by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
July 9, 2023
Have you heard the latest?
Canadians are losing their access to online news thanks to a new bill that would make tech companies liable for so much as linking to news stories.
French President Macron is mulling a social media shutdown in the name of quelling France’s social unrest.
Meta’s new “Twitter killer” Threads app is (surprise, surprise!) censoring from day one.
And the UK government is mulling a proposal to give their NSA equivalent, the GCHQ, unprecedented, sweeping new powers to monitor internet logs in real-time.
Are you noticing a pattern?
Yes, the Internet—the “Information Superhighway” version of the “Internet” that was sold as a digital panacea to a credulous public in the 1990s, that is—is now officially dead.
So what does this mean? And where do we go from here? Today, I’ll get to the bottom of the dead internet theory and what conspiracy realists should make of this news.
The Internet Theory
If you lived through the ’90s, congratulations! You had a front row seat to a fundamental transformation of society the likes of which hasn’t been seen by any generation since the days of Gutenberg.
Unless you were working at a university or a US government lab, you started the decade utterly ignorant of email and message boards and even the basic rudiments of computer networking. But by the time you were ringing in the millennium, you were (more likely than not) online, sending emails and surfing the web and getting into your first online flame wars.
You lived through the endless talk about the Information Superhighway. You survived the interminable propaganda designed to convince you that the Internet (capital “I” and all, as if cyberspace was some newly discovered foreign country that we were about to colonize) was going to democratize information, give everyone a voice in the conversation in the digital town square and unite us all in peace, harmony and understanding. And you endured ceaseless segments of befuddled TV hosts informing their audiences about URLs and email addresses as if they were reading an encyclopedia entry in a foreign language, carefully intoning every letter, colon and backslash and tittering over how to pronounce the “@” symbol.
It was all a lie, of course. Unbeknownst to the general public at the time, the internet did not spring fully formed from the heads of the Silicon Valley nerds in the 1990s. In fact, its origins go back much further. As we eventually came to learn, the internet actually began life as the ARPANET, a US Department of Defense project whose goal, according to the former director of DARPA, “was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.”
As it turns out, even this “nuclear resistant network” story is a limited hangout. As students of my Mass Media: A History online course will know by now, the ARPANET wasn’t just about securing America’s nuclear war-fighting capabilities but also about improving Uncle Sam’s tools of surveillance and control for counterinsurgency operations. This thread of the story—involving characters like psychologist-turned-computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider and his quest to build a tool capable of collecting, storing and analyzing mind-boggling amounts of information on every entity and individual deemed an enemy of the US government—has been largely lost to time.
As Yasha Levine documents in his book on Surveillance Valley, however, anti-Vietnam War protesters on US campuses in the 1960s recognized the ARPANET and The Cambridge Project and associated computer networking research projects for what they were: attempts to find a way to quash dissent against the powers-that-shouldn’t-be wherever and whenever that dissent arose.
One 1969 pamphlet on the growing peril of military-funded computer databases noted:
Clearly the ARPA network has practical military implications. While not a weapon of destruction per se, it will contribute a necessary link to a powerful automated military control system.
And another 1960s pamphlet on the looming threat of silicon surveillance observed:
The whole computer set-up and the ARPA computer network will enable the government, for the first time, to consult relevant survey data rapidly enough to be used in policy decisions. The net result of this will be to make Washington’s international policeman more effective in suppressing popular movements around the world.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, public awareness of the perils of digital dictatorship and the mechanized menace of the “Octoputer” (with its technological tracking tendrils snaking their way into every nook and cranny of your life) got lost along the way. By the ’90s, people were ready to believe that the digitization of social relations was a boon to humanity and that the world would be better off for it.
