| HN Mirror

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.