The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic

Evidence

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

• SHARE: The ‘history’s greatest antinomy’ line — a non-commercial network built to defend the capitalist realm — is worth sending to anyone who enjoys ironic structural observations about tech.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 285
• XREF: connects to: The internet’s military-industrial origins enabled a new economic and social order.; The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 283; The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548 (+5 more)

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’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism #qualifies (0.75) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34
• The early internet’s value lay precisely in sheltering niche subcultures from mainstream attention #complicates (0.72)