swords into smartphones
Imperialism, annihilation and the origins of our public Internet.
Imperialism thrives on paranoia. It is core to the emotional appeal used to justify increasing degrees of domination. Without paranoia, a war becomes outright murder. The enemy becomes undeniably human.
Many of the last century’s technological innovations were begotten of this state-sponsored paranoia. Speculation about foreign military research funneled billions into fantastical pursuits of destruction. Tanks, war planes, radar, submarines, encryption. Along the way, there were misfires. Ideas summoned from the frightened depths of human ingenuity which, when brought to light, weren’t really in the spirit of the game. Bioweapons, chemical warfare, industrialized genocide, nuclear annihilation. Individuals might succumb to paranoia exponentially; but collectively we desensitize on an S-curve.
Tragically, power has been retained by those calloused enough to play some part in refining that curve. Those who look at the horrors of chattel slavery, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombings of Japan for clues on how to exploit the limits of human indifference. When do we hit diminishing returns on paranoia? When do actions of motivational fear lead to a crisis of conscience? The end of WWII and the era of rapid nuclear weapons development following it brought these questions urgently forward.
Far from ending all wars, WWII simply showed us a type of war we have a harder time swallowing. It also dramatically distorted our understanding of suffering. When the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, the American slaughter of 600,000 Vietnamese civilians is seen as restrained. When Western forces killed over 300,000 people in Iraq following 9/11, the murder of 46,000 Gazans by the IDF is argued to be “not genocidal”. At the Ukrainian border, the Russian military runs drills with their arsenal of “tactical” nuclear weapons. Imperialist ambitions have not diminished, they have simply, like everything else, become more sustainable.
This present period, where states maximize both suffering and indifference to suffering, has spawned its own crop of characteristic technological innovations. Drones, facial recognition, automated weaponry, Keyhole satellites. Projects that maintain a healthy paranoia, but don’t bring young people out to shut down the DNC. Technologies that would be just as at home on the battlefield, as on the toy shelf at Target.
Technologies of war are never neutral. There are no “double edged swords.” The advantage is always held by whatever power is wielding the weapon. The distributed, escalating nature of state violence in our world today is built on obfuscating this truth. Facial recognition had to first appear as FaceID on the iPhone, before it could be tolerated in the TSA line. Quadcopters had to first appear as a mainstay of independent protest live streams before they could be armed and launched by police departments. These are emblematic of a new process of acclimating the public to Imperialist weapons. Both of these examples were seeded by defense spending, then marketed to consumers, before finally being implemented en masse for the surveillance state. An emergent process, not born of any one person’s devious brilliance, but of unchecked markets that get rich on devastation.
Through the motivations of many actors, a coherent and sick premise forms: to implicate the population in developing these technologies, bring them to a place of emotional dependence on them. The consumer is conscripted, no longer just a passive recipient but an active collaborator—inadvertently testing, refining, and normalizing tools that were once engineered for control. By using and demanding ever more sophisticated gadgets, consumers pave the way for these militaristic frameworks to seep into everyday life, reinforcing a culture that values convenience over scrutiny. Through each swipe and click, whole societies become complicit in perpetuating the very systems designed to monitor and manipulate them, deepening their reliance on—while quietly surrendering to—the next wave of militarized technologies.
Few innovations have done this so effectively as the public Internet. In many ways it is the inadvertent prototype for acclimating a public to military technology. Guaranteeing its own perpetual existence through a non-military consumer base and industry. Cloaking its original purpose and true character in a veneer of neutrality.
In October 1969, the Department of Defense sent the first message over ARPANET, an experimental network connecting research facilities nationwide. More than simply bridging academic institutions and military bases, ARPANET was funded to create information technology resilient to the rising spectacle of nuclear warfare. A breakthrough came in 1989, with the decentralized TCP/IP protocol, making it possible to instantaneously reroute network traffic around any node that was taken offline. With TCP/IP there was no longer a central authority directing traffic, instead every node in the network could speak with each other to negotiate the optimal path between one destination and another.
Though the state maintained a narrow vision of militaristic applications for the new technology, pockets of like-minded activists and computer scientists saw a different future. In the 1990s, financed by a burgeoning class of counter culture elites turned neoliberal technocrats, the public Internet was born.
Recognizing how Cold War era fears of nuclear annihilation delivered the modern Internet is critical to grasping its trajectory and purpose in our lives. Structurally, it is a technology built on paranoia. Paranoia that the network will be destroyed, and paranoia about activity of the network itself. The atomic bomb presented Western empires with the potential for world-scale destruction, replacing motivational paranoia with certain horror. Elite military, academic and financial institutions responded with the Internet. Through decentralization, and its virtual nature, it is meant to be an new, indestructible playfield for Imperialism.
If we spent the last century learning to destroy our world, then we will — necessarily — spend the next century learning to build new ones.