HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner,
your host on The Open Mind.
When considering the
advent of the internet, and
the social or
anti-social media complex,
we think of
names like Gates,
Jobs, Zuckerberg,
Page, Brin.
Our guest today, Claire
Evans confounds the single
gendered understanding
of the net's founding in
chronicles of the unsung
women who blazed
the trail, who made
the internet.
The book is Broad Band.
Just published by
Penguin Random House.
A writer, musician,
and founding editor
of Terraform, Vice's
science fiction vertical,
Evans has published
widely in The Guardian,
Wired, and
National Geographic.
The intellectually rigorous,
colorfully profiled women
include Ada Lovelace,
who envisioned a
groundbreaking computing
technology, Grace Hopper,
the mathematician who
invented a post-World War
Two programming language.
Elizabeth Feinler, an
internet administrator
of the nascent web.
Stacy Horn, the
developer of a precursor
to the Twitter/Reddit
message board.
And Jamie Levy, who
created the pre USB floppy
disc, and published
electronics magazines.
Claire will explore the
rich history of Broad Band,
and consider
the stakes for both the
citizen and women in
the technological age.
Welcome Claire.
EVANS: Thank you.
Nice to be here.
HEFFNER: Congratulations
on this book,
I know it's been a feat of two
years in the making, right?
EVANS: Thank
you very much.
It feels funny,
but I'm happy.
HEFFNER: What was the
most compelling anecdote
among the women.
Now you had the
opportunity to go
into the archives of
these pioneers.
What did you find
that most struck you?
Was there one
particular person, ultimately?
EVANS: That's a
big question.
I mean I think what
I found to be really
remarkable
about this history,
and really a lot of
technology history
is this way, where it's
really not about
individual accomplishments.
It's not about the one person
who invented the one thing.
The internet is
an interconnected,
you know, experience
that we all share,
and its development
is much the same way.
It's the consequence of
concerted collaboration
it's driven by the desires
and anxieties and fears
and very human foibles
of every single person
that was involved.
So I think sort of the
discovery of the somewhat
haphazard,
intensely human,
intensely interconnected
nature of the internet's
genesis, I think is the
thing that fascinated
me the most about
all of this.
It made me feel as though
there was nothing really
inevitable about the internet as
we have it today.
HEFFNER: What most
resonated with you
thematically in terms of
these women's' pursuit
of technological
advances? What can we relate to?
EVANS: Well, something
that I find to be quite
remarkable, is if you're
looking for women in the
history of technology,
the history of computing
or networked
computing, or the web,
a lot of the time, where
you end up finding them,
or when I ended
up finding them,
was concentrated at the
very beginnings of major
technological waves.
So, for example, the
invention of computer
programming is
something that is,
I think, squarely in
the hands of women,
who were hired to
essentially patch cables
on the earliest computers.
And they were hired
in the sense that,
you know they were, they were
like secretaries, or operators.
They were like
telephone operators.
They were manipulating
the menial hardware.
It wasn't considered to be a job
of any significance really.
It was considered to be
sort of an afterthought,
sort of a clerical job.
And yet the moment they
put their hands to it
and their minds to it,
they realized how much
possibility there was.
How actually the way that
you would put information
into a machine, and the
way that you process it,
and the way that you
design efficient systems
for doing so,
can actually,
you know,
change the world.
It's an art form of its
own, it's a language of its own.
And so its only when
programming became seen
as something of value,
something important after
the dedicated work of a
large number of female
computer programmers,
that it was sort of,
it was given its
own status that was
commensurate with the status of
engineering or hardware.
And then of
course, perhaps,
that's the moment at which
women lost grasp of the field.
And that happens, that's
happened again and again.
And you see that at the
beginning of every major wave.
At the beginning of
sort of thinking about
organizing information
and networked computing,
that was a space where
women thrived and worked.
The beginning of
online communities,
the very earliest waves
of interactive media
and publishing on the
web, all of these spaces
were spaces where
women thrived.
Partially I think that's
just because there were
places that perhaps were
taken less seriously by
the computer
science community,
because things like
hyper-text and online
community and you know
information management.
Those things were seen
as being on par with the
social, social sciences.
They were sort of
softer than classical
programming, and those
user-oriented spaces are
places where people
could get a toehold
if they didn't necessarily
have a rigorous education
in computer science.
And hadn't managed to make it,
you know all the way up
the channels of academia.
A woman could still find
a way to contribute
and participate in those,
in those early periods.
So, it's a lot of
innovation in the sort
of dusty corners,
underappreciated areas
at the beginning of
every technology.
And I think a lot of
that is also just,
when there's no, when
there's no precedent,
when there's no
canon, when there's no
establishment
quite there yet,
new technology actually
affords a lot of freedom
for people to define
what it's going to be.
And it's only then after
it's been defined
that it begins to take on an
outsize role in society.
HEFFNER: Well the one
established hierarchy was
the social construct.
Then and maybe now
too, of male dominated
professional
development if you will.
But one thing that struck
me is you identify
the first ever advertisement at
the beginning
of the book for a computer.
But it wasn't necessarily
a computer to an
individual to compute.
EVANS: Yes, yes.
Before a computer was a
machine, it was a job.
And it was a job that
was practiced primarily
by women, the job of computing.
Performing computations.
Because you know in the
early days of organized
science, if you wanted to
get, you know, large numbers of,
large amounts of
computation done for,
for example, you know
determining the arc of a,
of a planet, or maritime
calculations or ballistics
calculations, things that
involve a lot of math,
you couldn't just run
that through a machine,
you had to have, you
had to do the math.
You know, you had to
actually do the math.
And the people that
actually did the math
were groups of women working in
computing offices in the
18th and 19th century
and they did much of the,
you know, of the rigorous
grunt work of science for,
you know, for much of
the, of the beginning
of the scientific age
and essentially,
eventually replaced
themselves with the
machines that do
that job today. But, yeah.
HEFFNER: Has Google done doodles
for any of these women?
EVANS: I'm pretty sure
Google's been pretty good
about doing doodles.
HEFFNER: I think
they have right?
EVANS: I mean they have
365 days a year to cover,
so there's
plenty of people.
I know there's been,
there's definitely
been a Grace Hopper
google doodle,
certainly an Ada
Lovelace Google Doodle.
HEFFNER: I did a little
research and found
that a few of them
were covered.
But Lovelace is
the starting point,
right, in terms of
translating the computing
into some knowledge that could
be developed mechanically.
EVANS: Mhmm.
HEFFNER: But for those
who don't know anything
about her, can you share with
our viewers?
EVANS: What a
fantastic character.
I mean she is one of
those people that is
often trotted out as well here's
the original foremother
of all computing.
And it's I think an
uncontestable truth.
She, she wrote the first
computer program before
computers in the
mechanical sense existed.
She was the daughter of
the poet Lord Byron a
member of you know
Brit—the Victorian
Aristocracy, she was
married to the Count
of Lovelace, she was an
Aristocrat in the days
of you know high
society in London.
And she
absolutely hated it,
you know she never
wanted to be that.
She wanted to be
a mathematician,
because she was
obsessed with mathematics.
Her mother had instilled
in her from a very young
age a love of mathematics,
mostly because her mother
wanted to keep her
father's romantic
tendencies sort
of out of the mix,
because Lord Byron was
famously kind of a louche
character and you know
he divorced Ada's mother
after only a few years in
order to pursue an affair
with his half-sister.
Anyway that's, that's
historical gossip but Ada
grew up in a household
where mathematics and
science were valued
because they were seen as
being kind of the
opposite of poetry.
And unfortunately she,
for her mother anyway,
Ada had a romantic mind,
and she saw mathematics
in its highest form as
a form of poetry.
As something that had
profound metaphysical
value that could really
change the world and
articulate beautiful unseen
mysteries of the universe.
And so she threw herself into
mathematics her whole life.
And when she
was 19 I believe,
met Charles Babbage,
who was the creator
of a machine called
the difference engine,
which was a very very
early computing machine.
And really a machine in—in
that sense of the word.
It was made of, you know
bits of steel and brass.
It was very sort of
steam-punky by today's
standards aesthetically.
Designed to calculate, you
know mathematical tables
for the
British government.
Nobody understood how it
worked and ultimately it
was never finished,
because it was far too
ahead of its time, but
she was really entranced
by it, and became Babbage's sort
of diplomat in a way.
He was a difficult
character and not very
good about articulating
his ideas to the masses
and she believed in
what he was doing,
and so she wrote the notes
that would eventually
explain how his machines
worked to the rest of the world.
She was an
advocate for him,
she created mathematical
proofs that could be run
on his machines that
formed the basis of
computer programming
as we know it today.
So, really a
remarkable character.
Ultimately she had kind of a
tragic life, she died young.
The same year as her father had
in her mid-30s of cancer.
Which, in those days everyone
thought was just hysteria.
Classic sort of feminine ailment
of the Victorian age.
But she articulated the
aspirations of software.
A century before anyone
really understood what
that would mean.
HEFFNER: We do think of
the technological advances
not through the lens of a,
of a gender neutral order.
We think of kind of the names
that have been lionized or,
EVANS: I think it's
a couple of things.
I mean, the things that
our culture tends
to value in
technological innovation,
and you know I think
this is the consequence
of a lot of marketing and
also just perhaps our
capitalist
society, but, you know,
the heroes that we look
at that you mentioned
at the top of the show,
the Jobs the Zuckerbergs,
these are people that
either built physical
machines, like Steve Jobs,
like created hardware
that has a sort of lasting
presence in the world
because of its
literal physical presence.
Because it's—because
things are easy to point
to and say, this is an
object that has meaning.
This is an object you
can put in a museum.
This is an object you can,
that fills landfills
with its, with its mass.
And this, because, because
computer hardware is sort
of defined by its
continuous obsolescence
and the fact that we
constantly have to replace
it with more
material hardware.
You know it's a lot easier to
look at that stuff
and the people that
create that stuff
as being significant because
they're actually making
like a physical
impact on this world.
They're mining rare metals
and putting them into
boxes that we
put in our homes.
Software, which is what
a lot of the women in my
book at least
are—were responsible for
articulating, is much
more sort of mutable
and strange, and it doesn't
have a physical presence
in the same way,
and it you know,
software isn't preserved,
really with the same kind
of fastidiousness as
hardware is preserved.
We don't think about
software in the same ways.
It's much more difficult
to point to and say,
you know this is important,
because it's so ephemeral.
That's one thing.
I think the other thing
is the sort of fantasy,
the Silicon Valley fantasy
of serial entrepreneurship.
The fact that we
value people that start
companies that develop
massive user bases,
and then sell their
companies to other
companies to
start more companies,
or who IPO and make a lot of
money and leave the industry.
This, the sort of much
more entrepreneurial
focus, which is also very
masculine I think those
are the things that
we seem to value as a
society: things and money.
And things that make money.
But I don't know, what I admire
most about some
of the women in this book is
that they have a much more
sort of concerted
interest in supporting
the existence of the
platforms and the software
and the things
that they create.
That it's about developing
a platform and then taking
care of it, and
then maintaining it,
and sometimes
that's not glamorous,
and that doesn't make
you a lot of money,
but maybe you actually
have much more of a
significant impact on
individual people's lives
because you're building
something with value
that has an application
to a real community.
HEFFNER: Absolutely. And I
think it's the absence of that
underpinning, of nurturing
the knowledge-based system
that plagues web 2.0,
3.0, whatever it is now.
EVANS: Yeah.
HEFFNER: And someone like
Elizabeth Feinler who you
know thought, conceived
of an administrative way
that we should think of the
internet and the digital
analogy as a storage
house of knowledge, right?
EVANS: Feinler's an interesting
character for sure.
I mean she was... I mean
the earliest version
of the internet as we know it,
was called the ARPANET,
it was developed by the
Department of Defense.
It was designed for people
in the academic computer
science community to use
resources at a distance.
So there were obviously
not a ton of women
in that world, because we're
talking about the highest
echelons of engineering
and computer science
and the military.
Not very, you know,
HEFFNER: Right.
EVANS: Predominately male
dominated environments
for all the reasons
that we know.
But, there were women
involved in the ARPANET
in this sort of, again,
sort of secretarial
afterthought
kind of capacity,
which ended up becoming a
really important capacity.
Jake Feinler was
one of these women.
She ran what was called
the network information
center, or the NIC, which
was the primary central
office for the internet.
For the ARPANET.
Which sounds like
nothing, but really,
if you're thinking about
the earliest version of
networked computing, there
was no interface by which
computer scientists could
discover what resources
were available to
them on the network.
They had to know, you
know if they wanted
to use a computer, if a
computer scientist at MIT
wanted to use a machine
in Berkeley, they had to
know what was on that
machine in Berkeley.
HEFFNER: Right.
EVANS: And who
was running it,
and when it
would be online,
and when it
would be accessible,
and the only way they
could do that was by
calling this
office, the NIC,
and saying, you
know, hey Elizabeth,
what's, what's up with
that machine in Berkeley,
can I use it and when?
And she would have
all the resources.
So she knew what
everyone was doing,
everywhere on the network.
And anytime somebody
wanted to add a machine
to the network, they
had to call her office
and make sure that all
the protocols were right,
make sure that they had all of
their paperwork straight.
And she would assign them
a space on the network.
So she was the
administrator of space.
Of host, of the host
table it was called,
like the host table was
a sort of index of all
the host computers.
She knew everybody, you know,
and she kept the,
the yellow pages and
the white pages of the
early internet together.
Which were originally
print documents,
but eventually became part
of the network itself.
So for 25 years there
was a phone at the NIC
that was the phone
number for The Internet.
And if you had a question
about the internet,
you called that phone, and
she answered that phone,
and her staff answered that
phone for two decades.
And she knew before
anybody that you know
the real significance of
this network wasn't going
to be about sharing
computing muscle
for you know
engineering projects.
It was going to be that it was
an information network.
And it was something that
was gonna connect people
with one another.
HEFFNER: What can we
learn about these women,
Feinler and others, in the way
that they had hoped to
direct digital technology and it
hasn't gone their way.
It hasn't gone in
that direction.
EVANS: I mean there's
lots of forces at play
that are beyond just individual
contributions, but, you know...
First of all we
should make a
distinction between
the internet and the web
because that's a
very common thing.
The internet is the
infrastructure that
underlies the web.
The web is a visual platform
built on top of the internet.
And they're
quite different.
The internet was developed
by computer scientists.
The web was developed by
physicists and computer
scientists, and
they both, the,
I mean the great
similarity between the two
is that they both immediately
exponentially grew.
Because people, whenever
people are connected,
they want to
continue connecting.
Whenever two
machines are connected,
people are using it to
send emails to each other,
or send messages
to each other,
or connect
with each other,
because we are tribal,
we are social beings.
We love to connect with
each other over distance.
But there are many things
about the experience of
the early internet and the
early web that sort of,
it's limitations are what made
it interesting I think.
I mean, if you were using
dial-in online services
in the late 80s
and early 1990s,
there was a sort of geographical
fencing that would happen.
Because it would be
more expensive to call,
for example, a bulletin
board system on the west
coast if you were
on the east coast,
than it would be to dial
into a system locally.
So people tended to, even
though they were using
the network to connect
with each other,
there were a lot of
smaller communities
that were isolated from
one another and were
localized, and were rooted
in local environments.
You would be interacting
with people that you stood
a chance of
meeting in real life,
that you might, you
know personally in fact.
And that I think is a very
interesting lost part of the
internet.
The fact that people used
to be able to connect
with one another
without anonymity.
Like that they
knew each other.
And they stood the
chance to know each other.
And perhaps when we start
dealing with a network
where everyone is on
equal footing globally,
it's very difficult to
be responsible for what
people are going to
do, and what people,
how people are going to
behave with one another.
There's much less
accountability and
ultimately I think
that's what drives some
of the darkest corners.
Although to be
honest, there's been,
there's been bad actors online
since the very beginning.
You look at one of the
people I chronicle in the
book, Stacy Horn who
started a online community
in New York City
in the late 80s,
she had Nazis,
she had trolls,
she had stalkers,
she had all kinds of,
all, everything that we
have today, she had.
A smaller scale of
course, but it's all,
it's, all the good and
the bad come together,
and always have, so
I think it's...
HEFFNER: But they
were not empowered
EVANS: They were not empowered
in the same way, of course.
And, and the
administrators of a
platform like Echo had
the ability to just say,
hey get out of here.
Like you're, you're
fired you can't be
on this network anymore.
'Cause things
were more localized.
HEFFNER: So what kind
of solutions did they
foresee, or do you,
channeling their creative
energies, foresee.
We were talking a
bit off-camera,
I said I don't even wanna
use the word ecosystem
anymore as it
pertains to digital.
Because it's been
cannibalized by parasites
and we really question
whether or not there is
something living that can be
nurtured anymore on the web.
EVANS: I mean, I think a lot of
it comes down to money.
I mean a lot of the people
that build these early
versions, I mean the early
internet was built for
academics.
And it wasn't
about profit,
it wasn't about creating
commercial platforms.
The earliest online
communities were made
for the love of it,
really, I mean,
you people, people
dialed in and paid
for the privilege of doing so,
but it wasn't something
that anyone was getting
rich doing and earliest
contributions to the web
were done for the fun of
it by people who were
excited by the medium.
I think you know efforts
to try to understand how
to monetize these
platforms have ultimately
led us down a
very dark path.
If you look at the
earliest web publishing
experiments for example.
When people first started
publishing magazines on
the web, they thought they
were gonna get rich right
away, because people
paid money to subscribe
to magazines, and if you
had a magazine online,
you wouldn't have to
actually warehouse print
issues of magazines,
that you could just sell
subscriptions infinitely
to something ineffable,
and that would be like,
you'd be making money hand
over fist because you
wouldn't have to actually
print magazines, you
would just put them
on the internet and you could
sell subscriptions forever
and never run
out of magazines.
And so that was, that
was the original sort of
delusion about what, you know
how people would make money
online.
Then it became very clear
that the amount of free
content on the internet
was gonna make that
impossible as
a proposition.
So then it became about
advertising, selling ads
online.
You know, people
sold ads online,
made a lot of money, ultimately
that didn't quite get there.
So now we're in a
place where we've sort
of hybridized community and
publishing by selling you
know, user demographic
data to advertisers about
the users on a community. It's
a weird way of existing.
That you're sort of
monetizing by exploitation
of the community that
you're trying to serve.
I mean it's like... they
always say if you're not,
you know, if you're not
paying for the service
you're the product.
And that's the tricky
thing about life online
now, is you're always
being sold to or sold.
It's, how can you build a
healthy ecosystem that way?
HEFFNER: Right.
Right. Right. Well
it's not a
mystery to me,
Claire, that the three
women executive directors
of Wikipedia who
have appeared in,
where you're sitting,
have stewarded a more
knowledge-based internet,
and it's not a mystery
to me that the woman
executive director and
chairperson of the
Mozilla corporation,
these people who really
are at the helm
of what I like to call the
Good Samaritan Internet,
they're women.
EVANS: Yeah. Yeah.
I mean Wikipedia
is a great example.
Whenever people ask me
about you know what part
of the internet
I like today,
or I see sort of
commonalities between
contemporary usage and
the sort of earliest
aspirations of
cyber culture,
Wikipedia is one of them.
Because that's
really about the sort
of collective
pursuit of knowledge,
which was the, which was
the point of it all to
begin with, wasn't it?
HEFFNER: Right.
And is there some
inspiration you hope your
readers, take away
in their pursuit,
or application
of technology?
Of course the women who
have led Wikipedia are
stars and Firefox is
the one example of a
non-profit browser
that won't monetize your
privacy or personal data.
EVANS: Mhmm.
HEFFNER: What is your
hope from the reader's
perspective, that this may
lead them to some kind
of further pro-social,
EVANS: I mean for me, the hopes,
I have several hopes.
[LAUGHS] I want to believe that
a better internet is possible.
I think it is. I think part of
allowing people to sort of let
that possibility into their
spirits is understanding,
you know, that a better
internet could have been
possible if we
had just taken,
made a few different
decisions in history.
That's the thing that
blows me away about this
history is that, there are
so many kind of parallel
futures that you can
see in these stories,
like if for example, the
early hyper-text systems
that were
developed by women,
that were eventually
displaced by the web,
if those had taken
the place of the web,
what kind of world
would we be living in?
A different one.
And those are just,
you know—
HEFFNER: What would
it be, look like?
EVANS: Who knows but...
HEFFNER: Just for our viewers
who are not as familiar with the
lingo,
what would be the
qualitative difference,
in the, in the minutes
we have left. Seconds.
EVANS: The way
that, yeah, so the,
okay I'll try
to jam it in.
So the way that
the web works is,
it's built around the
concept of links, right?
Which that's
what hyper-text is,
it's the convention of
linking ideas together.
But before the web became
the hyper-text system
that we all know and
love, there was,
there was a decade of
research of being done
about how best to approach
this question of turning
data and information
into practical knowledge,
useful knowledge, how
to create connections
within it all that
would be practical
and applicable to
human life.
It was pretty much agreed
within those communities
that links should
always go two ways,
that if you
connected something,
you should be able to connect
back to where you came from.
And that links
should be not contextual,
not embedded in
the documents,
but this larger kind
of meta-information.
Because the connection
between two ideas is as
valuable a piece of
information as the
individual ideas
themselves, right?
Knowing what brings,
knowing what connects two
things is a very useful
piece of information.
It's meta
information, essentially.
And following a
thread like one would
on a Wikipedia deep-dive where
you go from one link
to the next, following a
thread through a series
of historical periods,
ideas, movements,
concepts, is an
incredibly valuable thing.
And sharing that thread with
other people is valuable, so,
HEFFNER: The
alternative though,
EVANS: The alternative,
HEFFNER: Would have been
something, perhaps, more
contextual?
EVANS: No well, if we
had gone with the way
that people understood
hyper-text to work in
those days, instead of
the way we built the web,
we would not ever
have a broken link.
We would never
have a 404 Error.
If a website today
disappears or it's moved,
or it's hidden
behind a pay-wall,
that, whatever links to it,
that link becomes broken.
So that piece of
information is gone.
And that is, I think a
huge loss to our culture
and to our, to our, you know,
the knowledge of humanity.
So these earlier systems
were designed in such a
way that that
would never happen.
So perhaps we would have
a sort of more holistic,
more information-driven, more
humane kind of conventional,
HEFFNER: More humane.
EVANS: More humane.
That's the goal.
HEFFNER: Thank you Claire.
EVANS: [LAUGHS]
HEFFNER: I appreciate you
being here with me today.
EVANS: Thank you
for having me.
HEFFNER: And thanks to
you in the audience,
I hope you join us again
next time for a thoughtful
excursion into
the world of ideas.
Until then,
keep an Open Mind.
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