The internet’s military-industrial origins enabled a new economic and social order.

Evidence

Its origins go back to 1969 when the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), a United States defense department, developed a method of exchanging military research information between researchers based at different sites. By the mid-1980s, these computer networks were expanded by another US government agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF established supercomputer centers whose resources were required to be accessible to any educational facility who wanted them. The NSF network was gradually refined and evolved into what we know as the Internet. Evidence first appeared in the 1980s that electronic mail and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which lie outside of the Internet were being used by neofascists. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The early internet was a capitalism-free zone. If anything, it seemed like an homage to Soviet Gosplan – the State Planning Committee whose job was to replace the market mechanism: a centrally designed, state-owned, non-commercial network. At the same time, it featured elements of early liberalism, even tributes to what I call ‘anarcho-syndicalism’: a network without hierarchy, it relied on horizontal decision-making and mutual gift exchange, not market exchanges. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 283 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The internet shifted production from industrial to networked information economies. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 77; The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 285; The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548 (+3 more)

Related

• The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic (similarity 0.91)
• The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. (similarity 0.90)
• Cold War military-industrial investment made the internet’s corporate order possible (similarity 0.88)
• The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies (similarity 0.87)
• The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons (similarity 0.83)
• Decentralized internet architecture was designed for nuclear survivability, not freedom (similarity 0.82)
• Free-information norms arose partly because early collaborators had no proprietary profit to protect. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. #corroborates (0.88) — 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 (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 285
• The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons #qualifies (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 283