In the dreamy 1990s, when the Internet was first popularized, the ruling meme was beautifully and evocatively utopian with that enduring desire in the human imagination for a technology of communication that finally matched the human desire for connectivity and (universal) community finally finding its digital expression in networked communication. Few voices were raised concerning the specter of harsher realities to come, namely the possibility that the Internet was also a powerful vehicle for sophisticated new iterations of ideologies of control as well as for inscribing a new global class structure on the world. To the suggestion that the destiny of the digital future was likely to be the rapid development of a new ruling class, the virtual class, with its leading fragments, whether information specialists, from coders to robotic researchers, or corporate visionaries closely linked–nation by nation, continent by continent, industry by industry–by a common (technocratic) world-view and equally shared interests, the response was just as often that this is purely dystopian conjecture. As the years since the official launch in 9/11 of the counter-revolution in digital matters indicates, the original funding of the Internet by DARPA was truly premonitory, confirming in the contemporary effective militarization of the networked communication that the visionary idea of developing a global form of network connectivity that harvested the most intimate forms of individual consciousness on behalf of swelling data banks was as brilliant in its military foresightedness as it was chilling in its impact.
from the CTheory.net monograph Surveillance Never Sleeps, July 2015, Volume 37, #1.
Red Herring and Wired magazines might have been dreaming of a utopian desire-filling network, but I surely wasn’t. Yeah, there was a tiny window for using the Master’s tools to quasi-autonomously generate disembodied and low-bandwidth connections with other humans remotely, but some of us knew that DARPAs master was the master of the protocols that drove the ‘net. And the maxim that ‘whomever controls the protocols of human connection controls the very human energies that are carried via those protocols’ applied then, applies now. This very much independent of any privacy concerns, as privacy is simply not a characteristic of communications or data storage when someone else is controlling the communications protocol.