Decentralized internet architecture was designed for nuclear survivability, not freedom

Evidence

As the nuclear arms race gathered pace, the Pentagon chose centrally to finance the design and construction of a network of decentralised computers. Its single purpose? To work out how to make different silos housing nuclear weapons communicate with each other, and all of them with Washington, without a central hub that a Soviet nuclear bomb could take out in one go. That’s how history’s greatest ever antinomy came about: a US government-built and -owned, non-commercial computer network that lay outside capitalist markets and imperatives but whose purpose was the defence of the capitalist realm. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms the redundancy-as-nuclear-defense account familiar from Abbate’s Inventing the Internet and popular histories, worth cross-referencing. — connects to: The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic — 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; Cold War military-industrial investment made the internet’s corporate order possible — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 107 (+3 more)
• CANDY: The distributed-network-for-nuclear-survival rationale is a neat elevator fact about why the internet has no central hub.

Broader Connections

• The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548
• The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic #corroborates (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 285
• The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies #corroborates (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 287
• Cold War military-industrial investment made the internet’s corporate order possible #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 107
• Decentralized pursuit of non-domination breeds accumulating petty despotisms, not freedom #contradicts (0.75) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 456