#birthoftheinternet — Public Fediverse posts

RFC 1 4/7/69

The Birth of the Internet  and the Implications for Peacebuilding

April 7, 1969 is often treated as a symbolic birthday of the internet, because RFC 1, Steve Crocker’s “Host Software,” is dated that day. By the end of 1969, four computers were connected on the initial ARPANET, and what the Internet Society calls the “budding Internet” was underway.

What strikes me most is that the internet’s symbolic birth did not begin with a trumpet blast or a decree. It began with a request for comments. Not a command. Not a manifesto. Not a demand for uniformity. A request. An invitation to think together. RFC 2555 later recalled that in those early days, the Network Working Group understood its documentation this way: notes could be produced “at any site by anybody” and included in the series. That means the internet, at least in one of its founding gestures, carried a seed of humility, collaboration, and shared authorship.

That matters for peacebuilding. Peace is rarely made by proclamation alone. Peace is usually made the same way the early internet was made: by imperfect people sending unfinished thoughts to one another, testing language, revising assumptions, building trust slowly, and creating protocols for living together. In that sense, the best theology of the internet is not that it is omniscient or liberating by nature, but that it can become a commons of encounter. Its original form suggests conversation before coercion . . .

Read the rest of the article at PeaceGrooves.