In the heady neoliberal 1990s, techno-optimism touched its most cringe-worthy extremes. Infused with the fatuous imaginary of what Richard Barbrook has termed the “Californian ideology,” tech workers, entrepreneurs, and techno-visionary ideologues identified digital technology as a weapon for liberation and personal autonomy. This tool, they proclaimed, would allow individuals to defeat the hated Goliath of the state, then widely portrayed in terms of the failing behemoths of the imploding Soviet bloc.
For anyone with a superficial knowledge of the origins of digital technology and Silicon Valley, this should have been, from the very start, a laughable belief. Computers were a product of the war efforts of the early 1940s, developed as means to decode encrypted military messages, with Alan Turing famously involved at Bletchley Park.
ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, considered the first general-purpose computer used in the United States, was developed for artillery calculations and to aid the development of the hydrogen bomb. As G. W. F. Hegel infamously argued, war is the state in its most brutal form: the activity in which the strength of the state is tested against that of other states. Information technologies have become ever more central to this quintessentially state business.
Some people may still believe the myth of Silicon Valley springing organically out of hackers soldering circuits in their garages. But the reality is that it would have never come to life without the infrastructural support of the US defense apparatus and its public procurement ensuring the commercial viability of many products and services that we now take for granted. This includes the internet itself, with DARPA — the Department of…
Auteur: Paolo Gerbaudo
