6 ms·

I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days,

by abeppu 6d ago

I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right? I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster? To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations? In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.

bluegatty 6d ago
Good point, but there's a very big difference between dual use tech that gets it's start in the military, vs building weapons systems. Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile. Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question. I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well. That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.
- abeppu 6d ago
  Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question". But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit. And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?
  - bigyabai 6d ago
    The lines blurred, IMO. Boycotting the 8086 wouldn't hamstring ICBM development. Boycotting the microwave oven wasn't going to prevent radar complexes from being constructed. Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time. It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age. [0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_push_notification_surveillance_letter.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
    - bluegatty 6d ago
      Microsoft Apple and Google have not blurred any lines, they are not defence contractors in any way. They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry. Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies. 'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military. It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.
- blablabla123 5d ago
  Interestingly AOL, Compuserve and similar ones originally ran without Internet. In fact it took a while until the Internet catched up with the level of interactivity, mostly through Flash. It's absurd that nowadays many websites require a central CDN to stay available.
  - jasomill 5d ago
    CompuServe was in many ways its own single-source proprietary internet. And CDNs are by nature distributed, even if their ownership is not. Just as it's unreasonable to expect a site operator to maintain their own global network backbone, it's unreasonable for every site to deploy global infrastructure for efficient content delivery. Which is not to say that we wouldn't be better off with a more diverse and distributed-in-the-ownership-sense market of CDN providers.
nradov 6d ago
Even before Fairchild Semiconductor was founded, much of the original SF Bay Area tech industry started during and after WWII to develop radar and electronic warfare systems for the military.
- thenthenthen 6d ago
  Is there a place I can read about this? I am doing research on tech-histories (mainly in Asia) and i would say 100% of all tech coming from there has its origins in radio and radar tech, yes including fridges (you might have in your home right now)
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6d ago
    https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ is all about it.
  - floweronthehill 5d ago
    Palo Alto by Malcom Harris goes even further back to the 1800s to explain the origin of Silicon Valley. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/?lens=little-brown https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo...
    - thenthenthen 5d ago
      Haha thank you both! Its always the question, how far back do you go!
- 4d4m 5d ago
  Palo alto runs on defense money
caycep 6d ago
I think this is true, and also a lot of tech, which often isn't as PR as the web/internet tech, gets funded by DOD/DARPA That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.
alexashka 6d ago
[flagged]
justin66 6d ago
> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amendments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...
- abeppu 6d ago
  Thanks for pointing that out; I was not aware of it. At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?
  - justin66 6d ago
    As a practical matter, I'm not sure the Mansfield amendment affected all agencies equally. My impression is that it affected ARPA (later DARPA) most profoundly. (pretty much everything I've read about this was in the context of ARPA and XEROX Parc so my perception might be a little skewed) I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.
  - forshaper 5d ago
    Consider that parts of yoga were stripped out and implemented for its effectiveness in reducing overuse injuries. Teaching individuals quickly and at scale is a core necessity for militaries. Whether not or it gets used, the US Army usually has access to whatever is near the edge there (as in some unit or officer somewhere was promoting the method, and had the sign offs necessary to disseminate it, but culturally it was not fully put in place).
cousinbryce 5d ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism

by abeppu 6d ago

bluegatty 6d ago

Good point, but there's a very big difference between dual use tech that gets it's start in the military, vs building weapons systems. Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile. Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question. I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well. That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.

abeppu 6d ago
Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question". But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit. And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?
- bigyabai 6d ago
  The lines blurred, IMO. Boycotting the 8086 wouldn't hamstring ICBM development. Boycotting the microwave oven wasn't going to prevent radar complexes from being constructed. Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time. It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age. [0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_push_notification_surveillance_letter.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
  - bluegatty 6d ago
    Microsoft Apple and Google have not blurred any lines, they are not defence contractors in any way. They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry. Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies. 'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military. It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.
blablabla123 5d ago
Interestingly AOL, Compuserve and similar ones originally ran without Internet. In fact it took a while until the Internet catched up with the level of interactivity, mostly through Flash. It's absurd that nowadays many websites require a central CDN to stay available.
- jasomill 5d ago
  CompuServe was in many ways its own single-source proprietary internet. And CDNs are by nature distributed, even if their ownership is not. Just as it's unreasonable to expect a site operator to maintain their own global network backbone, it's unreasonable for every site to deploy global infrastructure for efficient content delivery. Which is not to say that we wouldn't be better off with a more diverse and distributed-in-the-ownership-sense market of CDN providers.

nradov 6d ago

Even before Fairchild Semiconductor was founded, much of the original SF Bay Area tech industry started during and after WWII to develop radar and electronic warfare systems for the military.

thenthenthen 6d ago
Is there a place I can read about this? I am doing research on tech-histories (mainly in Asia) and i would say 100% of all tech coming from there has its origins in radio and radar tech, yes including fridges (you might have in your home right now)
- LargoLasskhyfv 6d ago
  https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ is all about it.
- floweronthehill 5d ago
  Palo Alto by Malcom Harris goes even further back to the 1800s to explain the origin of Silicon Valley. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/?lens=little-brown https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo...
  - thenthenthen 5d ago
    Haha thank you both! Its always the question, how far back do you go!
4d4m 5d ago
Palo alto runs on defense money

caycep 6d ago

I think this is true, and also a lot of tech, which often isn't as PR as the web/internet tech, gets funded by DOD/DARPA That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.

alexashka 6d ago

[flagged]

justin66 6d ago

> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amendments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

abeppu 6d ago
Thanks for pointing that out; I was not aware of it. At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?
- justin66 6d ago
  As a practical matter, I'm not sure the Mansfield amendment affected all agencies equally. My impression is that it affected ARPA (later DARPA) most profoundly. (pretty much everything I've read about this was in the context of ARPA and XEROX Parc so my perception might be a little skewed) I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.
- forshaper 5d ago
  Consider that parts of yoga were stripped out and implemented for its effectiveness in reducing overuse injuries. Teaching individuals quickly and at scale is a core necessity for militaries. Whether not or it gets used, the US Army usually has access to whatever is near the edge there (as in some unit or officer somewhere was promoting the method, and had the sign offs necessary to disseminate it, but culturally it was not fully put in place).

cousinbryce 5d ago

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism