A distributed network with many redundant paths and no central switching point keeps functioning when individual nodes are destroyed, because messages reroute around the damage rather than depending on any single link. This survivability logic, originally framed against nuclear attack, made redundancy and the absence of a center a design goal rather than a defect.
The ARPANET protocols were documented in a series called 'Request for Comments,' deliberately tentative notes that any participant could issue and revise, which lowered the barrier to contribution and kept standards open rather than dictated from above. Phrasing specifications as requests rather than decrees established authority through usefulness and consensus instead of hierarchy.
The ARPANET was built and funded to let researchers share scarce, expensive computing resources remotely, but the application that quickly dominated traffic was person-to-person electronic mail, which no one had designed the network to carry. The builders discovered that a system's actual value often emerges from uses its creators did not anticipate or prioritize.