Once you can do that automatically it’s a totally new way of thinking about the world, because all of sudden you can manage airspace and thousands of miles of border from a computer terminal. This was novel, as all previous systems relied on manual calculation. It connected radar arrays and computer systems to allow analysts to watch the entire US from a screen thousands of miles away.

It was a project that would help the Pentagon manage a global military presence.Īt the time there were computer systems coming online like ARPANET that functioned as the first early warning radar system in America to alert to a potential Soviet bombing raid. One thing we have to understand about the internet is that it came out of a research project that started during the Vietnam war, when the US was concerned with counterinsurgencies all around the world. Can you talk about the military imperatives it served? What your book does is to explain the material, political and ideological origins of the network. The way the internet gets discussed, it’s often as if it were some immaterial phenomenon. I hope the book fills some gaps in our knowledge because, as strange as it seems, we have forgotten this history. It’s sort of the whole point of the internet, going back 50 years to ARPANET.

Surveillance Valley came out two months before the Cambridge Analytica story hit and everything I talk about is a preface to how personal data manipulation is central to our politics and economy. Before Trump it was all good things: Facebook manipulation was a good thing when Obama used it. Yasha Levine: My book has come at a really good time, right as people are becoming aware of the ‘dark side’ of the internet. Olivier Jutel: How have you found the reception to your book Surveillance Valley and its central thesis that the internet is essentially a surveillance weapon?

Surveillance valley yasha levine