Information technologies grew up alongside nuclear technologies in the wake of the Second World War. The most obvious example of their pervasive importance is of course the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is the digital medium that everyone uses whenever they are referring to the Internet. Its emergence in the 1990s came as a result of decades of research into Cybernetics and the role of information technologies during the height of the “Cold War,” the continuation of World War II under an entirely different name.
The late 20th century saw rapid developments across many different technologies as the transdisciplinary field of Cybernetics was increasingly being explored on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The realm of information technologies reached their infancy as a viable model of Economic Governance around the Death of Bretton Woods, which was between the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was also the period of Détente when the Cold War (Read: World War II) was normalized until it finally came to an end by an official peace treaty in 1990. The computers in use between the 1960s and 1990s were unlike those which are so commonplace in the early 21st century. The older ones were massive machines that took up an entire room, their storage capacity too small and their overall Prices indicative of impracticality for everyday uses outside of government bureaucracies. In fact, it was because of those circumstances that the infamous “Y2K Bug” was allowed to become sensational enough to later pave the way for the Dot-Com Bubble.
For those who were born after 2000, the Y2K Bug was a computer error caused by the dating system relying on two-digit years rather than four-digit years. A computer prior to Y2K rarely composed the date as “MM/DD/YYYY” to generate an output of 12/31/1999 to indicate “December 31, 1999.” Again, the memory capacities of computers, particularly those that needed to store large amounts of data, were too small and too expensive to make four-digit years practical. Computer scientists in the late 20th century chose two-digit years as a stopgap measure, convinced that the affected computers would become obsolete before 2000. Their reasoning behind the use of two-digit years at the time was that, given the rapid advancement of computer and information technologies since the Death of Bretton Woods, these affected computers would be replaced by newer computers that have enough memory capacity to render the Y2K Bug ‘obsolete.’ Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning is just more of the same one-sided Liberal Capitalist thinking characteristic of having a linear perception of Life itself.
Thus, instead of “MM/DD/YYYY,” they programmed the computers to read the output for “MM/DD/YY” as “December 31, XX99.” The rollover after ‘99’, however, raises all kinds of questions. Yes, average people can figure out that the day after December 31, 1999 will be January 1, 2000, but what about the computer? Will the computer register the rollover year as “1900” or perhaps “19100” (Read: 19/00)? These flaws only became discernible by the 1990s, when the Y2K Bug was being taken seriously. Anyone who was alive then remembers the panic of this sudden realization and the subsequent push to have all computer systems “Y2K compliant.”
The WWW was already in its early years when the Y2K Bug began to receive the attention that it deserved. In a time before social media and proposals to develop near-absolute overdependency on the WWW, the “Internet-of-Things (IOT),” the transmission of information on the Internet in the 1990s was scant. Fewer people were on the Internet during those days, which accounts for why the historical record on the Internet from that period is so scarce or at risk of being forever lost. Although one could browse the old news archives from that period, there really is no Internet-only website or blog still operational whose origins can be traced back to the 1990s. What is commonly understood by most people about the Y2K Bug by average people on the Internet came from hindsight after 2000, rather than from foresight before 2000.
There is an instructive lesson to be learned from the Y2K Bug with implications related to the proliferation of disinformation and mass surveillance on social media. In essence, everyone knows how information technologies have become increasingly prominent in their own everyday lives. Anyone reading this Entry on their PC, smartphone or any other device has access to the WWW on those same devices. The greater availability and accessibility of the WWW came as a result of subsequent advancements in information technologies like WIFI and Cloud computing, allowing greater coverage for wireless devices like gaming consoles and smartphones, and enabling whole countries to become more interconnected. Like Petroleum and US Dollars, the WWW has become so commonplace that humanity somehow ‘losing’ access to it seems unfathomable for young people who grew up without any memories of life before the WWW.
The very notion of abandoning the WWW in favor of another Internet would seem outlandish for some people until they realize that this possibility was already being anticipated by governments and telecommunications firms as far back as the 1990s. Similar sentiments will no doubt manifest themselves as the Socialist Nation establishes its National Intranet and connects its digital infrastructure to another International Internet, Heliopolis. What distinguishes Heliopolis from the WWW is its ability to exhibit the characteristics of “Internet Balkanization,” an offline decentralization of the Internet into Intranets owned by their respective governments. This is already the case among the internal networks of universities, institutions, governments, and organizations. What Internet Balkanization entails is the concept of the Internet ‘splintering off into National Intranets connected to an International Intranet.’
From there, the Socialist Nation’s National Intranet can be further compartmentalized to insulate its digital infrastructure against external and internal cyberattacks, cyberterrorism and cybercrime, deterring them from affecting Financial Regime’s Mechanization Rate, the LERE Refineries and the online Tournaments of the VCS Economy and SSE. This Financial Warfare-capable feature deserves its fitting designation as “Splinternet” as it cannot be created by conventional firewalls, cyberdefenses and anti-malware software under the Political Organization Problem. The best way to comprehend its realization as a “Early Warning Cyberdefense System” begins with somebody logging onto the Socialist Nation’s National Intranet from one of three entry points: the “Clear Web” (Heliopolis or WWW); the “Deep Web” (other Intranets); and the “Dark Web” (software designed to illegally infiltrate or invade the National Intranet). The latter is where the Splinternet becomes increasingly relevant to the Y2K Bug because “Zero-Day Exploits” will also be identified by the Splinternet as entering the National Intranet from the Dark Web itself.
As computer hackers and their malware breach the Socialist Nation’s digital borders, the Splinternet is designed to limit their attacks to specific targets instead of the entire National Intranet. These targets could just as easily be decoys or traps capable of exposing their presences to other cyberdefenses. No hacker can access, let alone explore, the entirety of the National Intranet without attacking entire perimeters of cyberdefenses that become increasingly difficult to overcome before they can finally attack the LERE or even LER Processes. They will also have to navigate the digital infrastructure being split between the SSE, the VCS Economy, the Reciprocal-Reserve Banking System, and the Council State, and all four of which have their own segments of the National Intranet divided into smaller segments of networks and servers. Any suspicious activities will immediately set off the Splinternet and put the Socialist Nation on high alert.
Recent examples of this trend include the “Great Firewall” in Mainland China and the more recent “Sovereign Internet Law” passed in Russia. It is also possible that Cybersyn’s capabilities could be further bolstered by a concept like the Splinternet. Although some may find this proposal to be somewhat preposterous, malware and cyberattacks are not the only conditions tantamount to warranting the need for a Splinternet. Another challenge to the WWW’s hegemony is the widespread proliferation of trivial information, the inability of institutions, technology firms, and governments to filter the flow of information because information on the WWW grows exponentially to the point that nobody can keep track of anything. The latter has provided the impetus for the development of data mining and analytics to gather information, sort out the reliable from the unreliable, and draw conclusions based on their implications. Not to mention the common usage of search engine browsers like Google to navigate and sift through the information.
Furthermore, the Splinternet is compatible with the digital infrastructure of the National Intranet. For the International Internet, Heliopolis, its own infrastructure will be overseen by the WSO, as concluded earlier. The WWW in its current form by contrast is too ill-suited for such an arrangement due to how it was deliberately designed to ignore any and all considerations for national boundaries within the digital realm. This is because what passes as social media and “eCommerce” will assume different characteristics, capabilities and organizational structures under the Work-Standard in order to be compatible with the LERE Process. For eCommerce, rather than replacing the vast majority of offline economic and financial activities, the LERE Process promotes the integration of online activities with the offline ones. LERE Refineries will serve the means by which the Central Bank extends its Mechanization Rate to include Digital Arbeit.
The Mechanization Rate will then be capable of achieving what the Interest Rate was originally intended for, which is to control the rates at which Currency Depreciation/Appreciation vis-à-vis the Attrition/Inaction Rate, in addition to rendering the Interest Rate itself obsolete. Here, the old dynamics of Usury fades and in turn a different dynamic over the question of humanity and their technologies, which Ernst Jünger had anticipated in Der Arbeiter, emerges. The significance of the Work-Standard’s Mechanization Rate comes at a period in Western history where there are now looming questions over the future of Arbeit. A Financial Regime sets the Mechanization Rate, not the rate at which Geld is readily available, but the rate at which Arbeit is capable of being automated by the whole Socialist Nation. And as stated earlier, the Intent there is for the Socialist Nation to be capable of determining the extent of its dependency on Automation.
Categories: Compendium
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