According to Peters, the Soviets attempted to build their data network as if it were an economy. It's data center was physically located in Moscow (though outside the city center to avoid missile attacks), with secondary nodes located in strategically placed locations, each feeding the rest of the country.
He also argued for a complicity between these designers' plan for the computer allocation of resources (a factory reports its production rates, depots and stores report their inventories) and the dream of the eventual triump of socialism becoming communism. According to one of the Soviet scientists, economics was "a scab on the healthy workings of the political body" that a cold computer logic would correct. See also this article by Slava Gerovitch.
So I'm thinking about this relationship between economic policy and network architecture, and then I read the following from Nicholas Carr's recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Commenting on the fact that we now tend to Google a piece of information two or three times rather than choosing to remember it for ourselves, Carr writes,
On the Internet, we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link. And this is precisely the behavior that the Internet, as a commercial system, is designed to promote. We are the web's neurons, adn the more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make--the faster we fire--the more intelligence the Web collects, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off. (228)
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