3 ms·
Is the defense industry evil? There wouldn't be a western, democratic world without it. It also indirectly advances technology. The Internet was a defence proj
by _e8un 5y ago
Is the defense industry evil? There wouldn't be a western, democratic world without it. It also indirectly advances technology.
The Internet was a defence project.
- gbhjnkthrow 5y ago> There wouldn't be a western, democratic world without it. Citation very much needed. That's an extremely narrow view of history (and many of the 'villains' on the global stage were responding to threats by the western, democratic world.) > The Internet was a defence project. The internet was an inevitability, but did receive defense funding and support. It is not fundamentally necessarily a defense project.
- dekhn 5y agoI think it's fair to say that the US defense industry played a critical role in ensuring that the Allies were successful in WWII and the world would look very different if Germany had prevailed over western Europe and Russian over eastern Europe.
- sneak 5y agoSo was MK-ULTRA, and the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during WW2. I don't think we get to cherry-pick. I'm pretty sure we would have had wide-area and eventually global computer networks soon enough even if ARPA hadn't funded that specific research. People like to talk to other people. A better argument would be GPS due to the massive capex involved, I think, but even that is one that is far too useful to have gone not-done for long. Starlink shows us that it didn't need to be the military.