The primary goals of the internet have always been surveillance and control. Today, it is merely following its original design.
Internet (originally ARPANET) was born out of a Pentagon surveillance and counterinsurgency project. It was implemented by ARPA, a US Department of Defence research agency that we know as DARPA.
The effort to change the public perception of the internet from a military surveillance project to a promised utopian land of opportunity took about twenty years and a lot of work – and it worked like a charm – but surveillance has always remained at the centre of what the internet is about.
Personally, I am a big fan of Yasha Levine’s book, “Surveillance Valley,” even though later on, our views on covid did not coincide. Yasha’s book describes the counterinsurgency and surveillance underbelly of the internet really well.
The Internet came out of a 1960s Pentagon project called ARPANET. ARPANET was a counterinsurgency, communications, and surveillance project developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (“ARPA”) and based on the idea of “Great Intergalactic Network,” a futuristic-sounding term coined by J. C. R. Licklider, nicknamed “Lick.” Lick was an American psychologist and computer scientist and one of the “founding fathers” of interactive computing.
We all know ARPA as DARPA, the creepy Department of Defence (“DoD”) agency behind the Operation Warp Speed. ARPA was originally formed in response to the shock of being “beaten” by the USSR in space after the USSR launched its Sputnik in 1957.
The agency was intended to protect the United States from the Soviet nuclear threat from space. It was designed as a lean Pentagon agency that would be almost like a management company, overseeing advanced military research projects but contracting a lot of their work out to private companies.
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