[jMyles]

Two things:

1) Sure, good things do emerge from less good things. That's how improvement happens. That's why we have thumbs thumbs today, even though none of our ancestors in the neoproterozoic era did.

2) On longer time scales (say, measuring from about 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years hence), I'm not sure we can say that DARPAnet was the most important evolutionary milestone in the emergence of the internet. It has been long and steady with several exciting jumps, where DARPAnet is just one.

I'm also wary of being steered too much by the physical models (from vacuum tubes to GPU data centers) and not enough by the founding notions and ideas and songs and treatises.

To me, The Two Sisters -=> Salt Creek -=> Terrapin Station -=> A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -=> archive.org is a more dispositive lineage than the circuity, especially with regard to the potential for peace that exists in this domain.