There's a strand of libertarian internet thought that argues that computer networks, personal liberties, and immense profits are bound together like a coaxial cable. No authoritarian or socialist nation could ever invent the Internet. At best, they can buy these technologies from robust free societies. And on one level this is true: The Internet was invented by Americans, not Soviets. But on another level, this is false. The early internet was robustly supported by a profoundly non-capitalist military-academic complex. And in the Soviet Union, mathematicians, engineers, and cyberneticists worked on their own network.

In How Not to Network a Nation, Peters traces the origins and collapses of the Soviet network. Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushkov, two mathematicians inspired by a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics in a military library, conceived of computerization as the solution to the creaky command economy of the Soviet Union. A computer network would serve as a national nervous system, linking automated factories with statistical planners in regional centers and Moscow. Glushkov got his own research center, named Kybergrad, with hacker culture Soviet-style (including a saxophone playing robot as a mascot), but plans for OGAS, the All-State-Automated-System, never seemed to quite jell. Even as the Soviets introduced computers to the factory floor and long-distance networks for military radars, the idea of a national civilian computer network remained just that; an idea. Research was sidetracked into problems of statistical management, and the program was finally killed by the Politburo in 1970, a year after ARPANET went online.

Peters deploys the concepts of hetarchy, and Arendt's theory of polis and oikos to explain the collapse, but behind the complicated theory the matter is simply one of power. The high powers in the Politburo who ran the Ministry of Finance, Defense, and the statistical planning bureaus were unwilling to delegate power to dreamy cyberneticists. The low powers who controlled the material facts of the Soviet economy were unwilling to give up their black market perks and influence. When the moment of truth came in 1970, the cyberneticians lacked the allies to fund their dream, and the network died stillborn.

This is a dense academic book, probably best read in partnership with a volume on the Soviet economy. The human glimpses of Glushkov and Kybergrad are oasis in a wilderness of theory and history. But for a certain kind of scholar, this is like a portal into an alternate world, where the 'why' of networks was answered by the imperatives of dialectical materialism and the class struggle, rather than serving as the all consuming vortex of lies, distractions, advertising, and surveillance that the internet has become.