The Internet was designed to decelerate war, not accelerate it.

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. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 544

Categorization

• CANDY: A punchy counterintuitive tidbit — that the Internet was a decentralization-for-survival device rather than a speed machine — travel-ready for conversation.
• XREF: Builds on the book’s third category of deceleration (unintended side effects of acceleration efforts or the reverse) and recalls Castells’ network society reading. — connects to: The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 287; The Internet’s architecture was Maoist dispersion applied to communications. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 544; The internet’s military roots and privatization made its democratic promise contingent, not inevitable. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 287

Broader Connections

• The Internet’s architecture was Maoist dispersion applied to communications. #corroborates (0.75) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 544