Series ・ 6 parts

The Wire That Connected the World: How the Internet Was Born

The internet was built for nuclear war — this widely believed story is only half true. A distributed network that could survive a nuclear strike, and the wish of researchers, far apart, to share their expensive machines. In 1969, where those two motives crossed, the first message sent from UCLA to Stanford broke off after just two letters. This is where every origin begins.

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01 The Net Built to Survive the Bomb — ARPANET's First Cry, 1969 The internet was built for nuclear war — this widely believed story is only half true. A distributed network that could survive a nuclear strike, and the wish of researchers, far apart, to share their expensive machines. In 1969, where those two motives crossed, the first message sent from UCLA to Stanford broke off after just two letters. This is where every origin begins.
02 A Language Owned by No One — The Idea That Built the Internet ARPANET was only one net among many. The wireless net, the satellite net — how could networks of wholly different specifications ever be bound into one? The answer Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn set down in 1974 was TCP/IP. Let the net merely carry; keep the cleverness at the ends. This is the story of why an open design philosophy owned by no one grew the internet into something planetary in scale.
03 The Invention Given Away for Free — The Day the Web Opened the World In 1989, a single scientist at CERN proposed a way to link scattered information. What Tim Berners-Lee created became the World Wide Web — URL, HTML, HTTP. Then, in 1993, CERN released the invention to the world with no patent and no licensing fee. Had they kept it locked away, the web as we know it would never have existed. This is the story of how one choice — 'free' — changed the world.
04 The Dot-Com Frenzy: The Browser Wars and the Bubble Capital came flooding onto the free and open Web. The browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, and the frenzied speculation in which a stock leapt the moment a name gained a '.com' — the dot-com bubble. From 1995 to 2000 the Nasdaq swelled sixfold, and then 78% of it vanished. Yet from the ashes rose Amazon and Google. The turning point at which an idealistic space changed its shape into a colossal business.
05 The Silent Infrastructure — Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism The net that was meant to belong to no one was, before anyone noticed, fenced in by a handful of empires. Google, Amazon, Facebook — winner-take-all, with network effects as their weapon. And then the 'surveillance capitalism' named by Harvard's Shoshana Zuboff, in which our very behaviour is sold as a 'prediction product'. This is a reckoning with the true price of free convenience.
06 A World Splitting Apart — The Future of a Fracturing Net A net that once had no borders is now beginning to fracture nation by nation. China's Great Firewall, Russia's Sovereign Internet Law, and the planet-scale surveillance the United States was running, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. The wire that carries freedom was, all along, the same wire that carries surveillance. In its finale, the series looks hard at the true nature of the internet — a place where the ideal that no one owns it and the power to control everything live side by side.