Cold War military-industrial investment made the internet’s corporate order possible

Evidence

This newly intensified role for both capitalism and governments in managing social life became possible only through the unprecedented technological opportunities for connection that we know collectively as the internet. Their origins lie in investment from the US Cold War military-industrial complex and subsequent massive corporate investment that transformed the internet into a global space for corporate networking and transnational market coordination. Through the internet and its embedding into everyday life and business emerged something else: the possibility of a new type of economic and social order. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 107

Categorization

• XREF: The ARPANET-military-industrial origin is a familiar baseline; check how it is weighed against more distributed origin narratives. — connects to: Decentralized internet architecture was designed for nuclear survivability, not freedom — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 285; The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 287; The internet’s military-industrial origins enabled a new economic and social order. (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies #corroborates (0.90) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 287
• The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548
• The internet’s military-industrial origins enabled a new economic and social order. #expands (0.88)
• The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic #corroborates (0.82) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 285
• The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons #qualifies (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 283
• Internet commercialization transformed an infrastructure into a space dimension overlaying society #expands (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 113
• Neoliberal privatization decisions shaped the corporate-controlled internet #qualifies (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 288
• The internet enabled a shift to commons-based decentralized non-market production #complicates (0.72) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 77