This essay examines how the US government intelligence community (IC) as well as the public and commercial sectors contributed demand-pull, in different ways, for an unregulated, privatized Internet. Demand-pull entails more demand than supply, or a shortage in supply (such as a shortage in networks and thus a demand-pull for them). It is argued that an excessive supply of Cold War era IC spy data, which required high-speed data processing, incentivized ARPANET expansion. In the public sector, people wanted expanded networks for personal computing and in the commercial sector there was demand-pull for unregulated networks that bootlegged and gifted PROMIS derived software could be harnessed to. The IC demand pulled for their own cloned and separate networks, while the public demand pulled for their own networks and commercial interests demand pulled for unregulated, privatized and expanded networks. Together these different demand-pull scenarios incentivized a speedy and unchallenged privatization of an Internet that was neither owned nor regulated by any one government or company.
Abstract:Marx's alienation, dialectical materialism and stratification theory, provides a lens through which to explore an explosion of statistical studies regarding on-line interaction and possible Internet addiction (IA). Acclaimed authors Turkle, Greenwald and Foer, warn
Levine's Surveillance Valley reports how the Internet was privatized without public debate or resistance but overlooks decades of neoliberal economic and anti-communist purging history that had chilling effects on public resistance to Internet privatization-that history gap is explored here. How did military-industrial-complex contractors, using neoliberal and Communist threat rational, incentivize Internet development, while lessening the possibility of public interference to Internet privatization? Weber's special-skilled-occupational-status-group-theory is overlaid onto neoliberal economic and military-industrial-complex history to argue occupational-contractor-status-groups, with their monopoly access to early computer technology, fulfilled neoliberal doctrine by creating and protecting private markets for the Internet and exploited Communist threat rational to help clear the privatization path of people who might impede market plans.
Marx's Machine Age theory of capitalism ascribes a unique driving role for alienation and argues new modes of production emerge from past modes of production. Presently so-called surveillance capitalism is superseding Machine Age capitalism and distributing wealth unequally to a 1% global elite. There are debates about what alienation is at work in this changed epoch. Premised on Marx's idea that modes of production are born in the previous epoch along with the alienation that works with them, a hypothesis about how today's Internet enables both endless free speech, while inversely and simultaneously, enabling endless spying with impunity is presented here. The hypothesis is a conceptualization of alienation labeled as "known unknown." The adaption of the term "known unknown alienation" stems from the discourse in the film, "The Unknown Known" which highlights aspects of known unknown alienation, in the form of so-called national security experts who are mentally divided about what they can and can not know (or talk about) and also the divide between the expert and the taxpayer, who does not qualify to have access to the same information that the expert has. This personal internal contradiction and social alienation is compounded because Americans are proud of US constitutionally protected free speech rights (which according to The Citizens United Act allows corporations to be individuals); these contradictions help drive surveillance capitalism. The historical-comparative argument is: "Communist hunting" intelligence agents, scientists, and contractors, backed by neoliberal economists, built a military-industrial-complex that obligated them to both known and not know, or in the case of the CIA be "witting" of national security secrets, which alienated them from US constitutional free speech. Their alienation manifest in their interactive inventions-the Internet, pc and cell phone-devices that today dialectically give customers the ability to express free speech endlessly in electronic memory form, while inversely giving spies unlimited access to that speech with impunity. This process works in tandem: enabling appropriation of data for government surveillance and service fee payments for corporations.
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