This was too much of a coincidence for Maxwell, who (correctly) posited that light itself must be an electromagnetic phenomenon.

In 1886, Hertz demonstrated that these mutually sustaining waves were real, and could be detected. For a long time they were called Hertzian waves in his honor. (Asked about a practical use for radio, Hertz said "it's of no use whatsoever".)

In 1895, Marconi built the first practical radio system, which could transmit and receive bursts of noise over a short distance—a wireless telegraph.

Like the Internet, radio technology was on the horizon for a long time before it arrived, and it arrived in a rudimentary form that didn't strike anyone as a qualitatively new technology, let alone one that could upend politics.

The world that radio arrived in already had ways to communicate in real time over long distances—telegraphs and telephones. It wasn't clear at the outset that Hertzian waves could be detected at distances much greater than a few hundred meters, let alone that they might become a practical method to transmit the human voice.

At best, they might prove a useful method for detecting lightning at a distance, or communicating with ships at sea.

The world that radio was born into had a group of telegraphy enthusiasts who ran their own little networks, the Usenet of their day. And there was also an assortment of thriving small-scale telephone networks, including rural ones where the telephone wires were run over barbed wire fencing, connecting thirty or forty farms on a circuit.

Some of these people became the first radio "hams"—amateur hobbyists.

The first radio sets used a spark gap and could only send buzzing sounds, so people communicated in Morse code. This was the "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" period of amateur radio. Some intrepid women who found a way to make and operate a set enjoyed the freedom the pseudonymous radio subculture of the time offered them.

We forget how complete the isolation was in rural areas in the days before mass media. Many of the most active radio enthusiasts lived out in the sticks, a dynamic that comes up again and again with new communications technologies.

Over time, the range of these devices improved to where they could cover dozens of kilometers. People also learned how to amplify radio signals. The Navy became seriously interested in wireless sets as a military technology, and made them mandatory on ships.

An article about how early radio hobbyists created headaches for the Navy conveys some of the flavor of this era:

"When the wireless telegraph operator at the Portsmouth Navy Yard tried, a week ago last Saturday, to reach the fleet that was returning from its voyage around the world, he was able to catch only a single message, and that was from the cruiser Yankton a thousand miles in advance of the other ships.

The trouble was that the air was full of unimportant electric messages sent by young amateur operators in the region of Boston. The number of such amateurs who are experimenting with this new form of telegraphy is surprising; and their feats are interesting and picturesque.

One boy, for example, in a New York suburb, has a wireless installation which is practically entirely the work of his own hands. In the evening or after school hours he often sits at his...