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ECONOMY DIGITAL DIVIDE CITIES RISING

Chattanooga Was a Typical

Postindustrial City. Then It
Began Offering Municipal
Broadband.
Chattanooga’s publicly owned Internet service
has helped boost its economy and bridge the digital
divide.
By P.E. Moskowitz

JUNE 3, 2016

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The Tennessee River runs through the city of Chattanooga,
Tennessee. (CC)

D owntown Chattanooga looks like a lot of

postindustrial cities: wide streets, a mix of old
brick buildings, and uninspired ’60s-era brutalism.
Except there’s something here that many small
downtowns do without these days: people. And
many of them are here not just for the usual
accoutrements of your average gentrified
downtown—fancy restaurants, condos, and concert
venues (though those do exist here), but for
something more basic, and arguably much more
important: the Internet.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the

United States to be wired by a municipality for 1
gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service.
Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-
per-second service (for comparison, Time Warner
Cable’s maxes out at 300 megabits per second).
That has attracted dozens of tech firms to the city
that take advantage of the fast connections for
things like telehealth-app development and 3D
printing, and it’s given downtown Chattanooga a
vibrancy rare in an age when small city centers
have been emptied out by deindustrialization and
the suburbs.
The feat was made possible not by a tech giant but
by the city’s municipal power company, EPB, which
in 2007 set out to modernize the city’s power grid,
and realized it could lay every customer’s home for
fiber-optic cable at the same time. The near-
decade-long experiment has worked: By offering
gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing
discounts for low-income residents, EPB has taken
tens of thousands of customers from the Internet
behemoth Comcast, which offers service that is
about 85 percent slower at twice the price. EPB
now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of
the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success
that dozens of other towns and cities have begun
their own municipal broadband networks,
providing faster and cheaper service than private
companies.

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“Really, these last two years you’ve seen it pick up
steam,” said Christopher Mitchell, the director of
the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at
the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). “It’s
just going to keep on spreading.”

Six years ago, Chattanooga was the only city

offering publicly owned 1-gigabit Internet service.
Today, over 50 communities do, according to ILSR,
and there are over 450 communities in the United
States offering some form of publicly owned
Internet service. Many municipal networks are in
small towns and rural areas where private high-
speed access is hard to come by. But several dozen
are in cities like Chattanooga, where there are
other, private options that tend to be much more
expensive and slower than what governments have
proven they can provide.

Even in places where private companies provide

high-speed service, a public Internet option may
prove increasingly vital to low-income residents.
Internet inequality is a growing issue in the United
States: Internet connections are often required for
job applications, and seven in 10 teachers assign
homework that requires broadband access,
according to FCC commissioner Jessica
Rosenworcel; yet about one-third of low-income
families don’t have high-speed access to the
Internet in their homes. Part of the problem is
geography: Private Internet companies have little
incentive to lay cable to sparsely populated areas.
But even bigger cities usually only have one or two
options for private Internet access, and so
companies like Comcast have little competition
and therefore little incentive to make their services
affordable for low-income families.

Municipal Internet helps solve both of those issues.

Homes, no matter how rural, are usually already
wired for electricity by a municipal provider; it’s
not too much extra work to follow those lines with
fiber-optic cables. Chattanooga did not have to
raise taxes or find additional revenue within its
budget to pay for its system, which covers many of
the area’s most remote houses. The utility simply
laid the cable, charged for it, and is now reaping
the benefits.

EPB spent about $220 million developing its fiber-

optic system, and that’s translated into more than
$865 million in economic growth for the city. The
network also allows EPB to distribute its electricity
more cheaply by monitoring and shutting off areas
that are causing problems during storms, finding
where repairs need to be made, and routing power
more efficiently. And that means EPB can afford to
offer the Internet to low-income families at
significantly reduced prices, providing any family
with children who receive free or discounted
lunches at school 100 megabit service (which is
several times faster than standard cable-company
plans) for $26.99. So far, about 1,800 families are
taking advantage of the program.

“We really believe strongly that we should be open

and available to everyone and not slow them down,”
said David Wade, the chief operating officer of
EPB. “Everyone deserves at least 100 megabits.”

Most municipalities don’t have official mandates to

make Internet access more equitable, but it seems
that equity is nonetheless a central concern of
many municipal providers. In Wilson, North
Carolina (population: 50,000), the city began laying
fiber-optic cables between government buildings in
order to better share information, and decided it
could expand the service to others. The city now
offers free WiFi downtown and has teamed up with
two nonprofit after-school programs to provide the
Internet to low-income kids. The small city of
Sandy, Oregon, doesn’t have discounted plans, but
its municipal service nonetheless is cheaper than
corporate providers—100 megabits costs only $40 a
month.
“Just like we provide parks and trails and other
amenities, we also feel like…having great Internet is
a reason to live here,” Seth Atkinson, Sandy’s city
manager, said.

Laying fiber-optic cable can be expensive, so it’s

unlikely that big cities will jump on the municipal
Internet bandwagon anytime soon, but leaders are
nonetheless beginning to see equitable Internet
access as a major issue. In San Francisco, the city
teamed up with the nonprofit Internet Archive to
provide free high-speed Internet access to
thousands of public-housing residents. New York
City too is beginning to offer free Internet access
in public-housing projects.

But the biggest problem facing municipal Internet

services isn’t scale or the size of cities; it’s the cable
companies. When Chattanooga first started
planning its municipal network, Comcast sued,
saying the service amounted to unfair competition
for the company. It lost the suit, but Comcast and
other companies have spent millions of dollars on
ad campaigns and donations to local politicians in
the hope that municipal providers don’t expand
more than they already have. The company has a
history of supporting politicians opposed to public
Internet service and lobbying state legislatures to
pass legislation that prevents cities and towns from
offering their services outside of their municipal
boundaries. Eighteen states now have anti-
expansion laws on the books.

Chattanooga and Wilson have both sought to

expand beyond their current service areas, and last
year the Federal Communications Commission
ruled in their favor, preempting both Tennessee
and North Carolina’s anti-expansion laws. But
North Carolina’s attorney general sued the FCC in
response, saying that “the FCC unlawfully inserted
itself between the State and the State’s political
subdivisions.” Both Chattanooga and Wilson are
now waiting for a final determination before they
decide whether to expand their service areas.

Regardless of how the FCC’s suit eventually pans

out, more and more municipalities will likely keep
building Internet networks. But if the FCC
eventually rules in favor of municipalities like
Chattanooga and Wilson, a public Internet option
could grow a whole lot bigger a whole lot faster.

P.E. Moskowitz P.E. Moskowitz is the author of the newly released

The Case Against Free Speech The First Amendment, Fascism, and the
Future of Dissent, as well as How to Kill a City: Gentrification,
Inequality and the Future of the Neighborhood. They've written for
The Nation, NewYorker.com, Wired, and many other publications.
Born in New York City, P.E. now lives in New Orleans with their
dog, Remi.
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CULTURE MUSIC COLD WAR

How the CIA Learned to

Rock
A new podcast illuminates why the spy agency preferred
pop music in the cultural Cold War.
By Jeet Heer

YESTERDAY 10:56 AM

Rudolf Schenker of Scorpions performs on stage during

Bloodstock Festival 2019. (Katja Ogrin / Redferns)
J ames Jesus Angleton, chief of CIA
counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, was
nicknamed “the Poet.” Before he was a spy, he had
literary aspirations. As an undergraduate at Yale, he
wrote verse and, more impressively, coedited the
literary journal Furioso, which published poets like
E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos
Williams.

Angleton was an aesthete turned tormentor. The

two facets of his personality were combined in
disturbing ways. His literary sensibility was
nurtured on the close reading taught by the New
Criticism, with William Empson’s classic Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930) being an especially
formative influence. Empson taught Angleton that
no line of poetry had just one meaning, that the job
of the reader was to squeeze out every ambiguity
and hidden implication. Angleton notoriously
applied this methodology to the interrogation of
Soviet defectors, never taking them at face value
but constantly pressuring them to reveal their
covert intentions, always postulating that they
might be double agents, and sometimes torturing
them.

Strange as it may seem, Angleton’s use of high

modernism for spycraft was hardly unique. The
CIA in its first few decades was led by Ivy League
eggheads. Angelton’s protégé Cord Meyer often
hired literary critics from The Kenyon Review, an
organ of the New Criticism, to work as spies.

The CIA had not just an ideology but also an

aesthetic. The Cold War was a cultural struggle as
well as a political one. To demonstrate the
superiority of Western Civilization, and
particularly to win over wavering European
intellectuals who might be attracted to
communism, the agency funded literary magazines
like The Paris Review—founding editor Peter
Matthiesson was on the CIA’s payroll as a spy—and
sponsored exhibits of Abstract Expressionism. In
the late 1970s, the journalist Richard Elman
researched “the Aesthetics of the CIA” and found
documents revealing that the agency seriously
considered a suggestion that “T.S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets be translated into Russian and dropped by
airplane all over the Soviet Union.”

The cultural Cold War was the precursor to the

space race. In both competitions, government
largesse was deployed to prove that America could
outdo the Reds. In order to show that America was
fully as sophisticated as fellow-travelers like Jean-
Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, the CIA embraced
difficult and experimental art. In the same spirit,
NASA sent astronauts to the moon to wipe out the
humiliation of Sputnik.

But there was one creative field where the CIA was
more populist: music. As historian Hugh Wilford
noted in his 2008 study, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How
the CIA Played America, “Yet surprisingly, the CIA
appeared reluctant to extend its patronage to
America’s musical avant-garde, experimental,
‘serialist’ composers such as Milton Babbitt and
John Cage, both of whom shared many of the same
aesthetic ideas and indeed often collaborated with
abstract expressionists.”

Instead, the agency even in the 1950s thought that

America’s musical strength lay in popular work. In
a 1955, Frank Wisner, then deputy director of plans,
rejected the idea of sending the New York Ballet to
Moscow. “Our initial presentations to Soviet
audiences should aim for mass appeal,” Wisner
argued. He wanted music that was “expressive of
our folklore or unmistakably typical of U.S.” Wisner
was particularly interested in works by “negro
performers” that would display their “capacity” and
“the opportunities they have in U.S. artistic life.”
Wisner believed that “first-rate American jazz”
would “serve to demonstrate the breadth and
vitality of American musicianship.”
Wisner’s enthusiasm for jazz is the key to why the
CIA embraced popular culture in music even as it
was much more hoity-toity in regard to literature
and painting. The CIA was well aware that the
Soviet Union was calling attention to American
racism. This was a particularly vulnerable point in
the competition for support among the
decolonizing nations of Africa and Asia. Jazz, and
popular music more broadly, would be the way to
show that America wasn’t racist.

The story of the CIA’s love of popular music is

brought up to date in a splendid podcast called
Wind of Change, by New Yorker journalist Patrick
Radden Keefe. In the eight-episode series, Keefe
investigates the rumor that CIA agents composed
the ballad “Wind of Change,” first performed in
1989 by the German heavy metal group Scorpions
and released the following year. The song was a
huge hit on both sides of the Iron Curtain,
becoming a kind of unofficial anthem for the end
of communism.

The podcast is very much a detective story, and like

all whodunits deserves to be left spoiler-free. But
one of its strengths is that Keefe places his story
fully in the context of the CIA’s history of arts
patronage.
In the third episode, there’s a discussion of the
troubled relationship this patronage had with black
musicians. In 1955, The New York Times wrote,
“America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor
key. Right now its most effective ambassador is
Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong.” But Armstrong was a
reluctant ambassador, uncomfortable with doing
propaganda for Jim Crow America. He went along
on State Department tours but continued to speak
out against racism.

In the case of Nina Simone, the CIA had to use

trickery. As Wilford uncovered, Simone was sent on
a tour to Nigeria in 1961 by the American Society of
African Culture, a CIA front organization. As Keefe
notes, “It’s one thing for the government to
pressure Louis Armstrong to go to Africa on a
propaganda mission and have him grudgingly but
knowingly go along. It’s a very different thing to
covertly send an artist on false pretenses. And Nina
Simone was no patriot. She ended up renouncing
the United States and living abroad. She called it,
‘the United Snakes of America.’”

One of the great merits of Wind of Change is that it

directly confronts what is morally troubling about
spy agencies’ funding art. Arguably, the CIA’s
patronage was one of its most defensible deeds,
certainly preferable to fomenting coups or
assassinating foreign leaders. But even so, it
involved a corruption of art.

As Keefe observes, “We think of culture—or we

want to think of culture—as organic and
spontaneous, as purer than politics. Nina Simone
clearly did. She felt it gave her a deep connection
to the people she met in Nigeria. So it is really
unsettling to learn that the hidden hand of
government was at work. It’s a feeling of
dispossession, like someone picked your pocket.”

Another virtue of the podcast is that it recuperates

the idea of ambiguity, stealing it back from James
Jesus Angleton. If Angleton corrupted ambiguity
by turning it into a justification for torture, Keefe
shows that when ambiguity is properly used, it is
an essential tool for moral analysis. Throughout the
series, each bit of evidence, each new testimony or
historical discovery, is examined for its implicit
content or possible falsehood. The end result is not
Angleton’s murk but the illumination that comes
from honestly confronting the limits of knowledge.

Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent at The

Nation and the author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s
Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery:
Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014).
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For Reprints and Permissions, click here.

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