Interentity Communication: The Ontological Imaginary of Early Network Design

Abstract

Since the world saw proof of US and UK digital surveillance practices, the Internet has been imagined in public discourse not so much as a digital frontier than as a strictly delimited identity management system. While it is no doubt productive to think about this political crisis in terms of the Internet’s post-1968 countercultural history, that history is itself embedded within a larger intellectual history of mathematical logic. By taking a detour through the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline, this article examines the historical basis for a cyberspace of identity.