In the late afternoon of June 15, 1922, Herbert Hoover dropped in to a meeting of forty-four engineers who had assembled in a conference room at his Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Hoover, who earned international fame as the “Great Humanitarian” by guiding relief efforts during World War I, turned his talents and energies toward the American economy when he was named secretary of commerce by Warren Harding in 1921. Hoover was, in the pre-Depression era, a living and breathing icon of the triumph of rationality, organization, and the progressive spirit of the engineering profession – the “engineering method personified” in the words of one admiring colleague.

Several of Hoover’s contemporaries – such as the social theorist Thorstein Veblen and the radical engineers Howard Scott and Morris Cooke – believed that technical expertise could reform society and engineer a new age of efficiency and abundance. But the meeting at the Department of Commerce was not some sort of revolutionary “Soviet of Technicians.” Instead, it was a meeting of the leaders of the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), a private group of engineers who had a more modest and pragmatic goal: to order the inconsistent patchwork of codes, tests, and standards used in American industrial practice. Although the AESC sought (and found) support from Hoover and other government officials, their method of work – consistent with the American mentality that Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century – depended on private cooperation to create standards that would, in turn, be adopted on a voluntary basis throughout American industry. Unlike their peers abroad, they did not depend on kings (Tocqueville’s “men of rank”) or presidents (“men of government”). Instead, their success would hinge on their ability to convince industrial managers and executives that industry standards would make business less wasteful and more profitable.

The formative technological innovations of the “open” digital age – electronic computers that exchange data through digital communication networks – did not, by themselves, drive the decentralization of authority in late-twentieth century global society. These technologies, the offspring of the stormy marriage of computing and communications, came into being as components of broader and more fundamental critiques of centralized control. Critiques came first; then came technical development, standardization, and, finally, social consequences.

In the United States and abroad, the computing industry was younger and more volatile than the communications industry. Telephone systems in all industrialized countries operated under the clear jurisdiction of national governments. The American arrangement, which featured the private administration of a national monopoly with the grudging approval of regulators, was abnormal (if not exceptional). American federal regulators in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s used their authority to prevent AT&T from entering the computer business. These restrictions were motivated, in part, by the hope that competition would flourish and bring with it a new era of innovation that would fuel the continuation of American technological leadership.

The architects of the twenty-first-century digital age proclaim that openness is their foundational value. Their work is exemplified in movements that embrace open science, open access publishing, open source software, open innovation business strategies, open education, and so on. President Barack Obama’s “Open Government Initiative,” announced on his first day in office in 2009, captured the collective spirit of these efforts: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

The ideology of openness, as it is articulated and practiced in the early twenty-first century, would have surprised the critic and historian of technology Lewis Mumford. In his 1964 essay, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” he wondered: “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?” The advocates of openness, however, have not surrendered so easily. Instead, they sense the dawn of a radical, almost utopian transformation in which power hierarchies are flattened, secret activities are made transparent, individuals are empowered, and knowledge itself is democratized. They welcome innovation, thrive on diversity and change, insist on the sanctity of autonomy and freedom, and have an unqualified disdain for authority, restrictions, and gatekeepers.

The promise of data networking was evident to everyone who worked near the intersections of digital computer and communication technologies. The Bell Labs economist Jeffrey Rohlfs articulated the new conventional wisdom in a pioneering 1974 article, in which he based his “theory of interdependent demand for a communications service” on a forceful assertion: “The utility that a subscriber derives from a communication service increases as others join the system.” Rohlfs theorized and mathematized the lessons that the packet-switching researchers we met in Chapter 6 – such as Louis Pouzin, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Rémi Déspres, and Marc Levilion – understood intuitively: the value of a digital computer-communication network would reside primarily in its ability to facilitate and sustain interconnections on an ever-increasing scale.

As we have seen, these packet-switching researchers gained firsthand experience with the obstacles that prevented the universal adoption of new standards for data networking. As the “virtual circuit versus datagram” controversy described in Chapter 6 demonstrated, many technical disagreements mapped directly to conflicting strategic priorities and conflicting visions of control: telecommunications engineers used virtual circuits to keep more control inside the network, but computer engineers favored connectionless datagrams to shift control to the computers at the edges of the network. As positions hardened in the mid-1970s and it became clear that the argument was unlikely to be settled on technical merits alone, the network engineers we will meet in this chapter sought to create effective alliances that could constrain and direct the creation of international networking standards.

We have seen how organizations such as the American Standards Association (ASA) arose as creative responses to the status quo – that is, to the inadequacy of existing markets and hierarchies to provide effective mechanisms to coordinate technical standardization in American industry. The emergence of the “voluntary consensus” model of committee standardization, significant as it was, begs a related question: How did monopoly firms develop standards, and how did their standardization efforts fit within the collaborative, consensus-based model developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within trade associations and engineering societies?

Conventional answers to these questions point to the power of the managerial hierarchies that exist within monopoly firms. In the conventional view, monopolies create standards through a hierarchical, closed, and proprietary process as part of a broader strategy to erect barriers to entry and maintain centralized control over a given market or markets. They capture the network effects that standardization generates. Monopolies, in this view, act in a monolithic and almost petulant manner: their goal is to reduce variety, stifle outside innovations, lock in users, and preserve their control.

In recent years, ancient Pythagoreanism has tended to be a field pursued by a narrow group of specialists and ignored by most scholars of ancient philosophy and ancient civilization. The field can look like a morass that is better not entered at all or bridged by time-worn platitudes about Pythagoras. Many discussions of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in general works about ancient civilization or Western culture are thus woefully uninformed. For there has been a great deal of important scholarship on Pythagoreanism in the last fifty years, so that the Pythagoras of current scholarship is not your mother's let alone your grandmother's Pythagoras. The crucial moment in modern scholarship on Pythagoreanism was the publication fifty years ago of Walter Burkert's epoch-making study, which appeared ten years later in a revised version translated into English by Edwin Minar with the title Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (1972). References to Burkert's book in the footnotes of this volume are surely more frequent than those to any other piece of scholarship on Pythagoreanism. Burkert's Pythagoras was a religious leader and founder of a way of life and not the great mathematician to which many general accounts tenaciously cling. Yet even Burkert's view has not won universal acceptance; Pythagoras the mathematician survives among some scholars even in this book, and there has been significant scholarship that both builds on and reacts against Burkert.