This week on Low Frequency: the internet before the Internet by way of cyberpunk afrofuturism, a possible 1971 origin of Boomer Posting, 15 computers that changed the world with one weird trick, and sexy music about hanging out at a laptop cafe.

The old Carl Sagan saying goes, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” The same applies to the history of music community on the Internet. If you wish to email someone song lyrics, you must first invent a decentralized networking protocol.

The Internet as we know it starts with the ARPANET, so that’s where we’ll start too. Let’s actually talk about two ARPANETs. The first is the computer network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA, a significantly less sonorous acronym than ARPA) in conjunction with United States universities and private entities like the RAND corporation. The second is one of  Detroit electro don Gerald Donald’s solo projects, started after the dissolution of his legendary Drexciya project upon his bandmate James Stinson’s untimely death.

The proto-Internet ARPANET was developed under the ever-present nuclear threat during the Cold War. The US military believed it needed a resilient communications network in the event of a nuclear attack taking out a major hub for phone communications or radio and television broadcast, and that’s the exact type of project ARPA existed to facilitate. The specific technical innovation spawned by that effort was packet switching, basically a method for splitting data up into smaller pieces and sending those through a network along different pathways, until they reach their destination and get put back together.

The ARPANET first launched towards the end of 1969, first as a link between the computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in November, and then expanding to UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, truly becoming a network in December. The first use case for the network was to share computing resources between those places, something incredibly mundane now, but quite futuristic in 1969. Different computers at different institutions did different things, and the ARPANET offered a way for researchers to transcend the limitations of their home machines and take advantage of others. I’m sure the guys at ARPA would have gotten really mad if you called any of them comrade.

In those early years, the major research project the network was used for was really just how to get the thing to work, and work reliably. The plan was always to get at least 15 computers on the network, and that became reality in 1971 when ARPANET expanded to the Midwest and East Coast, bringing on institutions including MIT and Carnegie Mellon, as well private entities like Burroughs and the RAND Corporation. I’m pretty sure my parents met when they were working at Burroughs in the ‘80s…

ARPANET expanding didn’t just mean more institutions, but accounts for users who were not strictly computer science researchers. Historian Janet Abbate writes in her foundational Inventing the Internet that such users ended up steering the trajectory of the ARPANET, specifically communities of scientists and, as she calls them, “computer geeks” that existed offline and brought their sociality to the ARPANET to create the first virtual communities. 

Here, we see the real seeds of the Internet as we know it today. Abbate writes that in 1971, Michael Hart launched Project Gutenberg by posting the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, effectively the first explicit gesture of ideological libertarianism using computer network technology. During these early years, users hacked together ways to send messages to one another, piggybacking on message functionality was installed on the CTSS computer at MIT in 1965.

Then, in 1973, came email. Originally referred to as “net notes,” the first email functionality was built on top of the File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. This is the inflection point in Abbate’s history of ARPANET, when the network went from an interesting experiment to an in-demand resource that people would line up to access at their local institution. This struck the ARPANET’s originators as a surprise since the point of the technology was resource sharing and not communication. 

As my friend and iDPI head Ethan Zuckerman put it to me,

I’ll take that one step further. In this case—and in the case of a lot of the technologies I’ll be talking about in this blog—filesharing seems to have created the infrastructure for communication. Unbeknownst to anyone involved in ARPANET or FTP or the first emails, this would result in one of the World Wide Web’s major existential crises: the music piracy crisis.

FTP was the main way software and research data was exchanged in the early days of the Internet. It’s still used today. With a FTP client, a user could gain access to a server, view a list of available files, and download anything that looked interesting. Perhaps you, reader, have used FTP to download music. That’s because FTP formed the backbone of a bustling file sharing culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Yes, Napster took all the legal and media heat as the center of music piracy around the turn of the millennium. But the piracy practice that really fueled the flames in the bellies of litigious major music labels was leaking albums, one of the most famous cases coming with the leak of Eminem’s fourth album The Eminem Show in 2002. Those leaks generally came from a private FTP community known as The Scene, which hosted a competition between competing factions to be the first to share an album that had not been released yet. From there, it would migrate to wider userships through peer-to-peer technologies like Napster, Limewire, KaZaa, and so on.

One of the ideas I’ll be exploring as time goes on is that anti-piracy efforts are a major reason we lack dedicated community spaces for music online. Historically, many of the social spaces for music online were tied up with filesharing communities. Today, we have neither widespread music filesharing nor clear Internet community infrastructure for people interested in music.

More broadly, today’s online social spaces aren’t ones where we’re sharing files with each other, but instead ones where we give those files—photos, videos, memes—to a third party who then presents them via an algorithm. And then you can’t actually download any of that media from those platforms, even if you’re the one who uploaded it. 

Aside from email and the proto Facebook Boomer gesture of posting the Declaration of Independence, there are other ways ARPANET presaged social life online today. In the third episode of Computer Freaks—a really wonderful oral history of the ARPANET’s development—host Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan argues that while the ARPANET was seen as a roaring success at the time, the people who found it successful were a bunch of white, male academics and military contractors and they brought a fair amount of misogyny and machismo/chauvinist tendencies to the network. There were also students who became the Internet’s first ever trolls, exploiting the network as a vector for harassment in its infancy.

In Inventing the Internet, Abbate makes reference to an email correspondence she had with a source that suggested ARPANET was also used to sell drugs. There’s more documented in more detail on the two-part episode “Long Strange Tech,” (part 1 | part 2) of Deadcast, the official Grateful Dead podcast, where host Jesse Jarnow recounts an anecdote recounted to him during his research for his book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Jarnow recounts, “The first recorded bit of online commerce, in fact, was a cross-country dope sale when some of the Deadhead hackers at the Stanford lab sold some grass to the hackers at the MIT lab.”

That Stanford lab Jarnow is referring to is SAIL—the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab—which housed one of the first computers connected to ARPANET, and which itself had an internal message system. Former lab director Les Earnest told Jarnow that he found one of the ideal early uses of the messaging system was to try to send drafts transcriptions of Grateful Dead lyrics back and forth with other Deadheads on the network to try to reach consensus on them based on what those users would hear when they attended shows. And, as Jarnow tells it on that two-parter, in 1973, Paul Martin started the dead@dis email list, the first of several historically important online spaces for Deadheads.

So now that we’re talking music, let’s talk about the other ARPANET, the Gerald Donald project. It’s ice cold Detroit electro, definitely in the Kraftwerk lineage, but funkier and more cyberpunk. The projects aesthetics are imbued by an ascetic strain of techno-science mysticism: a captivating, elementary 3D rendering of a funnel on a Cartersian plane on the cover of the 2006 release Inertial Frame, track titles across various releases like “Devoid of Wires,” “Twin Paradox,” and “Quantum State Recombination.”

In the opening track from the project’s 2002 debut album Wireless Internet, a computer-generated text-to-speech voice read’s an essay about the spread of the wireless communication over an echoing arpeggio that sounds like a musical interpretation packet switching—data bouncing around a network. It ends: 

Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan suggested that the ARPANET was a clear success to the people who built it, but they didn't account for the users who might not be part of their in-group with their values. She offers it as an explanation for the problems we face on the Internet today: this technology wasn’t really developed for us, it was developed for a group of guys with very specific jobs in very specific places, and they didn’t take others’ safety or equitable participation into account because they didn’t need to. The text in “The Analyst” is grappling directly with this reality—a technology spreading and seeping into our lives like a virus that is both awesomely powerful and agnostic to use as people. How will it affect us? What will our world become? Who will we become?

For those unfamiliar, let me explain Gerald Donald. He is undoubtedly one of the single most important artists to emerge from electronic music, better respected and supported in Europe than he is here in America, his home. He comes from Detroit, and came up in the city’s fertile electro scene in the 1980s, which gave birth to techno when Detroit’s black middle class caught wind of the house music coming out of Chicago and remade it in the image of post-industrial civilization that they saw their city transforming into.

Donald was one half of Drexciya, a collaboration with fellow Detroiter James Stinson. Drexciya made some of the best music ever: absolutely perfect, hard-hitting, funky, emotional electro that many see as a missing link between afrofuturism in the Sun Ra mold, the electro DJing scene that spawned hip hop in the Bronx, and contemporary dance-oriented electronic music as we know it today. While most of their music was entirely instrumental, it was woven around their mythos of Drexciya, an underwater scientifically advanced civilization formed by sea creatures who descended from the pregnant African women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage who colonial slave traders deemed too costly to their operation.

The Sun Ra-specific strain of Afrofuturism is one where a sense of wonder about the the discoveries of 20th century astrophysics and technological advancements stands as a point of fascination and even hope when confronting the violence, injustice, and suffering imposed on Black Americans going back hundreds of years and persisting through American life today. So music about a technologically sophisticated underwater civilization founded by the ancestors of drowned mothers is a work of science fiction that sees the vanguard guiding humanity’s flourishing and advancement as life after death, its fate not conscribed by humanity’s foulest sinners. They build a civilization that surpasses the one back on land built on its ancestors’ torture.

But I also think that an over-determined focus on the Drexciya mythos risks missing a much richer evaluation of Gerald Donad’s and James Stinson’s catalog together and as solo artists, and that’s part of why I find the ARPANET project so compelling. Again, the debut album came out in 2002, the same year that James Stinston passed away at only 32 years old. The cover of Wireless Internet, with its Klein blue map of the Earth, echoes the cover art of the landmark Drexciya compilation The Quest from 1997. And on ARPANET, Donald strips down the arrangements to music that sound like the skeletons of Drexciya songs, with crystalline digital sound that feels like it has a similar relationship to the Drexciya sound as our digital identities have to our offline ones: streamlined, a little flat, legible as our personality yet not entirely the same.

Stinson also had a meditation on digital life, his 2001 album Lifestyles of the Digital Cafe released under the moniker The Other People Place. It’s sound is the inverse in many ways of the ARPANET sound: housey where ARPANET is clinically techno, sultry where ARPANET is cold, playful where ARPANET is calculating. And unlike the vast majority of most of the other music Stinson or Donald were involved with, Lifestyles has lyrics. They’re about the romantic lives of people in a laptop cafe—desiring people on the other side of the room, finding love through their computers.

It’s seductive music about a technology of seduction. There are moans, coos, beckonings. Listening to it feels like the slow motion moment before a first kiss, like a lover’s hand on your body. When I talk about it, I almost shy away from the fact that it’s about computers, the Internet, technology. Maybe because few things feel as consummately unsexy as the Internet, a place where software companies if anything find profit exploiting the anxieties that come from our aloneness.

But what I hear on Lifestyles, no matter what, is a realization of something that feels almost impossible: libidinal machine music, tightly quantized percussion and whispering synths winding around your soul. It’s a reminder that technology is made by humans and can be used by humans to channel something about our experience in this world. Stinson did it with an MPC and some synthesizers, but all musical instruments are technologies after all, and all technologies can be played like instruments. A project designed to share computational resources actually became relevant to the world because it created a place where people could talk to each other. Maybe all that really matters about the laptop cafe in the grand scheme of things is that it’s a place to find sex and love.

What I’ve been listening to

Janet Jackson, again. It happens all the time.

The inimitable Wonja, one of my favorite DJs these days, played a track of mine on Bill Spencers NTS show A Month of Sundays. So I’ve been listening back to Wonja mixes I missed and old episodes of A Month of Sundays. And then DJML, Wonja’s partner in the Do/While mix series and their incredible duo Motoko and Myers also put out a really great mix of like… “world music” jazz heavy scare quotes? The other Wonja mix below is a bunch of reggae, dancehall, and dub covers, it’s so fun.