Private tech firms now lead basic research that government once funded

Evidence

Waning levels of government leadership and funding for “ubiquitous computing” leave the technology companies to lead in basic research and applications, each vying to become “the Google” of the new apparatus and its architectures of extraction and execution. Despite the radical prospects of the ubiquitous connected sensate computational apparatus and the often-repeated claim “It will change everything,” technology firms in the US have, thus far, continued their run of relative lawlessness, unimpeded by any comprehensive social or regulatory vision. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier contrast between state-funded ARPANET era research and private corporate control — reversing the public-infrastructure history of computing.