I haven’t been sending out much these few weeks because I’ve gotten sucked into a different type of writing: writing a script and doing research for the first episode of THE VAMPIRE CASTLE…what I hope will become a short series about the origins of the internet and the nefarious cultural and political forces that are embedded in this technology.
I don’t have anything complete to share but I do want to show you a few things because today is a big day in world history: This week marks the 80th anniversary of the first (and still the only) offensive nuclear attack ever launched: America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place on August 6th and August 10th of 1945.
I didn’t realize that it was such a big anniversary this year. But it fits in with my renewed interest in the origins of the internet technology. Not many people know this, but the development of the first atomic weapon and its deployment by America against Japan played a central role in the development of the internet. The two technologies — nukes and information systems — were part of the same co-evolving meta-technology.
Fat Man and Little Boy, launched by President Truman, hit Japan, killing hundreds of thousands and dooming many to slow and agonizing deaths by radiation and sepsis. But they were really aimed at the Soviet Union — and at Stalin. They were meant to limit Soviet expansion in the Far East. They were also supposed to act as a warning and a demonstration of America’s technological and military power: America alone possessed this frightening new weapon. America alone possessed the technology to blot out entire cities with just one small bomb.
The development of these bombs and their deployment was done in extreme secrecy from the American public. The entire project was in many ways a referendum on the state of American democracy. There was no democracy, not in any meaningful way. That a technology of this global importance would be pursued by the “public” state with zero input from the public revealed the true nature of power in this system. No one had any input…no one even had a clue. And of course no one knew that by developing and using this bomb in the manner that it did, the United States would set off a process that even the people in power would no longer be able to control. It would trigger a technological arms race — the development of more and more deadly weapons and more and more sophisticated technologies of social control. It’s an arms race that continues to this day. The forces built into nuclear technology took over and began to shape American politics and the politics of the entire world in its image.
I’m not even talking about nukes. I’m talking about computers. Because the creation of modern computers and computer networks — the technology that now mediates and shapes so much of our lives — were a direct product of nuclear technology. The two were created together.
This is what the first episode of my doc will be about. How it all started, where the impetus for the networked communication/surveillance technology that we all use today came from… Most people don’t realize that fear of communism and nuclear bombs play a big role.
Last month I shared a couple of trailers/teasers (one and two). Today, I want to share a few more bits. The first is a rough intro for the first episode. The second is a segment about the nuking of Japan.
Intro to Episode One: The SAGE that birthed the real world.
Segment on the nuking of Japan (graphic content warning)
Reading commentary on the grim anniversary of the bombs, I realized that the only people that really seem to care about this are their sixties and seventies and beyond — people who grew up in the Cold War with the specter of nuclear holocaust haunting their lives and when there was a big global movement against nuclear technology. To the “younger” generation, my own included, the bombs don’t seem like a big deal. People aren’t that concerned about nuclear technology… To the extent that people do care, they think of it as a great abundant source of energy that will bring America back to its golden age. The guys at Jacobin are a prime example of that. They’re all into nuclear tech.
I find it all very strange. Because nuclear technology to me represents the ultimate hubris and sin of technological development: global life-ending technology created in secret by a tiny military-engineering priesthood. There is no greater single symbol of the kind of world we have created. And so I think it’s significant that these massive weapons are so intimately tied to the development of internet technology. It says something about the Vampire Castle.
When Truman decided to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, it had a predictable effect. The USSR raced to build its own nuclear bomb, which it did in 1949. Soviet nuclear tech was sped up by the fact that three different people inside the Manhattan Project were feeding it nuclear secrets.