This film is about the internet. It about how it became a vampiric technology — about how it caught us in its parasitic embrace, draining us and the world of life.
The question at the center of this story — How did it get so bad? How did a technology that promised liberation and personal empowerment turn into this…a never-ending spectacle…a vampire, a hall of mirrors, a global apparatus of extraction, scraping the earth for energy and rare minerals and strip-mining our time and energy? Was there a moment went it all turned bad? Or was this outcome predetermined? What I mean to ask is: Was this tech always an evil force?
You probably know the official story by now. Personal computers and the internet were the happy accidents of a bunch of playful utopian geeks. Just lovable guys who wanted to make cool stuff and help people help themselves. That’s the story that the computer industry wants you to know.
But the story of this technology is a lot deeper — and a lot more unpleasant. The computer revolution didn’t start with Apple or Facebook or Netscape or even Silicon Valley. It started with paranoia and the quest for power. More than anything it started with the nuclear bomb.
There are a lot of historical strands that go into something big like the creation of computers and the internet, this collection of communications technologies that sit at the apex of the industrial age. And I’ll get into this deeper history a later point in this series. For now…in this episode…I want to go back to the last big war that consumed this planet. I want to go back to 1945, when America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan and set off an arms race that would give us the vampiric technology we all use today.
By the time the war was won, pretty much all the leading industrial countries involved lay in ruin. Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy — their roads and buildings and bridges were leveled…millions killed and disfigured and displaced. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the destruction. Up to 20 million people there died during the war.
The only true victor in this war — the country that came out in better shape than when it started — was the United States. It had been far from the fighting and the Allies depended on it for industrial production to keep the war going. It was the perfect setup — a cosmic gift. While everyone else suffered and destroyed each other far away from American soil, America developed the technology needed to fight this war, arming its competitors as they reduced one another to rubble.
Far away from Eurasia, industry and technological development surged and America emerged from the war an advanced industrial country with no competitor in sight.
This is the first bits of the rough script for Episode One of VAMPIRE VALLEY, my series about the internet. A video version will come later…
Even before the war was over, America showed off its new technological superiority.
It dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan — first on Hiroshima and then a few days later on Nagasaki. The attacks were devastating, killing over a hundred thousand people instantly and dooming many of those who survived to slow and painful deaths by radiation and disease. Most of those who were killed were civilians. And from the point of view of the war, America didn’t need to use the nukes.
For months leading up to nuclear attack, U.S. bombers had been systematically burning Japan’s cities to the ground. Those raids were calibrated to inflict as many casualties as possible — and they did their job, killing over a million people and laying waste to most of the country’s infrastructure. There was famine and so many people were incinerated in those conventional firebombing runs that American pilots could smell burning Japanese flesh all the way up in their planes.
By the end, the Japanese people had lost their will to resist. And Japan’s emperor was ready to surrender.
But these nukes were only partially about Japan.
The nukes were a message.