AI and the internet. It has always been about power and control.
Apparently Google is now officially a part of the Pentagon’s push to introduce AI to all levels of operation — as commanded by Donald Trump. I guess it’s big that every military technocrat will have access to their own customized version of Google chatbot. But maybe not so big. I mean, Google AI has long being used by the Pentagon and other security services to kill people. Most infamously today — by Israel to wage a genocide.
I want to point out one other thing here, too. This AI craze we’re seeing today everywhere — all roads have been leading to this, really, since World War II. The whole point of the Pentagon’s internet project (known first as ARPANET) was to create more efficient, more automated weapons of bureaucratic and military control. And Artificial Intelligence was at the core of this dream. How this AI tech worked under the hood was not really important…it was the dream that mattered.
Google is very much part of the story. Although Google (now Alphabet) emerged in the 1990s, several decades after the Pentagon created the internet, it came out of research carried out under this very same bureaucratic security umbrella to create more efficient, computerized tools for social and political control — systems that could sift through data and information and automate defense and espionage and policing. Google cofounder Larry Page’s advisor at Stanford, a man who helped get Google off the ground by providing access to research grants, was involved in artificial intelligence research under a Pentagon ARPA program that had birthed the internet decades earlier.
To put it another way: The internet and AI are part of the same technocratic security state dream of global control. AI is the internet. And now the internet is AI.
I’m making a doc about the internet. Help me make it. We have to do something about internet technology before the only birds left in the sky are this.
As I wrote in my book Surveillance Valley:
[Larry] Page started the computer science PhD program at Stanford in the autumn of 1995. He was in his element and immediately started scratching around for a research topic worthy of a dissertation. He toyed with various ideas, including a self-driving car, which Google would later get into in a heavy way. Eventually , he settled on Internet search.
In the mid-1990s, the Internet was growing exponentially . The landscape was chaotic: a jumble of random websites, personal webpages, university sites, news sites, and corporate properties. Pages were popping up all over the place. But there was no good central or authoritative directory that could help people navigate to where they wanted to go or find a particular song, article, or webpage. Search engines and directory portals like Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite were crude and sometimes had to be curated by hand. Search algorithms were extremely primitive, matching searches word for word without the ability to find the most relevant results. Despite their primitive technology and awful search results, these early search sites attracted huge amounts of traffic and investment. The young programmers who started them were rich beyond belief.
In the parlance of Silicon Valley , it was a market ripe for disruption. Finding a way to improve search results not only was intellectually challenging but also could prove to be extremely lucrative.
With Nikola Tesla’s ghost hanging over him, Page tackled the issue with his laser-guided brain. Page’s tinkering was encouraged by his graduate adviser, Terry Winograd, a pioneer in linguistic artificial intelligence who had done work in the 1970s at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, a part of the bigger ARPANET project. In the 1990s, Winograd was in charge of the Stanford Digital Libraries project, one component of the multi-million-dollar Digital Library Initiative sponsored by seven civilian, military , and law enforcement federal agencies, including NASA, DARPA, the FBI, and the National Science Foundation.
The Internet had grown into a vast and labyrinthine ecosystem spanning every type of computer network and data type imaginable: documents, databases, photographs, sound recordings, text, executable programs, videos, and maps. The purpose of the Digital Library Initiative was to find a way to organize and index this digital mess. Though the project had a broad civilian mandate, it was also linked to the needs of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. More and more, life was taking place online. People were leaving behind trails of digital information: diaries, blogs, forums, personal photographs, videos. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies wanted a better way of accessing this valuable asset.
It made sense. Back in the 1960s, when the military was dealing with an avalanche of data and needed new tools to digest and analyze the information, ARP A was tasked with finding a solution. Three decades later, the Digital Library Initiative had evolved into an extension of the same project, driven by the same needs. And just like old times, DARPA played a role. Indeed, in 1994, just one year before Page had arrived at Stanford, DARPA ’s funding of the Digital Library Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University produced a notable success: Lycos, a search engine named after Lycosidae, the scientific name for the wolf spider family.
Larry Page’s interest in search aligned perfectly with the goals of the Digital Library Initiative, and his research was carried out under its umbrella. When he finally published his first research paper in 1998, it bore the familiar disclosure: “funded by DARPA” The agency that had created the Internet remained a central player.
The Pentagon only recently got to a place where something like an “AI” is even possible — all of it thanks to advances in the sheer computing power of a new generation of microchips that can brute force “learning” in a statistical manner. But AI has always been the dream chased by America’s corporate security state technocracy. And, well, we are finally here. Insurance companies are now deploying AI to deny people medical care. Now that is efficiency!
—Yasha
Want to know more? Learn about PROJECT VAMPIRE VALLEY…and help me make the film.