Event Response 3: The Internet as a Weapon

Tuesday night, I went to Yasha Levine’s talk on Digital Distopias, the internet as a weapon. Levine began this talk with a short video from the dawn of the residential-digital era, a family giving a tutorial on setting up and using a desktop/the internet. The video is as cheesy as it is old, but it showed how “bright and shiny” the internet was at one point. When it wasn’t feared or full of controlling ads/propaganda. However, Levine revealed that this idyllic view of the internet is, and always has been, false. The internet was never suddenly weaponized–the internet was created as a weapon. It is Silicon Valley that rebranded it as anything different.

The internet was always to be utilized by the government! J.C.R. Licklider (a forefather to the internet, you could say) believed computers were the future of war. The system he created, SAGE a computerized air defense system (powered by acre-large computers), was the brainchild of this idea. SAGE would evolve to the program ARPAnet which would then be utilized by the Pentagon to digitize files, making surveillance data and other information immortal. A world where nothing can be erased. Doesn’t that sound scary? It sounds scary, but that’s where we live now!

Another interesting thing that Levina brought up is that on the internet, we have no rights. Everything is private, independent, we are only consumers or watchers. We are at the mercy of these companies, etc. That’s how it seemed based on the talk anyway, (I feel like some things are illegal on the internet, albeit… harder to enforce). However, when you take into account what the internet originated for (a new kind of warfare) that’s not surprising. Levine says that the 2016 election is what shocked people, that everyone was outraged at the manipulation and weaponization of the internet, but that’s not news, it’s not new knowledge at all.

The Internet is another means of control. It is a means of extreme manipulation, of perpetuating societal norms and political agendas. Levine pointed out that we have more homelessness than we did pre-internet and that the majority of the richest men in the US are rich because of the internet. The internet is a powerful tool, it’s a powerful form of media and communication. It can be used to garner fear and to distract from just about anything. People can use the internet to become leaders.