finished: Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.
I finished Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.
I was ready to love this book. I want to read the book that this title promises, but this is not that book.
If you were to ask any reasonably intelligent non-specialist to write a book about women and the internet, they'd probably start jotting notes about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper along with lots of question marks around possible points of inquiry and at least mild embarrassment that they couldn't think of anyone else.
This person would then have two paths: either question whether they were the right person for the job, or engage in a serious research project. The first of these paths should lead you to the second, because no one knows everything, and wouldn't it be great to dig in and tell those stories?
Evans takes neither path. She writes engagingly about Ada Lovelace, less so about Grace Hopper, and then progressively wanders farther and farther from the book's ostensible subject, often bringing a hammer at the end of a chapter to crudely shape its contents to the premise.
"The Longest Cave," for example, is in some ways the best chapter in the book because it's a fascinating story about what led to the legendary text game known as "Colossal Cave Adventure." But Evans massages the story just so to reach a conclusion that's less than convincing if not actively deceitful. It's a story about a lot of things: a marriage, a family, a heartbreak, the coping, and the unlikely inspiration for an influential game. And it's a compelling story. But it's not a story about the internet, and it's not a story about women making the internet.
Will and Patricia Crowther were active members of the Cave Research Foundation and went on many expeditions together over many years. They even worked together on software to plot their maps. Evans strangely singles out Pat as "the party's mapmaker," but later makes it clear that mapping is an essential task for all cavers, and that surveying was core to the group. What makes this especially odd is that John Wilcox, whom Pat would later marry, led the expedition and was the chief cartographer of the Cave Research Foundation. After Pat left him for John, Will naturally stopped caving with the group. He coped in his loneliness by working on a game inspired by their cave exploration and by Dungeons and Dragons, and he used this as a way to bond with his daughters.
Many people in a variety of roles would have had a hand in mapmaking, but I suspect Evans calls Pat the mapmaker and focuses on the final expedition, in which Will was absent, in order to make the case that his game depended on her maps. This is beyond a stretch, but the chapter only works if readers accept it. But Evans tries to make the connection even stronger.
You see, not only did Will Crowther make a game based on his ex-wife's maps, and not only did he make the game for his daughters to play, but he even included a secret code for his sister. So it turns out that this game was inspired by and made for girls and women. And what's more, it was uploaded onto a server where it spread across the ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. That's pretty tidy, right? We have women. We have the internet (sort of). And the stinger at the end is that the men who played that game on those servers never knew that Patricia was in the cave the whole time. Now we have the "untold" part of the subtitle. But we still don't have a story about a woman helping to make the internet.
This is also the point in the book when we move away from an effective, readable kind of narrative non-fiction to that sort of journalistic long-form writing that centers the experience of the author as they travel to meet a subject, politely sip tea, or chat either in person or awkwardly online across time zones. These chapters drag aimlessly, often beginning with a claim that not many women were involved with coding at this time, before perpetuating stereotypes that women are non-technical but able to think about things like social connections.
Under a different title, and without attempting to frame these anecdotes as "the untold story of the women who made the internet," this could have been an excellent series of essays on people and communities who haven't received their due. But the connecting thread is thin, if it exists at all. The tone is uneven, the author's viewpoint is unclear, and the occasional attempts to restate the thesis are so often forced and distracting. At times, you get the sense that the book should feel a little rebellious, a little punk rock, but then we hear about someone bringing her passion to petroleum giant Mobil, or trying to sell an idea to the intelligence community who just wouldn't buy it.
Joyce Reynolds is mentioned once. Folks like Sally Floyd and Susan Estrada aren't mentioned at all. Women who were responsible for expanding access to the internet around the world, including Africa and Asia, such as Nancy Hafkin, Karen Banks, and Kanchana Kanchanasut are likewise unrecognized. There's no mention of Uruguay's Ira Holtz, whom Vint Cerf called "the mother of the internet." Instead, we hear a lot about women's spaces on the hippie enclave the WELL, and the hipster alternative run by a woman in New York, though it exists as an exclusive BBS outside the internet. The last chapter is essentially the history of a video game company whose only success was a Barbie game on CD-ROM, followed by an epilogue about "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century" by VNS Matrix, a group that is also best known for a CD-ROM rather than anything to do with making the internet.
So we have some stories about women tangentially connected to the internet (or ARPANET), some stories about women using similar or related technologies (e.g., different applications of hypertext, communities connecting over telnet), and way too many stories about CD-ROMs.
But where are the untold stories of the women who made the internet? Unfortunately they're not in this book.