The Internet’s architecture was Maoist dispersion applied to communications.

Evidence

Interestingly, after a closer look even the apparent paradigm example of the military development of late modern accelerative technologies, the Internet, supports my thesis that the principle of acceleration has lost its former function in military logic. Even though the Internet is doubtless a principal accelerator not only of information-technical processes but also of social change, for its military-strategical “inventors” its networking logic served to decelerate rather than accelerate war: the original form of the Internet, the Arpanet, was something invented by the U.S. Department of Defense to prevent the neutralization of American information systems at a single blow in case of a (Soviet) nuclear attack by scattering and decentering American communicative arrangements. As Manuel Castells observes: “To some extent, it was the electronic equivalent of the Maoist tactics of dispersing guerrilla forces around a vast territory to counter an enemy’s might with versatility and knowledge of terrain; the outcome was a network architecture that, as its inventors wanted, cannot be controlled from any center and is made up of thousands of autonomous computer networks that have innumerable ways to link up.” — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 544

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: decentralized resilience as a design philosophy — from Arpanet to mesh networks, and how de-centralization inverts the intuitive equation of technology with speed.
• XREF: connects to: The Internet was designed to decelerate war, not accelerate it. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 544; Intellectuals kept Maoist categories after renouncing organized Maoism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1319

Broader Connections

• Intellectuals kept Maoist categories after renouncing organized Maoism #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1319