[-empyre-] Surfing: new discussions about new media and theory

[Richard Wright]

And duct tape was invented by the US military for sealing ammunition cases (etc, etc).

But what would you like the internet to be?


Richard

> 
> I'd just like to make a short observation at the start of this discussion - noting that I've not yet read any of the texts mentioned by Renate.
> 
> Vladimir Putin recently stated that the internet is a CIA plot. The comment attracted headlines around the world as people speculated whether this was the case and what Putin was trying to suggest (eg: that different countries might initiate their own internets).
> 
> Whilst Putin's comment, and much of the analysis that followed, was premised on an erroneous understanding of what the internet is Putin was correct about the CIA plot part. The internet was, as is popularly known, initiated at Pentagon request by one of the USA's key military research quangos, ARPA (later renamed DARPA). ARPA and DARPA were part of the core infrastructure of US defence and intelligence, along with the NSA and CIA. The history on this is not surprisingly a little foggy, given the murky character of the defence and intelligence sector, but ARPANET was probably commissioned during the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson and realised during that of Richard Nixon. This was high-Cold War time and the function of the network was to be a defence communications network that would work in a nuclear war during severe infrastructure attrition. It's ironic that the president who 'gave the internet away' to the public was Ronald Reagan, the most bellicose of cold-warriors
> .
> 
> The point here is that the internet was not founded as a utopian vehicle. It was conceived as an instrument of war. It's true that during the late 1980's and into the 1990's political progressives exploited the infrastructure and protocols the internet offered to develop new ideas about social responsibility and liberty (so did pornographers, gun-runners and drug dealers). Swords into ploughshares (or other implements), I suppose. The same sort of things happened when the printing press became widely available and it is probably appropriate to consider the internet as something like the printing press (with its ancillary techno-social systems).
> 
> The Hermes metaphor aside, the internet has never been an egalitarian or utopian system. It's a military communications system that has morphed into a key part of the public domain (in all its complexity). Perhaps for some it seemed to be something else for a little while - but it wasn't.
> 
> best
> 
> Simon