A psychic on the television closes her ad with a sequence of numbers. It isn’t a phone number, or a street address, or even a website. It’s the code to a Minitel server, accessible at 3615 SOLEIL, and Jean-Phillipe, who is watching, recognizes “trente-six” as quintessentially Minitel, not unlike ‘www’ for the World Wide Web. Minitel is an acronym for le medium interactif par numérisation d’information téléphonique. She was a teletext terminal with an integrated modem, which hooked up to France’s famously unstable phone network. The top-level codes – 3615, 3617, 3616, 3614 – were followed by a word, which together constituted the address to a chatroom or mail server.

Elsewhere, five years earlier, a man by the name of Fernando Flores is friends with an Orson Welles type whom the newspapers call Merlin. Flores, however, calls him Melquiades, after the Colonel in cien años de soledad. Remember, please, that when Melquiades comes to town, he brings a telescope and a magnifying glass. Both Melquiadeses tell the people: Science has eliminated distance.

There is a story that used to be told. The story is about The Internet. The story goes like this: hackers are cowboys and the Web is a John Ford movie, anarchic and empty of peoples and history. It flatters the Americans, who had developed TCP/IP, ARPANET, and who consider themselves pretty good at blogging and Marxist literature collectives and stuff. But they weren’t first, just longest-lived. China has its own parallel Internet which now dwarfs the English-language Internet in size. Openness and censorship are two sides of the same coin; an Internet – a network of networks – is the coin, spinning in mid-air. But 1993, when the US government privatized ARPANET, isn’t where the coin gets flipped; the original tendrils trace to the Soviet Union.

Before America, before France, before Chile, there is the All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy. The name is no shorter in Russian, but the acronym is: “OGAS”.

In 1948, Norbert Wiener— who would eventually be called the Father of Cybernetics— wrote a manifesto titled “Cybernetics”. An artillery officer who had won the Order of the Red Star for exceptional service discovered it in the classified library of the first Soviet computer design bureau, Special Design Bureau 425, for which he was the ‘military expert’. In his memoirs, this Anatoly Kitov writes:

Having read it, I came to the conclusion that cybernetics was not bourgeois pseudo-science, as it was officially displayed that time, but on the contrary – a serious and important science. It was the year 1952.

In 1953, Stalin dies. Benjamin Peters, author of a book on OGAS, concludes:

To the scientists under study here, Stalin’s best replacement was no person at all, but rather a technocratic conviction that computer-aided governance could avoid the past abuses of its strongman state.

There is much drama about Kitov’s attempts to correct the Soviet record on cybernetics. He gingerly writes a paper, and its publication is deferred by the Central Committee. By 1955, the paper is published, and in 1956 and 1958, Kitov writes more books. Cybernetics has escaped the doghouse and become a respectable Soviet science. By 1959, Kitov has attained a military rank equivalent to ‘general’. The military computers he had helped design were crucial to the analysis of anti-air missile targeting, but the military computing centres never needed all that processing power at once, so Kitov suggests: let’s use that downtime to run the economy, too.

Kitov’s book has fans, even after he’s booted from the Party. One of them is a man named Victor Glushkov, who has just defended his PhD in abstract mathematics. Glushkov eventually hires his former mentor as a peer, working with Kitov on the theory of an enormous system of networked computers, clustered in each SSR.

Lenin quite famously said that the formula for communism was soviet power + the electrification of the country. Glushkov adds to this the computerization of the country. The most incendiary part of Glushkov’s proposal for OGAS was his design of a system of e-transfers that would supplant paper money, via “electronic receipt”, to bring about the cashless “higher state of Communism”. He bows to pressure and removes this from the proposal, which only barely passes the Central Committee’s approval. During this time, Glushkov is awarded the first two of his three Orders of Lenin. He publishes a prediction that, without computerization, by 1980, the entire adult population of the Soviet Union would be employed in managing its own bureaucracy.

His nightmare never comes to pass, and neither does his dream of a network of networks of networks. But this Soviet history troubles common assumptions about national computer networks, much later shattered by the modern Chinese Internet. Hacker-cowboys is only one competing way to build a network of networks, the rhizomatic tendril that connects society to itself.

In Chile, a decade later, another attempt. SINCO, the Systema di INformacion y COntrol, comes to life as an almost-accident. You may be familiar with the project by its English name, Project Cybersyn, under which it’s gotten an increasing amount of anglophone coverage, largely related to Eden Medina’s recent book on the subject. Fernando Flores’ friend, with the wild intense eyes and unkempt beard who constantly reeked of tobacco and sherry, paid partly in cash and partly in a supply of chocolate, wine, and cigars, is at the centre of the design. So too is a cache of mysterious equipment.

In a forgotten warehouse, the Chilean government had discovered 500 telex machines, an early contemporary of the telephone. The previous administration had ordered them but had no idea what to do with them. These were distributed to factories and linked to two control rooms in Santiago. It’s wrong to think of this as an Internet – Beer calls it “a nervous system”. It had a single computer and hundreds of machines networked to communicate with it. It also had a central conference and control room, equipped with the armchairs from Star Trek TNG and wall-to-wall displays of projected statistics. 

These slides weren’t computer monitors but overhead projectors, hand-painted by women design students and scrolled through by the circle of armchairs. It was designed to promote socialist decision-making, to eliminate the need for typists (which Beer calls “the girl between [yourself] and the machinery”; classic workerism, as if the women, as if clerical assistants, were not Real Workers in the same way as the factory men, but were somehow far too skilled to represent the average Chilean), and to resist the American trade war.

What they soon achieved in Chile was something not even being done in capitalist countries. Yes, production statistics were gathered, reports were written; but they could take up to a year to have any impact at all. Stafford Beer characterizes this state of affairs in a speech as, and he’s being candid, “fundamentally slow and stupid”.

Cybersyn’s grandest moment was, without a doubt, in October of 1972. If you know your Chilean history, you may remember that in October 72, Henry Kissinger and Nixon’s CIA put into motion their plan to overthrow an elected government. British and Australian spies posed as journalists, founded newspapers, and flooded Chile with fake news that accused Allende of treason, of selling state secrets to the Cubans. But it wasn’t the Commonwealth-written fake news coming into Chile that was the problem – it was the US dollars. Those went to strike wages for 40,000 Chilean truckers, and they came from the CIA. The truckers refrained from entering cities for 27 days, and if it hadn’t been for the presence of Cybersyn and just-in-time delivery, they may or may not have toppled the Allende government. The CIA loved this result, and tried it again the next year.

After the coup, the New York Times quotes a CIA analyst as saying that the 1973 strikes involved more than 250,000 truck drivers, shopkeepers, and professionals, who banded together in a middle‐class movement that made a “violent overthrow inevitable”. But the only inevitability at play was America’s commitment to domino theory.

The Americans leaned on Chile’s remaining trade partners, forcing them to embargo Chilean copper, which had until then represented four-fifths of the Chilean export market. The USA also sold off a lot of its strategic copper reserve, dropping the global price for it so low that the Chileans couldn’t even profit off of selling it to Cuba or the Soviets. The World Bank refused loans and credits to Chile, and so on. The post-coup Pinochet government became famous primarily for its brutal repression, incomprehensible violations of human rights, and for welcoming with open arms top Nazis like Mengele and the architect of the gas chambers. Domino theory said that this was the lesser of two evils.

Political scientist Arturo Valenzula notes that:

Ironically, it was the counter-mobilization of the petite-bourgeoisie responding to real, contrived, and imaginary threats which finally engendered, in dialectical fashion, a significant and autonomous mobilization of the working class.

Let’s turn the clock ahead to France, to the TV psychic, to the Minitel, in the spirit of what Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie, “defamiliarization”, normalizing the weird and confusing the familiar.

Making a bid for democratization of the information society, the state phone company distributed free “MINItel” terminals. Some 2,500 test terminals were offered in 1980, and more in another set of tests in 1981; commercial operation of the system proper began in 1982. By the end of the decade, millions of terminals had been distributed to homes, businesses, post offices, and community centres.

The terminals were paid for by the government, distributed to anyone who asked for one, and, crucially, connection fees were simply added onto your existing phone bill. To incentivize service providers, the agency sent two-thirds of the user’s per-minute connection fee directly TO those service providers, keeping the remaining third. Within eight years, the system was turning a small profit for the state and had attracted large amounts of advertising. Basically, by the end of the ‘80s, the system worked.

The French state solved the network adoption ‘chicken and egg problem’ by distributing a massive number of terminals, getting enough people and services on the Minitel that people without Minitel access now wanted it. Individual users could consult databases of information – farmers checking commodity prices or weather forecasts, businesses running credit checks on their customers, and the Minitel’s #1 use over its lifetime: consulting the electronic phonebook. 

That phone book database, when it was made, was the largest computer database in the entire world, and it was cheaper to connect to than any other Minitel node.

As shocking as it may seem to us, post-iPhone, the Minitel was, first and foremost, a phone book that did useful other stuff. The entire funding to buy and distribute the terminals came from a cut to the budget for printing paper phone books. An up to date digital phone book was awesome, a great app, but it was that ‘other stuff’ that came to dominate the platform. That same farmer from earlier could check grain prices, certainly, but he could also email his vet, play online poker, and have cybersex, forty years ago!

The state phone company thought their killer app would be the phone book, but the most famous Minitel services, which could take over an hour to successfully dial into, were the “messageries roses” – pink chatrooms. Marie Marchand, a researcher at France Telecom who wrote the first book in English about Minitel, writes that:

Videotex was first dubbed ‘rose’ or pink in 1981 because of the newly arrived left-wing government’s avid promotion of it: the rose is the symbol of France’s socialist party…and so the Minitel had gone from being ‘rose’ because of its left-wing affiliation to being ‘rose’ with sexual overtones. And there is no point exaggerating! Since the dawn of time communication has been used as a vehicle for sex. This should come as no great revelation;[…]Paris’s renowned tarts of the turn of the century[…]were among the first to subscribe to the telephone!

That “pink advertising” is one of the cultural touchpoints for Minitel nostalgia; TV ads like that psychic’s ad we started with, but also posters, radio jingles, billboards, every kind of advertising there was before Minitel. The press quickly realized just how much they could gain by being accessible on Minitel as well, rather than just forecasting their own irrelevance. Libé, a daily newspaper already famous for its personal ads, grew rapidly online – it likely would have folded without the 3615 revenue.

During the 1984 LA olympics, most events were happening in the middle of the French night. Roger Gicquel, director of Minitel for Libé, said that “event results came in too late for the newspapers. So we put the information on the Minitel straight from the telex”.

And they had hackers, too! Laurent Chemla, France’s first arrest for content piracy, was 22 years old when he was charged in 1986, the first year his region had access to the network. There wasn’t a crime on the books for electronic piracy, though, so he was eventually charged with “theft of energy” – the argument being that by having copied the arrangement of “energy” (binary ones and zeros; a sequence of electrons), Chemla could be charged under a statute originally meant for power thieves. 

Minitel succeeded wildly in the business, personal, AND private spheres, although….not always in the estimation of the capitalists. Silicon Valley VC guy – and major UFO conspiracist – Jacques Vallée wrote a 2003 book called “The Heart of the Internet: An Insider’s View of”, dot dot dot. In it, he describes Minitel – he’s French, writing for an American Silicon Valley audience – he describes it this way:

A single well-placed bomb could have taken the French Minitel out of commission.[…]To this day, the French are under the delusion that they invented the Internet because of the Minitel. […] It represented the exact opposite of the Internet concept, a closed system with no ability to grow organically.

I do not agree. Vallée’s analysis is myopic and ignores Minitel’s context. The venture capitalist’s imagination does not extend to the strategic French interventionism that enabled the blossoming of the network and its ubiquity in daily life, but does to the privatization of ARPANET more than a decade later. He sees it as a conflict between free market capitalism and the planned socialist economy, and can only conclude that his familiar framework is applicable but the socialist one was not. 

This stands in stark contrast to the genuine and frequent attempts to export Minitel to the United States. You had to buy the terminal for $4000 and then pay the same high fees as in the French system. The Minitel never succeeded anywhere outside of France, but in France, it was like an early app store.

The omnipresent public advertizing for Minitel – people spent more time viewing ads for the service than they ever did using it – was first invented by the dazzling Cécile Alvergnat, who in February of 1984 put out the simultaneous first print issue of Crac magazine, about emerging media, as well as 3615 CRAC, which would go on to be one of the top Minitel servers of all time. She is virtually unknown outside of French communications history nerds, and I hope you come to love her over the next few paragraphs. Marie Marchand again:

Cécile leased billboard space in the Paris metro and put up posters for Minitel showing off the voluptuous Miss A.C.I, symbol of the Crac on-line electronic mail service. Alvergnat worked hard to infuse her videotex products with her love of live broadcasting, her thorough knowledge of the press and book industry, and her sensitive grasp of the child’s world[….] Alvergnat’s conviction [is] that today’s world generates seas of solitude. To her way of thinking, videotex, with its communication potential, looked like an effective means of limiting the damage.

In 1987, Alvergnat founds Jardins du Minitel, the world’s first cybercafé. It had 25 Minitel terminals; one per table. A contemporary review says it looked like “a Pompeiian ruin” and was “the ideal place for a first date”. The one published newspaper photo looks like a movie set. Each table has one terminal and several chairs – you and a friend, or a date, would go to the cafe and use the terminal together. Connection begetting connections! Jardins… opened a full seven years before the first American internet café and a year before the first PC bang. I was shocked that I had never heard of it.

The Minitel network runs for over thirty years, until 2012. Guys like that venture capitalist / conspiracy theorist see its death, and the Internet’s endurance (in her 30s as well), as proof of the superiority of free market capitalism to the socialist building of infrastructure. But the cowboy-hacker Internet is dead too, isn’t it? We live in walled corporate gardens and scroll through the same four apps every day; the socialist monopoly on network design and function has been usurped by Meta and so on. Minitel was a phone book, newspaper, and cybersex facilitator the entire time.

What can we learn from the relative longevity of Minitel and the arrested birthing pains of Sinco? In both cases, systems theoretical thought combined with new technical equipment to create early and effective network societies. In either case, the networking of society was developed and administered by the centralized state. But the ways they came to be are as different from each other as they are from the Internet. For the French, Minitel was a successful state investment into the burgeoning information society; for the Chileans, Sinco was a desperate experiment built to run on machines they found in a warehouse. What might Cybersyn have looked like if it had lasted thirty years? If it had lasted even eight, the point at which Minitel turned a profit for France? We’ll never know.

I must leave you with Melquiades, Stafford Beer, writing of a meeting with Salvador Allende, four months before the coup:

When I first expounded the cybernetic model of any viable system (which I have not expounded today) to President Allende, I did so on a piece of paper lying between us on the table. I drew for him the entire apparatus of interlocking homeostats, in terms of the neurophysiological version of the model-since he is by profession a medical man. It consists of a five-tier hierarchy of systems. I worked up through the first, second, third and fourth levels. When I got to the fifth, I drew an histrionic breath—all ready to say: ’And this, compañero presidente, is you.’ He forestalled me. ‘Ah’, he said, with a broad smile, as I drew the topmost box: ‘at last — the people’.

Jocelyn Boulding is a potter and writer from Vancouver. Her first chapbook is Become With: finding a way to endure it.