What is The Lost Dao?

The American researchers of the 1960s and 70s who laid the groundwork for the internet aimed for people to connect, think together and govern together through computers. But as public investment dwindled, part of that ambition was never built and was forgotten. The book Plurality calls this "the lost dao".

When we log in online today, we usually use an account from a big tech company. When we pay, we go through some company's service. Yet the people who first built the internet meant to build even these foundations as something that belonged to everyone, the book ⿻ Plurality writes. The book calls that road not taken "The Lost Dao".

In short

The American researchers of the 1960s and 70s whose work became today's internet aimed for people to connect with one another, think together and govern together through computers. But as government research funding dwindled and large private companies filled the gap, part of that ambition was never built and was forgotten: foundations such as identity, payments and data sharing [1][2].

The book calls this "the lost dao" and calls for recovering it [1]. "Dao" is the Chinese word 道, meaning "way" or "path".

For example

The "Intergalactic Computer Network" (1963). J. C. R. Licklider, who led the information processing office at ARPA, a research agency of the US Department of Defense, "dubbed the network of collaboration between these hubs, with his usual tongue-in-cheek, the 'Intergalactic Computer Network'". He wanted it to be a model of collaboration and shared governance through computers. The five universities he supported, including Stanford and MIT, became centers of computer science. From the laboratory of Douglas Engelbart, which he also funded, came the mouse and "hypertext", which links texts to one another [3].

RFCs (Requests for Comments). The book calls the "Request for Comments" (RFC) process started by Steve Crocker "arguably one of the first 'wiki'-like processes of informal and mostly additive collaboration across many geographically and sectorally (governmental, corporate, university) dispersed collaborators". It led to TCP/IP, the communication rules of today's internet. TCP was first circulated as an RFC in 1974, and TCP/IP became the official standard in 1983 [4].

According to the book, the name "internet" comes from "the vision of a 'network of networks'": many diverse local networks that could interoperate. This was "in contrast to centralized networks (such as France's concurrent Minitel) that were standardized from the top down by a government" [4].

A surge in users. According to the book, "From the launch of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991, internet usage grew from roughly 4 million people (mostly in North America) to over 400 million (mostly around the world) by the end of the millennium" [5]. Since 400 million is 100 times 4 million, that is more than a hundredfold increase in under ten years.

In more detail

It started with Sputnik

According to chapter 3-3 of the book, things began to move in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik. The Eisenhower administration channeled Cold War fervor into scientific research and education, and created ARPA as a semi-independent agency within the Department of Defense. Licklider's office was one of its signature programs [6].

In his 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis", Licklider wrote that even if machines eventually surpassed the human brain, before that there would be a long period in which humans and computers would advance by working together [6]. The book states that much of this history draws on M. Mitchell Waldrop's book The Dream Machine, "from which much of what follows derives" [6].

⿻ in three layers

According to the book, the heart of the internet's development was replacing centralized, linear and fragmented structures with ⿻ (plural) relationships and governance. This happened in three layers, which came together as the web in the early 1990s [4]:

Packet switching. Instead of routing through a central exchange, data is broken into small pieces that flow through a mesh. In a 1964 report, Paul Baran argued that a network with many centers could survive attack by routing around damage, even with cheap components.
Hypertext. Instead of linear text, documents are linked to one another. In "Project Xanadu", Ted Nelson imagined letting readers follow many different paths through a text. Tim Berners-Lee's web spread this idea.
Open standard-setting. Instead of governments or companies deciding from above, the rules are set together: the RFCs and TCP/IP described above.

Warnings behind the triumph

Personal computers and the internet were a huge success. According to the book, "By 2000, a majority of Americans had a personal computer in their homes" [5].

But Nelson kept warning. Without a secure identity system, chaos and enclosure by states or companies would be unavoidable. Without protocols for commerce, the value of online work would fall, or finance would be monopolized. Without secure sharing and management of information, surveillance and the hoarding of information would be unavoidable. Jaron Lanier carried these concerns forward [5].

In a 1980 paper, Licklider also set out two futures: one in which monopolies take control and crush the technology's potential, and one in which society as a whole takes it on and computers serve democracy. Among the harms of the first, he listed surveillance and distrust of government, monopoly, false information, and private companies controlling the foundations of public speech. The book writes that the later backlash against big tech (the "Techlash") is strikingly similar to this warning [7].

Why the way was lost

The book presents Licklider's own diagnosis [2]:

From the right. With the rise of "small government conservatism", government pulled back from its role of funding technology ahead of the market.
From the left. The Vietnam War strengthened opposition to the military directing research. With the Mansfield Amendments (1970, 1971 and 1973), ARPA could no longer fund research not directly tied to defense.
Going global. Once the internet became worldwide, "there was (as Dewey predicted) no clear public authority to make the investments needed".

Into the vacuum stepped the private sector, the book writes: "The neglected identity functions were filled by the rise of Google and Facebook. Absent digital payments were filled in by PayPal and Stripe", and cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure took over the sharing of data and computation. The "core functions/layers that leaders like Lick and Nelson saw for the internet (e.g. identity, privacy/security, asset sharing, commerce)" were left absent [2].

"Nodes of light" that remain

Still, the book goes on, the dream has not died. It points to Wikipedia, open-source software, decentralized social media, and "civic tech" (movements in which citizens use technology to tackle social problems), such as Taiwan's g0v and Haruyuki Seki's Code for Japan [8].

What is debated

"Dao" is not DAO. It looks the same as "DAO" (decentralized autonomous organization) from the blockchain world, but it is something else. The Japanese edition translates the chapter title as 失われた道（ダオ）, and the Taiwanese Chinese edition as 我們遺忘的道, treating it as the Chinese word 道 [9][10].
The history leans heavily on one book. The book itself notes that much of the story from Licklider onward comes from Waldrop's book [6].
The authors' earlier arguments. In a 2019 essay, Weyl and co-authors argued that because the internet's foundations grew up in an environment where high trust and identity systems were already in the background, they lacked an identity layer for building trust among strangers. After commercialization, they write, a small number of giant companies took over the identities of billions of people [11]. A 2024 paper by Siddarth and co-authors also says that the early internet was governed through public money and standard-setting by many people, but that its upper layers were taken over by private companies, and proposes open protocols for identity, payments and data sharing [12].
Differences between editions. Chapter 3-3 of the Taiwanese Chinese edition is organized into sections differently from the English edition. It gives the year of Licklider's paper as 1979 (the English edition says 1980), and mentions only the 1973 Mansfield Amendment [10]. The Japanese edition also gives the paper's year as 1979 [9].

Where it fits in Plurality

Chapter 2-0 notes that the personal computer, the internet and the smartphone came from a lineage of "intelligence augmentation" that fits neither technocracy nor libertarianism, setting up chapter 3-3 [13]. → Three paths

Chapter 3-3 is its home. It tells the history as an attempt to realize, as technology, the ideas introduced in the preceding chapter 3-2 [6]. → Monist atomism

Another section of the same chapter writes that in Japan, another lost dao flowed through quality control (PDCA, kaizen) and Ken Suzuki's "Nameraka Society" [14].

Later chapters also draw on this history. Chapter 4-1 applies it to the design of identity [15] (→ Identity and Personhood, digital public infrastructure), and chapter 6-0 uses the fact that the personal computer began in small communities of early adopters in its theory of how ideas spread [16] (→ ⿻ theory of change).

Sources

Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao", opening — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, section "Losing our dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, subsection "The Intergalactic Computer Network" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, subsection "A network of networks" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, section "Triumph and tragedy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, section "⿻ launches" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, subsection "The internet and its discontents" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, subsection "Nodes of light" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, Japanese edition, 3-3 "失われた道" (in Japanese) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/jpn/ ［CC0］
Plurality, traditional Chinese edition, 3-3 "我們遺忘的道" (in Chinese) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/tree/main/contents/traditional-mandarin ［CC0］
Weyl, Young and Geiger, "Intersectional Social Data" (2019) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/2019-10-24-uh78r5/
Siddarth, Prewitt and Weyl, "Beyond Public and Private: Collective Provision Under Conditions of Supermodularity" (2024) — https://www.cip.org/supermodular
Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 3-3, section "Quality Control and Nameraka Society" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-1 "Identity and Personhood" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-1/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 6-0 "From ⿻ to Reality" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-0/eng/ ［CC0］

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