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Napster was the way I found decentralization. I was 19, and music was my symbol of freedom. But music wasnât free. Albums were very expensive and controlled by a middle-man: the record labels. Each week, Iâd go to my local record store, pay $14.99, and return home with a physical album. AÂ CD.
Centralized music distribution
Napster changed all that. In the summer of 1999, my college roommate installed the music file sharing app on my computer. Instantly, I could connect with strangers and share music freely.
Decentralized music file sharing
Napsterâs decentralization killed the middlemen, or at least significantly shrank their power.
As a result, album sales cut in half over the next decade. The world memorialized the industryâs precipitous downfall, âThe Year the Music Diesâ (Wired 2003), âThe Rise And Fall Of The Music Industryâ (NPR 2009), and âMusicâs lost decade: Sales cut in halfâ (CNNÂ 2010).
During the Napster era, I was enrolled in college as a Music Industry major. My life path changed the day I saw Napster. For me, coding, and hacking had become the new rock & roll. That fall I left my music studies, and began to study computers.
Today, thereâs a new rockstar turning heads: blockchain. Like Napster, blockchain has its own set of challengesâââspeculation, funding, regulation, censorship, etc. But these challenges arenât necessarily new. Blockchain and Napster are both just chapters in a much longer story: the story of decentralization.
Decentralization continues to disrupt global institutions, and gives life to new ones. If you understand the causes of why itâs happening you will be positioned to make wiser decisions in the future. Wisdom, as defined by Aristotle, is an understanding of the principles and causes of our knowledge. He wanted us to ask why things are a certain way.
My goal here is to show you why things are a certain way.
The story of decentralization isnât new. It begins all the way back in the Cold War. Letâs start thereâŠ
Act I: The Early Settlers of Cyberspace: 1945â1969
The first version of the internet begins with a rivalry between two superpowers from The Old World: The United States and the Soviet Union. To summarize the disagreement:
They each wanted to spread their belief system to other countries around the world. Each side was 100% certain that they were right. And they both had huge missiles pointing at each other!
This rivalry is known as The Cold War. âColdâ because it wasnât fought on a battlefield (It was fought by scientists in the lab!). And although it was called a âwarâ it was more of a raceâââa race between the U.S. and the Soviets to see who could invent the most revolutionary technology.
They were neck and neck in the race until 1957 when the Soviets pulled into first place. Thatâs the year the Soviets launched the first-ever satellite into space: Sputnik. Sputnik showed the world that the Soviets had missiles capable of reaching any part of the world. Americans were terrified, as is seen in this ad for practical low-cost nuclear fallout shelters.
Cold War Fallout Shelter ad in Popular Science, 1962
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in direct response to Sputnik, requested the funds from Congress to start two new agencies: The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Whereas NASA would send the first man to space. ARPA would bring the first taste of cyberspace to man.
The Beginning of ARPA: Washington, DC
In 1963, a man named J. C. R. Licklider (known by his peers as âLickâ) working for ARPA suggested that we create an Intergalactic Computer Network. The main gist of Lickâs argument was that for the United States to compete in the technology race we needed to double-down on computer research.Âł
The problem with computers, as Lick saw it, was that they were too expensive! One computer could take up an entire room. Lick proposed a solution called time-sharing. With time-sharing, you could have one central âbrainâ computer which could communicate with lower-cost computers. Essentially, what we today refer to as networking.
Lickâs proposed time-sharing, 1963
Lickâs suggestion was implemented, and the future intergalactic computer networking was off to a fabulous start!
Except for One Problem: Enter Paul Baran
In 1964, a guy named Paul Baran, at the U.S. government funded RAND Corporation, pointed out a deadly design flaw with Lickâs time-sharing.
Paul Baran argued that centralized communication networks are vulnerable to attack, 1964
Baran wrote a report to the U.S. Air Force where he made the argument: the U.S. government must upgrade communications from the centralized model to a newly-designed decentralized model.âŽ
If the Soviets bombed the main computer, the entire network goes down!.â”
Let me explain his thesis using friendly photos of The Muppets. This (below) is an example of a centralized network. As you can see all communications need to pass through Kermit. So if Kermit were to be attacked, then Fozzie Bear could no longer connect with Ms. Piggy.
But with Baranâs new proposal, if Kermit were to be attacked, Fozzie and Miss Piggy could still communicate!
Baranâs idea for decentralization was revolutionary. Baranâs influence would soon find its way to Lick where, together (along with a team of engineers), they would build the first version of the internet, which was known as the ARPANET.
Decentralization! Itâs Alive!
The big innovation with the ARPANET wasnât just that you could send messages. Before the ARPANET people were already sending written messages via Morse code, telegraph, and windmills (yes, windmills). With the ARPANET two computers could now send messages to each other. What was amazing was how they did it.
âThis cat, brought to you by decentralizationâ
To explain, I think it will do us some good to dive deeper into how decentralization works. Letâs start with cats.
If Kermit sends Fozzie a cute cat pic, that image is broken up into smaller pieces called packets.
An example of decentralization where a cat image moves from Kermit to Fozzie.
The packets travel along a variety of different routes: through wires, over land and sea, and eventually reassemble when they reach their destination. The cat image above is broken into only four packets, but in real practice it would be thousands of packets.
Each of the letters represents a server (aka. like a computer) between Kermit and Fozzie. In geek speak, we call them ânodes.â If node âDâ and âGâ were to fail, then the packets can just reroute through other available nodes.
If node D or G breaks down, the decentralized network reroutes the message
Declaring War on Decentralizationâââ1969 to 1999
By the winter of 1999, there were many speculative claims about the future of Napster. Everything from, âNapster is going to kill the record industry!â to âThe government is going to regulate file sharing, itâll never last.â
Ultimately, both happened. Over that next decade, the RIAA (The Record Industry Association of America) made it its mission to destroy Napster! They used their strongest weapon, money, to fund a litany of lawsuits against Napster founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Two years later, Napster officially shut down to comply.
What the RIAA didnât know is that decentralization flows like a parade of ants. Step in their way, and they naturally find a path around your feet.
Decentralization flows like a parade of ants
With Napster shut down, hundreds of Napster-copycats popped up: BitTorrent, Gnutella, Kazaa, Limewire, the list goes on. The RIAA tried to hit down each of these like a game of whack-a-mole. But they hit one down, and two more popped up!
In the decade between 2000 and 2009, the RIAA would spend $58 million dollars serving lawsuits to both founders of file sharing companies, and the individual users downloading music in their homes.
Eventually, in 2009 the RIAA ended their war against decentralization. They couldnât fight the power of the network. Somewhat ironically, the war against file sharing ended the same way the Cold War ended: Not with a climactic battle, but from exhaustion.
How Control Exists After Decentralization
The what-a-mole seems random if youâre just swinging the mallet from above. But peer down below the surface, and youâll find there is an order. Itâs not random.
If you take some time to study the machine you may start to see the pattern.
Next upâââPart Two: The Secret Code of Hackers. In the next chapter we attempt to understand the pattern by looking more closely at the the people who created it. What do Licklider (the ARPANET), Shawn Fanning (Napster), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin) all have something in common? They are all hackers. Hackers are guided by a shared code of ethics. Crack the code, and guess their next move.
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Citations and Notes
- Why The Arpanet Was Built, by Stephen J. Lukasik, September 2011. Lukasik was DARPA Deputy Director in 1967 and âthe person who signed most of the checks for Arpanetâs developmentâ In this essay he explains, âThe goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.â
- Decentralization (as a process) existed before 1969. Throughout this piece when I refer to âdecentralization,â Iâm referring specifically to digitally decentralized communication networks.
- Memorandum for: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network, J. C. R. Licklider, Washington 25, D.C. April 23, 1963. In this paper Licklider makes a case for time-sharing technology as it relates to military solutions for ARPA. âAs I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence.â
- On Distributed Communications, Paul Baran, August 1964. In this paper Baran talks about three types of networks: centralized, decentralized and distributed. For simplicityâs sake, I chose to focus on decentralization, and intentionally omitted mentioning distributed networks. Baran writes, âThis memorandum briefly reviews the distributed communication network concepts and compares it to the hierarchical or more centralized systems. The payoff in terms of survivability for a distributed configuration in the cases of enemy attacks directed against nodes, links, or combinations or nodes and links is demonstrated.â
Very special thanks to Pippa Biddle, and Alexis Rondeau for reading early drafts and providing countless insights. Shout out to the students at One MonthâââLearn to code in 30 Days for your support and inspiration.
The History of The Internet was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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