The History of Computing

Months before the first node of ARPANET went online, the intrepid easy engineers were just starting to discuss the technical underpinnings of what would evolve into the Internet some day. Here, we hear how hosts would communicate to the IMPs, or early routing devices (although maybe more like a Paleolithic version of what's in a standard network interface today).

It's nerdy. There's discussion of packets and what bits might do what and later Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn would redo most of this early work as the protocols evolved towards TCP/IP. But reading their technical notes and being able to trace those through thousands of RFCs that show the evolution into the Internet we know today is an amazing look into the history of computing. 

Humanity realized we could do more with stone tools some two and a half million years ago. We made stone hammers and cutting implements made by flaking stone, sharpening deer bone, and sticks, sometimes sharpened into spears. It took 750,000 years, but we figured out we could attach those to sticks to make hand axes and other cutting tools about 1.75 million years ago. Humanity had discovered the first of six simple machines, the wedge. 

During this period we also learned to harness fire. Because fire frightened off animals that liked to cart humans off in the night the population increased, we began to cook food, and the mortality rate increased. 

More humans. We learned to build rafts and began to cross larger bodies of water. We spread. Out of Africa, into the Levant, up into modern Germany, France, into Asia, Spain, and up to the British isles by 700,000 years ago. And these humanoid ancestors traded. Food, shell beads, bone tools, even arrows. 

By 380,000-250,000 years ago we got the first anatomically modern humans. The oldest of those remains has been found in modern day Morocco in Northern Africa. We also have evidence of that spread from the African Rift to Turkey in Western Asia to the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia, Eritraea, across the Red Sea and then down into Israel, South Africa, the Sudan, the UAE, Oman, into China, Indonesia, and the Philopenes. 

200,000 years ago we had cored stone on spears, awls, and in the late Stone Age saw the emergence of craftsmanship and cultural identity. This might be cave paintings or art made of stone. We got clothing around 170,000 years ago, when the area of the Sahara Desert was still fertile ground and as people migrated out of there we got the first structures of sandstone blocks at the border of Egypt and modern Sudan. As societies grew, we started to decorate, first with seashell beads around 80,000, with the final wave of humans leaving Africa just in time for the Toba Volcano supereruption to devastate human populations 75,000 years ago. 

And still we persisted, with cave art arriving 70,000 years ago. And our populations grew. 

Around 50,000 years ago we got the first carved art and the first baby boom. We began to bury our dead and so got the first religions. In the millennia that followed we settled in Australia, Europe, Japan, Siberia, the Arctic Circle, and even into the Americas. This time period was known as the Great Leap Forward and we got microliths, or small geometric blades shaped into different forms. This is when the oldest settlements have been found from Egypt, the Italian peninsula, up to Germany, Great Britain, out to Romania, Russia, Tibet, and France. We got needles and deep sea fishing. Tuna sashimi anyone?

By 40,000 years ago the neanderthals went extinct and modern humans were left to forge our destiny in the world. The first aboriginal Australians settled the areas we now call Sydney and Melbourne. We started to domesticate dogs and create more intricate figurines, often of a Venus. We made ivory beads, and even flutes of bone. We slowly spread. Nomadic peoples, looking for good hunting and gathering spots. In the Pavolv Hills in the modern Czech Republic they started weaving and firing figurines from clay. We began to cremate our dead. Cultures like the Kebaran spread, to just south of Haifa. But as those tribes grew, there was strength in numbers. 

The Bhimbetka rock shelters began in the heart of modern-day India, with nearly 800 shelters spread across 8 square miles from 30,000 years ago to well into the Bronze Age. Here, we see elephants, deer, hunters, arrows, battles with swords, and even horses. A snapshot into the lives of of generation after generation. Other cave systems have been found throughout the world including Belum in India but also Germany, France, and most other areas humans settled. As we found good places to settle, we learned that we could do more than forage and hunt for our food. 

Our needs became more complex. Over those next ten thousand years we built ovens and began using fibers, twisting some into rope, making clothing out of others, and fishing with nets. We got our first semi-permanent settlements, such as Dolce Vestonice in the modern day Czech Republic, where they had a kiln that could be used to fire clay, such as the Venus statue found there - and a wolf bone possibly used as a counting stick. The people there had woven cloth, a boundary made of mammoth bones, useful to keep animals out - and a communal bonfire in the center of the village.

A similar settlement in modern Siberia shows a 24,000 year old village. Except the homes were a bit more subterranean. 

Most parts of the world began to cultivate agriculture between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago according to location. During this period we solved the age old problem of food supplies, which introduced new needs. And so we saw the beginnings of pottery and textiles. Many of the cultures for the next 15,000 years are now often referred to based on the types of pottery they would make.

These cultures settled close to the water, surrounding seas or rivers. And we built large burial mounds. Tools from this time have been found throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and in modern Mumbai in India. Some cultures were starting to become sedentary, such as the Natufian culture we collected grains, started making bread, cultivating cereals like rye, we got more complex socioeconomics, and these villages were growing to support upwards of 150 people. 

The Paleolithic time of living in caves and huts, which began some two and a half million years ago was ending. By 10,000 BCE, Stone Age technology evolved to include axes, chisels, and gouges. This is a time many parts of the world entered the Mesolithic period. The earth was warming and people were building settlements. Some were used between cycles of hunting. As the plants we left in those settlements grew more plentiful, people started to stay there more, some becoming permanent inhabitants. Settlements like in Nanzhuangtou, China. Where we saw dogs and stones used to grind and the cultivation of seed grasses. 

The mesolithic period is when we saw a lot of cave paintings and engraving. And we started to see a division of labor. A greater amount of resources led to further innovation. Some of the inventions would then have been made in multiple times and places again and again until we go them right.  One of those was agriculture. 

The practice of domesticating barley, grains, and wheat began in the millennia leading up to 10,000 BCE and spread up from Northeast Africa and into Western Asia and throughout. There was enough of a surplus that we got the first granary by 9500 BCE. This is roughly the time we saw the first calendar circles emerge. Tracking time would be done first with rocks used to form early megalithic structures. 

Domestication then spread to animals with sheep coming in around the same time, then cattle, all of which could be done in a pastoral or somewhat nomadic lifestyle. Humans then began to domesticate goats and pigs by 8000 BCE, in the Middle East and China. Something else started to appear in the eight millennium BCE: a copper pendant was found in Iraq.

Which brings us to the Neolithic Age. And people were settling along the Indus River, forming larger complexes such as Mehrgarh, also from 7000 BCE. The first known dentistry dates back to this time, showing drilled molars. People in the Timna Valley, located in modern Israel also started to mine copper. This led us to the second real crafting specialists after pottery. Metallurgy was born. 

Those specialists sought to improve their works. Potters started using wheels, although we wouldn’t think to use them vertically to pull a cart until somewhere between 6000 BCE and 4000 BCE. Again, there are six simple machines. The next is the wheel and axle. 

Humans were nomadic, or mostly nomadic, up until this point but settlements and those who lived in them were growing. We starting to settle in places like Lake Nasser and along the river banks from there, up the Nile to modern day Egypt. Nomadic people settled into areas along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers with Maghzaliyah being another village supporting 150 people. They began to building using packed earth, or clay, for walls and stone for foundations. This is where one of the earliest copper axes has been found. And from those early beginnings, copper and so metallurgy spread for nearly 5,000 years. 

Cultures like the Yangshao culture in modern China first began with slash and burn cultivation, or plant a crop until the soil stops producing and move on. They built rammed earth homes with thatched, or wattle, roofs. They were the first to show dragons in artwork. In short, with our bellies full, we could turn our attention to the crafts and increasing our standard of living. And those discoveries were passed from complex to complex in trade, and then in trade networks. 

Still, people gotta’ eat. Those who hadn’t settled would raid these small villages, if only out of hunger. And so the cultural complexes grew so neolithic people could protect one another. Strength in numbers. Like a force multiplier. 

By 6000 BCE we got predynastic cultures flourishing in Egypt. With the final remnants of the ice age retreating, raiders moved in on the young civilization complexes from the spreading desert in search of food. The area from the Nile Valley in northern Egypt, up the coast of the Mediterranean and into the Tigris and Euphrates is now known as the Fertile Crescent - and given the agriculture and then pottery found there, known as the cradle of civilization. Here, we got farming. We weren’t haphazardly putting crops we liked in the grounds but we started to irrigate and learn to cultivate. 

Generations passed down information about when to plant various crops was handed down. Time was kept by the season and the movement of the stars. People began settling into larger groups in various parts of the world. Small settlements at first. Rice was cultivated in China, along the Yangtze River. This led to the rise of the Beifudi and Peiligang cultures, with the first site at Jaihu with over 45 homes and between 250 and 800 people. Here, we see raised altars, carved pottery, and even ceramics. 

We also saw the rise of the Houli culture in Neolithic China. Similar to other sites from the time, we see hunting, fishing, early rice and millet production and semi-subterranean housing. But we also see cooked rice, jade artifacts, and enough similarities to show technology transfer between Chinese settlements and so trade. Around 5300 BCE we saw them followed by the Beixin culture, netting fish, harvesting hemp seeds, building burial sites away from settlements, burying the dead with tools and weapons. The foods included fruits, chicken and eggs,  and lives began getting longer with more nutritious diets.

Cultures were mingling. Trading. Horses started to be tamed, spreading from around 5000 BCE in Kazakstan. The first use of the third simple machine came around 5000 BCE when the lever was used first, although it wouldn’t truly be understood until Archimedes. 

Polished stone axes emerged in Denmark and England. Suddenly people could clear out larger and larger amounts of forest and settlements could grow. Larger settlements meant more to hunt, gather, or farm food - and more specialists to foster innovation. In todays Southern Iraq this led to the growth of a city called Eridu. 

Eridu was the city of the first Sumerian kings. The bay on the Persian Gulf allowed trading and being situated at the mouth of the Euphrates it was at the heart of the cradle of civilization. The original neolithic Sumerians had been tribal fishers and told stories of kings from before the floods, tens of thousands of years before the era. They were joined by the Samarra culture, which dates back to 5,700 BCE, to the north who brought knowledge of irrigation and nomadic herders coming up from lands we would think of today as the Middle East. The intermixing of skills and strengths allowed the earliest villages to be settled in 5,300 BCE and grow into an urban center we would consider a city today. 

This was the beginning of the Sumerian Empire Going back to 5300, houses had been made of mud bricks and reed. But they would build temples, ziggurats, and grow to cover over 25 acres with over 4,000 people. As the people moved north and gradually merged with other cultural complexes, the civilization grew. 

Uruk grew to over 50,000 people and is the etymological source of the name Iraq. And the population of all those cities and the surrounding areas that became Sumer is said to have grown to over a million people. They carved anthropomorphic furniture. They made jewelry of gold and created crude copper plates. They made music with flutes and stringed instruments, like the lyre. They used saws and drills. They went to war with arrows and spears and daggers. They used tablets for writing, using a system we now call cuneiform. Perhaps they wrote to indicate lunar months as they were the first known people to use 12 29-30 day months. They could sign writings with seals, which they are also credited with. How many months would it be before Abraham of Ur would become the central figure of the Old Testament in the Bible? 

With scale they needed better instruments to keep track of people, stock, and other calculations. The Sumerian abacus - later used by the Egyptians and then the device we know of as an abacus today entered widespread use in the sixth century in the Persian empire. More and more humans were learning larger precision counting and numbering systems. 

They didn’t just irrigate their fields; they built levees to control floodwaters and canals to channel river water into irrigation networks. Because water was so critical to their way of life, the Sumerian city-states would war and so built armies. 

Writing and arithmetic don’t learn themselves. The Sumerians also developed the concept of going to school for twelve years. This allowed someone to be a scribe or writer, which were prestigious as they were as necessary in early civilizations as they are today. 

In the meantime, metallurgy saw gold appear in 4,000 BCE. Silver and lead in 3,000 BCE, and then copper alloys. Eventually with a little tin added to the copper. By 3000 BCE this ushered in the Bronze Age. And the need for different resources to grow a city or empire moved centers of power to where those resources could be found. 

The Mesopotamian region also saw a number of other empires rise and fall. The Akkadians, Babylonians (where Hammurabi would eventually give the first written set of laws), Chaldeans, Assyrians, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and one of the greatest empires in history, the Persians, who came out of villages in Modern Iran that went back past 10,000 BCE to rule much of the known world at the time. The Persians were able to inherit all of the advances of the Sumerians, but also the other cultures of Mesopotamia and those they traded with. One of their trading partners that the Persians conquered later in the life of the empire, was Egypt. 

Long before the Persians and then Alexander conquered Egypt they were a great empire. Wadi Halfa had been inhabited going back 100,000 years ago. Industries, complexes, and cultures came and went. Some would die out but most would merge with other cultures. There is not much archaeological evidence of what happened from 9,000 to 6,000 BCE but around this time many from  the Levant and Fertile Crescent migrated into the area bringing agriculture, pottery, then metallurgy. 

These were the Nabta then Tasian then Badarian then Naqada then Amratian and in around 3500 BCE we got the Gerzean who set the foundation for what we may think of as Ancient Egypt today with a drop in rain and suddenly people moved more quickly from the desert like lands around the Nile into the mincreasingly metropolitan centers. Cities grew and with trade routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia they frequently mimicked the larger culture. 

From 3200 BCE to 3000 BCE we saw irrigation begin in protodynastic Egypt. We saw them importing obsidian from Ethiopia, cedar from Lebanon, and grow. The Canaanites traded with them and often through those types of trading partners, Mesopotamian know-how infused the empire. As did trade with the Nubians to the south, who had pioneered astrological devices. At this point we got Scorpion, Iry-Hor, Ka, Scorpion II, Double Falcon. This represented the confederation of tribes who under Narmer would unite Egypt and he would become the first Pharaoh. They would all be buried in Umm El Qa’ab, along with kings of the first dynasty who went from a confederation to a state to an empire. 

The Egyptians would develop their own written language, using hieroglyphs. They took writing to the next level, using ink on papyrus. They took geometry and mathematics. They invented toothpaste. They built locked doors. They took the calendar to the next level as well, giving us 364 day years and three seasons. They’d of added a fourth if they’d of ever visited Minnesota, don’tchaknow. And many of those Obelisks raided by the Romans and then everyone else that occupied Egypt - those were often used as sun clocks. They drank wine, which is traced in its earliest form to China. 

Imhotep was arguably one of the first great engineers and philosophers. Not only was he the architect of the first pyramid, but he supposedly wrote a number of great wisdom texts, was a high priest of Ra, and acted as a physician. And for his work in the 27th century BCE, he was made a deity, one of the few outside of the royal family of Egypt to receive such an honor. 

Egyptians used a screw cut of wood around 2500 BCE, the fourth simple machine. They used it to press olives and make wine.  They used the fifth to build pyramids, the inclined plane. And they helped bring us the last of the simple machines, the pulley. And those pyramids. Where the Mesopotamians built Ziggurats, the Egyptians built more than 130 pyramids from 2700 BCE to 1700 BCE. And the Great Pyramid of Giza would remain the largest building in the world for 3,800 years. It is built out of 2.3 million blocks, some of which weigh as much as 80 tonnes. Can you imagine 100,000 people building a grave for you? 

The sundial emerged in 1,500 BCE, presumably in Egypt - and so while humans had always had limited lifespans, our lives could then be divided up into increments of time. 

The Chinese cultural complexes grew as well. Technology and evolving social structures allowed the first recorded unification of all those neolithic peoples when You the Great and his father brought flood control, That family, as the Pharos had, claimed direct heritage to the gods, in this case, the Yellow Emperor. The Xia Dynasty began in China in 2070 BCE. They would flourish until 1600 BCE when they were overthrown by the Shang who lasted until 1046 when they were overthrown by the Zhou - the last ancient Chinese dynasty before Imperial China. 

Greek civilizations began to grow as well. Minoan civilization from 1600 to 1400 BCE grew to house up to 80,000 people in Knossos. Crete is a large island a little less than half way from Greece to Egypt. There are sites throughout the islands south of Greece that show a strong Aegean and Anatolian Cycladic culture emerging from 4,000 BCE but given the location, Crete became the seat of the Minoans, first an agricultural community and then merchants, facilitating trade with Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean. The population went from less than 2,000 people in 2500 BCE to up to 100,000 in 1600 BCE. They were one of the first to be able to import knowledge, in the form of papyrus from Egypt.

The Mycenaeans in mainland Greece, along with earthquakes that destroyed a number of the buildings on Crete, contributed to the fall of the Minoan civilization and alongside the Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians, we got the rise of the first mainland European empire: Mycenaean Greece. Sparta would rise, Athens, Corinth, Thebes. After conquering Troy in the Trojan War the empire went into decline with the Bronze Age collapse. We can read about the war in the Iliad and the return home in the Odyssey, written by Homer nearly 400 years later. 

The Bronze Age ended in around 1,200 BCE - as various early empires outgrew the ability to rule ancient metropolises and lands effectively, as climate change forced increasingly urbanized centers to de-urbanize, as the source of tin dried up, and as smaller empires banded together to attack larger empires. Many of these empires became dependent on trade. Trade spread ideas and technology and science. But tribalism and warfare disrupted trade routes and fractured societies. We had to get better at re-using copper to build new things. The fall of cultures caused refugees, as we see today. It’s likely a conflagration of changing cultures and what we now call Sea People caused the collapse. These Sea People include refugees, foreign warlords, and mercenaries used by existing empires. These could have been the former Philistines, Minoans, warriors coming down from the Black Sea, the Italians, people escaping a famine on the Anatolian peninsula, the Mycenaeans as they fled the Dorian invasion, Sardinians, Sicilians, or even Hittites after the fall of that empire. The likely story is a little bit of each of these. But the Neo-Assyrians were weakened in order to take Mesopotamia and then the Neo-Babylonians were. And finally the Persian Empire would ultimately be the biggest winners.

But at the end of the Bronze Age, we had all the components for the birth of the Iron Age. Humans had writing, were formally educating our young, we’d codified laws, we mined, we had metallurgy, we tamed nature with animal husbandry, we developed dense agriculture, we architected, we warred, we destroyed, we rebuilt, we healed, and we began to explain the universe. We started to harness multiple of the six simple machines to do something more in the world. We had epics that taught the next generation to identify places in the stars and pass on important knowledge to the next generation. 

And precision was becoming more important. Like being able to predict an eclipse. This led Chaldean astronomers to establish Saros, a period of 223 synodic months to predict the eclipse cycle. And instead of humans computing those times, within just a few hundred years, Archimedes would document the use of and begin putting math behind many of the six simple devices so we could take interdisciplinary approaches to leveraging compound and complex machines to build devices like the Antikythera mechanism. We were computing.  We also see that precision in the way buildings were created. 

After the collapse of the Bronze Age there would be a time of strife. Warfare, famines, disrupted trade. The great works of the Pharaohs, Mycenaeans and other world powers of the time would be put on hold until a new world order started to form. As those empires grew, the impacts would be lasting and the reach would be greater than ever. 

We’ll add a link to the episode that looks at these, taking us from the Bronze Age to antiquity. But humanity slowly woke up to proto-technology. And certain aspects of our lives have been inherited over so many generations from then. 

The written word allowed us to preserve human knowledge, or data, from generation to generation. We know only what we can observe from ancient remains from before writing, but we know more and more about societies as generations of people literate enough to document their stories spread. And the more documented, the more knowledge to easily find and build upon, thus a more rapid amount of innovation available to each generation...

The Sumerians established the first written language in the third millennium BCE. They carved data on clay. Written languages spread and by the 26th century BCE the Diary of Merer was written to document building the Great Pyramid of Giza. They started with papyrus, made from the papyrus plant. They would extract the pulp and make thin sheets from it. The sheets of papyrus ranged in color and how smooth the surface was. But papyrus doesn’t grow everywhere. 

People had painted on pots and other surfaces and ended up writing on leather at about the same time. Over time, it is only natural that they moved on to use parchment, or stretched and dried goat, cow, and sheep skins, to write on. Vellum is another material we developed to write on, similar, but made from calfskin. The Assyrians and Babylonians started to write on vellum in the 6th century BCE. 

The Egyptians wrote what we might consider data that was effectively included into pictograms we now call hieroglyphs on papyrus and parchment with ink. For example, per the Unicode Standard 13.0 my cat would be the hieroglyph 130E0. But digital representations of characters wouldn’t come for a long time. It was still carved in stone or laid out in ink back then. 

Ink was developed by the Chinese thousands of years ago, possibly first by mixing soot from a fire and various minerals. It’s easy to imagine early neolithic peoples stepping in a fire pit after it had cooled and  realizing they could use first their hands to smear it on cave walls and then a stick and then a brush to apply it to other surfaces, like pottery. By the time the Egyptians were writing with ink, they were using iron and ocher for pigments. 

India ink was introduced in the second century in China. They used it to write on bamboo, wooden tablets, and even bones. It was used in India in the fourth century BCE and used burned bits of bone, powders made of patroleum called carbon black, and pigments with hide glue then ground and dried. This allowed someone writing to dip a wet brush into the mixture in order to use it to write. And these were used up through the Greek and then Roman times.

More innovative chemical compounds would be used over time. We added lead, pine soot, vegetable oils, animal oils, mineral oils, and while the Silk Road is best known for bringing silks to the west, Chinese ink was the best and another of the luxuries transported across it, well into the 17th century. 

Ink wasn’t all the Silk Road brought. Paper was first introduced in the first century in China. During the Islamic Golden Age, the islamic world expanded the use in the 8th century, and adding the science to build larger mills to make pulp and paper. Paper then made it to Europe in the 11th century.

So ink and paper laid the foundation for the mass duplication of data. But how to duplicate? 

We passed knowledge down verbally for tens of thousands of years. Was it accurate with each telling? Maybe. And then we preserved our stories in a written form for a couple thousand years in a one to one capacity. The written word was done manually, one scroll or book at a time. And so they were expensive. But a family could keep them from generation to generation and they were accurate across the generations.

Knowledge passed down in written form and many a manuscript was copied ornately, with beautiful pictures drawn on the page. But in China they were again innovating. Woodblock printing goes back at least to the second century to print designs on cloth. But had grown to include books by the seventh century. The Diamond Sutra was a Tang Dynasty book from 868 that may be the first printed book, using wood blocks that had been carved in reverse. 

And moveable type came along in 1040, from Bi Sheng in China. He carved letters into clay. Wang Chen in China then printed a text on farming practices called Nung Shu in 1297 and added a number of innovations to the Chinese presses. And missionaries and trade missions from Europe to China likely brought reports home, including copies of the books.

Intaglio printing emerged where lines were cut, etched, or engraved into metal plates, dipped into ink and then pressed onto paper. Similar tactics had been used by goldsmiths for some time. 

But then a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg began to experiment using similar ideas just adding the concept of moveable type. He used different alloys to get the letter pressing just right - including antimony, lead, and tin. He created a matrix to mold new type blocks, which we now refer to as a hand mould. He experimented with different kinds of oil and water-based inks. And vellum and paper.  

And so Gutenberg would get credit for inventing the printing press in 1440. This took the basic concept of the screw press, which the Romans introduced in the first century to press olives and wine and added moveable type with lettering made of metal. He was at it for a few years. Just one problem, he needed to raise capital in order to start printing at a larger scale. So he went Johann Fust and took out a loan for 800 guilders. He printed a few projects and then thought he should start printing Bibles. So he took out another loan from Fust for 800 more guilders to print what we now call the Gutenberg Bible and printed indulgences from the church as well. 

By 1455 he’d printed 180 copies of the Bible and seemed on the brink of finally making a profit. But the loan from Fust at 6% interest had grown to over 2,000 guilders and once Fust’s son-in-law was about to run the press, he sued Gutenberg, ending up with Gutenberg’s workshop and all of the Bibles basically bankrupting Gutenberg by 1460. He would die in 1468. 

The Mainz Psalter was commissioned by the Mainz archbishop in 1457 and Fust along with Peter Schöffer, a Gutenberg assistant, would use the press to become the first book to be printed with the mark of the printer. They would continue to print books and Schöffer added putting dates in books, colored ink, type-founding, punch cutting, and other innovations. And Schöffer’s sons would carry on the art, as did his grandson. 

As word spread of the innovation, Italians started printing presses by 1470. German printers went to the Sorbonne and by 1476 they set up companies to print. Printing showed up in Spain in 1473, England in 1476, and Portugal by 1495. In a single generation, the price of books plummeted and the printed word exploded, with over 20 million works being printed by 1500 and 10 times that by 1600.

Before Gutenberg, a single scribe could spend years copying only a few editions of a book before the printing press and with a press, up to 3,600 pages a day could be printed. The Catholic Church had the market on bibles and facing a cash crunch, Pope Alexander VI threatened to excommunicate printing manuscripts. In two decades, John Calvin and Martin Luther changed the world with their books - and Copernicus followed quickly by other scientists published works, even with threats of miscommunication or the Inquisition. 

As presses grew, new innovative uses also grew. We got the first newspaper in 1605. Literacy rates were going up, people were becoming more educated and science and learning were spreading in ways it had never done before. Freedom to learn became freedom of thought and Christianity became fragmented as other thinkers had other ideas of spirituality. We were ready for the Enlightenment. 

Today we can copy and paste text from one screen to the next on our devices. We can make a copy of a single file and have tens of thousands of ancient or modern works available to us in an instant. In fact, plenty of my books are available to download for free on sites with or without mine or my publisher’s consent. Or we can just do a quick Google search and find most any book we want. And with the ubiquity of literacy we moved from printed paper to disks to online and our content creation has exploded. 90% of the data in the world was created in the past two years. We are producing over 2 quintillion bytes of data daily. Over 4 and a half billion people are connected, What’s crazy is that’s nearly 3 and a half billion people who aren’t online. 

Imagine having nearly double the live streamers on Twitch and dancing videos on TikTok! I have always maintained a large physical library. And while writing many of these episodes and the book it’s only grown. Because some books just aren’t available online, even if you’re willing to pay for them. 

So here’s a parting thought I’d like to leave you with today: history is also full of anomalies or moments when someone got close to a discovery but we would have to wait thousands of years for it to come up again. The Phaistos Disc is a Minoan fired clay tablet from Greece. It was made by stamping Minoan hieroglyphs onto the clay. 

And just like sometimes it seems something may have come before its time, we also like to return to the classics here and there. Up until the digital age, paper was one of the most important industries in the world. Actually, it still is. But this isn’t to say that we haven’t occasionally busted out parchment for uses in manual writing. The Magna Carta and the US Constitution were both written on parchment.

So think about what you see that is before its time, or after. And keep a good relationship with your venture capitalists so they don’t take the printing presses away. 

Following the Renaissance, Europe had an explosion of science. The works of the Greeks had been lost during the Dark Ages while civilizations caught up to the technical progress. Or so we were taught in school. Previously, we looked at the contributions during the Golden Age of the Islamic Empires and the Renaissance when that science returned to Europe following the Holy Wars.

The great thinkers from the Renaissance pushed boundaries and opened minds. But the revolution coming after them would change the very way we thought of the world. It was a revolution based in science and empirical thought, lasting from the middle of the 1500s to late in the 1600s. 

There are three main aspects I’d like to focus on in terms of taking all the knowledge of the world from that point and preparing it to give humans enlightenment, what we call the age after the Scientific Revolution. These are new ways of reasoning and thinking, specialization, and rigor. Let’s start with rigor.

My cat jumps on the stove and burns herself. She doesn’t do it again. My dog gets too playful with the cat and gets smacked. Both then avoid doing those things in the future.

Early humans learn that we can forage certain plants and then realize we can take those plants to another place and have them grow. And then we realize they grow best when planted at certain times of the year. And watching the stars can provide guidance on when to do so. This evolved over generations of trial and error. 

Yet we believed those stars revolved around the earth for much of our existence. Even after designing orreries and mapping the heavens, we still hung on to this belief until Copernicus. His 1543 work “On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” marks the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Here, he almost heretically claimed that the stars in fact revolved around the sun, as did the Earth. 

This wasn’t exactly new. Aristarchus had theorized this heliocentric model in Ancient Greece. Ptolemy had disagreed in Almagest, where he provided tables to compute location and dates using the stars. Tables that had taken rigor to produce. And that Ptolemaic system came to be taken for granted. It worked fine. 

The difference was, Copernicus had newer technology. He had newer optics, thousands more years of recorded data (some of which was contributed by philosophers during the golden age of Islamic science), the texts of ancient astronomers, and newer ecliptical tables and techniques with which to derive them. 

Copernicus didn’t accept what he was taught but instead looked to prove or disprove it with mathematical rigor. The printing press came along in 1440 and 100 years later, Luther was lambasting the church, Columbus discovered the New World, and the printing press helped disseminate information in a way that was less controllable by governments and religious institutions who at times felt threatened by that information. For example, Outlines of Pyrrhonism from first century Sextus Empiricus was printed in 1562, adding skepticism to the growing European thought. In other words, human computers were becoming more sentient and needed more input. 

We couldn’t trust what the ancients were passing down and the doctrine of the church was outdated. Others began to ask questions. 

Johannes Keppler published Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596, in defense of Copernicus. He would go on to study math, such as the relationship between math and music, and the relationship between math and the weather. And in 1604 published Astronomiae Pars Optica, where he proposed a new method to measure eclipses of the moon. He would become the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, where he could work with other court scholars. He worked on optical theory and wrote Astronomiae Pars Optica, or The Optical Part of Astronomy. He published numerous other works that pushed astronomy, optics, and math forward. His Epitome of Copernican Astronomy would go further than Copernicus, assigning ellipses to the movements of celestial bodies and while it didn’t catch on immediately, his inductive reasoning and the rigor that followed, was enough to have him conversing with Galileo. 

Galileo furthered the work of Copernicus and Kepler. He picked up a telescope in 1609 and in his lifetime saw magnification go from 3 to 30 times. This allowed him to map Jupiter’s moons, proving the orbits of other celestial bodies. He identified sunspots. He observed the strength of motions and developed formulas for inertia and parabolic trajectories. 

We were moving from deductive reasoning, or starting our scientific inquiry with a theory - to inductive reasoning, or creating theories based on observation. Galileos observations expanded our knowledge of Venus, the moon, and the tides. He helped to transform how we thought, despite ending up in an Inquisition over his findings.

The growing quantity and types of systematic experimentation represented a shift in values. Emiricism, observing evidence for yourself, and the review of peers - whether they disagreed or not. These methods were being taught in growing schools but also in salons and coffee houses and, as was done in Athens, in paid lectures.

Sir Francis Bacon argued about only basing scientific knowledge on inductive reasoning. We now call this the Baconian Method, which he wrote about in 1620 when he published his book, New method, or Novum Organum in latin. This was the formalization of eliminative induction. He was building on if not replacing the inductive-deductive method  in Aristotle’s Organon. Bacon was the Attorney General of England and actually wrote Novum while sitting as the Lord Chancellor of England, who presides over the House of Lords and also is the highest judge, or was before Tony Blair. 

Bacon’s method built on ancient works from not only Aristotle but also Al-Biruni, al-Haytham, and many others. And has influenced generations of scientists, like John Locke. 

René Descartes helped lay the further framework for rationalism, coining the term “I think therefore I am.” He became by many accounts the father of modern Western Philosophy and asked what can we be certain of, or what is true? This helped him rethink various works and develop Cartesian geometry. Yup, he was the one who developed standard notation in 1637, a thought process that would go on to impact many other great thinkers for generations - especially with the development of calculus. As with many other great natural scientists or natural philosophers of the age, he also wrote on the theory of music, anatomy, and some of his works could be considered a protopsychology. 

Another method that developed in the era was empiricism, which John Locke proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689. George Berkeley, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume would join that movement and develop a new basis for human knowledge in that empirical tradition that the only true knowledge accessible to our minds was that based on experience.

Optics and simple machines had been studied and known of since antiquity. But tools that deepened the understating of sciences began to emerge during this time. We got the steam digester, new forms of telescopes, vacuum pumps, the mercury barometer. And, most importantly for this body of work - we got the mechanical calculator. 

Robert Boyle was influenced by Galileo, Bacon, and others. He gave us Boyle’s Law, explaining how the pressure of gas increases as the volume of a contain holding the gas decreases. He built air pumps. He investigated how freezing water expands, he experimented with crystals. He experimented with magnetism, early forms of electricity. He published the Skeptical Chymist in 1660 and another couple of dozen books. Before him, we had alchemy and after him, we had chemistry.

One of his students was Robert Hooke. Hooke. Hooke defined the law of elasticity, He experimented with everything. He made music tones from brass cogs that had teeth cut in specific proportions. This is storing data on a disk, in a way. Hooke coined the term cell. He studied gravitation in Micrographia, published in 1665. 

And Hooke argued, conversed, and exchanged letters at great length with Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. He gave the first theory on the speed of sound, Newtonian mechanics, the binomials series. He also gave us Newton’s Rules for Science which are as follows:

1. We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
2. Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
3. The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
4. In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, until such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions

These appeared in Principia, which gave us the laws of motion and a mathematical description of gravity leading to universal gravitation. Newton never did find the secret to the Philosopher’s Stone while working on it, although he did become the Master of the Royal Mint at a pivotal time of recoining, and so who knows. But he developed the first reflecting telescope and made observations about prisms that led to his book Optics in 1704. And ever since he and Leibniz developed calculus, high school and college students alike have despised him. 

Leibniz also did a lot of work on calculus but was a great philosopher as well. His work on logic 

1. All our ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas, which form the alphabet of human thought.
2. Complex ideas proceed from these simple ideas by a uniform and symmetrical combination, analogous to arithmetical multiplication.

This would ultimately lead to the algebra of concepts and after a century and a half of great mathematicians and logicians would result in Boolean algebra, the zero and one foundations of computing, once Claude Shannon gave us information theory a century after that. 

Blaise Pascal was another of these philosopher mathematician physicists who also happened to dabble in inventing. I saved him for last because he didn’t just do work on probability theory, do important early work on vacuums, give us Pascal’s Triangle for binomial coefficients, and invent the hydraulic press. Nope. He also developed Pascal’s Calculator, an early mechanical calculator that is the first known to have worked. He didn’t build it to do much, just help with the tax collecting work he was doing for his family. 

The device could easily add and subtract two numbers and then loop through those tasks in order to do rudimentary multiplication and division. He would only build about 50, but the Pascaline as it came to be known was an important step in the history of computing. And that Leibniz guy, he invented the Leibniz wheels to make the multiplication automatic rather than just looping through addition steps. It wouldn’t be until 1851 that the Arithmometer made a real commercial go at mechanical calculators in a larger and more business like way. While Tomas, the inventor of that device is best known for his work on the calculator today, his real legacy is the 1,000 families who get their income from the insurance company he founded, which is still in business as GAN Assurances, and the countless families who have worked there or used their services. 

That brings us to the next point about specializations. Since the Egyptians and Greeks we’ve known that the more specialists we had in fields, the more discoveries they made. Many of these were philosophers or scientists. They studied the stars and optics and motions and mathematics and geometry for thousands of years, and an increasingly large amount of information was available to generations that followed starting with the written words first being committed to clay tablets in Mesopotamia.

The body of knowledge had grown to the point where one could study a branch of science, such as mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry for their entire lives - improving each field in their own way. Every few generations, this transformed societal views about nature. We also increased our study of anatomy, with an increase in or return to the dissection of human corpses, emerging from the time when that was not allowed.

And these specialties began to diverge into their own fields in the next generations. There was certainly still collaboration, and in fact the new discoveries only helped to make science more popular than ever.

Given the increased popularity, there was more work done, more theories to prove or disprove, more scholarly writings, which were then given to more and more people through innovations to the printing press, and a more and more literate people. Seventeenth century scientists and philosophers were able to collaborate with members of the mathematical and astronomical communities to effect advances in all fields.

All of this rapid change in science since the end of the Renaissance created a groundswell of interest in new ways to learn about findings and who was doing what. There was a Republic of Letters, or a community of intellectuals spread across Europe and America. These informal networks sprang up and spread information that might have been considered heretical before transmitted through secret societies of intellectuals and through encrypted letters. And they fostered friendships, like in the early days of computer science. 

There were groups meeting in coffee houses and salons. The Royal Society of London sprang up in 1600. Then the British Royal Society was founded in 1660. They started a publication called Philosophical Transactions in 1665. There are over 8,000 members of the society, which runs to this day with fellows of the society including people like Robert Hooke and fellows would include Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Einstein, Francis Crick, Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking. And this inspired Colbert to establish the French Academy of Sciences in 1666.

They swapped papers, read one another’s works, and that peer review would evolve into the journals and institutions we have today. There are so many more than the ones mentioned in this episode. Great thinkers like Otto von Guericke, Otto Brunfels, Giordano Bruno, Leonard Fuchs, Tycho Brahe, Samuel Hartlib, William Harvey, Marcello Malpighi, John Napier, Edme Mariotte, Santorio Santorio, Simon Stevin, Franciscus Sylvius, John Baptist van Helmont, Andreas Vesalius, Evangelista Torricelli, Francois Viete, John Wallis, and the list goes on. 

Now that scientific communities were finally beyond where the Greeks had left off like with Plato’s Academy and the letters sent by ancient Greeks. The scientific societies had emerged similarly, centuries later. But the empires had more people and resources and traditions of science to build on. 

This massive jump in learning then prepared us for a period we now call the Enlightenment, which then opened minds and humanity was ready to accept a new level of Science in the Age of Enlightenment. The books, essays, society periodicals, universities, discoveries, and inventions are often lost in the classroom where the focus can be about the wars and revolutions they often inspired. But those who emerged in the Scientific Revolution acted as guides for the Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, engineers, and thinkers that would come next. But we’ll have to pick that back up in the next episode!

Sponges are some 8,000 species of animals that grow in the sea that lack tissues and organs. Fossil records go back over 500 million years and they are found throughout the world. Two types of sponges are soft and can be used to hold water that can then be squeezed out or used to clean. Homer wrote about using Sponges as far back as the 7th century BCE, in the Odyssey. Hephaestus cleaned his hands with one - much as you and I do today. 

Aristotle, Plato, the Romans, even Jesus Christ all discussed cleaning with sponges. And many likely came from places like the Greek island of Kalymnos, where people have harvested and cultivated sponges in the ocean since that time. They would sail boats with glass bottoms looking for sponges and then dive into the water, long before humans discovered diving equipment, carrying a weight, cut the sponge and toss it into a net. Great divers could stay on the floor of the sea for up to 5 minutes. 

Some 2,600 years after Homer, diving for sponges was still very much alive and well in the area. The people of Kalymnos have been ruled by various Greek city states, the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, Venetians, and still in 1900, the Ottomans. Archaeologist Charles Newton had excavated a Temple of Apollo on the island in the 1850s just before he’d then gone to Turkey to excavate one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, built by Mausolus - such a grand tomb that we still call buildings that are tombs mausoleums in his honor, to this day.

But 1900 was the dawn of a new age. Kalymnos had grown to nearly 1,000 souls. Proud of their Greek heritage, the people of the island didn’t really care what world power claimed their lands. They carved out a life in the sea, grew food and citrus, drank well, made head scarfs, and despite the waning Ottomon rule, practiced Orthodox Christianity. 

The sponges were still harvested from the floor of the sea rather than made from synthetic petroleum products. Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his team of sponge divers are sailing home from a successful run to the Symi island, just as they’d done for thousands of years, when someone spots something. They were off the coast of Antikythera, another Greek island that has been inhabited since the 4th or 5th millennia BCE, which had been a base for Cilician pirates from the 4th to 1st centuries BCE and at the time the southern most point in Greece.

They dove down and after hearing stories from the previous archaeological expedition, knew they were on to something. Something old. They brought back a few smaller artifacts like a bronze arm - as proof of their find, noting the seabed was littered with statues that looked like corpses. 

They recorded the location and returned home. They went to the Greek government in Athens, thinking they might get a reward for the find, where Professor Ikonomu took them to meet with the Minister of Education, Spyriodon, Stais. He offered to have his divers bring up the treasure in exchange for pay equal to the value of the plunder and the Greek government sent a ship to help winch up the treasures. 

They brought up bronze and marble statues, and pottery. When they realized the haul was bigger than they thought, the navy sent a second ship. They used diving suits, just as those were emerging technology. One diver died. The ship turned out to be over 50 meters and the wreckage strewn across 300 meters. 

The shipwreck happened somewhere between 80 and 50 BCE. It was carrying cargo from Asia Minor probably to Rome, sank not by pirates, which had just recently been cleared from the area but likely crashed during a storm. There are older shipwrecks, such as the Dokos from around 2200 BCE and just 60 miles east of Sparta, but few have given up as precious of cargo. We still don’t know how the ship came to be where it was but there is speculation that it was sailing from Rhodes to Rome, for a parade marking victories of Julius Caesar.

Everything brought up went on to live at the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. There were fascinating treasures to be cataloged and so it isn’t surprising that between the bronze statues, the huge marble statues of horses, glassware, and other Greek treasures that a small corroded bronze lump in a wooden box would go unloved. That is, until archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed a gear wheel in it. 

He thought it must belong to an ancient clock, but that was far too complex for the Greeks. Or was it? It is well documented that Archimedes had been developing the use of gearwheels. And Hero of Alexandria had supposedly developed a number of great mechanical devices while at the Library of Alexandria. 

Kalymnos was taken by Italians in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912. World War I came and went. After the war, the Ottoman Empire fell and with Turkish nationalists taking control, they went to war with Greece. The Ottoman Turks killed between 750,000 and 900,000 Greeks. The Second Hellenic Republic came and went. World War II came and went. And Kylamnos was finally returned to Greece from Italy. With so much unrest, archeology wasn’t on nearly as many minds. 

But after the end of World War II, a British historian of science who was teaching at Yale at the time, took interest in the device. His name was Derek de Solla Price. In her book, Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant takes us through a hundred year journey where scientists and archaeologists use the most modern technology available to them at the time to document the device and publish theories as to what it could have been used for. This began with drawings and moved into X-ray technology becoming better and more precise with each generation. And this mirrors other sciences. We make observations, or theories, as to the nature of the universe only to be proven right or wrong when the technology of the next generation uncovers more clues. It’s a great book and a great look at the history of archaeology available in different stages of the 19th century. 

She tells of times before World War II, when John Svoronos and Adolf Wilhelm uncovered the first inscriptions and when Pericles Redials was certain the device was a navigational instrument used to sail the ship. She tells of Theophanidis publishing a theory it might be driven by a water clock in 1934. She weaves in Jeaques Cousteau and Maria Savvatianou and Gladys Weinberg and Peter Throckmorton and Price and Wang Ling and Arthur C. Clarke and nuclear physicist Charalambos Karakolos and Judith Field and Michael Wright and Allan Bromley and Alan Crawley and Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth and Nastulus, a tenth century astronomer in Baghdad.

Reverse engineering the 37 gears took a long time. I mean, figuring up the number of teeth per gear, how they intersected, what drove them, and then trying to figure out why this prime number or what calendar cycle this other thing might have represented. Because the orbit isn’t exactly perfect and the earth is tilted and all kinds of stuff. Each person unraveled their own piece and it’s a fantastic journey through history and discovery. 

So read the book and we’ll skip to what exactly the Antikypthera Device was. Some thought it an astrolabe, which had begun use around 200 BCE - and which measured the altitude of the sun or stars to help sailors navigate the seas. Not quite. Some theorized it was a clock, but not the kind we use to tell time today. More to measure aspects of the celestial bodies than minutes. 

After generations of scientists studied it, most of the secrets of the device are now known. We know it was an orrery - a mechanical model of the solar system. It was an analog computer, driven by a crank, and predicted the positions of various celestial bodies and when eclipses would occur many, many decades in advance - and on a 19 year cycle that was borrowed from cultures far older than the Greeks. The device would have had some kind of indicator, like gems or glass orbs that moved around representing the movements of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus. It showed the movements of the sun and moon, representing the 365 days of the year as a solar calendar and the 19-year lunar cycle inherited from the Babylonians - and those were plotted relative to the zodiac, or 12 constellations. It forecast eclipses and the color of each eclipse. And phases of the moon.

Oh and for good measure it also tracked when the Olympic Games were held. 

About that one more thing with calculating the Olympiad - One aspect of the device that I love, and most clockwork devices in fact, is the analogy that can be made to a modern micro service architecture in software design. Think of a wheel in clockwork. Then think of each wheel being a small service or class of code. That triggers the next and so-on. The difference being any service could call any other and wouldn’t need a shaft or the teeth of only one other wheel to interact - or even differential gearing. 

Reading the story of decoding the device, it almost feels like trying to decode someone else’s code across all those services. 

I happen to believe that most of the stories of gods are true. Just exaggerated a bit. There probably was a person named Odin with a son named Thor or a battle of the Ten Kings in India. I don’t believe any of them were supernatural but that over time their legends grew. Those legends often start to include that which the science of a period cannot explain. The more that science explains, the less of those legends, or gods, that we need.

And here’s the thing. I don’t think something like this just appears out of nowhere. It’s not the kind of thing a lone actor builds in a workshop in Rhodes. It’s the kind of device that evolves over time. One great crafter adds another idea and another philosopher influences another. There could have been a dozen or two dozen that evolved over time, the others lost to history. Maybe melted down to forge bronze weapons, hiding in a private collection, or sitting in a shipwreck or temple elsewhere, waiting to be discovered. 

The Greek philosopher Thales was said to have built a golden orb. Hipparchus of Rhodes was a great astronomer. The Antikythera device was likely built between 200 and 100 BC, when he would have been alive. Was he consulted on during the creation, or involved? Between Thales and Hipparchus, we got Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Philo, Ctesibius, and so many others. Their books would be in the Library of Alexandria for anyone to read. You could learn of the increasingly complicated Ctesibius water clocks along with their alarms or the geometry of Euclid or the inventions of Philo. Or you could read about how Archimedes continued that work and added a chime. 

We can assign the device to any of them - or its’ heritage. And we can assume that as with legends of the gods, it was an evolution of science, mathematics, and engineering. And that the science and technology wasn’t lost, as has been argued, but instead moved around as great thinkers moved around. Just as the water clock had been in use since nearly 4000 BCE in modern day India and China and become increasingly complicated over time until the Greeks called them clepsydra and anaphoric clocks. Yet replacing water with gears wasn’t considered for awhile. Just as it took Boolean algebra and flip-flop circuits to bring us into the age of binary and then digital computing. 

The power of these analog computers could have allowed for simple mathematic devices, like deriving angles or fractions when building. But given that people gotta’ eat and ancient calculation devices and maps of the heavens helped guide when to plant crops, that was first in the maslovian hierarchy of technological determinism. 

So until our next episode consider this: what technology is lying dormant at the bottom of the sea in your closet. Buried under silt but waiting to be dug up by intrepid divers and put into use again, in a new form. What is the next generation of technical innovation for each of the specialties you see? Maybe it helps people plant crops more effectively, this time using digital imagery to plot where to place a seed. Or maybe it’s to help people zero in on information that matters or open trouble tickets more effectively or share their discoveries or claim them or who knows - but I look forward to finding out what you come up with and hopefully some day telling the origin story of that innovation!

The Roman Empire grew. Philosophy and the practical applications derived from great thinkers were no longer just to impress peers or mystify the commoners into passivity but to help humans do more. The focus on practical applications was clear. This isn’t to say there weren’t great Romans. We got Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Tacitus, Lucretius, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, one of my favorite Hypatia, and as Christianity spread we got the Cristian Philosophers in Rome such as Saint Augustine. 

The Romans reached into new lands and those lands reached back, with attacks coming by the Goths, Germanic tribes, Vandals, and finally resulting in the sack of Rome. They had been weakened by an overreliance on slaves, overspending on military to fuel the constant expansion, government corruption due to a lack of control given the sheer size of the empire, and the need to outsource the military due to the fact that Roman citizens needed to run the empire. Rome would split in 285 and by the fourth century fell.

Again, as empires fall new ones emerge. As the Classical Period ended in each area with the decline of the Roman Empire, we were plunged into the Middle Ages, which I was taught was the Dark Ages in school. But they weren’t dark. Byzantine, the Eastern Roman Empire survived. The Franks founded Francia in northern Gaul. The Celtic Britons emerged. The Visigoths setup shop in Northern Spain. The Lombards in Northern Italy. The Slavs spread through Central and Eastern Europe and the Latin language splintered into the Romance languages. 

And that spread involved Christianity, whose doctrine often classed with the ancient philosophies. And great thinkers weren’t valued. Or so it seemed when I was taught about the Dark Ages. But words matter. The Prophet Muhammad was born in this period and Islamic doctrine spread rapidly throughout the Middle East. He united the tribes of Medina and established a Constitution in the sixth century. After years of war with Mecca, he later seized the land. He then went on to conquer the Arabian Peninsula, up into the lands of the Byzantines and Persians. With the tribes of Arabia united, Muslims would conquer the last remains of Byzantine Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and take large areas of Persia. 

This rapid expansion, as it had with the Greeks and Romans, led to new trade routes, and new ideas finding their way to the emerging Islamic empire. In the beginning they destroyed pagan idols but over time adapted Greek and Roman technology and thinking into their culture. They Brough maps, medicine, calculations, and agricultural implants. They learned paper making from the Chinese and built paper mills allowing for an explosion in books. Muslim scholars in Baghdad, often referred to as New Babylon given that it’s only 60 miles away. They began translating some of the most important works from Greek and Latin and Islamic teachings encouraged the pursuit of knowledge at the time. Many a great work from the Greeks and Romans is preserved because of those translations. 

And as with each empire before them, the Islamic philosophers and engineers built on the learning of the past. They used astrolabes in navigation, chemistry in ceramics and dyes, researched acids and alkalis. They brought knowledge from Pythagoras and Babylonians and studied lines and spaces and geometry and trigonometry, integrating them into art and architecture. Because Islamic law forbade dissections, they used the Greek texts to study medicine.  

The technology and ideas of their predecessors helped them retain control throughout the Islamic Golden Age. The various Islamic empires spread East into China, down the African coast, into Russia, into parts of Greece, and even North into Spain where they ruled for 800 years. Some grew to control over 10 million square miles. They built fantastic clockworks, documented by al-Jazari in the waning days of the golden age. And the writings included references to influences in Greece and Rome, including the Book of Optics by Ibn Al-Haytham in the ninth century, which is heavily influenced by Ptolemy’s book, Optics. But over time, empires weaken. 

Throughout the Middle Ages, monarchs began to be deposed by rising merchant classes, or oligarchs. What the framers of the US Constitution sought to block with the way the government is structured. You can see this in the way the House of Lords had such power in England even after the move to a constitutional monarchy. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has moved more and more towards a rule by oligarchs first under Yeltsin and then under Putin. Because you see, we continue to re-learn the lessons learned by the Greeks. But differently. Kinda’ like bell bottoms are different than all the other times they were cool each time they come back. 

The names of European empires began to resemble what we know today: Wales, England, Scotland, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Germany, and France were becoming dominant forces again. The Catholic Church was again on the rise as Rome practiced a new form of conquering the world. Two main religions were coming more and more in conflict for souls: Christianity and Islam.

And so began the Crusades of the High Middle Ages. Crusaders brought home trophies. Many were books and scientific instruments. And then came the Great Famine followed quickly by the Black Death, which spread along with trade and science and knowledge along the Silk Road. Climate change and disease might sound familiar today. France and England went to war for a hundred years. Disruption in the global order again allows for new empires. Ghengis Khan built a horde of Mongols that over the next few generations spread through China, Korea, India, Georgia and the Caucasus, Russia, Central Asia and Persia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Baghdad, Syria, Poland, and even Thrace throughout the 11th to 13th centuries. Many great works were lost in the wars, although the Mongols often allowed their subjects to continue life as before, with a hefty tax of course. They would grow to control 24 million square kilometers before the empires became unmanageable. 

This disruption caused various peoples to move and one was a Turkic tribe fleeing Central Asia that under Osman I in the 13th century. The Ottomon empire he founded would go Islamic and grow to include much of the former Islamic regime as they expanded out of Turkey, including Greece Northern Africa. Over time they would also invade and rule Greece and almost all the way north to Kiev, and south through the lands of the former Mesopotamian empires. While they didn’t conquer the Arabian peninsula, ruled by other Islamic empires, they did conquer all the way to Basra in the South and took Damascus, Medina, and Mecca, and Jerusalem. Still, given the density of population in some cities they couldn’t grow past the same amount of space controlled in the days of Alexander. But again, knowledge was transferred to and from Egypt, Greece, and the former Mesopotamian lands. And with each turnover to a new empire more of the great works were taken from these cradles of civilization but kept alive to evolve further. 

And one way science and math and philosophy and the understanding of the universe evolved was to influence the coming Renaissance, which began in the late 13th century and spread along with Greek scholars fleeing the Ottoman Turks after the fall of Constantinople throughout the Italian city-states and into England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Spain. Hellenism was on the move again. The works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Plato, and others heavily influenced the next wave of mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers, and scientists. Copernicus studied Aristotle. Leonardo Da Vinci gave us the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, the Vitruvian Man, Salvator Mundi, and Virgin of the Rocks. His works are amongst the most recognizable paintings of the Renaissance. But he was also a great inventor, sketching and perhaps building automata, parachutes, helicopters, tanks, and along the way putting optics, anatomy, hydrodynamics and engineering concepts in his notebooks. And his influences certainly included the Greeks and Romans, including the Roman physician Galen. Given that his notebooks weren’t published they offer a snapshot in time rather than a heavy impact on the evolution of science - although his influence is often seen as a contribution to the scientific revolution. 

Da Vinci, like many of his peers in the Renaissance, learned the great works of the Greeks and Romans. And they learned the teachings in the Bible. They they didn’t just take the word of either and they studied nature directly. The next couple of generations of intellectuals included Galileo. Galileo, effectively as with Socrates and countless other thinkers that bucked the prevailing political or religious climate of the time, by writing down what he saw with his own eyeballs. He picked up where Copernicus left off and discovered the four moons of Jupiter and astronomers continued to espouse that the the sun revolved around the Earth Galileo continued to prove it was in fact suspended in space and map out the movement of the heavenly bodies. 

Clockwork, which had been used in the Greek times, as proven with the Antikypthera device and mentions of Archytas’s dove. Mo Zi and Lu Ban built flying birds. As the Greeks and then Romans fell, that automata as with philosophy and ideas moved to the Islamic world. The ability to build a gear with a number of teeth to perform a function had been building over time. As had ingenious ways to put rods and axles and attach differential gearing. Yi Xing, a Buddhist monk in the Tang Dynasty, would develop the escapement, along with Liang Lingzan in the seventeenths century and the practice spread through China and then spread from there. But now clockwork would get pendulums, springs, and Robert Hook would give us the escapement in 1700, making clocks accurate. And that brings us to the scientific revolution, when most of the stories in the history of computing really start to take shape.

Thanks to great thinkers, philosophers, scientists, artists, engineers, and yes, merchants who could fund innovation and spread progress through formal and informal ties - the age of science is when too much began happening too rapidly to really be able to speak about it meaningfully. The great mathematics and engineering led to industrialization and further branches of knowledge and specializations - eventually including Boolean algebra and armed with thousands of years of slow and steady growth in mechanics and theory and optics and precision, we would get early mechanical computing beginning the much more quick migration out of the Industrial and into the Information Age. These explosions in technology allowed the British Empire to grow to control 34 million square kilometers of territory and the Russian empire to grow to control 17 million before each overextended.

Since writing was developed, humanity has experienced a generation to generation passing of the torch of science, mathematics, and philosophy. From before the Bronze Age, ideas were sometimes independently perceived or sometimes spread through trade from the Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian civilizations (and others) through traders like the Phoenicians to the Greeks and Persians - then from the Greeks to the Romans and the Islamic empires during the dark ages then back to Europe during the Renaissance. And some of that went both ways. 

Ultimately, who first introduced each innovation and who influenced whom cannot be pinpointed in a lot of cases. Greeks were often given more credit than they deserved because I think most of us have really fond memories of toga parties in college. But there were generations of people studying all the things and thinking through each field when their other Maslovian needs were met - and those evolving thoughts and philosophies were often attributed to one person rather than all the parties involved in the findings. 

After World War II there was a Cold War - and one of the ways that manifested itself was a race to recruit the best scientists from the losing factions of that war, namely Nazi scientists. Some died while trying to be taken to a better new life, as Archimedes had died when the Romans tried to make him an asset. For better or worse, world powers know they need the scientists if they’re gonna’ science - and that you gotta’ science to stay in power. When the masses start to doubt science, they’re probably gonna’ burn the Library of Alexandria, poison Socrates, exile Galileo for proving the planets revolve around Suns and have their own moons that revolve around them, rather than the stars all revolving around the Earth. There wasn’t necessarily a dark age - but given what the Greeks and Romans and Chinese thinkers knew and the substantial slowdown in those in between periods of great learning, the Renaissance and Enlightenment could have actually come much sooner. Think about that next time you hear people denying science. 

To research this section, I read and took copious notes from the following and apologize that each passage is not credited specifically but it would just look like a regular expressions if I tried: The Evolution of Technology by George Basalla. Civilizations by Filipe Fernández-Armesto, A Short History of Technology: From The Earliest Times to AD 1900 from TK Derry and Trevor I Williams, Communication in History Technology, Culture, Leonardo da vinci by Walter Isaacson, Society from David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Timelines in Science, by the Smithsonian, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology by Donald Cardwell, a few PhD dissertations and post-doctoral studies from journals, and then I got to the point where I wanted the information from as close to the sources as I could get so I went through Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences from Galileo Galilei, Mediations from Marcus Aurelius, Pneumatics from Philo of Byzantium, The Laws of Thought by George Boole, Natural History from Pliny The Elder, Cassius Dio’s Roman History, Annals from Tacitus, Orations by Cicero, Ethics, Rhetoric, Metaphysics, and Politics by Aristotle, Plato’s Symposium and The Trial & Execution of Socrates.

For a running list of all books used in this podcast see the GitHub page at https://github.com/krypted/TheHistoryOfComputingPodcast/blob/master/Books.md 

Science in antiquity was at times devised to be useful and at other times to prove to the people that the gods looked favorably on the ruling class. Greek philosophers tell us a lot about how the ancient world developed. Or at least, they tell us a Western history of antiquity. Humanity began working with bronze some 7,000 years ago and the Bronze Age came in force in the centuries leading up to 3,000 BCE.

By then there were city-states and empires. The Mesopotamians brought us the wheel in around 3500 BCE, and the chariot by 3200 BCE. Writing formed in Sumeria, a city state of Mesopotamia, in 3000 BCE. Urbanization required larger cities and walls to keep out invaders. King Gilgamesh built huge walls. They used a base 60 system to track time, giving us the 60 seconds and 60 minutes to get to an hour. That sexagesimal system also gave us the 360 degrees in a circle. They plowed fields and sailed. And sailing led to maps, which they had by 2300 BCE. And they gave us the Epic, with the Epic of Gilgamesh which could be old as 2100 BCE. At this point, the Egyptian empire had grown to 150,000 square kilometers and the Sumerians controlled around 20,000 square kilometers.

Throughout, they grew a great trading empire. They traded with China, India and Egypt with some routes dating back to the fourth millennia BCE. And commerce and trade means the spread of not only goods but also ideas and knowledge. The earliest known writing of complete sentences in Egypt came to Egypt a few hundred years after it did in Mesopotamia, as the Early Dynastic period ended and the Old Kingdom, or the Age of the Pyramids. Perhaps over a trade route. 

The ancient Egyptians used numerals, multiplications, fractions, geometry, architecture, algebra, and even quadratic equations. Even having a documented base 10 numbering system on a tomb from 3200 BCE. We also have the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus, which includes geometry problems, the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll, which covers how to add fractions, the Berlin Papyrus with geometry, the Lahun Papyri with arithmetical progressions to calculate the volume of granaries, the Akhmim tablets, the Reisner Papyrus, and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, which covers algebra and geometry. And there’s the Cairo Calendar, an ancient Egyptian papyrus from around 1200 BCE with detailed astronomical observations. Because the Nile flooded, bringing critical crops to Egypt.

The Mesopotamians traded with China as well. As the Shang dynasty from the 16th to 11th centuries BCE gave way to the Zhou Dynasty, which went from the 11th to 3rd centuries BCE and the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age, science was spreading throughout the world. The I Ching is one of the oldest Chinese works showing math, dating back to the Zhou Dynasty, possibly as old as 1000 BCE. This was also when the Hundred Schools of Thought began, which Conscious inherited around the 5th century BCE. Along the way the Chinese gave us the sundial, abacus, and crossbow. And again, the Bronze Age signaled trade empires that were spreading ideas and texts from the Near East to Asia to Europe and Africa and back again. For a couple thousand years the transfer of spices, textiles and precious metals fueled the Bronze Age empires. 

Along the way the Minoan civilization in modern Greece had been slowly rising out of the Cycladic culture. Minoan artifacts have been found in Canaanite palaces and as they grew they colonized and traded. They began a decline around 1500 BCE, likely due to a combination of raiders and volcanic eruptions. The crash of the Minoan civilization gave way to the Myceneaen civilization of early Greece. 

Competition for resources and land in these growing empires helped to trigger wars. 

Those in turn caused violence over those resources. Around 1250 BCE, Thebes burned and attacks against city states cities increased, sometimes by emerging empires of previously disassociated tribes (as would happen later with the Vikings) and sometimes by other city-states.  This triggered the collapse of Mycenaen Greece, the splintering of the Hittites, the fall of Troy, the absorption of the Sumerian culture into Babylon, and attacks that weakened the Egyptian New Kingdom. Weakened and disintegrating empires leave room for new players. The Iranian tribes emerged to form the Median empire in today’s Iran. The Assyrians and Scythians rose to power and the world moved into the Iron age. And the Greeks fell into the Greek Dark Ages until they slowly clawed their way out of it in the 8th century BCE. Around this time Babylonian astronomers, in the capital of Mesopomania, were making astronomical diaries, some of which are now stored in the British Museum. 

Greek and Mesopotamian societies weren’t the only ones flourishing. The Indus Valley Civilization had blossomed from 2500 to 1800 BCE only to go into a dark age of its own. Boasting 5 million people across 1,500 cities, with some of the larger cities reaching 40,000 people - about the same size as Mesopotamian cities. About two thirds are in modern day India and a third in modern Pakistan, an empire that stretched across 120,000 square kilometers. As the Babylonian control of the Mesopotamian city states broke up, the Assyrians began their own campaigns and conquered Persia, parts of Ancient Greece, down to Ethiopia, Israel, the Ethiopia, and Babylon. As their empire grew, they followed into the Indus Valley, which Mesopotamians had been trading with for centuries. 

What we think of as modern Pakistan and India is where Medhatithi Gautama founded the anviksiki school of logic in the 6th century BCE. And so the modern sciences of philosophy and logic were born. As mentioned, we’d had math in the Bronze Age. The Egyptians couldn’t have built pyramids and mapped the stars without it. Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t have built the Mesopotamian cities and walls and laws without it. But something new was coming as the Bronze Age began to give way to the Iron Age. The Indians brought us the first origin of logic, which would morph into an almost Boolean logic as Pāṇini codified Sanskrit grammar linguistics and syntax. Almost like a nearly 4,000 verse manual on programming languages. Panini even mentions Greeks in his writings. Because they apparently had contact going back to the sixth century BCE, when Greek philosophy was about to get started.

The Neo-Assyrian empire grew to 1.4 million square kilometers of control and the Achaeminid empire grew to control nearly 5 million square miles. 

The Phoenicians arose out of the crash of the Late Bronze Age, becoming important traders between the former Mesopotamian city states and Egyptians. As her people settled lands and Greek city states colonized lands, one became the Greek philosopher Thales, who documented the use of loadstones going back to 600 BCE when they were able to use magnetite which gets its name from the Magnesia region of Thessaly, Greece. He is known as the first philosopher and in the time of Socrates even had become one of the Seven Sages which included according to Socrates. “Thales of Miletus, and Pittacus of Mytilene, and Bias of Priene, and our own Solon, and Cleobulus of Lindus, and Myson of Chenae, and the seventh of them was said to be Chilon of Sparta.” 

Many of the fifth and sixth century Greek philosophers were actually born in colonies on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Thales’s theorum is said to have originated in India or Babylon. But as we see a lot in the times that followed, it is credited to Thales. Given the trading empires they were all a part of though, they certainly could have brought these ideas back from previous generations of unnamed thinkers. I like to think of him as the synthesizers that Daniel Pink refers to so often in his book A Whole New Mind. 

Thales studied in Babylon and Egypt, bringing thoughts, ideas, and perhaps intermingled them with those coming in from other areas as the Greeks settled colonies in other lands. Given how critical astrology was to the agricultural societies, this meant bringing astronomy, math to help with the architecture of the Pharoes, new ways to use calendars, likely adopted through the Sumerians, coinage through trade with the Lydians and then Persians when they conquered the Lydians, Babylon, and the Median.

So Thales taught Anaximander who taught Pythagoras of Samos, born a few decades later in 570 BCE. He studied in Egypt as well. Most of us would know the Pythagorean theorem which he’s credited for, although there is evidence that predated him from Egypt. Whether new to the emerging Greek world or new to the world writ large, his contributions were far beyond that, though. They included a new student oriented way of life, numerology, the idea that the world is round, numerology, applying math to music and applying music to lifestyle, and an entire school of philosophers emerged from his teachings to spread Pythagoreanism. And the generations of philosophers that followed devised both important philosophical contributions and practical applications of new ideas in engineering.

The ensuing schools of philosophy that rose out of those early Greeks spread. By 508 BCE, the Greeks gave us Democracy. And oligarchy, defined as a government where a small group of people have control over a country. Many of these words, in fact, come from Greek forms. As does the month of May, names for symbols and theories in much of the math we use, and many a constellation. That tradition began with the sages but grew, being spread by trade, by need, and by religious houses seeking to use engineering as a form of subjugation. 

Philosophy wasn’t exclusive to the Greeks or Indians, or to Assyria and then Persia through conquering the lands and establishing trade. Buddha came out of modern India in the 5th to 4th century BCE around the same time Confucianism was born from Confucious in China. And Mohism from Mo Di. Again, trade and the spread of ideas. However, there’s no indication that they knew of each other or that Confucious could have competed with the other 100 schools of thought alive and thriving in China. Nor that Buddhism would begin spreading out of the region for awhile. But some cultures were spreading rapidly.

The spread of Greek philosophy reached a zenith in Athens. Thales’ pupil Anaximander also taught Anaximenes, the third philosopher of the Milesian school which is often included with the Ionians. The thing I love about those three, beginning with Thales is that they were able to evolve the school of thought without rejecting the philosophies before them. Because ultimately they knew they were simply devising theories as yet to be proven. Another Ionian was Anaxagoras, who after serving in the Persian army, which ultimately conquered Ionia in 547 BCE. As a Greek citizen living in what was then Persia, Anaxagoras moved to Athens in 480 BCE, teaching Archelaus and either directly or indirectly through him Socrates. This provides a link, albeit not a direct link, from the philosophy and science of the Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Egyptians through Thales and others, to Socrates.  

Socrates was born in 470 BCE and mentions several influences including Anaxagoras. Socrates spawned a level of intellectualism that would go on to have as large an impact on what we now call Western philosophy as anyone in the world ever has. And given that we have no writings from him, we have to take the word of his students to know his works. He gave us the Socratic method and his own spin on satire, which ultimately got him executed for effectively being critical of the ruling elite in Athens and for calling democracy into question, corrupting young Athenian students in the process. 

You see, in his life, the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta - and as societies often do when they hit a speed bump, they started to listen to those who call intellectuals or scientists into question. That would be Socrates for questioning Democracy, and many an Athenian for using Socrates as a scape goat. 

One student of Socrates, Critias, would go on to lead a group called the Thirty Tyrants, who would terrorize Athenians and take over the government for awhile. They would establish an oligarchy and appoint their own ruling class. As with many coups against democracy over the millennia they were ultimately found corrupt and removed from power. But the end of that democratic experiment in Greece was coming.

Socrates also taught other great philosophers, including Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Alcibiades. But the greatest of his pupils was Plato. Plato was as much a scientist as a philosopher. He had works of Pythagoras, studied the Libyan Theodorus. He codified a theory of Ideas, in Forms. He used as examples, the Pythagorean theorem and geometry. He wrote a lot of the dialogues with Socrates and codified ethics, and wrote of a working, protective, and governing class, looking to produce philosopher kings. He wrote about the dialectic, using questions, reasoning and intuition. He wrote of art and poetry and epistemology. His impact was vast. He would teach mathemetics to Eudoxus, who in turn taught Euclid. But one of his greatest contributions the evolution of philosophy, science, and technology was in teaching Aristotle. 

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE and founded a school of philosophy called the Lyceum. He wrote about rhetoric, music, poetry, and theater - as one would expect given the connection to Socrates, but also expanded far past Plato, getting into physics, biology, and metaphysics. But he had a direct impact on the world at the time with his writings on economics politics, 

He inherited a confluence of great achievements, describing motion, defining the five elements, writing about a camera obscure and researching optics. He wrote about astronomy and geology, observing both theory and fact, such as ways to predict volcanic eruptions. He made observations that would be proven (or sometimes disproven) such as with modern genomics. He began a classification of living things. His work “On the Soul” is one of the earliest looks at psychology. His study of ethics wasn’t as theoretical as Socrates’ but practical, teaching virtue and how that leads to wisdom to become a greater thinker. 

He wrote of economics. He writes of taxes, managing cities, and property. And this is where he’s speaking almost directly to one of his most impressive students, Alexander the Great. Philip the second of Macedon hired Plato to tutor Alexander starting in 343. Nine years later, when Alexander inherited his throne, he was armed with arguably the best education in the world combined with one of the best trained armies in history. This allowed him to defeat Darius in 334 BCE, the first of 10 years worth of campaigns that finally gave him control in 323 BCE.

In that time, he conquered Egypt, which had been under Persian rule on and off and founded Alexandria. And so what the Egyptians had given to Greece had come home. Alexander died in 323 BCE. He followed the path set out by philosophers before him. Like Thales, he visited Babylon and Egypt. But he went a step further and conquered them. This gave the Greeks more ancient texts to learn from but also more people who could become philosophers and more people with time to think through problems. 

By the time he was done, the Greeks controlled nearly 5 million square miles of territory. This would be the largest empire until after the Romans. But Alexander never truly ruled. He conquered. Some of his generals and other Greek aristocrats, now referred to as the Diadochi, split up the young, new empire. You see, while teaching Alexander, Aristotle had taught two other future kings : Ptolemy I Soter and Cassander. 

Cassander would rule Macedonia and Ptolemy ruled Egypt from Alexandria, who with other Greek philosophers founded the Library of Alexandria. Ptolemy and his son amassed 100s of thousands of scrolls in the Library from 331 BC and on. The Library was part of a great campus of the Musaeum where they also supported great minds starting with Ptolemy I’s patronage of Euclid, the father of geometry, and later including Archimedes, the father of engineering, Hipparchus, the founder of trigonometry, Her, the father of math, and Herophilus, who codified the scientific method and countless other great hellenistic thinkers. 

The Roman Empire had begin in the 6th century BCE. By the third century BCE they were expanding out of the Italian peninsula. This was the end of Greek expansion and as Rome conquered the Greek colonies signified the waning of Greek philosophy. Philosophy that helped build Rome both from a period of colonization and then spreading Democracy to the young republic with the kings, or rex, being elected by the senate and by 509 BCE the rise of the consuls. 

After studying at the Library of Alexandria, Archimedes returned home to start his great works, full of ideas having been exposed to so many works. He did rudimentary calculus, proved geometrical theories, approximated pi, explained levers, founded statics and hydrostatics. And his work extended into the practical. He built machines, pulleys, the infamous Archimedes’ screw pump, and supposedly even a deathly heat ray of lenses that could burn ships in seconds. He was sadly killed by Roman soldiers when Syracuse was taken. But, and this is indicative of how Romans pulled in Greek know-how, the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus was angry that he lost an asset, who could have benefited his war campaigns. In fact, Cicero, who was born in the first century BCE mentioned Archimedes built mechanical devices that could show the motions of the planetary bodies. He claimed Thales had designed these and that Marcellus had taken one as his only personal loot from Syracuse and donated it to the Temple of Virtue in Rome. 

The math, astronomy, and physics that go into building a machine like that was the culmination of hundreds, if not thousands of years of building knowledge of the Cosmos, machinery, mathematics, and philosophy. Machines like that would have been the first known computers. Machines like the first or second century Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1902 in a shipwreck in Greece. Initially thought to be a one-off, the device is more likely to represent the culmination of generations of great thinkers and doers. Generations that came to look to the Library of Alexandria as almost a Mecca. Until they didn’t. 

The splintering of the lands Alexander conquered, the cost of the campaigns, the attacks from other empires, and the rise of the Roman Empire ended the age of Greek Enlightenment. As is often the case when there is political turmoil and those seeking power hate being challenged by the intellectuals, as had happened with Socrates and philosophers in Athens at the time, Ptolemy VIII caused The Library of Alexandria to enter into a slow decline that began with the expulsion of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145BC. This began a slow decline of the library until it burned, first with a small fire accidentally set by Caesar in 48 BCE and then for good in the 270s. 

But before the great library was gone for good, it would produce even more great engineers. Heron of Alexandria is one of the greatest. He created vending machines that would dispense holy water when you dropped a coin in it. He made small mechanical archers, models of dancers, and even a statue of a horse that could supposedly drink water. He gave us early steam engines two thousand years before the industrial revolution and ran experiments in optics. He gave us Heron’s forumula and an entire book on mechanics, codifying the known works on automation at the time. In fact, he designed a programmable cart using strings wrapped around an axle, powered by falling weights. 

Claudius Ptolemy came to the empire from their holdings in Egypt, living in the first century. He wrote about harmonics, math, astronomy, computed the distance of the sun to the earth and also computed positions of the planets and eclipses, summarizing them into more simplistic tables. He revolutionized map making and the properties of light.

By then, Romans had emerged as the first true world power and so the Classical Age.

To research this section, I read and took copious notes from the following and apologize that each passage is not credited specifically but it would just look like a regular expressions if I tried: The Evolution of Technology by George Basalla. Civilizations by Filipe Fernández-Armesto, A Short History of Technology: From The Earliest Times to AD 1900 from TK Derry and Trevor I Williams, Communication in History Technology, Culture, Leonardo da vinci by Walter Isaacson, Society from David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Timelines in Science, by the Smithsonian, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology by Donald Cardwell, a few PhD dissertations and post-doctoral studies from journals, and then I got to the point where I wanted the information from as close to the sources as I could get so I went through Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences from Galileo Galilei, Mediations from Marcus Aurelius, Pneumatics from Philo of Byzantium, The Laws of Thought by George Boole, Natural History from Pliny The Elder, Cassius Dio’s Roman History, Annals from Tacitus, Orations by Cicero, Ethics, Rhetoric, Metaphysics, and Politics by Aristotle, Plato’s Symposium and The Trial & Execution of Socrates.

Today we’re going to have a foundational episode, laying the framework for further episodes on digital piracy, venture capital, accelerators, Bitcoin, PayPal, Square, and others. I’ll try to keep from dense macro and micro economics but instead just lay out some important times from antiquity to the modern financial system so we can not repeat all this in those episodes. I apologize to professionals in these fields whose life work I am about to butcher in oversimplification. 

Like a lot of nerds who found myself sitting behind a keyboard writing code, I read a lot of science fiction growing up. There are dystopian and utopian outlooks on what the future holds for humanity give us a peak into what progress is. Dystopian interpretations tell of what amount to warlords and a fragmentation of humanity back to what things were like thousands of years ago. The utopian interpretations often revolve around questions about how society will react to social justice, or a market in equilibrium.

The dystopian science fiction represents the past of economics and currency. And the move to online finances and digital currency tracks against what science fiction told us was coming in a future more utopian world. My own mental model of economics began with classes on micro and macro economics in college but evolved when I was living in Verona, Italy.

We visited several places built by a family called the Medici’s. I’d had bank accounts up until then but that’s the first time I realized how powerful banking and finance as an institution was. Tombs, villas, palaces. The Medici built lasting edifices to the power of their clan. They didn’t invent money, but they made enough to be on par with the richest modern families. 

It’s easy to imagine humans from the times of hunter-gatherers trading an arrowhead for a chunk of meat. As humanity moved to agriculture and farming, we began to use grain and cattle as currency. By 8000 BC people began using tokens for trade in the Middle East. And metal objects came to be traded as money around 5,000 BC.

And around 3,000 PC we started to document trade. Where there’s money and trade, there will be abuse. By 1,700 BC early Mesopotamian even issued early regulations for the banking industry in the Code of Hammurabi. By then private institutions were springing up to handle credit, deposits, interest, and loans. Some of which was handled on clay tablets. 

And that term private is important. These banking institutions were private endeavors. As the Egyptian empire rose, farmers could store grain in warehouses and then during the Ptolemeic era began to trade the receipts of those deposits. We can still think of these as tokens and barter items though. Banking had begun around 2000 BC in Assyria and Sumeria but these were private institutions effectively setting their own splintered and sometimes international markets. Gold was being used but it had to be measured and weighed each time a transaction was made. 

Until the Lydian Stater. Lydia was an empire that began in 1200 BC and was conquered by the Persians around 546 BC. It covered the modern Western Anatolia, Salihli, Manisa, and Turkey before the Persians took it. One of their most important contributions to the modern world was the first state sponsored coinage, in 700BC. The coins were electrum, which is a mix of gold and silver. 

And here’s the most important part. The standard weight was guaranteed by an official stamp. The Lydian king Croesus then added the concept of bimetallic coinage. Or having one coin made of gold and the other of silver. Each had a different denomination where the lower denomination was one dozen of the higher. They then figured out a way to keep counterfeit coins off the market with a Lydian stone, the color of which could be compared to other marks made by gold coins. And thus modern coinage was born. And the Lydian merchants became the merchants that helped move goods between Greece and Asia, spreading the concept of the coin. Cyrus the second defeated the Lydians and Darius the Great would issue the gold daric, with a warrior king wielding a bow. And so heads of state adorned coins. 

As with most things in antiquity, there are claims that China or India introduced coins first. Bronzed shells have been discovered in the ruins of Yin, the old capital of the Shang dynasty dating back hundreds of years before the Lydians. But if we go there this episode will be 8 hours long. 

Exodus 22:25-27 “If you lend money to my people—to any poor person among you—never act like a moneylender. Charge no interest.”

Let’s put that bible verse in context. So we have coins and banks. And international trade. It’s mostly based on the weight of the coins. Commerce rises and over the centuries banks got so big they couldn’t be allowed to fail without crashing the economy of an empire. Julius Caeser expands the empire of Rome and gold flows in from conquered lands. One thing that seems constant through history is that interest rates from legitimate lenders tend to range from 3 to 14 percent. Anything less and you are losing money. Anything more and you’ve penalized the borrower to the point they can’t repay the loan. The more scarce capital the more you have to charge. Like the US in the 80s. So old Julius meets an untimely fate, there are wars, and Augustus manages to solidify the empire and Augustus reformed taxes and introduced a lot of new services to the state, building roads, establishing a standing army, the Praetorian Guard, official fire fighting and police and established a lot of the old Roman road systems through the empire that Rome is now known so well for. It was an over 40 year reign and one of the greatest in history. But greatness is expensive. 

Tiberius had to bail out banks and companies in the year 33. Moneylending sucks when too many people can’t pay you back. Augustus had solidified the Roman Empire and by the time Tiberius came around Rome was a rich import destination. Money was being leant abroad and interest rates and so there was less and less gold in the city. Interest rates had plummeted to 4 percent. Again, we’re in a time when money is based on the weight of a coin and there simply weren’t enough coins in circulation due to the reach of the empire. And so for all my Libertarian friends - empires learned the hard way that business and commerce are essential services and must be regulated. If money cannot be borrowed then crime explodes. People cannot be left to starve. Especially when we don’t all live on land that can produce food any more. 

Any time the common people are left behind, there is a revolt. The more the disparity the greater the revolt. The early Christians were heavily impacted by the money lending practices in that era between Julius Caeser and Tiberius and the Bible as an economic textbook is littered with references to usury, showing the blame placed on emerging financial markets for the plight of the commoner. Progress often involves two steps forward and one back to let all of the people in a culture reap the rewards of innovations.  

The Roman Empire continued on gloriously for a long, long time. Over time, Rome fell. Other empires came and went. As they did, they minted coins to prove how important the ruling faction was. It’s easy to imagine a farmer in the dark ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire dying and leaving half of the farm to each of two children. Effectively each owns one share. That stock can then be used as debt and during the rise of the French empire, 12th century courretiers de change found they could regulate debts as brokers. The practice grew. 

Bankers work with money all day. They get crafty and think of new ways to generate income. The Venetians were trading government securities and in 1351 outlawed spreading rumors to lower the prices of those - and thus market manipulation was born. By 1409 Flemish traders began to broker the trading of debts in Bruges at an actual market. Italian companies began issuing shares and joint stock companies were born allowing for colonization of the American extensions to European powers. That colonization increased the gold supply in Europe five fold, resulting in the first great gold rush. 

European markets, flush with cash and speculation and investments, grew and by 1611 in Amsterdam the stock market was born. The Dutch East India Company sold shares to the public and brought us options, bonds and derivatives. Dutch perpetual bonds were introduced and one issued in 1629 is still paying dividends. So we got the bond market for raising capital. 

Over the centuries leading to the industrial revolution, banking, finance, and markets became the means with which capitalism and private property replaced totalitarian regimes, the power of monarchs, and the centralized control of production. As the markets rose, modern economics were born, with Adam Smith codifying much of the known works at that point, including those from French physiocrats. The gold standard began around 1696 and gained in popularity. The concept was to allow paper money to be freely convertible into a pre-defined amount of gold. Therefore, paper money could replace gold and still be backed by gold just as it was in antiquity. By 1789 we were running a bit low on gold so introduced the bimetallic standard where silver was worth one fifteenth of gold and a predefined market ratio was set.  

Great thinking in economics goes back to antiquity but since the time of Tiberius, rulers had imposed regulation. This had been in taxes to pay for public goods and bailing out businesses that had to get bailed out - and tariffs to control the movement of goods in and out of a country. To put it simply, if too much gold left the country, interest rates would shoot up, inflation would devalue the ability to buy goods and as people specialized in industries, those who didn’t produce food, like the blacksmiths or cobblers, wouldn’t be able to buy food. And when people can’t buy food, bad things happen. 

Adam Smith believed in self-regulation though, which he codified in his seminal work Wealth of Nations, in 1776. He believed that what he called the “invisible hand” of the market would create economic stability, which would lead to prosperity for everyone. And that became the framework for modern capitalistic endeavors for centuries to come. But not everyone agreed. Economics was growing and there were other great thinkers as well. 

Again, things fall apart when people can’t get access to food and so Thomas Malthus responded with a theory that the rapidly growing populations of the world would outgrow the ability to feed all those humans. Where Smith had focused on the demand for goods, Malthus focused on scarcity of supply. Which led to another economist, Karl Marx, to see the means of production as key to providing the Maslovian hierarchy. He saw capitalism as unstable and believed the creation of an owner (or stock trader) class and a working class was contrary to finding balance in society. He accurately predicted the growing power of business and how that power would control and so hurt the worker at the benefit of the business. We got marginalize, general equilibrium theory, and over time we could actually test theories and the concepts that began with Smith became a science, economics, with that branch known as neoclassical.

Lots of other fun things happen in the world. Bankers begin instigating innovation and progress. Booms or bull markets come, markets over index and/or supplies become scarce and recessions or bear markets ensue. Such is the cycle. To ease the burdens of an increasingly complicated financial world, England officially adopted the gold standard in 1821 which led to the emergence of the international gold standard, adopted by Germany in 1871 and by 1900, most of the world. Gaining in power and influence, the nations of the world stockpiled gold up until World War I in 1914. The international political upheaval led to a loss of faith in the gold standard and the global gold supply began to fall behind the growth in the global economy. 

JP Morgan dominated Wall Street in what we now called the Gilded age. He made money by reorganizing and consolidating railroad businesses throughout America. He wasn’t just the banker, he was the one helping become more efficient, digging into how the businesses worked and reorganizing and merging corporate structures. He then financed Edison’s research and instigated the creation of General Electric. He lost money investing on a Tesla project when Tesla wanted to go wireless. He bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, the first modern buyout that gave us US Steel. The industrialists from the turn of the century increased productivity at a rate humanity had never seen. We had the biggest boom market humanity had ever seen and then when the productivity gains slowed and the profits and earnings masked the slowdown in output a bubble of sorts formed and the market crashed in 1929. 

These markets are about returns on investments. Those require productivity gains as they are usually based margin, or the ability to sell more goods without increasing the cost - thus the need for productivity gains. That crash in 1929 sent panic through Wall Street and wiped out investors around the world. Consumer confidence, and so spending and investment was destroyed. With a sharp reduction needed in supply, industrial output faltered and workers were laid off, creating a vicious cycle. 

The crash also signaled the end of the gold standard. The pound and franc were mismanaged, commodity prices, new power Germany was having trouble repaying war debts, commodity prices collapsed, and thinking a reserve of gold would keep them legitimate, countries raised interest rates, further damaging the global economy. High interest rates reduce investment. England finally suspended the gold standard in 1931 which sparked  other countries to do the same, with the US raising the number of dollars per ounce of gold from $20 to $35 and so obtaining enough gold to back the US dollar as the de facto standard. 

Meanwhile, science was laying the framework for the next huge boom - which would be greater in magnitude, margins, and profits. Enter John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics, the rise of macroeconomics. In a departure from neoclassical economics he believed that the world economy had grown to the point that aggregate supply and demand would not find equilibrium without government intervention. In short, the invisible hand would need to be a visible hand by the government. By then, the Bolsheviks had established the Soviet Union and Mao had founded the communist party in China. The idea that there had been a purely capitalist society since the time the Egyptian government built grain silos or since Tiberius had rescued the Roman economy with bailouts was a fallacy. The US and other governments began spending, and incurring debt to do so, and we began to dig the world out of a depression.

But it took another world war to get there. And that war did more than just end the Great Depression. World War II was one of the greatest rebalancing of powers the world has known - arguably even greater than the fall of the Roman and Persian empires and the shift between Chinese dynasties. In short, we implemented a global world order of sorts in order to keep another war like that from happening. Globalism works for some and doesn’t work well for others. It’s easy to look on the global institutions built in that time as problematic. And organizations like the UN and the World Bank should evolve so they do more to lift all people up, so not as many around the world feel left behind. 

The systems of governance changed world economics.The Bretton Woods Agreement would set the framework for global currency markets until 1971. Here, all currencies were valued in relation to the US dollar which based on that crazy rebalancing move now sat on 75% of the worlds gold. The gold was still backed at a rate of $35 per ounce. And the Keynesian International Monetary Fund would begin managing the balance of payments between nations. Today there are 190 countries in the IMF

Just as implementing the gold standard set the framework that allowed the investments that sparked capitalists like JP Morgan, an indirect financial system backed by gold through the dollar allowed for the next wave of investment, innovation, and so productivity gains.

This influx of money and investment meant there was capital to put to work and so bankers and financiers working with money all day derived new and witty instruments with which to do so. After World War II, we got the rise of venture capital. These are a number of financial instruments that have evolved so qualified investors can effectively make bets on a product or idea. Derivatives of venture include incubators and accelerators. 

The best example of the early venture capital deals would be when Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson raised $70,000 in 1957 to usher in the age of transistorized computing. DEC rose to become the second largest computing company - helping revolutionize knowledge work and introduce a new wave of productivity gains and innovation. They went public in 1968 and the investor made over 500 times the investment, receiving $38 million in stock. More importantly, he stayed friends and a confidant of Olson and invested in over 150 other companies. 

The ensuing neoclassical synthesis of economics basically informs us that free markets are mostly good and efficient but if left to just Smith’s invisible hand, from time to time they will threaten society as a whole. Rather than the dark ages, we can continue to evolve by keeping markets moving and so large scale revolts at bay. As Aasimov effectively pointed out in Foundation - this preserves human knowledge. And strengthens economies as we can apply math, statistics, and the rising computers to help apply monetary rather than fiscal policy as Friedman would say, to keep the economy in equilibrium. 

Periods of innovation like we saw in the computer industry in the post-war era always seem to leave the people the innovation displaces behind. When enough people are displaced we return to tribalism, nationalism, thoughts of fragmentation, and moves back into the direction of dystopian futures. Acknowledging people are left behind and finding remedies is better than revolt and retreating from progress - and showing love to your fellow human is just the right thing to do. Not doing so creates recessions like the ups and downs of the market in the years as gaps between innovative periods formed.

The stock market went digital in 1966, allowing more and more trades to be processed every day. Instinet was founded in 1969 allowing brokers to make after hour trades. NASDAQ went online in 1970, removing the floor or trading market that had been around since the 1600s. And as money poured in, ironically gold reserves started to go down a little. Just as the Romans under Tiberius saw money leave the country as investment, US gold was moving to other central banks to help rebuild countries, mostly those allied with NATO, to rebuild their countries. But countries continued to release bank notes to pay to rebuild, creating a period of hyperinflation.

As with other times when gold became scarce, interest rates became unpredictable, moving from 3 to 17 percent and back again until they began to steadily decline in 1980. 

Gold would be removed from the London market in 1968 and other countries began to cash out their US dollars for gold. Belgium, the Netherlands, then Britain cashed in their dollars for gold, and much as had happened under the reign of Tiberius, there wasn’t enough to sustain the financial empires created. This was the turning point for the end of the informal links back to the gold standard. By 1971 Nixon was forced to sever the relationship between the dollar and gold and the US dollar, by then the global standard going back to the Bretton Woods Agreement, became what’s known as fiat money. The Bretton Woods agreement was officially over and the new world order was morphing into something else. Something that was less easily explainable to common people. A system where the value of currency was based not on the link to gold but based on the perception of a country, as stocks were about to move from an era of performance and productivity to something more speculative.

Throughout the 80s more and more orders were processed electronically and by 1996 we were processing online orders. The 2000s saw algorithmic and high frequency trading. By 2001 we could trade in pennies and the rise of machine learning created billionaire hedge fund managers. Although earlier versions were probably more just about speed. Like if EPS is greater than Expected EPS and guidance EPS is greater than EPS then buy real fast, analyze the curve and sell when it tops out. Good for them for making all the moneys but while each company is required to be transparent about their financials, the high frequency trading has gone from rewarding companies with high earnings to seeming like more a social science where the rising and falling was based on confidence about an industry and the management team.

It became harder and harder to explain how financial markets work. Again, bankers work with money all day and come up with all sorts of financial instruments to invest in with their time. The quantity and types of these became harder to explain. Junk bonds, penny stocks, and to an outsider strange derivatives. And so moving to digital trading is only one of the ways the global economy no longer makes sense to many. 

Gold and other precious metals can’t be produced at a rate faster than humans are produced. And so they had to give way to other forms of money and currency, which diluted the relationship between people and a finite, easy to understand, market of goods. 

As we moved to a digital world there were thinkers that saw the future of currency as flowing electronically. Russian cyberneticist Kitov theorized electronic payments and then came ATMs back in the 50s, which the rise of digital devices paved the way to finally manifest themselves over the ensuing decades. Credit cards moved the credit market into more micro-transactional, creating industries where shop-keepers had once kept debits in a more distributed ledger. As the links between financial systems increased and innovators saw the rise of the Internet on the way, more and more devices got linked up.

This combined with the libertarianism shown by many in the next wave of Internet pioneers led people to think of ways for a new digital currency. David Chaum thought up ecash in 1983, to use encrypted keys, much as PGP did for messages, to establish a digital currency. In 1998, Nick Szabo came up with the idea for what he called bitgold, a digital currency based on cryptographic puzzles and the solved puzzles would be sent to a public registry using a public key where the party who solved the puzzle would receive a private key. This was kinda’ like using a mark on a Lydian rock to make sure coins were gold. He didn’t implement the system but had the initial concept that it would work similar to the gold standard - just without a central authority, like the World Bank. 

This was all happening concurrently with the rise of ubiquitous computing, the move away from checking to debit and credit cards, and the continued mirage that clouded what was really happening in the global financial system. There was a rise in online e-commerce with various sites emerging to buy products in a given industry online. Speculation increased creating a bubble around Internet companies. That dot com bubble burst in 2001 and markets briefly retreated from the tech sector. 

Another bull market was born around the rise of Google, Netflix, and others. Productivity gains were up and a lot of money was being put to work in the market, creating another bubble. Markets are cyclical and need to be reigned back in from time to time. That’s not to minimize the potentially devastating impacts to real humans. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 came along for a number of reasons, mostly tied to the bursting of a housing bubble to oversimplify the matter. The lack of liquidity with banks caused a crash and the lack of regulation caused many to think through the nature of currency and money in an increasingly globalized and digital world. After all, if the governments of the world couldn’t protect the citizenry of the world from seemingly unscrupulous markets then why not have completely deregulated markets where the invisible hand does so?

Which brings us to the rise of cryptocurrencies.

Who is John Galt? Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, who created the first blockchain database and brought the world into peer-to-peer currency in 2009 when bitcoin .1 was released. Satoshi mined block 0 of bitcoin for 50 bitcoins. Over the next year Satoshi mined a potential of about a million bitcoins. Back then a bitcoin was worth less than a penny. As bitcoin grew and the number of bitcoins mined into the blockchain increased, the scarcity increased and the value skyrocketed reaching over $15 billion as of this writing. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? No one knows - the name is a pseudonym. Other cryptocurrencies have risen such as Etherium. And the market has largely been allowed to evolve on its own, with regulators and traditional financiers seeing it as a fad. Is it? Only time will tell. 

There is about an estimated 200,000 tonnes of gold in the world worth about 93 trillion dollars if so much of it weren’t stuck in necklaces and teeth buried in the ground. The US sits on the largest stockpile of it today, at 8,000 tonnes worth about a third of a trillion dollars, then Germany, Italy, and France. By contrast there are 18,000,000 bitcoins with a value of about $270 billion, a little less than the US supply of gold. By contrast the global stock market is valued at over $85 trillion.

The global financial markets are vast. They include the currencies of the world and the money markets that trade those. Commodity markets, real estate, the international bond and equity markets, and derivative markets which include contracts, options, and credit swaps. This becomes difficult to conceptualize because as one small example in the world financial markets, over $190 billion is traded on stock markets a day. 

Seemingly, rather than running on gold reserves, markets are increasingly driven by how well they put debt to work. National debts are an example of that. The US National Debt currently stands at over $27 trillion dollars. Much is held by our people as bonds, although some countries hold some as security as well, including governments like Japan and China, who hold about the same amount of debt if you include Hong Kong with China. But what does any of that mean? The US GDP sits at about $22.3 trillion dollars. So we owe a little more than we make in a year. Much as many families with mortgages, credit cards, etc might owe about as much as they make. And roughly 10% of our taxes go to pay interest. Just as we pay interest on mortgages. 

Most of this is transparent. As an example, government debt is often held in the form of a treasury bond. The treasury.gov website lists who holds what bonds: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt. Nearly every market discussed here can be traced to a per-transaction basis, with many transactions being a matter of public record. And yet, there is a common misconception that people think the market is controlled by a small number of people. Like a cabal. But as with most perceived conspiracies, the global financial markets are much more complex. There are thousands of actors who think they are acting rationally who are simply speculating. And there are a few who are committing a crime by violating or inorganically manipulating markets, as has been illegal since the Venetians passed their first laws on the matter. Most day traders will eventually lose all of their money. Most market manipulators will eventually go to jail. But there’s a lot of grey in between. And that can’t entirely be planned for. 

At the beginning of this episode I mentioned it was a prelude to a deeper dive into digital piracy, venture capital, Bitcoin, PayPal, Square, and others. Piracy, because it potentially represents the greatest redistribution of wealth since the beginning of time. Baidu and Alibaba have made their way onto public exchanges. ANT group has the potential to be the largest IPO in history. Huawei is supposedly owned by employees. You can also buy stocks in Russian banking, oil, natural gas, and telecom. 

Does this mean that the split created when the ideas of Marx became a political movement that resulted in communist regimes is over? No. These have the potential of creating a bubble. One that will then need correcting, maybe even based on intellectual property damage claims. The seemingly capitalistic forays made by socialist or communist countries just go to show that there really isn’t and has never been a purely capitalist, socialist, or communist market. Instead, they’re spectrums separated by a couple of percentages of tax here and there to pay for various services or goods to the people that each nation holds as important enough to be universal to whatever degree that tax can provide the service or good. 

So next time you hear “you don’t want to be a socialist country, do you?” Keep in mind that every empire in history has simply been somewhere in a range from a free market to a state-run market. The Egyptians provided silos, the Lydians coined gold, the Romans built roads and bailed out banks, nations adopted gold as currency, then build elaborate frameworks to gain market equilibrium. Along the way markets have been abused and then regulated and then deregulated. The rhetoric used to day though is really a misdirection play handed down by people with ulterior motives. You know, like back in the Venetian times. I immediately think of dystopian futures when I feel I’m being manipulated. That’s what charlatans do. That’s not quite so necessary in a utopian outlook.

I just finished reading a book by Ben Peters called How Not To Network A Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. The book is an amazing deep dive into the Soviet attempts to build a national information network primarily in the 60s. The book covers a lot of ground and has a lot of characters, although the most recurring is Viktor Glushkov, and if the protagonist isn’t the Russian scientific establishment, perhaps it is Viktor Glushkov. And if there’s a primary theme, it’s looking at why the Soviets were unable to build a data network that covered the Soviet Union, allowing the country to leverage computing at a micro and a macro scale 

The final chapter of the book is one of the best summaries and most insightful I’ve ever read on the history of computers. While he doesn’t directly connect the command and control heterarchy of the former Soviet Union to how many modern companies are run, he does identify a number of ways that the Russian scientists were almost more democratic, or at least in their zeal for a technocratic economy, than the US Military-Industrial-University complex of the 60s.  

The Sources and Bibliography is simply amazing. I wish I had time to read and listen and digest all of the information that went into the making if this amazing book. And the way he cites notes that build to conclusions. Just wow.

In a previous episode, we covered the memo, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” - sent by JCR Licklider in 1963. This was where the US Advanced Research Projects Agency instigated a nationwide network for research. That network, called ARPAnet, would go online in 1969, and the findings would evolve and change hands when privatized into what we now call the Internet. We also covered the emergence of Cybernetics, which Norbert Wiener defined in 1948 as a the systems-based science of communication and automatic control systems - and we covered the other individuals influential in its development. 

It’s easy to draw a straight line between that line of thinking and the evolution that led to the ARPAnet. In his book, Peters shows how Glushkov uncovered cybernetics and came to the same conclusion that Licklider had, that the USSR needed a network that would link the nation. He was a communist and so the network would help automate the command economy of the growing Russian empire, an empire that would need more people managing it than there were people in Russia, if the bureaucracy continued to grow at a pace that was required to do the manual computing to get resources to factories and good to people. He had this epiphany after reading Wiener’s book on cybernetics - which had been hidden away from the Russian people as American propaganda. 

Glushkov’s contemporary, Anatoly Kitov had come to the same realization back in 1959. By 1958 the US had developed the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE. The last of that equipment went offline in 1984. The environment was a system of networked radar equipment that could be used as eyes in the sky to detect a Soviet attack. It was crazy to think about that a few years ago, but think today about a radar system capable of detecting influence in elections and maybe notsomuch any more. SAGE linked computers built by IBM. 

The Russians saw defense as cost prohibitive. Yet at Stalin’s orders they began to develop a network of radar sites in a network of sorts around Moscow in the early 50s, extending to Leningrad. They developed the BESM-1 mainframe in 1952 to 1953 and while Stalin was against computing and western cybernetic doctrine outside of the military, as in America, they were certainly linking sites to launch missiles. Lev Korolyov worked on BESM and then led the team to build the ballistic missile defense system. 

So it should come as no surprise that after a few years Soviet scientists like Glushkov and Kitov would look to apply military computing know-how to fields like running the economics of the country. 

Kitov had seen technology patterns before they came. He studied nuclear physics before World War II, then rocketry after the war, and he then went to the Ministry of Defence at Bureau No 245 to study computing. This is where he came in contact with Wiener’s book on Cybernetics in 1951, which had been banned in Russia at the time. Kitov would work on ballistic missiles and his reputation in the computing field would grow over the years. Kitov would end up with hundreds of computing engineers under his leadership, rising to the rank of Colonel in the military. 

By 1954 Kitov was tasked with creating the first computing center for the Ministry of Defence. They would take on the computing tasks for the military. He would oversee the development of the M-100 computer and the transition into transistorized computers. By 1956 he would write a book called “Electronic Digital Computers” and over time, his views on computers grew to include solving problems that went far beyond science and the military. Running company

Kitov came up with the Economic Automated Management System in 1959. This was denied because the military didn’t want to share their technology. Khrushchev sent Brezhnev, who was running the space program and an expert in all things tech, to meet with Kitov. Kitov was suggesting they use this powerful network of computer centers to run the economy when the Soviets were at peace and the military when they were at war. 

Kitov would ultimately realize that the communist party did not want to automate the economy. But his “Red Book” project would ultimately fizzle into one of reporting rather than command and control over the years. 

The easy answer as to why would be that Stalin had considered computers the tool of imperialists and that feeling continued with some in the communist party. The issues are much deeper than that though and go to the heart of communism. You see, while we want to think that communism is about the good of all, it is irrational to think that people will act ways in their own self-interest. Microeconomics and macroeconomics. And automating command certainly seems to reduce the power of those in power who see that command taken over by a machine. And so Kitov was expelled from the communist party and could no longer hold a command. 

Glushkov then came along recommending the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing, or OGAS for short, in 1962. He had worked on computers in Kyiv and then moved to become the Director of the Computer Center in Ukraine at the Academy of Science. Being even more bullish on the rise of computing, Glushkov went further even added an electronic payment system on top of controlling a centrally planned economy. Computers were on the rise in various computer centers and other locations and it just made sense to connect them. And they did at small scales. 

As was done at MIT, Glushkov built a walled garden of researchers in his own secluded nerd-heaven. He too made a grand proposal. He too saw the command economy of the USSR as one that could be automated with a computer, much as many companies around the world were employing ERP solutions in the coming decades. 

The Glushkov proposal continued all the way to the top. They were able to show substantial return on investment yet the proposal to build OGAS was ultimately shot down in 1970 after years of development. While the Soviets were attempting to react to the development of the ARPAnet, they couldn’t get past infighting. The finance minister opposed it and flatly refused. There were concerns about which ministry the system would belong to and basically political infighting much as I’ve seen at many of the top companies in the world (and increasingly in the US government). 

A major thesis of the book is that the Soviet entrepreneurs trying to build the network acted more like capitalists than communists and Americans building our early networks acted more like socialists than capitalists. This isn’t about individual financial gains though. Glushkov and Kitov in fact saw how computing could automate the economy to benefit everyone. But a point that Peters makes in the book is centered around informal financial networks. Peters points out that Blat, the informal trading of favors that we might call a black market or corruption, was common place. An example he uses in the book is that if a factory performs at 101% of expected production the manager can just slide under the radar. But if they perform at 120% then those gains will be expected permanently and if they ever dip below the expected productivity, they might meet a poor fate. Thus Blat provides a way to trade goods informally and keep the status quo. A computer doing daily reports would make this kind of flying under the radar of Gosplan, or the Soviet State Planning Committee difficult. Thus factory bosses would likely inaccurately enter information into computers and further the Tolchachs, or pushers, of Blat. 

A couple of points I’d love to add onto those Peters made, which wouldn’t be obvious without that amazing last paragraph in the book. The first is that I’ve never read Bush, Licklider, or any of the early pioneers claim computers should run a macroeconomy. The closest thing that could run a capitalist economy. And the New York Stock Exchange would begin the process of going digital in 1966 when the Dow was at 990. The Dow sat at about that same place until 1982. Can you imagine that these days? Things looked bad when it dropped to 18,500. And the The London Stock Exchange held out going digital until 1986 - just a few years after the dow finally moved over a thousand. Think about that as it hovers around $26,000 today. And look at the companies and imagine which could get by without computers running their company - much less which are computer companies. There are 2 to 6 billion trades a day. It would probably take more than the population of Russia just to push those numbers if it all weren’t digital. In fact now, there’s an app (or a lot of apps) for that. But the point is, going back to Bush’s Memex, computers were to aid in human decision making. In a world with an exploding amount of data about every domain, Bush had prophesied the Memex would help connect us to data and help us to do more. That underlying tenant infected everyone that read his article and is something I think of every time I evaluate an investment thesis based on automation. 

There’s another point I’d like to add to this most excellent book. Computers developed in the US were increasingly general purpose and democratized. This led to innovative new applications just popping up and changing the world, like spreadsheets and word processors. Innovators weren’t just taking a factory “online” to track the number of widgets sold and deploying ICBMs - they were foundations for building anything a young developer wanted to build. The uses in education with PLATO, in creativity with Sketchpad, in general purpose languages and operating systems, in early online communities with mail and bulletin boards, in the democratization of the computer itself with the rise of the pc and the rapid proliferation with the introduction of games, and then the democratization of raw information with the rise of gopher and the web and search engines. Miniaturized and in our pockets, those are the building blocks of modern society. And the word democratization to me means a lot.

But as Peters points out, sometimes the Capitalists act like Communists. Today we close down access to various parts of those devices by the developers in order to protect people. I guess the difference is now we can build our own but since so many of us do that at #dayjob we just want the phone to order us dinner. Such is life and OODA loops.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how technological determinism would lead to global information networks. It’s easy to see electronic banking and commerce and that people would pay for goods in apps. As the Amazon stock soars over $3,000 and what Jack Ma has done with Alibaba and the empires built by the technopolies at Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of others. In retrospect, it’s easy to see the productivity gains. But at the time, it was hard to see the forest through the trees. The infighting got in the way. The turf-building. The potential of a bullet in the head from your contemporaries when they get in power can do that I guess. 

And so the networks failed to be developed in the USSR and ARPAnet would be transferred to the National Science Foundation in 1985, and the other nets would grow until it was all privatized into the network we call the Internet today, around the same time the Soviet Union was dissolved. As we covered in the episode on the history of computing in Poland, empires simply grow beyond the communications mediums available at the time. By the fall of the Soviet Union, US organizations were networking in a build up from early adopters, who made great gains in productivity increases and signaled the chasm crossing that was the merging of the nets into the Internet. And people were using modems to connect to message boards and work with data remotely. Ironically, that merged Internet that China has splinterneted and that Russia seems poised to splinter further. But just as hiding Wiener’s cybernetics book from the Russian people slowed technological determinism in that country, cutting various parts of the Internet off in Russia will slow progress if it happens.

The Soviets did great work on macro and micro economic tracking and modeling under Glushkov and Kitov. Understanding what you have and how data and products flow is one key aspect of automation. And sometimes even more important in helping humans make better-informed decisions. Chile tried something similar in 1973 under Salvador Allende, but that system failed as well. 

And there’s a lot to digest in this story. But that word progress is important. Let’s say that Russian or Chinese crackers steal military-grade technology from US or European firms. Yes, they get the tech, but not the underlying principals that led to the development of that technology. Just as the US and partners don’t proliferate all of their ideas and ideals by restricting the proliferation of that technology in foreign markets. Phil Zimmerman opened floodgates when he printed the PGP source code to enable the export of military-grade encryption. The privacy gained in foreign theaters contributed to greater freedoms around the world. And crime. But crime will happen in an oppressive regime just as it will in one espousing freedom. 

So for you hackers tuning in - whether you’re building apps, hacking business, or reingineering for a better tomorrow: next time you’re sitting in a meeting and progress is being smothered at work or next time you see progress being suffocated by a government, remember that those who you think are trying to hold you back either don’t see what you see, are trying to protect their own power, or they might just be trying to keep progress from outpacing what their constituents are ready for. And maybe those are sometimes the same thing, just from a different perspective. Because go fast at all costs not only leaves people behind but sometimes doesn’t build a better mousetrap than what we have today. Or, go too fast and like Kitov you get stripped of your command. No matter how much of a genius you, or your contemporary Glushkov are. The YouTube video called “Internet of Colonel Kitov” has a great quote: “pioneers are recognized by the arrows sticking out of their backs.” But hey, at least history was on their side! 

Thank you for tuning in to the History of Computing Podcast. We are so, so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day and I hope you too are on the right side of history!

Welcome to the history of computing podcast. Today we’re going to talk about the use of big data in elections. But first, let’s start with a disclaimer. I believe that these problems outlined in this episode are apolitical. Given the chance to do so I believe most politicians (or marketers), despite their party, would have jumped on what happened with what is outlined in this podcast. Just as most marketers are more than happy to buy data, even when not knowing the underlying source of that data. No offense to the parties but marketing is marketing. Just as it is in companies. Data will be used to gain an advantage in the market. Understanding the impacts of our decisions and the values of others is an ongoing area of growth for all of us. Even when we have quotas on sales qualified leads to be delivered. 

Now let’s talk about data sovereignty. Someone pays for everything. The bigger and more lucrative the business, the more that has to be paid to keep organizations necessarily formed to support an innovation alive. If you aren’t paying for a good or service, then you yourself are the commodity. In social media, this is represented in the form of a company making their money from data about you and from the ads you see. The only other viable business model used is to charge for the service, like a Premium LinkedIn account as opposed to the ones used by us proletariat.  

Our devices can see so much about us. They know our financial transactions, where we go, what we buy, what content we consume, and apparently what our opinions and triggers are. Sometimes, that data can be harnessed to show us ads. Ads about things to buy. Ads about apps to install. Ads about elections.

My crazy uncle Billy sends me routine invitations to take personality quizzes. No thanks. Never done one. Why?

I worked on one of the first dozen Facebook apps. A simple rock, paper, scissors game. At the time, it didn’t at all seem weird to me as a developer that there was an API endpoint to get a list of friends from within my app. It’s how we had a player challenge other players in a game. It didn’t seem weird that I could also get a list of their friends. And it didn’t seem weird that I could get a lot of personal data on people through that app. I mean I had to display their names and photos when they played a game, right? I just wanted to build a screen to invite friends to play the app. I had to show a photo so you could see who you were playing. And to make the game more responsive I needed to store the data in my own SQL tables. It didn’t seem weird then. I guess it didn’t seem weird until it did. 

What made it weird was the introduction of highly targeted analytics and retargeting. I have paid for these services. I have benefited from these services in my professional life and to some degree I have helped develop some. I’ve watched the rise of large data warehouses. I’ve helped buy phone numbers and other personally identifiable information of humans and managed teams of sellers to email and call those humans. Ad targeting, drip campaigns, lead scoring, and providing very specific messages based on attributes you know about a person are all a part of the modern sales and marketing machine at any successful company. 

And at some point, it went from being crazy how much information we had about people to being - well, just a part of doing business. The former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix once said “From Mad Men in the day to Math Men today.” From Don Draper to Betty’s next husband Henry (a politician) there are informal ties between advertising, marketing and politics. Just as one of the founders of SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica had ties with royals having dated one and gone to school with others in political power.

But there have also always been formal ties. Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick was the first colonial newspaper in America and was formally suppressed after its first edition in 1690. But the Boston News-Letter was formally subsidized in 1704. Media and propaganda. Most newspapers were just straight up sponsoring or sponsored by a political platform in the US until the 1830s. To some degree, that began with Ben Franklin’s big brother James Franklin in the early 1700s with the New England Courant. Franklin would create partnerships for content distribution throughout the colonies, spreading his brand of moral virtue. And the papers were stoking the colonies into revolution. And after the revolution Hamilton instigated American Minerva as the first daily paper in New York - to be a Federalist paper. Of course, the Jeffersonian Republicans called him an “incurable lunatic.” And yet they still guaranteed us the freedom of press. 

And that freedom grew to investigative reporting, especially during the Progressive Era, from the tail end of the 19th century up until the start of the roaring twenties. While Teddy Roosevelt would call them Muckrakers, their tradition extends from Nellie Bly and Fremont Older to Seymour Hersch, Kwitny, even the most modern Woodward and Bernstein. They led to stock reform, civic reforms, uncovering corruption, exposing crime in labor unions, laying bare monopolistic behaviors, improving sanitation and forcing us to confront racial injustices. They have been independent of party affiliation and yet constantly accused over the last hundred years of being against whomever is in power at the time.

Their journalism extended to radio and then to television. I think the founders would be proud of how journalism evolved and also unsurprised as to some of the ways it has devolved. But let’s get back to someone is always paying. The people can subscribe to a newspaper but the advertising is a huge source of revenue. With radio and television flying across airwaves and free, advertising exclusively became what paid for content and the ensuing decades became the golden age of that industry. And politicians bought ads. If there is zero chance a politician can win a state, why bother buying ads in that state. That’s a form of targeting with a pretty simple set of data. 

In Mad Men, Don is sent to pitch the Nixon campaign. There has always been a connection between disruptive new mediums and politics. Offices have been won by politicians able to gain access to early printing presses to spread their messages to the masses, those connected to print media to get articles and advertising, by great orators at the advent of the radio, and by good-looking charismatic politicians first able to harness television - especially in the Mad Men fueled ad exec inspired era that saw the Nixon campaigns in the 60s. The platforms to advertise become ubiquitous, they get abused, and then they become regulated. After television came news networks specifically meant to prop up an agenda, although unable to be directly owned by a party. None are “fake news” per se, but once abused by any they can all be cast in doubt, even if most especially done by the abuser. 

The Internet was no different. The Obama campaign was really the first that leveraged social media and great data analytics to orchestrate what can be considered to really be the first big data campaign. And after his campaign carried him to a first term the opposition was able to make great strides in countering that. Progress is often followed by lagerts who seek to subvert the innovations of an era. And they often hire the teams who helped with previous implementations. 

Obama had a chief data scientist, Rayid Ghani. And a chief analytics officer. They put apps in the hands of canvassers and they mined Facebook data from Facebook networks of friends to try and persuade voters. They scored voters and figured out how to influence votes for certain segments. That was supplemented by thousands of interviews and thousands of hours building algorithms. By 2012 they were pretty confident they knew which of the nearly 70 million Americans that put him in the White House. And that gave the Obama campaign the confidence to spend $52 million in online ads against Romney’s $26 million to bring home the win. And through all that the Democratic National Committee ended up with information on 180 million voters.

That campaign would prove the hypothesis that big data could win big elections. Then comes the 2016 election. Donald Trump came from behind, out of a crowded field of potential Republican nominees, to not only secure the Republican nomination for president but then to win that election. He won the votes to be elected in the electoral college while losing the popular vote. That had happened when John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in 1824, although it took a vote in the House of Representatives to settle that election. Rutherford B Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden in 1876 in the electoral college but lost the popular vote. And it happened again when Grover Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. And in 2000 when Bush beat Gore. And again when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. And he solidly defeated her in the electoral college with 304 to her 227 votes. 

Every time it happens, there seems to be plenty of rhetoric about changing the process. But keep in mind the framers built the system for a reason: to give the constituents of every state a minimum amount of power to elect officials that represent them. Those two represent the number of senators for the state and then the state receives one for each member of the house of representatives. States can choose how the electors are instructed to vote. Most states (except Maine and Nebraska) have all of their electors vote for a single ticket, the one that won the state. Most of the states instruct their elector to vote based on who won the popular vote for their state. Once all the electors cast their votes, Congress counts the votes and the winner of the election is declared. 

So how did he come from behind? One easy place to blame is data. I mean, we can blame data for putting Obama into the White House, or we can accept a message of hope and change that resonated with the people. Just as we can blame data for Trump or accept a message that government wasn’t effective for the people. Since this is a podcast on technology, let’s focus on data for a bit. And more specifically let’s look at the source of one trove of data used for micro-targeting, because data is a central strategy for most companies today. And it was a central part of the past four elections. 

We see the ads on our phones so we know that companies have this kind of data about us. Machine learning had been on the rise for decades. But a little company called SCL was started In 1990 as the Behavioral Dynamics Institute by a British ad man named Nigel Oakes after leaving Saatchi & Saatchi. Something dangerous is when you have someone like him make this kind of comparison “We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler.”

Behavioural Dynamics studied how to change mass behavior through strategic communication - which US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Hastings described in 2008 as the “synchronization of images, actions, and words to achieve a desired effect.” Sounds a lot like state conducted advertising to me. And sure, reminiscent of Nazi tactics. You might also think of it as propaganda. Or “pay ops” in the Vietnam era. And they were involved in elections in the developing world. In places like the Ukraine, Italy, South Africa, Albania, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, even India. And of course in the UK. Or at least on behalf of the UK and whether directly or indirectly, the US. 

After Obama won his second term, SCL started Cambridge Analytica to go after American elections. They began to assemble a similar big data warehouse. They hired people like Brittany Kaiser who’d volunteered for Obama and would become director of Business Development. 

Ted Cruz used them in 2016 but it was the Trump campaign that was really able to harness their intelligence. Their principal investor was Robert Mercer, former CEO of huge fund Renaissance Technologies. He’d gotten his start at IBM Research working on statistical machine translation and was recruited in the 90s to apply data modeling and computing resources to financial analysis. This allowed them to earn nearly 40% per year on investments. An American success story. He was key in the Brexit vote, donating analytics to Nigel Farage and an early supporter of Breitbart News. 

Cambridge Analytica would get involved in 44 races in the 2014 midterm elections. By 2016, Project Alamo was running at a million bucks a day in Facebook advertising. In the documentary The Great Hack, they claim this was to harvest fear. And Cambridge Analytica allowed the Trump campaign to get really specific with targeting. So specific that they were able to claim to have 5,000 pieces of data per person. 

Enter whistleblower Christopher Wylie who claims over a quarter million people took a quick called “This is Your Digital Life” which exposed the data of around 50 million users. That data was moved off Facebook servers and stored in a warehouse where it could be analyzed and fields merged with other data sources without the consent of the people who played the game or the people who were in their friend networks. Dirty tactics. 

Alexander Nix admitted to using bribery stings and prostitutes to influence politicians. So it should be as no surprise that they stole information on well over 50 million Facebook users in the US alone. And of course then they lied about it when being investigated by the UK for Russian interference and fake news in the lead to the Brexit referendum. Investigations go on. 

After investigations started piling up, some details started to emerge. This is Your Digital Life was written by Dr Spectre. It gets better. That’s actually Alexandr Kogan for Cambridge Analytica. He had received research funding from the University of St Petersburg and was then lecturing at the Psychology department at the University of Cambridge. It would be easy to make a jump that he was working for the Russkies but here’s the thing, he also got research funding from Canada, China, the UK, and the US. He claimed he didn’t know what the app would be used for. That’s crap. When I got a list of friends and friends friends who I could spider through, I parsed the data and displayed it on a screen as a pick list. He piped it out to a data warehouse. When you do that you know exactly what’s happening with it. 

So the election comes and goes. Trump wins. And people start asking questions. As they do when one party wins the popular vote and not the electoral college. People misunderstand and think you can win a district due to redistricting in most states and carry the state without realizing most are straight majority. Other Muckraker reporters from around the world start looking into Brexit and US elections and asking questions. 

Enter Paul-Olivier Dehaye. While an assistant professor at the University of Zurich he was working on Coursera. He started asking about the data collection. The word spread slowly but surely. Then enter American professor David Carroll, who sued Cambridge Analytica to see what data they had on him. Dehaye contributed to his Subject Access request and suddenly the connections between Cambridge Analytica and Brexit started to surface, as did the connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, including photos of the team working with key members of the campaign. And ultimately of the checks cut.  Cause there’s always a money trail. 

I’ve heard people claim that there was no interference in the 2016 elections, in Brexit, or in other elections. Now, if you think the American taxpayer didn’t contribute to some of the antics by Cambridge Analytica before they turned their attention to the US, I think we’re all kidding ourselves. And there was Russian meddling in US elections and illegally obtained materials were used, whether that’s emails on servers then leaked to WikiLeaks or stolen Facebook data troves. Those same tactics were used in Brexit. And here’s the thing, it’s been this way for a long, long time - it’s just so much more powerful today than ever before. And given how fast data can travel, every time it happens, unless done in a walled garden, the truth will come to light. 

Cambridge Analytica kinda’ shut down in 2017 after all of this came to light. What do I mean by kinda? Well, former employees setup a company called Emerdata Limited who then bought the SCL companies. Why? There were contracts and data. They brought on the founder of Blackwater, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, and others to serve on the board of directors and she was suddenly the “First Lady of the Alt-Right.” Whether Emerdata got all of the company, they got some of the scraped data from 87 million users. No company with the revenues they had goes away quietly or immediately. 

Robert Mercer donated the fourth largest amount in the 2016 presenting race. He was also the one who supposedly introduced Trump to Steve Bannon. In the fallout of the scandals if you want to call them that, Mercer stepped down from Renaissance and sold his shares of Breitbart to his daughters. Today, he’s a benefactor of the Make America Number 1 Super PAC and remains one of the top donors to conservative causes. 

After leaving Cambridge Analytica, Nix was under investigations for a few years before settling with the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to delete illegally obtained data and settled with the UK Secretary of State that he had offered unethical services and agreed to not act as a director of another company for at least 7 years. 

Brittany Kaiser flees to Thailand and is now a proponent of banning political advertising on Facebook and being able to own your own data. 

Facebook paid a $5 billion fine for data privacy violations and have overhauled their APIs and privacy options. It’s better but not great. I feel like they’re doing as well as they can and they’ve been accused of tampering with feeds by conservative and liberal media outlets alike. To me, if they all hate you, you’re probably either doing a lot right, or basically screwing all of it up. I wouldn’t be surprised to see fines continue piling up. 

Kogan left the University of Cambridge in 2018. He founded Philometrics, a firm applying big data and AI to surveys. Their website isn’t up as of the recording of this episode. His Tumblr seems to be full of talk about acne and trying to buy cheat codes for video games these days. 

Many, including Kogan, have claimed that micro-targeting (or psychographic modeling techniques) against large enhanced sets of data isn’t effective. If you search for wedding rings and I show you ads for wedding rings then maybe you’ll buy my wedding rings. If I see you bought a wedding ring, I can start showing you ads for wedding photographers and bourbon instead. Hey dummy, advertising works. Disinformation works. Analyzing and forecasting and modeling with machine learning works. Sure, some is snake oil. But early adopters made billions off it. Problem is, like that perfect gambling system, you wouldn’t tell people about something if it means you lost your edge. Sell a book about how to weaponize a secret and suddenly you probably are selling snake oil.  

As for regulatory reactions, can you say GDPR and all of the other privacy regulations that have come about since? Much as Sarbanes-Oxley introduced regulatory controls for corporate auditing and transparency, we regulated the crap out of privacy. And by regulated I mean a bunch of people that didn’t understand the way data is stored and disseminated over APIs made policy to govern it. But that’s another episode waiting to happen. Suffice it to say the lasting impact to the history of computing is both the regulations on privacy and the impact to identity providers and other API endpoints, were we needed to lock down entitlements to access various pieces of information due to rampant abuses. 

So here’s the key question in all of this: did the data help Obama and Trump win their elections? It might have moved a few points here and there. But it was death by a thousand cuts. Mis-steps by the other campaigns, political tides, segments of American populations desperately looking for change and feeling left behind while other segments of the population got all the attention, foreign intervention, voting machine tampering, not having a cohesive Opponent Party and so many other aspects of those elections also played a part. And as Hari Seldon-esque George Friedman called it in his book, it’s just the Storm Before the Calm. 

So whether the data did or did not help the Trump campaign, the next question is whether using the Cambridge Analytica data was wrong? This is murky. The data was illegally obtained. The Trump campaign was playing catchup with the maturity of the data held by the opposition. But the campaign can claim they didn’t know that the data was illegally obtained. It is illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns and Bannon was warned about that. And then-CEO Nix was warned. But they were looking to instigate a culture war according to Christopher Wylie who helped found Cambridge Analytica. And look around, did they? 

Getting data models to a point where they have a high enough confidence interval that they are weaponizable takes years. Machine learning projects are very complicated, very challenging, and very expensive. And they are being used by every political campaign now insofar as the law allows. To be honest though, troll farms of cheap labor are cheaper and faster. Which is why three more got taken down just a month before the recording of this episode. But AI doesn’t do pillow talk, so eventually it will displace even the troll farm worker if only ‘cause the muckrakers can’t interview the AI. 

So where does this leave us today? Nearly every time I open Facebook, I see an ad to vote for Biden or an ad to vote for Trump. The US Director of National Intelligence recently claimed the Russians and Iranians were interfering with US elections. To do their part, Facebook will ban political ads indefinitely after the polls close on Nov. 3. They and Twitter are taking proactive steps to stop disinformation on their networks, including by actual politicians. And Twitter has actually just outright banned political ads. 

People don’t usually want regulations. But just as political ads in print, on the radio, and on television are regulated - they will need to be regulated online as well. As will the use of big data. The difference is the rich metadata collected in micro-targeting, the expansive comments areas, and the anonymity of those commenters. But I trust that a bunch of people who’ve never written a line of code in their life will do a solid job handing down those regulations. Actually, the FEC probably never built a radio - so maybe they will.

So as the election season comes to a close, think about this. Any data from large brokers about you is fair game. What you’re seeing in Facebook and even the ads you see on popular websites are being formed by that data. Without it, you’ll see ads for things you don’t want. Like the Golden Girls Season 4 boxed set. Because you already have it. But with it, you’ll get crazy uncle Billy at the top of your feed talking about how the earth is flat. Leave it or delete it, just ask for a copy of it so you know what’s out there. You might be surprised, delighted, or even a little disgusted by that site uncle Billy was looking at that one night you went to bed early.

But don’t, don’t, don’t think that any of this should impact your vote. Conservative, green, liberal, progressive, communist, social democrats, or whatever you ascribe to. In whatever elections in your country or state or province or municipality. Go vote. Don’t be intimated. Don’t let fear stand in the way of your civic duty. Don’t block your friends with contrary opinions. If nothing else listen to them. They need to be heard. Even if uncle Billy just can’t be convinced the world is round. I mean, he’s been to the beach. He’s been on an airplane. He has GPS on his phone… And that site. Gross.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so, so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day.