Hacking against the Apocalypse: Tony Stark and the Remilitarized Internet

Abstract

Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) is an excellent history of the cross-pollinations of military thought and technological advances, focusing alternately on the evolution of larger hardware components (ballistic missiles, computers) and on the “control machinery” (155), or software, that directs that hardware. Through the eyes of his robot historian, the Internet and modern computing was incubated by the American military: driven by a scarcity of computing supplies and resources, Paul Baran at the Research ANd Development (RAND) Corporation had “convinced government officials the United States needed to establish a distributed communications system that could withstand a nuclear attack” (Moshovitus, 35). This meant the creation of a “distributed network,” one that sent “small ‘packets’ of information” over a number of different routes (Ryan, 15); this proposed system shunned the “traditional network” (one unit of information over one single path, as exampled by “AT&T’s highly centralized national telephone network” [Ryan, 13]) and would instead “allow information to be sent over many different possible routes” (Moshovitus, 35). The first such space, ARPAnet, was created in December 1969 (ibid., 61); while it publicly debuted at the 1972 International Conference on Computer Communications, it wasn’t until “a rumor, suggesting army intelligence officers had used ARPAnet files to relocate files concerning the whereabouts and behaviors of political activities” that knowledge of its existence became widespread (ibid., 87).