[JumpCrisscross]

> We don't know that though, do we?

We can reasonably conclude the internet was not created to spy on citizens, it was created for military connectivity. One could suggest the World Wide Web was created for espionage, but that again requires several leaps with respect to its early creators, most of whom have shown a lifelong dedication to a vision of human freedom that far exceeds the population’s central tendency.

Was the rollout of the WWW and internet to the masses motivated, in part, by domestic surveillance desires? Sure. Almost no question about it. But was that a guiding aim? No, at least not in America, not until the project was well underway.

[Jon_Lowtek]

The US military involvement in the creation of the internet is a bit of a myth. It is true that the military had a big interest in a decentral "nuke resiliant" digital communication network and as such became an early adopter and big spending investor, but it was invented, build and distributed by universities to networking the local networks of universities together. Wiring two computers together to exchange data is quite obvious and doing so over long distance calls was the next logical step. There were many early adopters in the industry as well, telecommunication and electronics being the obvious ones. Military interest and financing influenced many small parts, and at the big picture it played a big role, i am not denying that, but the military did not invent or build it, and it wasn't created solely or even mostly for them either. It's a myth, a simple explanations for a complex process, a story that sounds nice, but is as wrong as it is right. The internet isn't even one thing, that is a rather grand abstraction, like "the forests" - which forests? All of them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> US military involvement in the creation of the internet is a bit of a myth

It was relatively front and centre. SAGE was the Air Force’s networked radar system in the 1950s [1]. Its vulnerability directly lead to the work at RAND, in the U.S., on packet switching in the 1960s. Academia then took the mantle, but never far from the military’s aegis. (The UK took a parallel path through the NPL that wasn’t as martial, but still quite so.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Enviro...

[Jon_Lowtek]

i am not denying that it was front and center, i am just saying this "the military created it" story that gets reurgitated endlessly is a very oversimplified explanation that downplays the involvement of many civilian and global actors in favor of a story of militaristic mysticism and american nationalism. The internet is not packet switching, even if it mostly uses packet switching and the internet is not a network of radars either and while RAND surely was military-industrial complex, it did not create the internet. Sure the DoD was always strongly involved, but claiming the ARPANET is the predecessor of the internet is like claiming i had one grandparent, while in truth i had four. The ARPANET sure was about networking, but not about global internetworking, even if it became one of the internetworked networks, and it sure did not care about global commerce and people sharing videos of their cats either. Last time i checked the military did not network yemen into the global communication network, they bombed them out of it (scnr). I am not saying that the US military did not invest heavily in computer networks and financed a lot of the science and technology, they surely did, but they did not create the internet. It is like saying Bill Gates became a billionaire by founding a company in his garage and working really hard, it is not entirely wrong, but it kind of misses a lot of rather important details to instead make an inspirational story filled with survivorship bias and american dreams.

[verisimi]

That the military created it, assures you that it was _not_ about control of the populace. Ok.