Premium Episode 158: CERN & The Early Internet feat Michael Hiltzik (Sample)
The Large Hadron Collider. A portal to hell? We explore CERN as a scientific experiment and organization, then speak to Pulitzer Prize winner and author Michael Hiltzik about the early internet and the role of CERN, ARPA, and competing corporations. The second half of this thick episode sees us navigating conspiracy theories related to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider — which predate QAnon by far.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Michael Hiltzik & find his work: https://twitter.com/hiltzikm / https://michaelhiltzik.com/
Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (https://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com). Editing by Corey Klotz.
Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 158 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the CERN episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we're taking you on a trip beneath the Swiss countryside, into the hollow Earth, where a complex system of tunnels has been created over the course of decades to house the most ambitious scientific experiment on Earth, CERN.
Originally it stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Council for Nuclear Research and later they were like renaming it because it's like name something different now and they were like oh fuck it's gonna end up being OERN or something and they're like fuck it just keep CERN even though it is literally the French acronym and also no longer is what that project is but anyways all the way back in 1952 basically a bunch of physicists and other scientists got together and To wonder, hey, what if we freaked everyone out by building a complex and inscrutable machine that looks like it's designed to end the world?
So first we'll get you some background on CERN, and then we'll discuss its role in creating the internet with Michael Hiltzik, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC, and the Dawn of the Computer Age.
But since we're not just here to be serious, Jake has also prepared a segment on the various conspiracy theories generated by CERN and its most impressive mechanical demon, the Large Hadron Collider, which in reality is merely the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, theoretically capable of forming, quote, quantum black holes, which CERN's website is quick to explain would be perfectly safe.
I mean, if you type in CERN, like, it will autofill to, like, is CERN going to be able to make a black hole?
It is, yeah.
A lot of people think that CERN was invented to do, you know, complex scientific research, you know, about quantum mechanics and subatomic particles.
But really, its actual purpose is to generate dozens of conspiracy theories.
And we're going to take a look at the real origins and then obviously dip into that a bit later.
Yeah.
In the 1940s, a group of scientists in Europe assembled to address the accelerating brain drain their communities were experiencing.
Too many smart people had been bailing on good ol' Europe and taking their scientific minds to the United States.
Now, small side note, Operation Paperclip began in July of 1945, which I'm sure is just a coincidence.
Nonetheless, to compete with the American industrial machine, the scientists and their governments pooled resources and founded CERN in 1952 with grand plans to build a world-class nuclear physics research facility.
By 1954, 12 Western European countries had ratified a convention which stated, in part, "...the organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements, and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available."
CERN was originally composed of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and Yugoslavia.
Among their scientists was Dutchman Niels Bohr, quite famous if you're into physics, who became the first director of CERN and oversaw its departure from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark to some tranquil fields west of Geneva, Switzerland, where they established a permanent base in 1954 to study the atomic nuclei.
Their focus soon shifted, however, to higher energy physics, which focuses on the interaction between subatomic particles.
What's commonly referred to as particle physics.
Today, CERN is composed of 23 member states, three countries awaiting membership, and seven more associate member states.
Non-members Japan, Russia, and the United States hold what they call observer status, specifically with respect to CERN's most famous installation, the Large Hadron Collider.
There's also a long list of countries with international cooperation agreements.
It reads like a list of the countries in the world.
So CERN, I mean, we will never in this episode be able to explore their discoveries because none of us are scientists and certainly not capable of theoretical thinking in physics or even of understanding half the words we're about to read on their list of accomplishments.
So let's go through them.
This is roughly 70 years of existence, and these are the kind of most fascinating and
often admittedly inscrutable scientific breakthroughs that they've accomplished.
>>Steve: In 1973, the discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamel Bubble Chamber.
>>Joe: So that's the first discovery and you're like, "Isn't that the guy from Smurfs?"
That was the only word I recognized and bubble and chamber.
The Gargamel bubble chamber sounds like a bong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Named by like, uh, you know, some guy in like a college dorm room.
In 1983, the discovery of WNZ bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments Who can forget that one?
That's the year of my birth.
My parents were celebrating it.
I mean, two letter bosons.
I mean, W and Z, those were the big ones.
Yeah, the big bosons, for sure.
In 1989, the determination of the number of light neutrino families at the Large Electron-Positron Collider LEP operating on the Z boson peak Yeah, mostly we're reading these not to just make fun of ourselves for knowing nothing about this, but to kind of explain why maybe CERN felt the need to sell their accomplishments in more exciting and thrilling ways because it is essentially invisible and incomprehensible to anybody that is not.
Already a particle physicist.
In 1995, the first creation of anti-hydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment.
The discovery of direct CP violation in the NA...
A 4-8 experiment?
Listen, these people, these scientists, you can't call anything a CP violation in your experiments.
People might read that the wrong way.
Not nowadays!
In 2000, the Heavy Ion Program discovered a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma.
In 2010, the isolation of 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen.
Oh, a couple dozen, not bad.
2011, maintaining anti-hydrogen for over 15 minutes.
This reads like the kid who was like, I can hold my breath underwater.
Listen, we don't know anything about this stuff, but I will say that I do know about the 2012 discovery that's the last on this broad list.
A boson with mass around 125 GeV per C2, consistent with the long sought Higgs boson.
Otherwise known as the God Particle.
Yes, well, scientists don't like people saying the God Particle.
But journalists and writers do.
They love that shit, yes.
Yeah, journalists love it.
It's very catchy.
But yeah, so it sounds like mega-geniuses sort of like uncovering the structure and nature of the physical reality in which we reside in total obscurity.
Oh yeah.
Yes.
The majority of their facilities are composed of particle accelerators, which are machines designed to accelerate subatomic particles like electrons or protons, to high velocities by means of
electric or electromagnetic fields.
The accelerated particles are generally made to collide with other particles, and the machine
uses a set of complex imaging technologies to analyze what happens during the resulting explosion.
Smashing these subatomic particles together after accelerating them releases intense heat,
with some experiments producing temperatures a billion times greater than those at the core of
To give you an idea of how massive the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is at CERN, in circumference it is 27 kilometers, or 17 miles.
If you view the entire ring from above, you see it contains multiple Swiss towns.
And seen from the inside, the LHC looks like a complex mandala of woven machinery.
It's really quite breathtaking and it looks like fucking science fiction.
As a normal person, if you're standing in these places, if you're seeing the images of it,
you don't understand it. It is above you, it is beyond you, it is beautiful because it is awe-inspiring.
Like a cathedral.
And they like to use that kind of terminology, especially in the PR department.
Because, I don't know if you noticed, but CERN really needs to make these installations and experiments look and sound badass, because otherwise it's just the list like we read.
Like, Gluon discovered this year or whatever.
So here's a passage from their own YouTube channel.
This is a 2008 video entitled, CERN 50 Years of Science.
Responding to a massive electrical kick, the proton having an electrical charge begins to accelerate.
Moving in the opposite direction are other protons, travelling in an adjacent tube.
By the time the proton has been accelerated by a linear accelerator, gained energy circulating around two synchrotrons, and been injected into the Large Hadron Collider, its speed is approaching the speed of light.
In this apocalyptic jousting tournament, the lead proton is not alone.
Each proton group numbers more than 100,000 million.
[music]
In one of the LHC's four giant underground detector caverns, their two paths converge as their Armageddon approaches.
The energies created at collisions in the LHC have never occurred since the Big Bang itself, and some of the particles released have not roamed free since that time.
Side note, on one of the conspiracy threads that I was researching, the Baker used the scene from Ghostbusters where the top of the firehouse blows off and all of the, you know, sort of like, you know, ghost particles, like, stream out into the city as basically a coded nod to, like, what CERN is doing.
That this is, well, we'll get into it, but that, yeah, very, very connected with popular culture films specifically for some reason.
Yeah, I can see like a CERN scientist opening their fridge and you know what's next, Jake.
So very fun stuff, obviously.
CERN is also aware that the Large Hadron Collider is an incredible piece of architecture.
They sometimes refer to it as a cathedral, although a lot of the scientists are not a big fan of that or calling the Higgs-Boson particle the god particle.
But if we return to the CERN video, it really doesn't feel like the PR team is trying to play that aspect down.
The huge international team working on CERN's Large Hadron Collider are on schedule.
and soon the vast energy of the LHC will place the nearly completed detectors
on the very brink of the creation of the universe.
So yeah, I mean, it's like, it's amazing.
Oh my God.
I really do love it.
I have to say that just broadly, the CERN YouTube is amazing.
And after I'm done showing you a couple of clips here, we have to, we have to go watch the CERN wrap.
So because a lot of the discoveries made at CERN are really difficult to explain to a lay person, they're invisible, basically.
It's clear that the organization wants to appeal to people's existential wonder, right?
Now, sometimes, obviously, they achieve dread, but whatever.
Here's an example of that, stemming from their reference to ATLAS, which is the biggest general-purpose particle detector that's used to study the Large Hadron Collider explosions, essentially.
ATLAS and her sister detectors are poised to rediscover the universe through new eyes.
The subtle differences, for example, between matter and antimatter at the birth of the universe.
Then there's the mysterious nature of dark matter making up most of our universe and about which we know almost nothing.
Although Newton described gravity over 300 years ago, its nature is still unknown and may even link us to other dimensions.
And the LHC will be investigating the possibility that the particles around us have hidden supersymmetric partners.
An ancient phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, is to be investigated by the LHC's Alice detector, where massive lead nuclei will be smashed together.
Even the very nature of the interstellar vacuum is under intense scrutiny.
Then there's a mechanism that a group of theorists, including Peter Higgs, have proposed that explains how particles get their mass.
Maybe our universe is filled with a field which is now called the Higgs field, and this Higgs field interacts with each type of particle in a different way to give it its very specific mass, in a kind of a friction with a vacuum.
All these imponderables are seen as whispered clues to the ultimate understanding of the universe we find ourselves in.
Clues waiting to be interpreted in the long tradition of creative thinking at CERN.
It's very interesting to see them just straight up be like, yeah, might be different dimensions.
Have fun with that one.
By the way, supersymmetry might exist, which means there's like the same particles have a twin in another dimension that we can't actually see yet.
And it might have something to do with antimatter itself, which we don't understand and composes most of the universe.
It's really bad when conspiracy theorists can link to the actual website to be like, see?
You don't have to go to punchnews.com or whatever.
You can just be like, look, it says it right on their website.
I can't tell you how many times that came up over the course of the conspiracy theory threads.
They say it right out in the open.
Yo, this reminds me, unfortunately, of some of the programming on like Gaia TV, where in terms of like, you know, there's the low quality, you know, computer graphics, there's sort of the speculating about alternative dimensions and how they affect us.
And there's some guy I don't know explaining, you know, the nature of reality.
But in this case, these people are like, you know, they're Trying to build upon the back of 400 years of hard physics and chemistry.
Whereas, like, a guy at TV is like, you know, guys who are talking about a dream they had.
Yeah, all PhDs, like... Yeah, these guys should hire the, like, production team from PragerU.
Oh, God.
You know, make the videos a little bit easier to understand, a little bit more down to earth, you know?
One of the reasons the PR team, other than the fact that they're European, seem intent on dramatizing CERN is because, in reality, it's actually pretty boring.
It's a big scientific campus with over 2,600 employees that often resembles an industrial zone on the edge of a suburb.
What you can see from above ground isn't nearly as exciting as what lies below.
And to kind of prove that the culture there is, they're really trying to have fun because it's, you know, it's a lot of work.
Here is the Large Hadron Rap, which is to this day up on the CERN YouTube.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
Oh yeah.
(upbeat music)
I'm about to drop some particle physics into the club.
*laughter* The LHC is super duper fly.
You know what I'm saying.
Check it.
27 kilometers of tunnel underground.
kilometers tunnel underground design with mind is them protons around a
Designed with mindless little protons around.
A circle that crosses through, swizzling in bands.
circle the process through Switzerland and 16 nations contribute to scientific
16 nations contribute to scientific advance.
advance to be the protons being round through the ring they ride till in the
Two beams of protons swing round through the ring they ride.
hearts of the detectors they made to collide and all that energy packed and
Telling the hearts of the detectors they're made to collide.
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of food becomes mass.
such a tiny bit of food becomes mass particles created from the vacuum and
Product is created from the vacuum and then...
then [Music]
Oh yeah.
LHCbE is where the animators go.
Incredible!
It's so great.
You know what?
I'm not going to knock this.
I've learned a few things, so I'm going to say this was a net positive.
Yeah, for us it's perfect.
It's like, break it down and do a rap, please.
And you know, I think what some people don't understand, and I actually know this firsthand, I have a family member who works in a high-tier facility, we'll say, with lots of engineers, They're not old, crusty guys, you know?
It's a lot of young people.
It's, you know, when I toured the facility, there were guys wearing, you know, cut-off jean shorts.
And so, you know, this idea that you're, you know, that you have these very high-level calculations and mathematics and these big brains working on this stuff.
Yeah.
I think, you know, there's also a big educational part of it.
is actually inconsistent with my experience.
It's more like this, that there are young people that wanna have fun, they wanna make raps,
they wanna do songs, we'll get into that later too.
I have a song as well from the CERN website.
Yeah, and I think there's also a big educational part of it, so they have students kind of attending stuff
and they also have opened it to the public sometimes, so they have people coming through and they do,
they're building a whole educational wing and stuff.
So it is like a small city, I mean it's a campus.
It's like a company town and a campus all in one with the biggest deep underground base in the world.
The fucking world in like the shape of a giant circle like invisible to the eye, which is great.
It's just good.
And so people, you know, they get they have fun.
And well, the one thing that I do want to mention is that CERN is not just known for particle physics.
It also has a computer science department and, you know, it contributed to the creation of the early Internet.
They lay claim to having invented what they call the World Wide Web.
And so I kind of started wondering, you know, oh, you know, how does this fit in with some of the conspiracies around the creation of the
internet, you know, the ARPA project and all that, and I started to ask myself, you know, did CERN
really create the internet? And, you know, it's a little more complicated than that. To discuss this,
we're sitting down with Michael Hiltzik, author of the 2009 book Dealers of Lightning, Xerox
PARC, and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Welcome to the show, Michael. Thanks. Thanks
for having me on. Oh, it's our pleasure.
You know, I caught wind of your work and also some articles that you've written trying to kind of make distinctions in this field of claims about the early Internet.
And so I guess we've been talking about CERN so far, and they claim on their website and kind of publicly to have created what they call the World Wide Web.
So could you explain what that means in relation to the Internet as we now know it?
Sure, I think CERN is justified in making that claim because the main developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was at CERN at the time that he did it, and I think that was about 1990.
The World Wide Web essentially is an iteration of the Internet that allows us to have web
pages and that incorporates all of these functions that include hyperlinks, which Tim didn't
invent but were around then, graphical displays, web pages, and all that stuff that we now
think of as the front end of the web, or at least the user's end of the web.
That's what the World Wide Web is.
Before that we had the Internet, which was really a way of communicating, but it required some specialized expertise and experience to use.
And so the distinction between the World Wide Web and the Internet and un-Internet, can you kind of explain that?
Well, in traditional parlance, an Internet is a network that connects other networks to one another.
The Internet is what we think of today.
We use it interchangeably with World Wide Web.
It's what we have on our screens.
If you're like me, you have it on your screen 24 hours a day, and you do all your work and communicating, more or less, through it.
So I think that the Internet and the World Wide Web are all, today, they're all basically, they mean the same thing.
In 2012, you wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times entitled, So, Who Really Did Invent the Internet?
Can you explain what that was in reaction to?
Sure.
This was a response to a column that had been written by a guy named Gordon Krovitz, who at that time was an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal.
He was later to become the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and he's still around.
And he had written a column that basically called out the notion that the government had invented the Internet.
He called it an urban legend.
And I was gratified to a certain extent that he had cited my book about Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning, but I had to point out that he got it wrong.
And that, in fact, the truth was, and as my book explained, it really was the government that had essentially invented the Internet.
It was a government agency.
This was an agency that was part of the Pentagon.
It was the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It had a unit that was working on networking technologies that was headed by a guy named Taylor.
And Taylor was the guy at the Pentagon who said, you know, he was funding all of these individual networking and computer science projects at various universities around the country at Utah and Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA and other places.
And he had really gotten exasperated by having to have Separate terminals on his desk for each one.
So he had, you know, a half a dozen or eight terminals in his office and they didn't communicate with each other.
And he basically issued a call for a technology that would allow them all to talk with one another and then talk together to him.
So he would need one terminal on his desk and he would be able to access all of these other systems.
So, he basically said, I'm going to fund this if anybody out there wants to put it together.
They did.
He funded it.
The first iteration was called the ARPAnet because it was funded by ARPA.
And then it developed over time.
First, it got taken over by the National Science Foundation.
It became the NSFnet.
And then it became what we know of today as the Internet.
And so, I guess, how does that play in with CERN's work and, of course, Xerox and that whole era?
Well, CERN's work came rather later, really about 20 years later, because Taylor was working on this stuff and funding it in the late 60s.
CERN's work really developed in around 1990.
But in this period that we're talking about, from the first iteration of the Internet to CERN's development, Of the World Wide Web, there were a lot of implementations of the Internet that were being worked on.
Technical protocols that specified how data and information was going to cross over this Internet.
So the World Wide Web was certainly the most user-friendly up to that point, but there were all these other schemes, essentially, that took place that were being
developed by brilliant data scientists, including at PARC.
The engineers at PARC were working with the engineers at ARPA, later DARPA when they put
the defense in front of the ARPA acronym, and they were all developing these protocols
sort of together and in collaboration.
So that's how PARC entered into it.
Uh, and then, uh, all these, uh, Bolt, Baranek, and Newman, which is a technical firm, uh, out of, uh, Boston or Cambridge, they helped implement a, a lot of the internet at the time.
Uh, and that's all been documented, um, at UCLA.
the first internet message processor, the first computer that stood between
all of the other systems and the internet itself was implemented at UCLA.
So it really was the first computer on the internet really was there.
So this was all going on over this period of 10 or 20 years.
And so, I mean, it's very interesting because there are, you know,
European centric projects like CERN that are supposed to be basically, you know,
open source science for everybody, not representing any military background.
You have ARPA later becomes DARPA, like you said, so clearly was a Pentagon operation
that later went on to become even more kind of represented by its military side.
And then you have the role of all these corporations also that were, you know, basically, you know,
you describe how it led to the first iteration of Windows and, you know, basically created
personal computing in some ways.
So how did all these different interests work together?
And, you know, is there anything to this broader conspiracy belief that you hear sometimes
that, you know, the military created the Internet with some sort of, I don't know, nefarious
intent to control people in some ways?
Yeah, I think once again, you have to go back to Bob Taylor and his role.
Bob was at ARPA, you know, he had a very high level post there.
He wasn't really thinking about military applications when he called for the development of this internetwork.
He was really thinking about the best way to essentially have machines communicate with humans.
That was his thing.
He worked with a guy, his mentor, At the Pentagon was a guy named JCR Licklider.
They were theorists and advocates of using computers and really graphical implementations of computer screens so that computers and humans could communicate So humans could communicate with computers.
Really, the humans were always the leading factor.
So Bob was really trying to implement a technology that he understood from the beginning would have really mostly civilian applications.
He was at the Pentagon, so he had to bow to some extent toward military needs.
But at that point, as I said, DARPA was known as ARPA.
It was really under Licklider and Taylor.
It had a very broad portfolio.
It was not focused on only military applications.
It was focused on applications that undoubtedly would have military uses, but he was really thinking much, much more broadly, and that's the way the Internet was developed.
I mean, you know, the aspects that he specified that It had to be resistant to interference.
It had to be resistant to tampering.
These were all factors that would be important for any use of a network like this, not particularly military.
And so do you think with time the military took more of an interest in this technology because it was just a genie-in-a-bottle kind of thing?
It emerges from one of these almost purely scientific projects and then more use cases are developed and ARPA becomes DARPA?
How did that exactly go?
Yeah, I think the military became interested in the applications of these networks with pretty much the same schedule or at the same pace that the scientific researchers became interested in it, technical researchers.
You know, you have to think back that this was in the very, very early days of computer science as a discipline.
It grew out of electrical engineering as a discipline, but it really began to become much more specialized around the same time, really the early 1970s, late 60s and early 1970s.
Now, there was this other thread that was going on at the time.
That was associated, I think, with the fallout from the Vietnam War.
And that was a debate over to what extent the Pentagon should be involving itself in really civilian research and civilian research funding and civilian research techniques.
And over this period of time, the Pentagon was told by Congress to become much more focused on strictly military applications.
Rather than casting this wide net, and that's why the Advanced Research Projects Agency became the Defense Research Projects Agency, it was to specify that we're the Pentagon, and what we want is stuff that we can use as a military agency and military operation.
So I think that's what happened.
But I don't think you could really say that the military wanted this as a military application.
Bob Taylor and J.C.R.
Licklider were off on their own, and they took great pride in the fact that they could really follow their noses wherever they thought it was necessary for society at large.
Um, so, um, and then eventually, you know, Bob, of course, uh, left the Pentagon and went to work for private industry.
And so at that point where, you know, this previously basically public technology, um, starts to become privatized in some ways and people see opportunities to make money, uh, what, what defined that shift and, and those days, uh, in PARC and how did, I mean, now that we're on the other side of it, you know, what was already kind of clear at the time, how did that lead to today's corporate landscape, uh, online?
So, I think, you know, we need to go back to Gordon Krovitz's essay, which, as I said, got things entirely backwards.
And Krovitz was sort of talking the Wall Street Journal's book, you know, which was, this is all about free enterprise and private enterprise and the government, when it's involved, you know, is in the way of things.
I think that was, and that is to this day, completely upside down.
Basically, the government gets involved in something, including the development of technology, when private enterprise isn't interested, because private companies are essentially interested in what they can do and invent and innovate for their own business models and their own business structures.
Something like the Internet wasn't very clear how this was going to apply to businesses at large.
They were high-tech companies that had developed their own networks.
IBM had a network of its own.
Honeywell had a network of its own.
All these companies had developed really proprietary systems.
But nobody really had an interest in creating a system that everybody could join into.
This was really counter to what private industry wanted to do at the time.
So basically, IBM wanted to go to its clients and say, we can do this.
We can create a network for you to connect all your offices, but you're going to have to buy it from us.
You're going to use our hardware and our software.
And it's not going to be compatible with anything you might buy from the other guy, so you better buy it from us and not the other guy.
And Honeywell would do the same thing.
All these companies would do the same thing.
Nobody had a commercial interest in putting it all together, and that's where the government stepped in.
And we see this over and over again throughout history.
Hoover Dam, which I've also written a book about.
was a government project because nobody had an interest in creating a dam that did all the things that
Hoover Dam would do that would not only be good for flood control and irrigation, but would generate electricity and
provide water for communities.
So the government had to do it. And then once the government creates this, it's natural and good.
It's something that we should be proud of.
The government then puts it out there and says to private industry, you can now use this infrastructure that we created for you and you can do with it what you want.
And that's exactly what happened with the Internet.
The government brought it to the point where it was essentially ready to be commercialized by anybody who wanted to commercialize it.
The technology was open source, it was public domain, so now you had this explosion of innovation that was being implemented by private companies, but they had the backbone.
The spine of it had been created by the government, and Krovitz sort of wanted to say, well, gee, you know, the government didn't have anything to do with this.
The government came in later and got in the way.
That's, as I said, completely backwards, and it's not the way things worked then, and it's not the way things work now, and it's not the way things are going to work in the future, because, you know, this is really going And so when you look at ARPA and CERN and the way they start, you know, basically they have a democratic ideal at their core, you know, they want to have all this be open and shared and it should profit humanity in some ways, obviously ARPA less than CERN possibly.
But, you know, you've also written recently about the attempts to basically continue privatization of the Internet to the point where a
free Internet as we once knew it would no longer be a thing.
So can you describe how, I guess, the connective tissue that has brought us to this point?
Yeah, well, one of the other sort of natural phenomena that we see and that I think we need to beware of
and and try to counteract as much as we can is that as private
enterprise, as individual actors in private enterprise become bigger and
more powerful, they want to control more of this and they want to turn what should be a
public institution and public infrastructure into private infrastructure that they can commercialize and that they
can start to exclude others from using it.
And that's why, you know, so we see, you know, these walled gardens cropping up, ISPs making deals or buying up content creators and then trying to sequester that content In ways that it's no longer available to anybody on the web, but you have to now be a subscriber.
We have ISPs that have bought entertainment networks, and they want to favor their entertainment networks on the internet that's accessed by their customers, and then exclude or interfere with others.
And that's really not legal.
But they're trying to get away with it.
And that's what the whole network neutrality debate is all about.
So we see that, you know, as I said, it's a natural development in business, but it's not necessarily and it's seldom in the public interest.
So that's what's what's been happening here.
Thanks so much for helping us clear a lot of that up and for answering all our questions, Michael.
People can check out your new book, Iron Empires, Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America.
And where else can people in our audience follow you and find more of your work?
Sure, well, I write a column...
Almost daily, not quite daily, but for the Los Angeles Times, where I'm a staff columnist, and you can find that at www.latimes.com, and then my columns are all there.
You can search for my name.
I also have my own website.
It's michaelhiltzik.com.
M-I-C-H-A-E-L-H-I-L-T for Thomas, Z for Zebra, I-K.com.
And there you'll find my other books.
Iron Empires is my seventh book.
Dealers of Lightning was my third book, I believe, but I've also written basically a history of Hoover Dam.
I've written a history of the New Deal.
I've written a biography of Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, a major figure in the Manhattan Project.
So, now that we've filled our brains with knowledge, it's time to scoop it all out and make space for the many conspiracy theories related to CERN.
That's my output.
Great. Go check it out, folks. And thank you so much again for joining us, Michael.
Happy to do it.
So now that we've filled our brains with knowledge, it's time to scoop it all out
and make space for the many conspiracy theories related to CERN.
Jake, take us away.
CERN Conspiracy Theories I want to preface my section with the accusation that
everything Julian has said before this is 100% conspiracy nonsense.
What about the guest?
You're going to accuse him too?
Slander his good name?
No, he was perfect.
I have no... No.
He should have written the entire episode.
But Julian's section, 100%, it's a smokescreen to water down the true nature of CERN.
Well, wait, Jake.
I mean, don't be too quick to judge.
I can bring up fun stuff, too.
Like, did I ever tell you about that time a weasel, probably a weasel, shut down the entire Deep State's portal to hell by fucking up the functioning of the...
Yeah, a weasel apparently chewed through a cable, and this was the biggest problem that's happened so far.
And they lost a bunch of equipment, damaged a whole part of the ring and stuff, and had to rebuild.
But that's not the only thing I can tell you.
There's also a bird apparently took a piece of baguette with his beak and dropped it on a part of like...
And so they had to they have a bunch of articles if you look for it where they talk about a bird and and pieces of baguette and how they almost Created the same problem that had happened with the maybe weasel.
They think it's a weasel.
Anyways, it seems like they're struggling It's like for these scientists are like, oh we can do this we can you know We can create like temperatures a billion times more than the core of the Sun but they can't even fight off like simple birds and weasels and so maybe that I don't know is that exciting to you or In 1952, the world's greatest minds came together to build one of the most expensive machines of humankind.
In all seriousness, CERN and the conspiracies surrounding it have been around much longer than QAnon, and in order to tackle this topic properly, I did my best to recreate the control group in which one might uncover the quote-unquote truth about the massive particle collider.
First, I opened a web browser.
Then, I typed in www.reddit.com slash r slash conspiracy.
I searched for CERN and filtered to the most popular posts of all time, all with upvotes in the thousands.
From here, I allowed myself to buy the ticket and take the ride, follow the links, and try to compile a list of the most prevalent conspiracy theories.
You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way.
For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes.
So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe.
