In this exclusive interview, Dr. Noel Packard — guest editor of the upcoming American Behavioral Scientist special issue “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks” – discusses her research on Cold War–era military networks, their role in shaping today’s global communication systems, and the importance of revisiting these histories. She also shares details of the Call for Papers, inviting researchers from across disciplines to contribute to this unique and timely project.
1. Your academic journey spans sociology, media and digital history. What first sparked your interest in the origins of networked communications systems and the prehistory of the Internet?
Actually I did not intend to write about the prehistory of the Internet. Rather than me seeking the opportunity to write about this topic, the opportunity seems to have arrived – to borrow Weber’s term – by chance. For those who wish to read more I detail the events below.
First, all my academic degree programs (economics, public administration, sociology and media) utilized Max Weber’s writings regarding the history of economics and later the meaning derived from ideal type analysis. In the 1990s at the New School I studied Durkheim, Marx and Weber as founders of sociology. I attempted a PhD at New School that was to be a study of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), one of the earliest on-line activist organizations that protected parents from allegedly false claims of sex abuse from their adult children and also military funded scientists from allegedly false claims of experimental abuse by unwitting victims turned witting in retrospect. Although my PhD program was unsuccessful and left me with massive student loan debts I was able to publish an article about it in Humanity and Society entitled “Weber on status groups and collegiality: applying the analysis to a modern organization”. I used Weber’s concept of status occupation groups to frame a comparative analysis of how the on-line FMSF usurped the role and function of earlier face-to-face sex abuse survivor groups and their published literature, turning the support groups into on-line chat groups that kept survivors isolated and largely neutralizing, containing or controlling the so-called survivorship movement of people recalling childhood or past sex trauma.
Years later after paying off the Federal Student Loan debt I left my job, truck and home in California for another attempt at a Sociology PhD in New Zealand. I completed a Sociology BA Honours degree at Victoria University where I published two three articles that had to do with sociology and media. The articles were titled, “Habitual Interaction Estranged”, “No Place to Hide, Before and After Data (Driven) Journalism” and “Statistical demand-pull in 1930’s U.S.A and Germany: Good will, welfare and warfare”. I applied for a Sociology PhD program at University of Auckland but when there were no supervisors available Neal Curtis offered me a place in Media, Film and Television PhD program. I was concerned that doing a PhD in a field I had no previous course work in would hinder my career prospects but lacking other options I took the opportunity. In California I had been freelancing research and publications about how the new Internet and data banking were usurping the place of collective memory and print media so I had some media knowledge to draw on. I melded this knowledge with the same Weberian framework regarding status groups that I had wanted to use in my first PhD thesis attempt. Weber’s status or Social Honor group concept provided a macro way to discuss the creators of the Internet and “get around” the fragmented traditionally individualized stories about inventors, scientists and their particular inventions. Other parts of Weber’s works also helped to frame what would become my PhD thesis entitled, “Exploiting and Neutralising the ‘Communist Threat’ for the Privatised Internet” and the article entitled, “Internet Prehistory: ARPANET Chronology”. As chance would have it my academic journey lead me back to Cold War history about early-networked societies that overlapped perfectly with the years of my life!
2. You describe your work as rooted in the theories of Max Weber, Karl Marx and Norbert Wiener. Could you share how their frameworks shape your understanding of pre-Internet networks and their legacy today?
As I discussed in my answer to the first question every academic program I undertook (economics, public administration, sociology) required reading Max Weber’s works such as General Economic History, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Essays from Max Weber and Economy and Society. My BA economics program at California State University Fresno in the 1980s was considered the most “radical” economics program in the state system because it offered courses in labor history and Marxian economics thanks to faculty members such as Izumi Taniguchi, Robert Allison, Grady Lee Mullenix, and James Cypher. The first courses I took in my Master of public administration program at California State University, East Bay (then Hayward) included a course taught by R. Van de Meer who introduced students to discussions about bureaucracy, alienation and rarefaction through the writings of Weber. In the New School we examined how and why Marx turned Hegel “on his head”, why Weber was not a Marxist and how we can thank Marx’s labor theory of value for establishing a theoretical foundation for our paychecks and thank him for an understanding of alienation in modern and now digital society. The last class I took at New School was a research methods class taught by Arthur Vidich when he was writing a book with Guy Oakes, entitled Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C.Wright Mills. Little did I know that their book would become a valuable resource over 20 years later when I charted the testing phase of the pre-Internet networks. Since I had no course work behind me in communications I drew on my academic training from these earlier programs when I started the PhD in University of Auckland’s Media, Film and Television program in 2018.
At the start of my PhD research I found fragmented history about the origins of the networks that became our Internet. The information was scattered across books and government reports and showed that there was no one “official account” of the Internet’s origins. Instead, there were many accounts and each had a different perspective. This liberated me to apply Weber’s concept of status or social honor groups to the history of the pre-Internet networks to “get around” all of this fragmented history that hindered me from writing a more unified thesis. Once I could see the workforce that built, tested and distributed the Internet over decades in a macro-way, as a “social honor realm workforce” I could escape from writing in detail about specific scientists their particular inventions (the way that Paul Edwards did in his book The Closed World or Yasha Levin and Shoshanna Zuboff and Phillip Mirowski do in their books). This also liberated me to see this “behind the scenes” workforce as mostly a hidden workforce, in marked contrast to scientists celebrated in books. This hidden workforce spanned police forces and intelligence agents, unnamed military scientists from think tanks like Rand to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to turn of the century historical agents that pioneered counterinsurgency and Cold War red squad work in the US and abroad. Frank Donner, a Constitutional and labor rights attorney and political theorist spent a lifetime writing about this kind of behind-the scenes-workforce in, The UnAmericans (1961), The Age of Surveillance (1981) and Protectors of Privilege (1990). Michael Klare and Michael McClintock also wrote about this workforce at the same time Donner was writing, but from a military rather than domestic intelligence viewpoint – as detailed in McClintock’s The American Connection books and Klare’s War Without End (1972), Supplying Repression (1981) and Low Intensity warfare (1988)
This out-of-sight workforce wasn’t really at liberty to talk or write honestly about what it was doing – since part of the job of a Social honor realm actor entails secrecy about occupation and exclusive consumption of other people’s special goods (such as the tax payer funded ARPANET for example). Early in my thesis research I presented a paper that applies Marxian alienation concepts to this dilemma of a workforce tasked to spy on unwitting populations, that must remain unseen and unheard of itself – and the tensions and frustration that this must cause that workforce. I have not had time to develop this line of thought but my presentation paper entitled, “Alienating Marx(ists) From the Cold War into Surveillance Capitalism” presented at the IISES International Academic Conference in Prague invites further discussion about this topic. Essentially I argue that by being precluded from the freedom of speech to process what spy lifestyle means as a job, makes that workforce more aggressive when they see others enjoying the freedom of speech to protest against military oppression – hence a surveillance society fosters civil war via oppression of a workforce doomed to social honor codes that forbid venting their own grievances, pitting them against those who express their grievances and claim a legal right to do so.
I enlisted other aspects of Weber’s works into my thesis research. For example Weber’s first and second dissertations helped for framing the commercialization phase of the pre-internet networks. Weber’s first dissertation followed a fragmented historical trail of documents to chart where, when and why a so-called special fund emerged in the legal documents of the earliest commercial partnerships. Weber described how an employer and contractor eventually inverted their positions, so that the contractor no longer had to sell the employers goods on a contract basis but could become a capitalist selling the goods himself and able to give shares of his company to his former employers. The privatization of the pre-Internet networks (military, National Science Foundation net and other networks) where commercialized by military contractor companies that inverted their position with the Federal government in much the same way that Weber described in his dissertation about early forms of commercial partnerships. Likewise Weber’s discussions about how the new commercial partnerships took on a bundle of rights or acquired rights like an individual is reflected in the post-commercialization phase of the Internet. This was when the telecommunications companies were granted retroactive immunity from class action suits regarding violation of privacy laws. Then in 2010 they were given unlimited free speech rights under the Citizen’s United Act, allowing them to give back to the government officials shares of the telecommunications company profits through large contributions to super pacs —thereby influencing elections and leaders.
After completing the PhD program I reflected on the research findings in terms of political polarization and growing wealth inequality in a post-Internet (post 1995) and fully networked world. Weber’s writings about how government and the Social Honor realm actors can hinder the market and control consumption of special goods lead me to make some presentations regarding how wealth inequality had widened in Cold War networked societies and continues to widen in a globally networked and closed world. I made a presentation online with the New International Virtual Association Conference entitled, “Cold War Military Networked Operations Enabled Pre-and Post-Internet Wealth Inequality“. I presented “The Digital Divide Begins in the Cold War Military Networks, Rather Than the Global Digital, or AI Age” at research symposium “Digital Capital and Political System: Shaping Inequalities in a Technological Age,” hosted and organized by professor Massimo Ragnedda and the IAMCR Digital Divide Working Group at University of Sharjah, Sharjah City, United Arab Emirates. Weber wrote that when the government controlled the market (to harness it for war spending, for example) the market could not respond as normal to demands. Weber warned that this would cause a battle of man against man. We can see an extreme case of this as government control of the market in Gaza starves the Palestinians while enriching arms manufactures and their shareholders. Likewise the US government has spent the majority of US tax money on military, Pentagon and military-industrial complex contractors for decades to subsidize an endless war economy which has left the US impoverished in terms of social needs (affordable health care, housing, food and education) while fattening the stock portfolios of the so called one per centers and their money management firms as Peter Phillips reports in his books Giants (2018) and Titans (2024).
Hindering the market to subsidize special interests leads to a battle of man against man struggling to obtain needed goods while others hoard special goods (ranging from money to inventions, to estates, resources, homes, and so forth) hide them, destroy and launder them. This polarized activity polarizes wealth distribution to the benefit of a few and to the disadvantage of the many. I was interested in how this polarization process is helped along by the Internet because global wealth inequality continues to grow in the post-Internet (1995 onwards) years. While other social scientists debated over polarized speech and politics (hate speech and extreme right politics) I continued to look at the networks in the background of these raging events. Could it be that the networks themselves had a physical influence on this polarized social behavior that was impacting people and nations across the world? I began to wonder what it meant to have every water filled human body touching electronic devices that are interactive 24/7 sharing wireless networks that cocoon our planet in microwaves. This reminded me of the experiment when a large metal bar, or bolt is wrapped with live electrical wires and the molecules in the bolt become polarized, creating a positive and negative end to the bolt. I was also reminded of how Norbert Wiener, the founder of “Cybernetics” (man and machine relations) and America’s premier mathematician and child prodigy, had warned that with increasing electronic communication would come increasing disorganization of the communications. Consider another game where one person whispers a sentence into another person’s ear in a line of people. By the time the last person receives the whispered sentence it has changed it’s meaning and become distorted due to incremental changes in the passage of the communication from one person to the next.
Weber (1864-1920) and Wiener’s (1894 -1964) lives overlapped. Weber was about 30 when Wiener was born and Wiener would have been acquainted with Weber’s works as they were transferred from Germany to the US in the post-WWI years, translated and studied in elite universities like Harvard and the London School of economics and the University of Chicago. Weber and Wiener both pioneered ways to make meaning of a world that increasingly relied on machines, like tabulating machines, and then managed computers, and then interactive computers and wireless networks. Weber and Wiener grappled with a changing world where scientists were challenging earlier established laws of science and physics. New tabulating and data processing machines and cameras proved things could be replicated but “exact repetition is impossible” as Wiener, wrote (1954, 48). Scientists like Ludwig Bolzmann (1844-1906) in Germany, Josiah W. Gibbs (1839- 1903) in the US, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) in Scotland and even pioneering photographers like Eadweard Muybridge were confirming that “chance”, “probability” and “randomness” (a word rooted to the French word randir meaning to “gallop”) – established what Weiner called a “contingent universe”. In other words, neither machines nor men could repeat actions exactly and therefore predicting precise human behavior into the future was impossible – or possible only by matters of changing degrees. Maxwell and Gibbs applied the use of statistics to physics and demonstrated with a scientific method that physics cannot escape considering uncertainty or essentially a contingency universe. Weber and Wiener were surrounded by these new scientific debates and developments and they were both interested in how machines contributed to it or interacted with it. Weber was concerned that a large bureaucratic state empowered with tabulating machines and early forms of computers and teletype machines would foster a Machine State that would hinder innovation, liberal forms of government, ossify society and stunt leadership. Wiener pioneered the study of cybernetics but he also turned against the military-industrial-complex interests in their headlong rush to build and clone interactive computers for military purposes. Wiener warned that cybernetics might be able to help maintain limited progress against the inevitable tide of entropy, disorder and decay, but only for a time. He warned that the planet is a closed environment and that as we relied more on electronic devices to do more work for us we would sap the resources of nature and speed up the “heat death” of our closed and only home planet.
As I wrote in “Habitual Interaction Estranged” published in the International Journal of Social Science (2018) Marx argued that when humans invested themselves into machines they would become alienated from each other, their work and nature. In my 2015 article in the Innovative Journal of Business and Management entitled “Profiling the Machine Age into the perpetuum mobile” I wrote about Marx’s thoughts regarding a machine that could reproduce and never die (unlike human workers). He called it a “perpetuum mobile” which would dominate labor, reduce labor’s value to zero and help capitalists hoard, “turn over” and launder money. Although Max Weber was not a Marxist, he worried that machines in the hands of government bureaucracy would create a “Machine State”. Weber offered no solution for surveillance and machine state but Marx suggested that capitalism and the means of production be taken over by the workers, and if workers were freed from work altogether they might find a utopia where they could improve their lives and the world. Today we appear to be in machine state world where corrupt capitalists hoard, launder, turn over money and coerce governments while underemployed-workers invest themselves into alienating social media that turn over profits for GAFA capitalists.
3. What role did collective memory – especially in its shift from print to digital forms – play in guiding your current research focus?
From 2002 to 2017 I organized a panel of speakers for my “Sociology of Memory: New & Classical Conceptualizations of Memory: Personal or Commodity: Public or Private?” session for the annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association meeting. I solicited speakers from around the world, coordinated them and introduced them in the session. I also guest edited a 2005 theme issue of the American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) entitled “Sociology of Memory”. The managing editor of ABS, Laura Lawrie sent me an invitation to guest edit an issue of ABS. I accepted and recruited writers. I also co-authored an article with Christopher Chen entitled, “From Medieval Mnemonics to a Social Construction of Memory: Thoughts on Some Early European Conceptualizations of Memory, Morality and Consciousness”. Since Laura was new to the ABS job and I had never been an editor, it was a good learning experience for both.
I also edited a book of some of the PSA session presentation papers for Cambridge Scholars Publishing, titled Sociology of Memory: Papers from the Spectrum (2009). Amanda Millar invited me to edit this book. It was a volunteer effort that took about 5 years but I enjoyed recruiting and working with the many accomplished scholars who contributed their essays to the book, including, Anika Walke, Sofia Tchouikina, Janelle Wilson, Ben Herzog, Gabriela Fried Amilivia, Svetlana Hristova, Diane Bartel-Boucher, Roberta Bartoletti, Patricia Lengermann, Gillian Niebrugge, Dean Bond, Nina Baur, Percy Schmeiser and Bonnie Faulkner.
Throughout the 15 or so years that worked on this session, ABS issue and book I observed how speakers and authors spoke eloquently about collective memory while simultaneously using electronic memory to show their research (through power point), publish and share their research (through the Internet) and transact business (through cellphones) for purposes of conference registration, accommodation and transport to the conferences. I asked presenters why they never spoke about the “elephant in the room”, namely the electronic memory or what I termed “the third kind of memory” (after individual and collective memory). The speakers didn’t seem to have a way to talk about this or they were reluctant to explore this avenue of thought. When I edited the book Sociology of memory: Papers from the Spectrum I tried to arrange the articles in such a way as to show how collective memory held in peoples mind’s and printed media and other forms (such as seed banks for example) were/are giving way to electronic data-banked memory – and even to manufactured life forms such as genetically mutated crops. All these ventures confirmed that people allow electronic media to usurp human collective memory. That we do not talk about this seems to confirm Marx’s point, that the machine is alienating us from each other, our own memory and ourselves. Instead of relying on each other to confirm what is or is not remembered we rely on machinery and electronically banked data that as Weiner would remind us, is prone to entropy and distortion – just as we are.
Since the Internet was still new to people in the early 2000s I began to write about how it was usurping collective memory using theories from Marx and George Mead to frame the research. If you look at my CV you can see a list of the presentations that I made at the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) and at the National Social Scientists Association (NSSA) during the early 2000s. For example there are is a trilogy of presentation papers that followed one another for three years, which I wanted to develop further. They include, “Relating Marx’s Commodity Theory to Data-Banking” (2013); “Information, Appropriation, Value and Questions” (2014); and “Has the “Perpetuum Mobile” Age Arrived?” (2015).
During this time I was living in a condominium complex in an East San Francisco Bay community, namely, Vallejo, California. Vallejo was hit hard by the sub-prime mortgage crisis that began in 2009 and this taught me a hard lesson about what electronic data in the hands of corrupt banks could do. I witnessed how my neighbors lost their homes to corrupt banks and the community went from being largely homeowner owned to rental property owned by foreign investors and venture capitalists. I was caught in the middle of these events since I owned my tiny studio condo outright, but its value fell from over $100,000 to about $18,000 on the auction block. I could not sell or rent my property because the community was degraded by the crisis. Living in my home became an ordeal as newly homeless people stole from the homes and cars of those who could retain their homes. The entire community changed as condos filled up with cash rich immigrant renter families who didn’t speak English and broke health and safety codes by having large families in one-bedroom condos. California Attorney General Harris did an investigation and had a list of bankers who could have been prosecuted but she did not put any bankers in jail. Why? One year into the crisis the Citizens United Act permitted the new telecommunication companies like Sprint or AT&T wireless or the GAFA companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) or corporations or banks, to have unlimited free speech rights like individuals and to return profit shares to the government in the form of contributions to super pacs. After Citizen’s United passed Harris won a seat in the California Senate and after one term became the vice -presidential running-mate to Biden. When Biden stepped down from running for a second term as President Harris ran for the presidency with contributions of over $80 million dollars for her campaign finance. She lost the election but showed us how Citizens United (“Citizens” being corporations) united to help boost her position from an Attorney General (who did nothing to prosecute corrupt bankers) into the Vice President’s seat in a matter of a few short years – a record for a young, black, woman politician. As a California homeowner I watched these events unfold and prepared to sell my condo at a loss and leave California for a second attempt at a PhD program in another country, namely New Zealand. I took this knowledge with me as I opened a new chapter in my life in 2017 – landing in Wellington, New Zealand the year that Trump took office the first time. What I had lived through in Vallejo would inform my PhD thesis research in regards to what Weber called the “personhood” phase of a commercial partnership – when a firm acquires the rights of an individual person.
To sum up, I experienced and witnessed how the Internet usurped human collective memory. I asked fellow scholars to write and speak about this. When they could not, or if even when they did, I continued to write and present on how electronic data banking was displacing human collective memory activities. This research venture grew into 15 years of conference organizing and presentations, a book and an issue of American Behavioral Scientist. The efforts were hindered by the events of the subprime mortgage crisis made possible by the new Internet and electronic data banking, as the banks used new electronic ways to “see” and know and predict which lenders would default on their loans, thus allowing the bank to foreclose on their homes, leaving the homeowner homeless and allowing the bank to sell the home to venture capitalists. While I studied, wrote and spoke about how electronic media was usurping collective memory, I was witnessing the consequences of how that electronic data banking was being used to the advantage of corrupt banks and vulture capitalists at the expense of poor Americans. I also experienced the “personhood” phase of the new tele-communications companies as they were granted retroactive immunity from class action lawsuits over violations of privacy rights of individuals and gaining “free speech rights” as corporate individuals. Fleeing to New Zealand I took these hard-won lessons with me to attempt another PhD program – this time a successful one!
4. You have been invited by the Editorial Board of American Behavioral Scientist to guest edit an issue originally entitled, “Pre-Internet Networked Operations”, now re-titled, “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks.” What inspired the creation of this project, and why now?
When I was writing the Conclusion for my PhD thesis I realized that the societies that had been networked in the 1960s (which I consider to be test-beds or study cases for a larger networked world) were valuable cases of localized networked communities that are documented in the historical record. They can be used as a reference point against which today’s globally networked world can be compared. I learned the advantages of comparing events in today’s networked world against a similar historical event from my failed attempt at the New School PhD program. After I left the New School I wrote a journal article from my thesis research and looked at the history of psychotherapy. I read Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Goring Institute (1985) by Geoffrey Cocks. It provided an historical case that I could compare and contrast my failed thesis research about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) to. I framed my FMSF research in Weber’s status group concept and compared and contrasted how the online FMSF usurped the membership and function of the human abuse survivor groups and changed them into a different kind of group – not so differently from how the Goring Institute usurped Freud’s Institute, changing psychotherapy in the process. The Goring Institute and the literature about it provided a more fixed historical example or reference point that I could compare the contemporary FMSF research to.
The results of this historical comparison were better than what I tried to do at the New School. There I had compared the FMSF to another contemporary organization that shared experts with the FMSF namely The Innocence Project. I spent years a writing comparison study of these two new organizations and it was like trying to hold onto Jell-O! No sooner would I have a draft written comparing some aspect of these organizations when there would be some new event, person or something else that would change the dynamics and picture of the organization – making my research dated, deficient and obsolete even before it could be reviewed and contributing to the failure of my first PhD program. I remembered this hard lesson when I began to think about making a survey about pre-Internet, networked communities in El Salvador, or Chile or Vietnam or Indonesia or even in the US. I wanted to know what these early networks tell us about life in a fully networked world. Whatever they tell us about life in a networked, militarized society can be compared and contrasted to todays globally networked world more meaningfully than comparing one aspect of today’s networked world against another changing aspect of today’s networked world – because things are changing too fast to make meaningful conclusions. This is one reason why I have yet to take on reviewing articles for a communications journal. Articles about network issues or digital world issues seem confounding and jargon loaded. No sooner is an article written about some troublesome aspect of the digital world when suddenly there is new technology, theory, language, codes or development that out-dates the most recent research. With AI set loose on the world one cannot even be sure that an article is written by an author, no matter how well it reads. I made a conscience choice when I published “Weber on status Groups and collegiality: Applying the Analysis to a modern organization” that I would mostly do comparative historical research using very historical reference points, rather than comparing phenomenon happening simultaneously in the present. Abiding by this rule served me well and had a lot to do with why my second thesis was successful.
I undertook “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks” now because I wanted to write a book about my thesis research but thought it was important to unpack history about these test case networked societies first. I want the book to be informed by whatever information might be gathered about how these test-case networked communities coped with networked experiments in surveillance, authoritarian governments, and network assisted economic planning, occupation and consumption. Also I could not study all these test-case networks on my own but I remembered how I had edited a survey of essays about collective memory for Sociology of Memory: Papers for the Spectrum and the ABS guest edited issue of ABS back in 2005. I decided to gather survey information about these test-case networks by guest editing another theme issue of ABS and invited a team of authors to each write about a different network in the cluster. I approached American Behavioral Scientist with my proposal and was delighted that Laura Lawrie was still the managing editor at ABS (now with a very impressive Board of editors). I sent her a prospectus for an issue originally titled “Pre-Internet Networked Operations” which she and her Board approved. With ABS each issue is guest edited and there is more flexibility in time for assembling the issue. The issue is composed entirely by the lead editor before being sent to ABS for review and publication. I invited Bradley Simpson, professor of History and Asian American Studies at University of Connecticut and author of Economists with Guns Authoritarian Development and the US -Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 to be a co-editor of this ABS venture and he accepted on condition that I be lead editor. He offered to write the Introduction to the issue once it is in publication.
I am most grateful to Laura, her Board and professor Simpson for their support in this effort. I later changed the name of the issue to “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks” after briefly exchanging emails with Michael McClintock, a human rights expert and an authority on counterinsurgency warfare. I asked Mr. McClintock if he would write an article about ORDEN in El Salvador because I think his book entitled, The American connection, volume one. State terror and popular
Resistance in El Salvador provides the best coverage of ORDEN. He did not want to write an article but generously granted me permission to quote passages from his book since the book is no longer under the auspices of the original publisher, Zed. During this email exchange Michael pointed out that ORDEN was not an operation. This caused me to reconsider the title of the ABS issue. Since I wasn’t sure if ORDEN or any of the other test-case networks in the survey were operations I changed the title to “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks”. This is a good example of why a survey like this is worth undertaking, since there is still a lot to learn about what these networks were or even what to call them.
5. The issue focuses on Cold War military networks like COINTELPRO, Phoenix, ORDEN and Operation Condor. How do these systems form what you call a “test-case” networks or a sort of “control group” for studying modern surveillance societies?
The networks this question asks about are shown in the illustration. Staring from the top of the illustration I’ll describe the networks briefly. ORDEN was a networked system that McClintock claims went hand-in hand with today’s intelligence system and likely informed the other networks. Jakarta in Indonesia and Operation Condor in South America were networked experiments in state surveillance and information management for killing large numbers of people who had supported democratically elected leaders ousted by US supported coups and for installing new planned and managed economies. System Operation OBAN in Brazil was a network in service to the authoritarian regime that took over Brazil’s government from 1969 to 1974. Networks aided police in identifying people who were subjected to state torture, while at the same time Brazil experienced an “Economic Miracle”. COINTELPRO was a secrete FBI program that J. Edgar Hoover put into action in 1956, unilaterally, as a way to continue the work of the McCarthy hearings after they were censored; the program officially ran until 1972 in conjunction with the CIA’a CHAOS program which spied on Civil rights activists at the request of the President. CHAOS was the first official CIA program to run on domestic soil. Phoenix was an information management and Vietcong neutralization program that ran in South Vietnam from1968 to 1972. Below the ARPANET line is a line labeled Recession. The US experienced the worst recession since World War Two after the ARPANET went into mission service with DCA and close to the time when McNamara left the World Bank and Reagan became President. Reagan used the recession to justify commercializing the National Science Foundation net and other networks in order to stimulate the economy and increase jobs. The survey is focused on these pre-Internet test-case networks because they were all working within the 1960s-70s timeframe when the Advance Research Projects Agency networks or ARPANET was called a “general computer” or experimental computer (before ARPANET was transferred to the Defense Communication Agency in 1975/6).
The networks share certain traits. The funding to build such networks was justified for anti-Communist counterinsurgency purposes to hunt for the “enemy within” democratic societies. Governments cooperated with the US military in building and using networks to illegally spy on civilians and use networks to help target and track civilians for neutralization. The networks were composed of interactive computers that communicated with each other through a chain of so-called technical collection instruments that spanned the world to send revolutionary new electronic data to the Pentagon, the battlefield, the ballistics labs, economic think tanks, intelligence agencies and private companies but not to civilians or the taxpayers. Taxpayers subsidized the microwave, satellite, optic cable, sonar, radar, teletype, ultra fax and other forms of wireless communication systems that engaged in two way continuous communication with a capability to “learn” through “feedback” and thus “progress” rather than repeat mechanically in a uniform way.
I worked with graphics designers to chart the phased history of the military networks into the Internet. The info-graphics showed how these Cold War networked enhanced experiments in social surveillance and management were like a “cluster” of networked experiments that spanned the world. These networks are famous for human right abuses as reported in much literature. There may be countless other communities that were networked in other locations but COINTELPRO, ORDEN, OBAN, Jakarta and Condor offer us a literary review into what these networked experiments in social management produced. We can compare how those networks impacted the societies they were built in to our now fully, or as Weiner might say “closed”, networked world.
These experiments in networked society are reference points against which today’s globally networked and ever changing network related problems, can be compared. Comparing today’s network issues to historical cases of similar phenomena is more meaningful than comparing contemporary issues about networks to other contemporary issues since the political conditions; technology, language and jargon are changing too fast to draw lasting and meaningful conclusions from. For example, today there is much written about hate speech in different parts of the world but there isn’t enough analysis about how some of this hate speech is rooted in Nazi and White supremacy movements that date back to the 1930s and earlier. It is like comparing two apples picked from the same tree without considering how the historical soil they grow from helped to produce seemingly different apples, year after year. Today comparative historical research is hindered in an AI environment that makes it harder to know if the research, writing or hate speech is the work of a machine or a human. An AI enhanced research article may read better that a human written one but may lack critical analysis or may be an extension of the networked experiment in social management designed to replace human knowledge and memory and shape our consciousness.
6. In your view, what misconceptions exist about the Internet’s origins, and how can examining these Cold War networks correct or deepen our understanding?
This is an important question because it is difficult for people to consider their conceptions as misconceptions when the conceptions are guided by a belief in the existence of a legitimate order populated with people who have the “Geltung” or “validity” to guide social action as Weber described in his chapter, “Basic Sociological Terms, Legitimate Order” in Economy & Society. It is said that the “victors” or the most powerful, in a way that protects that power, makes history. I think the same holds true for conceptions about Internet origins. Those who have more validity in academics tend to sway the conceptions about how the Internet arrived and where it came from. Scholars who maintain the political viewpoint of the Internet (and now AI) and its’ history as a beneficial, patriotic and necessary instrument of progress and national security are welcomed in the academy and given grants and teaching posts, while those who are doubtful, questioning and critical of unregulated networked and surveillance technology have a harder time even when they are accomplished and prize winning scholars like Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, or famed sociologist C. Wright Mills for example. Both Weiner and Mills made contributions to their fields and had great validity in those fields but were critical of massive US military funding, government secrecy and were friendly with people in Communist countries that the US military feared and hated – landing both of them on FBI and CIA watch lists. Both Mills and Wiener died of heart attacks in the years when the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was officially in operation along with the CIA’s first domestic intelligence program CHAOS. Mills and Wiener suffered damage to their social honor, validity and creditability for taking stands against US military policy. Books like C. Wright Mills: Letters and autobiographical Writings by Mills daughters Kathryn and Pamela and Dark Hero of the Information Age In search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman detail those struggles. For those with the time and interest I outline below some history about Mills and Wiener as an example of how conceptions or misconceptions about the early military history of the Internet are challenged and shaped by those with more power or more validity for both job and national security. What I outline here expands on a presentation that I made entitled, ‘Max Weber’s Social Order Concept Applied to U.S. Military Networked History’ for the Sociological Association of Aotearoa and New Zealand (SAANZ) at University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ in December 2024.
In 1950 Norbert Weiner the founder of man-machine relations or cybernetics published his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society ten years before the government authorized building the ARPANET. In the opening pages Weiner wrote, ” I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together”. Weiner was right about how sociologists were overlooking the role of communication in society because they were preoccupied with regulating communication in a time of national security secrets (Wiener opposed government secrecy). Among the most famous sociologists of the 1950s were Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils who were translating Weber’s works for US readers. Parsons canonized Weber as a founder of sociology, translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and “structuralized” Weber’s theories. Shils translated many of Weber’s essays, including “Classes, Status, Party” which I draw upon for framing my thesis in regards to the Social Honor realm workforce that built the military networks. Shils and other professors used Weber’s translated essays as “in house” reading materials for students at elite universities such as the University of Chicago, Harvard and the London School of Economics. Shils had served in the Office of Special Services (which became the CIA after 1947) but did not complete a PhD. Shils taught sociology until retirement and participated in Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and arguably was a CIA informant. When German journalist and immigrant Hans Gerth fled Nazi Germany Shils helped Gerth obtain a job in the US. Gerth met sociologist C. Wright Mills at the University of Wisconsin and together they edited a textbook of Weber’s essays entitled, From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology. The book included Weber’s “Class, Status, Party” essay. Shils accused Wright and Gerth of plagiarism, claiming Gerth stole his translation of the essay. This is was a serious charge that threatened the careers of Wright and Gerth. Clearly Shils had more validity in this dispute since he was backed by the CIA, working at University of Chicago when the Manhattan Project research was underway, was close friends with Parsons and a member of Friedrich Heyek’s Mount Pelerin Society. Nevertheless From Max Weber was published in 1947 and became the first book to make some of Weber’s most famous essay’s accessible to readers outside elite universities. An account of how this happened was written by Guy Oakes and Arthur Vidich in Collaboration, reputation and ethics in American academic life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.
Sociologist C. Wright Mills confronted and exposed the military-industrial complex that was growing in the background of a prosperous America enjoying full employment and a high standard of living in the aftermath of WWII. Full employment brought huge tax revenue that military contractors could count on for multi-million dollar, multi-year military contracts. It’s as if Keynes theory of “priming the pump” for supporting the development of a national social welfare system was turned up-side-down to fund the military-industrial-complex at the expense of the taxpayers.
While Gerth was confined to life under military surveillance in Wisconsin as a suspect immigrant from Nazi Germany, C. Wright Mills led a radical lifestyle by conservative Cold War era standards. He divorced twice, built his own house, drove a motorcycle, toured Russia in a VW van and bought an island. Wright coined the term “New Left” when he published a “Letter to the New Left” advocating political activism that had nothing to do with Marxism or Communism. Mills was a living example of his politics and set a standard in lifestyle for many young New Left adults in the 1960s. The FBI had Wright on their watch list and adopted the term “New Left” as a label for COINTELPRO watch list targets after most of the US Communist party members had been neutralized (thanks in part to Ronald Reagan spying for the FBI in Hollywood). C. Wright published books like White Collar: The American Middle Class, The Power Elite, The Sociological Imagination, The Causes of World War Three and Listen Yankee: the Revolution in Cuba which were radical in comparison to the structural sociology of Parsons, the neoliberal economics of Hayek and Shils reference book for the proper way for Americans to respect members of the growing military-intelligence and academic-industrial-complex, detailed in his book entitled, The torment of secrecy: The background and consequences of American security policies. Shils ominous book seemed to foretell of life in a surveillance state where it was so difficult to know fact from fiction that one was only safe by following the orders of those with more validity, rather than using ones’ own critical thinking and constitutional rights to hold those with power accountable for abuses. Shill’s book was a kind of book of etiquette that advised Americans how to live and think in a national security state — and a surveillance state that was yet to come. In 1956 Shills’ book advocated for social restraint in the face of a growing national security bureaucracy, in 1958 Mills book advocated for activism in the face of a growing military-industrial complex.
In the background of these developments networks grew as part of the military effort to pioneer a new “third kind of war” (along side nuclear and conventional) called counterinsurgency, later called “low-intensity” and later called “dirty wars”. Built into that new kind of warfare were other experimental ventures that included psychological operations, clandestine killing and ventures that were kept secret from Congress and the taxpayers so that trillions of U.S. taxpayer money would continue to be processed through IBM government computers for military-industrial-complex contracts and appropriations on a multi-year basis and also to Israel, which took the largest portion of military funding. It wasn’t just the world’s most expensive invention and informational infrastructure that was being built and tested for intelligence gathering in those Cold war decades, a new kind of economy was being built that would subsidize Israel and enrich the military-industrial-complex actors. Eight years after Wiener wrote that sociologists were overlooking how communication held society together, sociologist C. Wright Mills was communicating that a new kind of endless war economy that funded multi-year projects such as a continuous communication system, was a threat to democracy, free speech and thought.
Mills published his book, The Causes of World War Three in 1958, the year before the government authorized funding for DARPA to build ARPANET. Mill’s book ran counter to the etiquette laid out in Shils Torment of Secrecy Book because it confronted rather than respected the national security state and the military-industrial-complex interests and advised Americans to do the same, to hinder the development of an endless war economy subsidized with taxpayer money. In 1961 attorney Frank Donner published an expose about the McCarthy Hearings and wrote that C. Wright was on an FBI watch list along with hundreds of other law abiding Americans. While COINTELPRO (the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program) was officially functioning Mills died of a heart attack in 1962, just before he was to appear in a televised debate with famed economist Adolf Augustus Berle author of The Modern Corporation and Private Property. If Mills had lived he might have provided us with keen insights into how this new kind of endless war economy hinders the civil market economy. Wiener was right that sociologists overlooked how communication held social fabric together but sociologist C. Wright Mills did try to break through the sociological censorship of communication regarding the growth and threat of a secretive military-industrial-complex and endless war economy. After Mills death his works were marginalized in the academy and Britannica refuses to include From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology as one of C Wright’s books. Offending the Social honor of a CIA agent and breaking with ranks of conformist scholars who had more validity had consequences for Mills, but like Donner and Wiener he left books that still read as if they were written for today.
The Cold War military networks and the continuous communication systems that were built to service the military-industrial-complex elites were expensive, protected in guarded locations and used by privileged parties who had (to borrow Weber’s term) more validity than ordinary civilians or taxpayers. Ordinary people were forced to use the networks at least three decades after the experimental networks (including the ARPANET and Michigan Networks or Michnet) were built. In the middle of these developments Norbert Wiener navigated a difficult path trying to promote the science of cybernetics, while also trying to warn the military-industrial-complex elites like Vannevar Bush about the dangers of an military networked and automated world that relied too much on machine intelligence, an overly militarized economy and too much government secrecy. His warnings were laid out clearly in the Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics in Society. In the chapter on “Progress and Entropy” Weiner writes about America’s endless quest for “progress” through technology that will shield America from having to confront death and the death of the planet. In forever funding military technology to combat the Communist threat and to protect against nuclear holocaust and the “internal enemy” science had turned away from servicing humanity and instead sped up the exploitation of the planet’s resources. Such warnings were not welcomed in the military-industrial-complex and intelligence community. Computer scientists who learned as much as they could from Weiner, such as Claude Shannon and Joseph Licklider but did not challenge or question the government and the intelligence community as Wiener did were given good jobs and were subsidized with growing budgets to spend as they pleased to build interactive computers, new software for data processing and world wide technical collection systems that did not leave evidence of spying in the US and abroad. Cybernetic research that fit with Wiener’s vision of cybernetics for aiding humans was denied, while funding for a continuous communication system for gathering intelligence skyrocketed. This happened for a variety of reasons. By the 1960s Russia had embraced both cybernetics and Wiener. Russia began developing a national “Unified Information Net” and CIA agents following Weiner and Russian developments became alarmed and saw potential for another kind of race against the Soviet threat – a race to build a better and bigger intelligence network that could contain the Russians. The intelligence community wanted wireless networks anyway because they left no evidence of spying. After all, President Nixon was unseated due to wiretapping evidence spurring on intelligence demand for wireless communication and surveillance systems. Cybernetics and Wiener became tainted with the Communist threat. Funding for any cybernetic research was reduced while funding for Artificial Intelligence and for intelligence gathering and processing for intelligence data banking increased. Conway and Siegelman took care to unpack this transitional moment in cybernetics research history on pages 321and 322 of their 2005 book Dark Hero of the Information Age. They wrote, “according to von Foerster, the embrace of AI by the U.S. military, together with the Soviet embrace of cybernetics, spelled doom for cybernetics in America…it was not suppressed, but they neglected it and began funneling all their money into intelligence, whether it was artificial or natural.” When von Foerster would ask the government for funding for cybernetic programs the government shunned the programs in keeping with the neoliberal ideology that was fostered by Milton Friedman’s followers at University of Chicago – that anything that benefited social needs for poor people or people in need of medical devices that cybernetics could advance was a waste of tax revenue that was better spent on subsidizing the military-intelligence-complex and in turn US military support for Israel. As the authors note Weiner “had railed against the use of the new science for military purposes and he boycotted such efforts. Now, in an act of retribution by the gods, and apparently by the lords of American science as well, his science was paying a tangible price for its successes on foreign soil, and, maybe, too, for its father’s defiant words and actions.” Weiner died of a heart attack when he visited Sweden in 1964 – two years after Mills.
Ten years later in 1975, Senator Frank Church opened his famous “Church Committee” to investigate intelligence agency abuses by calling a press conference. The press photographed Church holding up a dart gun that intelligence agents used to inject people with chemicals that cause heart attacks. Whether Wiener and Mills were neutralized by natural, or covert means we will never know but Mill’s books were dropped out of sociology courses and today Britannica does not include From Max Weber in their biography of Mills. As Conway and Siegelman report, cybernetics and Wiener were shunted aside by the military-industrial-academic-intelligence communities in the rush to build a worldwide network that would gather intelligence to contain the Communist and the internal threat. The intelligence community played a large role in building and testing the ARPANET networks that would become the Defense Communication Networks, and then the National Science Foundation networks, and then the Internet with its 1992 Strategic Partnership Plan merging data flow from the decommissioned ARPANET into Michnet. Some may say that to entertain the prospect that the US intelligence community killed two outstanding American professors who criticized the development of an economic system programed to send tax revenue to military spending and Israel is conspiracy theory, others think it is good to think critically and openly about the methods used to impose military networks onto civil society.
7. You draw attention to the political function of these networks – not just technological evolution, but also their role in enforcing neoliberal and counterinsurgency programs. Why is it important for sociologists and media scholars to examine this history?
Regarding neoliberalism, it’s clear from the historical record that neoliberal interests went hand-in-hand with network R&D from the start and this topic deserves a lot more study. I think the relationship of neoliberalism to the networks is mostly about keeping taxpayers and Congress from questioning what the neoliberal capitalists were doing with the powerful networks in the Cold War years. Neoliberalism offered a methodology for dominating labor in anyway necessary that freed rich and powerful people to use the networks without government or civilian oversight, a rationale or methodology which was likely being absorbed by the purpose seeking interactive computers that OD scientists had at their exclusive and unregulated disposal for several decades.
Powerful neoliberal leaders had vested interests in the development of these networks for their own political purposes, which were being absorbed by new purpose learning and seeking interactive computers. Neoliberal or free market capitalists like Rockefeller and Ford funded think tanks and universities that helped build this new communication infrastructure. They sponsored think tank operation research (OR) scientists and economists who informed these new learning and purpose seeking machines with OR as described in Mirowski’s book Machine Dreams Economics becomes a cyborg science. The powerful networks had the capacity to manage huge financial transactions as Secretary of defense McNamara and his comp controller Charles Hitch knew as they machine managed massive amounts of tax revenue for huge military appropriations that consumed larger and larger portions of US tax revenue. McNamara sowed his Ford Motor Company computer system skills first in the US Department of Defense (1961-68) and then in the World Bank (1968-81) before moving on to the Brookings Institute. Meanwhile G.H.W. Bush Sr. watched over Congress in the Cold War years as it passed larger and larger military budgets. Bush Sr. spent a year heading the CIA during the transfer of ARPANET into the Defense Communication Agency (DCA) for mission service with the Pentagon and finally, during his tenure as President, the networks were commercialized.
Regarding the political function of the networks— that was originally spelled out in a 1959 U.S. Department of Defense Directive (DDD 5129.33). It authorized the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build an exclusive continuous communication system for military-industrial-complex actors to exchange information and advice within the military, DOD agencies, R&D agencies outside the Department of Defense, including private business companies, educational and research institutions and Government agencies. This was to be Advanced Research Projects Agency networks or ARPANET. It became a continuous two-way communication system of interactive computers communicating with each other from remote locations, following orders from the Pentagon, providing evidence free communications and data processing services to exclusive occupational status groups in the military, political parties, police, intelligence agencies, universities and think tanks like RAND or Merit and private companies like Lockheed, General Electric, Standard Oil, International Business Machines (IBM) and Ford Motor Company, for example. Once these agents had access to the state of the art, experimental, wireless microwave technical collection systems (long before civilians had cellphones or laptops) the function of the networks evolved and changed in the hands of these elite groups that were not subject to government regulation or oversight since they had greater national security validity — so what were these exclusive occupational groups doing with the networks from 1960 to 1995 before the public had access or even knowledge of the commercial networks?
During those decades between 1960 and 1995 the networks were being tested and a new kind of economy was being developed. These developments were watched by members of the Bush, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford families who patronized think tanks and universities that contributed to R&D for various aspects of network related ventures such as neoliberal economic OR. Below I provide an example of how military networks were tested for both so called public safety and economic development.
Literature review of the networks named in the info-graphic tell us that networks were built to facilitate two-way continuous communication systems with the potential to learn through what Wiener called, “feedback” or essentially learning from past experience. Two-way, feedback enabled, learning and purpose seeking communication systems serviced US military and intelligence agents and police with anti-Communist US military agreements, such as Chile, Indonesia, and South Vietnam. The US supplied advisors and built wireless surveillance and communication systems for foreign governments to monitor populations in search of Communists, political activists, unionists, the alleged and real “internal threat” or generally people that the police or their superiors did not like.
These were revolutionary, computer enhanced networks that were superior to earlier human networks used by Ford Motor Company in the 1930s. Ford Motor Company’s human networks collaborated with the FBI, with the Mayor, the police “red squads” and with vigilante groups that notoriously conducted after-hours “brass knuckle” jobs from the Ford Service Department to rough up employees who strayed from the Christian and America First values of Ford Motor Company. Ford Motor Company also employed sociologists who conducted surveys of Ford employee homes, advising employees about improving their homes and lives. Eventually the sociologists were renamed “Advisors”. Ford even transplanted an entire American style Ford factory town to Brazil, for a cloned factory experiment called “Fordlandia”. Ford Motor Company transplanted its American factory, employee housing and lifestyle monitoring methods to Brazil. In the 1960s the US military under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (a former Ford Motor President) with help from CIA agent Edward Lansdale and Michigan State University Group (MSUG) reconstructed the demographics of South Vietnam into a grid system of provincial hamlets crudely resembling small suburban or rural American towns, each with a communication command center (today we might call them cell phone towers), housing units and farms, with an interrogation room, a jail and an assigned Advisor.
In Vietnam the Advisor conducted grievance census surveys to collect information from the Vietnamese living in the hamlets. Monitoring went further as the census grievance information was fed into a computer in Saigon and sent to the Pentagon for evaluation. Evaluation results were returned via Teletype machines in the form of kill lists of alleged and real Vietcong to be targeted for assassination by the Advisor and their paramilitary teams. This system advanced upon employee management networks at Ford Motor —a company famous for systematising production —because the machines used to help make kill lists were learning machines that were purpose seeking. Are the purposes that those early machines learned still engrained in the networks that interact with the commercial Internet?
In 1962 Michigan State University Group (MSUG) with its embedded CIA advisors finished building networks and hamlets in Vietnam and returned to Michigan (the state that Ford Motor Company is based in) after-which construction of Michigan microwave networks or Michnet soon began in juxtaposition to ARPANET on the west coast. The point of this historical comparison is to demonstrate that military networks were at the least duo or multi-purpose with a “public safety” side to them and an economic (planning or development) side to them — both being helped along by learning and purpose seeking machines. The data banks in Vietnam were in the control of the CIA advisors, not the government, as part of the public safety program.
The powerful computer enhanced communication systems were surely watched carefully by captains of industry, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence community since the machines were learning and progressing in ways that were new to the elite and the exclusive occupational status groups who had access to them. Congressman Bush visited Vietnam and took an interest in pacification programs. Three weeks after Bush visited Vietnam the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive after which a new computer was installed at Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base and programed to handle a large workload as kill list quota increased. CIA Director Colby described watching census grievance data appear on screens in Washington DC and how analysis was done to determine how many Vietcong were killed or needed to be killed. This was the public safety side of the networks.
There was an economic side to this process that was supposed to benefit the Vietnamese with economic development programs. Instead a black market economy arose from selling military surplus and drugs and prostitutes to GIs. Vietnamese relied on snitch money from CIA agents when they informed on who the Vietcong were. In the end, the most benefit went to the stock portfolios of the military-industrial-intelligence-complex occupational status groups and their shareholders. As the war dragged on for years trillions of tax dollars flowed through computers programed by the military and IBM into multi-million dollar, multi-year military contracts for arms and equipment. University of California President Charles Hitch, one of the authors of the “Pentagon’s Bible” (see above) wrote about this kind of programing in his second book, Decision-making for defense. President Johnson once commented that he couldn’t stop the Vietnam War because his friends were making too much money. In this way the military-industrial-intelligence-complex created an endless war economy that enriched themselves while destroying the economies of other countries and depriving Americans of necessary tax revenue for social care.
Even after withdrawing from Vietnam the wars never stopped as Michael Klare warned about in 1972 in War Without End: American Planning for the next Vietnams and David Vine confirmed in 2020 in his book, The United States of War. The purpose seeking machines that process military spending budgets for multi-year contracts rely on endless funding and today (July 19th, 2025) Congress approved a bill that allocates about $832 billion dollars more to defense funding for fiscal year 2026. Weiner knew that purpose seeking and learning machines in the hands of the military was dangerous to humanity and advocated that cybernetics be in service to the betterment of humanity. But neoliberal military, economic scientists and capitalists promoted the development of purpose seeking machines that sought out “New Left” activists for neutralization in the US under COINTELPRO and sought Vietcong on the other side of the world for neutralization under Phoenix at the same time. The endless war economy that C. Wright Mills warned about in 1958 was in full operation by the late 1960s. Today it appears this system economy is being passed on to the NATO countries to shoulder, since America is in $37 trillion dollars worth of debt due to military spending. For these reasons and others it is important for sociologists and media scholars to examine Cold War military history in a way that cuts through thick, protective, distracting neoliberal ideology and follows the money wherever it goes— to Israel, to venture capitalists’ stock portfolios, or hoarded, hidden and money laundered in cheap wars to be “found” later to fund more expensive wars, or stolen from government civil service departments to fund military budgets — while next to nothing is spent on social welfare or on the victims of war.
8. You mention a desire to see Pre-Internet and post-Internet history treated as distinct periods – much like pre- and post-WII. How might this perspective reshape social science and comparative historical analysis?
Since the Internet changed almost everything in the world why don’t we distinguish pre-Internet from post Internet years? In September of 2024 I made a presentation entitled, “A Manifesto to Name and Distinguish Pre-from Post-Internet History” at the South African Communication Conference (SACOMM) at Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa. I proposed that social scientists begin to differentiate Internet history in the same way that we have differentiated epochs, or distinguished pre- from post World War Two, or the Middle Ages from the Enlightenment, B.C. from A.D. The Iron Age from the Stone Age and so on. I advocate differentiating Internet history into three epochs: 1) non-Internet (pre-1960s), 2) military/pre-commercial networks (1960s -1995), and 3) post-Internet history (1995- onward). I think that differentiating Internet history will make social science more accurate and open up new areas of investigation. I wrote an essay about this proposal and submitted it to several journals that rejected it without peer review. It’s the first time I have had difficulty with getting peer review for an article in decades of publishing articles. Presently it is in peer review with a journal after being sent to about six other journals that focused on communications, sociology or time studies.
The article is divided into three sections. The first section discusses why we do not differentiate Internet history and the second section discusses and why we would benefit from doing so. The third section applies the analysis to a contemporary issue, specifically growing wealth inequality. In the first section I argue that the reason why we don’t differentiate Internet history is to protect the social honor of some actors and agents who built, tested and commercialized the military networks into the commercial Internet. A vast workforce of neoliberal occupational groups who never questioned that the networks would be commercialized built the networks, rather than government regulated or socialized. Learning and purpose seeking networks were helping to channel billions of dollars to Israel and servicing on-gong wars and multi-year military contracts, all in the name of national security. I argue that those who benefit the most from this type of economy have strong interests in avoiding the scrutiny of Marxian or other critical analysis that examines wealth inequality fostered by this way of using networks, particularly when the networks were in the exclusive hands of an elite few for several decades. It was by design difficult to apply Marxian analysis to Internet history since all of the network R&D was conducted by people who subscribed to the ideology of free market capitalism and neoliberalism promoted by Friedrich Hayek (whose original job was calculating business cycles for Rockefeller) and Milton Friedman (who worked for the economics department of University of Chicago which was patronized by Rockefeller and the Ford foundation). Neoliberal, free market soldiers were trained at London School of Economics and the University of Chicago and Harvard to dominate the market of economic ideas and drive out the Communist and Marxist threat – keeping it away from discourse about an endless war economy. The threat of McCarthy hearings, the loyalty oaths demanded of professors and C. Wright Mills demise from a massive lawsuit and heart attack, and Wiener’s heart attack sent strong messages to social scientists about the risks of questioning or challenging the prerogatives of those with more validity in the new national security state. But now, years later, we can revisit this history and even demarcate it to make it easier to study using other theories besides neoliberal ones.
Demarcating the Internet history as illustrated in the Figure 1 info-graphic would help to open up this chapter of Cold War history for better comparative historical analysis about what early networked test cases can tell us about networked society, its advantages and drawbacks. It would help make social science more accurate because scholars would have to be more careful about making comparisons about the past to today’s digital world. For example people compare the Covid pandemic to the Black Plague in terms of numbers of people killed but just like the speakers in my Sociology of memory conference session they fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the Internet that enabled the Covid lockdown to be enforced across the world and the ability of people to work from home and to boost Amazon’s and big Pharma’s profits nearly fourfold. These aspects of the historical comparison are often left out. I argue that differentiating the Internet history is a step towards making people conscience of their dependence on these networks and the realities of that dependence for better or worse. Since people were not asked for permission to impose the Internet on society at least we can differentiate Internet history and perhaps give people some feeling of ownership of this infrastructure that we all paid for both then and now. This might help counteract the feeling of alienation that comes from constant solo individualized isolated interaction with a machine that now enhanced by AI dominates labor.
In the Cold War years students were arrested for challenging military spending on learning and purpose seeking computers built for military purposes. Professors were punished for engaging in research with Russians. Draft dodgers abandoned their education and fled to other countries. People abroad in networked countries in South America were neutralized, tortured and disappeared and people in the US were put on watch lists and smeared by the McCarthy Hearings and worse. This is painful history but it was also the bedrock that the learning and purpose seeking networks that became the Internet grew out of. Good comparative analysis about what life is in a fully networked world means comparing our digital world to what the limited networks were doing in the Cold War years, or alternatively to what was happening in the non-Internet years before the Cold War. Likewise good comparative historical analysis includes not just the human story of loss but also the economic story of who gained from these learning and purpose seeking networks that were harnessed to seek Communists and the enemy within. What did occupational status groups who tested, distributed and commercialized the networks into the Internet gain? Who gained the most and how? Questions like these are what neoliberal dogma is designed to fend off but demarcating Internet history opens up an opportunity to shrug off the dogma and take a more critical look at what was being built during the Cold War years. Take away the neoliberal rhetoric and what lessons can those limited Cold War networks tell?
9. What types of submissions are you hoping to receive for this Call for papers for an issue of American Behavioral Scientist? Are there specific regions, cases, or methodological approaches you would especially welcome?
Because this research is complex, fragmented and difficult I welcome a wide range of reporting on these pre-Internet networks from a wide range of authors. I am an interdisciplinary social scientist and enjoy working with social scientists across a wide range of academic disciplines. At the start of the year there were about six authors who were interested in contributing essays but in a matter of a few months they dropped out mostly because they had other projects or commitments. I was disappointed because I saw this as an opportunity for all the authors to share information about the networks they wanted to write about. I hoped that we would exchange our drafts with each other and compare our network to networks that other writers had researched. In short I had great hopes for a sort of collaborative, teamwork experience similar to the teamwork experience I had editing the Sociology of Memory book and earlier ABS issue.
I still hope contributors will arrive before the October 1 2025 deadline. For those who consider submitting abstracts I urge them to explain how their research about their chosen network will demonstrate the public safety or national security and economic sides of these duo-purpose networks (as discussed above).
Now I’ll say a few words about what is unwelcome. I have turned away a number of excellent abstracts that propose study of specific Cold War operations that are outside the cluster of networks listed in the CALL. Or they proposed study of innovative information processing, or advancements in disinformation during the Cold War years. I explained to the authors of these abstracts that I their research is interesting and deserves more study however I am doing a comparative historical survey of a select group of Cold War networks that were built in a specific timeframe and appear to have informed each other. I invited the abstract authors to pick one of the networks (COINTELPRO for example) to research and write an essay about for the ABS issue. None of the abstract authors followed through on the invitation.
I learned three things from this process. First I needed to change the title of the ABS issue to something more focused so that people would understand that this was a survey not just a CALL for papers about Cold War events in general. Second it showed me that there is interest among academics in studying Cold War history and its relevance to today’s networked and data-banked world that sadly are not supported as well as studies about AI, for example. Third, speaking of AI reminds me of an interesting response to my CALL sent to me by my brother who is ten years younger than me and grew up not before the Internet (as I did) but with it — becoming proficient with AI over his lifetime. My brother fed my CALL into an AI generator that sent back a remarkably well-written and organized plan for how to write an essay for the survey. It was so well written that as I read it three things crossed my mind.
First I felt the full force of what Marx wrote about machines “dominating” labor and reducing its value to zero. What were all my hard-won academic degree programs worth in light of this instant eloquent machine intelligence? Second, it occurred to me that my brother, with help from AI, could potentially write an essay about each network in the survey—but would the ABS Board of Directors be fooled (?) and even if they were, how could I keep up “the lie”? Third, this showed me how difficult it is for editors to know where an author’s work ends and the AI begins. I decided I would have to have some discussion about AI with contributing authors, particularly younger ones who did not live through the Cold War years. My brother who has no college degrees gave me a valuable educational experience in a collaborative way— now if only I could find some contributing authors who could collaborate on the survey without using AI!
10. You’ve shared that the topic of ORDEN in EL Salvador remains open due to contributor changes. Could you elaborate on the significance of this case and why someone should consider writing about it?
As mentioned above I invited Michael McClintock to write an essay about ORDEN in El Salvador because I think his book The American connection, volume one. State terror and popular resistance in El Salvador has the best account of ORDEN. Michael McClintock is a leading authority on human rights law, working over 30 years for Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. He is an expert on counterinsurgency. He authored Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism 1940-1990 and a second volume of The American Connection: state terror and popular resistance in Guatemala. Although Mr. McClintock did not want to contribute an essay he granted permission to allow extracts to be quoted from the book for an essay. He also sent along documents that provide other information about ORDEN; at least one is in Spanish. At the time I was working on an essay about ORDEN and calling it and the other networks “operations” and he informed me that ORDEN was not an operation. After that I began thinking about a new title as discussed above. I gave up writing about ORDEN because a contributor who expressed interest in writing about Phoenix left the project and I picked up writing about Phoenix. Alternatively I would happy to write about ORDEN is there is a contributor who will write about Phoenix or I would be happy to co-author an article about ORDEN with another contributor. If anyone is interested in this venture please email me at npac825@aucklanduni.ac.nz.
Regarding ORDEN, as you can see in the Figure 1, ORDEN officially ran from 1962 to 1992, spanning all the testing, distribution and commercialization phases of the military networks into the Internet. ORDEN began as a human network for national security that was a bit like how paramilitary Pancasila youths are organized in Indonesia today. Volunteer civilian paramilitary networks of young men lead by older men, or even vigilante groups in the US, were a precursor to electronic and computer enhanced Cold War era, technical collection systems meshed with police, intelligence agencies, paramilitary forces, political and capitalist elites. ORDEN spanned this entire spectrum, beginning as a loosely organized human network and growing into a professionalized, highly equipped modern technical collection surveillance and intelligence system that inspired McClintock to write: “today’s intelligence system and ORDEN were part of a single process”. What was that process? That is what a contributor writing about ORDEN can focus on. It is an honor to have permission to quote from McClintock’s American Connection book and it would be great if someone were interested in writing an article about ORDEN from McClintock’s materials. Many thanks to Michael McClintock!
11. Your info-graphic timeline and your New Zealand Science Festival presentation aim to make Internet history more visible. What kinds of public engagement do you hope this issue will foster beyond academia.
At the 2025 New Zealand Science Festival in Dunedin I made a presentation entitled, “Making Internet History More Visible” within the category or theme of “Interdisciplinary science & art collaborations”. This was the first time I have made a presentation in a science faire environment and the first time in decades that I had more than the usual 10 to 20 minutes of speaking time typically allowed for a conference presentation. This was very special since I had about 40 slides showing most of the info-graphics I have been working on to illustrate the military networks into Internet history. These info-graphics have been a collaborative effort with several professional graphic designers since 2022. The festival was a great opportunity to honor, showcase, share and enjoy the wonderful graphics that Adrienne Charlton, Milan Law, Hannah Day, Allison Boman and Emma Ryan produced, with help from my instructions, to illustrate the history of the military networks into the Internet. Sam Henderson the science writer for the Otago Daily News published an interview about the show, available here:
A copy of “Making Internet History More Visible” is available here:
Regarding what kinds of public engagement I hope the issue will foster is a topic that could go on for a long time. I had planned to do a post doc or a fellowship when I completed the PhD however I was over the age limit to apply for residency in NZ and without residency I can not apply for post docs or fellowships in New Zealand. Having been out of the US for many years precludes me from applications for post docs or fellowships in the US. Not having residency also makes it difficult to obtain jobs in NZ. So my dreams for doing a post doc that would help to further my research in a new and broader environment were abandoned. In fact the ABS project took the place of the fellowship quest. I still hope that contributors will join the ABS project and we can be a collaborative team sharing insights about these historical networks. If a collaborative team does evolve I would propose that we form a working group within the Surveillance Studies Network and collaborate on making presentations at conferences and publishing articles.
I also have some ideas about teaching or guest lecturing. I would like to teach a course about this history in a traditional classroom and in a “living history” way that gives students the experience of taking a college class before the Internet existed. This would mean no cell phones or laptops or power point in the classroom, taking notes with pen and paper (in the same way that the people who built the original networks did their engineering) and spending at least one week in the course living cellphone and social media -free while journaling in handwriting on paper each day about how life without a cellphone works and how that experience feels. The class project would be that each student study some aspect of pre-Internet Cold War history and write a research paper from published and available sources. Students can create info graphic for their research paper or to add their information into info graphics that I use in the lectures. The class would be an interdisciplinary course using sociology from Max Weber, media history from the work of Norbert Wiener and US military and Cold War political history from various authors. An extra credit assignment would be for students to conduct an interview with a person who lived at least half his/her life before the arrival of the Internet and ask that person to compare and contrast the pros and cons of life with and without the Internet.
Finally, there is also the on-going project of promoting differentiating Internet history that entails a lot of public engagement and debate if the public is to feel empowered to name and acknowledge a non-Internet, Cold War networks and post-Internet world. Public engagement to promote differentiating Internet history would best be initiated by social scientists like us since that is our job. How that job is done is an open question with a multitude of answers that a sociological imagination can conjure!
12. Much of your work has been self-funded or supported through small grants, yet you’ve produced multiple publications and conference presentations. What motivates you to continue this work under such conditions?
Shortly put writing academic papers has turned out to be my life’s greatest work starting from about third or fourth grade when I wrote a handwritten report that included a bibliography. For those who are interested more details follow. I grew up in an academic family that moved from one campus town to another every two years of my life until I was about 14; that made it hard to keep lasting friendships but easy to become a avid reader. Most of my adult relatives were college educated professors or scientists or worked in education. That was the example of a career path I grew up with and accepted. I spent my adult life working mostly in blue-collar jobs that rarely paid more than about $18,000 a year and working towards college degrees by night. I learned too late that my college degrees did not net me academic jobs since my work experience was not congruent with my degrees. I was invited to teach one university course in Sociology at California State University East Bay but shortly after that suffered an injury to my face, which made lecturing difficult, followed quickly by the loss of the New School PhD program. I still wanted to complete a PhD program but to do so required many years of freelancing as a writer, conference organizer, researcher and author. I can thank my bio- and my step-father(s) for helping me struggle through this difficult time. My bio-dad, David Packard, a sculptor who died long ago, taught me how important it is to love your work. My step-dad, Brandt Kehoe, became my greatest patron after the subprime mortgage crisis reduced my job hours to one shift a week, after which he put me on a gift allowance to supplement my meager earnings, my US Federal student loans and later my pension and Social Security. Years later when a fellow PhD student asked my University of Auckland Supervisor Neil Curtis how things were going for my PhD research and me, he told her, “It’s hard!” and it has been hard both during the PhD program and after it. Accomplished scholars like C. Wright Mills and Norbert Wiener had a hard time too when they became critical of the military-industrial-complex.
What also motivates me are the discoveries that emerge from the research journey. Since much of this network history overlaps the years of my life the research journey becomes rather personal. Besides discovering how well Weber’s theories frame Cold War network history, two other research discoveries motivated me to expand the research. First there is Michnet and second is the tangled issue of navigating literature review that may protect the interests of those with concerns about war crimes and liability. Writing about the commercialization phase of the Internet meant including the Michigan Networks into the timeline history because of the ANS/Merit Strategic Partnership Plan of 1992. Including Michnet into the timeline changed how my info-graphics look since now Michnet appears to shadow ARPANET. In turn Michnet is shadowed by the Ford Motor Company and Vietnam War era Michigan State University Group (MSUG) history that arguably helped to build Michnet. Michnet history deserves to be revisited and reassessed. For example, there was an important study in 1966 entitled, ‘The Economic Need for Common Carrier Microwave Communication – as Related to Time Shared Computer Utility Systems’ written by Com-Share, Inc. of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The report impacted microwave development industry wide. When I tried to locate the report I couldn’t find one—hopefully someone else will. Literature review is difficult when sources are missing or classified, but it is also difficult when there is a blizzard of literature pushing one away from a critical line of inquiry and onto a hailstorm of neoliberal dogma or endless theoretical feedback loops moving in circles regarding wishful thinking about power and free markets being everywhere instead of being monopolized, dominating and concentrated.
What can make the research slow down is the not-so-evident problem that not just the US military and research universities, but the Catholics, Jews and the French have interests in suppressing research or teaching about how the military networks were tested, distributed and commercialized into the Internet. For example, Jewish neoliberal economists have interests in the military sending US tax money (by the trillions) to Israel and would not want Marxian scholars investigating history about how US tax money is appropriated for the military first, before any goes to social needs. The Catholics do not want people investigating how networks were tested in Vietnam (and arguably in the US) to protect the reputations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Strange McNamara (along his ties to Ford Company, the World Bank, the Brooking Institute and RAND). I remember when I read Mirowski’s excellent Machine Dreams: Economics becomes a cyborg science and asked him if he had written about the pre-Internet history of the military networks. He wrote back that he had written about it in Machine Dreams. Perhaps I offended him because I could not see the history of the networks clearly enough in his reporting about OR economists and then I remembered that he works at a Catholic University, Norte Dame. The French and the Catholic Vietnamese, who were the allies of the US military during the Vietnam War do not want people investigating how networks, and interactive computers were tested in Vietnam, in the AGILE, IGLOO and Phoenix programs. The French lost their hold on Vietnam to the Communists and invited the US into the Vietnam War and continue to protect US interests against the taint of liability for war crimes in Vietnam.
It’s interesting how in the 1960s French social scientists like Raymond Aron heralded Max Weber as the greatest sociologist, but after the commercial Internet arrived the French and everyone else embraced theorists like Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This shifted attention away from the kind of theories that had help to build the military networks (like Weber’s theories do so well). Attention shifted to theories that had to do with resisting colonialism and identity politics. In other words when students first began using email and online searches the new French theories encouraged personal and political viewpoints to be shared online— at a time when students topped every military surveillance watch list and military surveillance was easier than ever before thanks to the advent of the commercial Internet. I doubt this topic was being discussed in those theory courses back then, but perhaps it could be discussed in hindsight today? Questions like these motivate my research and give me a reason to get up each morning and work on academic papers even without pay. I still dream of a day when I will be paid for doing this academic work I love to do.
13. In 2025 you received a scholarship to attend the Brussel’s Privacy Hub’s Summer Academy. How do events like this shape your approach to studying privacy, surveillance and historical continuity?
Receiving a full scholarship to attend online the 2025 Brussel’s Privacy Hub’s Summer Academy was a great honor. I had given up hope on ever receiving any kind of scholarship, fellowship or post doc given my NZ residency predicament (discussed above). Many thanks to Bárbara Rosa who invited me to apply for the scholarship when I wrote that I wanted to attend but couldn’t afford to pay for the program. I sent her my application (here is a link to it: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gyyhmh4kzmjm1y3vrkm1s/letter-of-motivation.pdf?rlkey=xwctqkw0g3dwjihyaxdag57nq&st=7msy8oyy&dl=0 )
and was awarded a full scholarship.
As I point out in my motivation statement I recognize that Europe has much better privacy laws than the US does and worry that the NATO countries push towards war with Russia and China will weaken those laws because counterinsurgency warfare demands ever growing amounts of data. In todays AI and war crazed world the chances seem slim Europe will hang onto the strong privacy rights laws that other countries admire. Hopefully the NATO countries will not have the same bankruptcy and impoverishment experiences the US has had after they take up the mantle of the military-industrial-complex’s endless war economy from the US.
Regarding how events like the Privacy Hub’s Summer Academy shape or inform my approach to research I can affirm they help me understand political trends and the latest research. I supplement that information with listening to about three hours of news each day from Democracy Now (dot) org, KPFA evening news and Alijazeeza. It’s hard to imagine living far from university libraries since I use them all the time.
14. Your PhD thesis Exploiting and Neutralising the “Communist Threat” for the Privatised Internet” tackles the commercialization of ARPANET through a sociological lens. How does this work feed into your current editorial project?
In my answer to question #4 I write that I undertook “Survey of a Cluster of Pre-Internet Networks” because I want to unpack history about these test case networked societies but can not study all these test-case networks on my own so I invite other authors to write about networks in the cluster. This will help us understand how these US military assisted, Cold War networked communities were impacted by surveillance, authoritarian governments, network assisted economic rigging, occupation and high-tech colonialism before civilians had access to the Internet. Was life any better or worse to live with these things with the Internet, or without it? Questions like these can be answered through a sociological lens but also through a political lens, a communication theory lens, a military history lens, a public administrative lens, a theoretical lens (perhaps a French one?) or even through a neoliberal lens, and so on. As an interdisciplinary social scientist I write and research using different lenses all the time. I also work well with all kinds of scholars from different parts of the world — I certainly had to while organizing my conference session for the Pacific Sociological Association and presenting in conferences worldwide. I hope contributors to this survey write essays through a variety of lens that are interesting, informative and as diverse as (hopefully) the readership will be. It would be great to have contributors from a variety of countries, perhaps countries where these networks were located. I hope this answers the question but if not please feel free to send questions to npac825@aucklanduni.ac.nz
15. Finally, what message would you like to share with early-career researchers or graduate students considering submitting an abstract to this issue?
I can share a lot of insights with early and late career researchers and I’m happy to do so upon request or upon receipt of an abstract for my CALL. Here are some general suggestions. It’s important to approach this research with sort of “double vision” in two different ways. The first way is to remember that a huge amount of effort went into building these networks and testing them which leads to the accounts of abuse; however it must have have benefitted someone, which leads to the economic side of the account. Who benefitted from Jakarta, COINTELPRO, OBAN, ORDEN, Phoenix and Condor? Did the US taxpayers benefit? While it is important to acknowledge the abuse of civilians always have another eye open for who or what benefited from the abuse.
The second kind of double vision has to do with “seeing” those invisible networks that the military relied on, but didn’t always described in detail. The military wanted wireless technical collection (that we take for granted today) because it was invisible and did not leave evidence the way human spies and telephone “bugs” did. Part of what made the networks so good for surveillance is that no one can see them. This makes writing about the networks difficult by design. The researcher always has be asking, “Where are the networks in this account?” Some authors like McClintock and Donner describe aspects of networks in detail but most do not. That is the work of the contributing author – to read Cold War literature (often in books) with an eye out for what is being presented on the surface, while keeping another eye out for the networks (in between the lines or in the background). Such duo-observation makes modern history look different.
Here is a word to the younger generation. I’ve heard young people tell me it is difficult to read print media or touch paper. A lot of this Cold War history is not on the web because it was published in print media before there was a Web. A lot of Cold War literature has not been digitized – just like the thousands of police telephone bugs that were left forgotten on now decaying landline telephone lines – there is probably some interest in having lot of literature decaying and forgotten too.
In conclusion, the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) and tech companies (Microsoft, Palentier, etc.) along with the telecommunications companies (that we pay for network services) are the richest companies in the world but they are different from the richest companies of yesterday’s world, such as Ford Motor, Standard Oil, the Bell Telephone System, General Electric or even Microwave Corporation of America. Older companies were usually founded with private capital from capitalist families like the Fords, Bell or Rockefeller, for example. The telecommunications, tech and GAFA companies did not use all their own wealth to build the networks and the Internet informational infrastructure that their business is built on; their companies use the infrastructure that was paid for in a large part by US tax payers, that was legally transferred to private companies, with strings attached, by the US government. The tech companies that prosper from this informational infrastructure have always had ties to the military-industrial-complex as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Authority confirms in a recently issued report that names several US companies aiding Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian. What is happening in Gaza with the help of the networks could happen to others so it is important to study this history rather than ignore, forget or censor it. Thank you and The Sociology Group for your time and consideration. I welcome receiving abstracts for my CALL.
We hope you enjoyed reading this insightful interview with Dr. Noel Packard. If you’d like to learn more about the Call for Papers for the special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, you can contact Dr. Packard at npac825@aucklanduni.ac.nz or reach out to us directly.
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