How 1990s Internet Boom Quietly Built a Centralized Financial Control Engine

During the dot-com era of 1998 to 2000, engineers working in server farms across Northern Virginia and New Jersey were constructing a highly centralized, algorithmic infrastructure beneath the public-facing web. While ordinary users experienced the internet as an open, decentralized frontier, the underlying architecture was being optimized for speed, automation, and capital movement. Researchers and former defense contractors repurposed network routing mathematics — originally developed for survivability during nuclear disruption — to automate financial price discovery at microsecond speeds. The piece draws a parallel between this emerging system and the Soviet OGAS project, a 1960s vision by Victor Glushkov to manage an entire economy through real-time computerized data aggregation. Unlike OGAS, which failed due to hardware and bandwidth limitations, the late-1990s internet provided the computational density and packet-switched bandwidth needed to realize a similar model of algorithmic economic control.