The internet was built by the United States military. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is the matter-of-fact starting point for any honest history of the network. Understanding what the internet is requires understanding where it came from, what it was designed to do, and by whom. It also requires understanding what emerged against that grain — which turns out to be substantial, real, and ongoing.
Both things are true. The internet is a surveillance and military infrastructure. It is also a terrain on which communities have fought, and sometimes won, genuine liberation. Knowing both histories is the beginning of using the network with clear eyes.
The Pentagon Built It#
ARPANET — the direct ancestor of today’s internet — came online in 1969, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its designers were not utopians. They were Cold War engineers solving a military problem: how do you build a communication network that survives a nuclear strike? The answer was packet switching — breaking messages into fragments that route themselves around damage. If one node is destroyed, the packets find another path.
This architecture was not designed for privacy, anonymity, democratic participation, or community control. It was designed for military resilience. The infrastructure that underlies every email, every website, every encrypted message you send today was paid for by US taxpayers and built to serve the strategic interests of the United States government.
Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley (2018) traces what this origin story actually means in practice: the behavioral surveillance tools, the counterinsurgency applications, the never-severed relationship between the internet’s core infrastructure and the national security apparatus. The ARPANET included surveillance tools from the beginning. The NSA’s PRISM program — revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 — was not a sudden departure from the internet’s nature. It was its nature, grown to full expression.
What Emerged Against the Grain#
Within that military infrastructure, and in explicit opposition to it, communities built something different.
The MIT hacker culture of the 1950s and 60s developed a set of values — openness, sharing, the belief that information should flow freely and that systems should be improvable by anyone who understood them — that had nothing to do with military hierarchy. These early hackers were not criminals. They were the people who stayed up all night because they were genuinely curious about what the machine could do. (See our Hacker Culture page for this history in full.)
The Free Software Movement, launched by Richard Stallman in 1983, was an explicitly political response to the privatization of software. The GNU General Public License (GPL) was a legal weapon designed to ensure that software, and all its derivatives, would remain permanently free — not free in price but free as in freedom: the freedom to run, study, modify, and share. Stallman understood that proprietary software was not just a business model but a form of control.
Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) in the 1980s were genuinely local community networks — dial-up systems run by hobbyists, serving their immediate neighborhoods. Before the commercial web, these were the internet’s social layer: imperfect, idiosyncratic, and actually owned by their communities.
The cypherpunks of the late 1980s and early 90s — a loose network of cryptographers and activists — understood early that surveillance was the internet’s default mode, and that encryption was the political response. Their motto: cypherpunks write code. Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), released in 1991, gave ordinary people access to military-grade encryption for the first time. The US government called it a munition and tried to prosecute Zimmermann. They failed.
Indymedia, launched in 1999 during the WTO protests in Seattle, built a decentralized, volunteer-run independent media network using the internet to publish news that corporate media wouldn’t touch. At its peak, Indymedia had hundreds of local nodes worldwide — a genuine grassroots alternative information infrastructure.
The Zapatistas — the EZLN, an Indigenous revolutionary movement in Chiapas, Mexico — used the early internet to broadcast their 1994 uprising to the world and build international solidarity networks. A colonized and militarily outgunned Indigenous community had turned the US military’s communication infrastructure into a tool for their own liberation. This was not accidental. It was deliberate and strategic.
Corporate Capture#
Tim Wu’s The Master Switch (2010) documents a pattern that recurs across information technologies: a period of openness, during which creativity flourishes and power is distributed, followed by consolidation in the hands of a few who capture the technology and close it off.
The internet followed this pattern with startling speed. The open protocols of the 1990s — email, the web, IRC, Usenet — gave way to the walled gardens of the 2000s and 2010s. Facebook replaced community forums. Google replaced open search. Amazon replaced independent e-commerce. Twitter replaced Usenet. Each replacement was technically smoother and more convenient. Each was also a transfer of power from distributed community ownership to centralized corporate control.
The result is what researchers call platform capitalism: a handful of corporations own the infrastructure through which most human communication, commerce, and coordination now flows. They set the terms. They can silence, surveil, monetize, or simply disappear any community that uses their platforms. They answer to shareholders, not users.
The open internet did not disappear — it still exists, and the Collective uses it. But it became the road less traveled, requiring more knowledge and more effort to access and maintain. The default became the corporate platform.
The Surveillance Apparatus#
One of the most important and uncomfortable facts about the internet’s liberation tools is that they share infrastructure — and sometimes funding — with the surveillance apparatus they resist.
Tor, the anonymizing network used by journalists, dissidents, and privacy-conscious communities worldwide, was developed with US Navy funding and continues to receive significant funding from the US State Department. This is not a reason to stop using Tor — its code is open, its design is sound, and its actual users are overwhelmingly ordinary people seeking privacy, not government assets. But it is a reason to hold liberation tools with clear eyes rather than uncritical faith.
The surveillance infrastructure did not emerge after the fact. Levine’s research shows behavioral surveillance tools in ARPANET’s original architecture. The NSA built its mass surveillance systems into the backbone of the internet — the cables, the routers, the data centers — over decades, largely without public knowledge. When Snowden revealed PRISM in 2013, he was not describing something new. He was describing something that had been built quietly, for years, using the same infrastructure that carries everyone’s traffic.
This does not mean resistance is futile. It means resistance requires knowledge of what you are resisting.
Indigenous and Community Counter-Movements#
Some of the most significant fights over internet sovereignty have been waged by Indigenous nations.
Marisa Elena Duarte’s Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (2017) documents how tribes in the American Southwest — facing corporate telecoms that had no interest in serving rural Indigenous communities — built their own internet infrastructure. Tribal broadband networks, owned and operated by the communities they serve, are not just a connectivity solution. They are an assertion of sovereignty: the right to control the communication infrastructure on which contemporary life depends.
The Māori community’s Te Pā Tūwatawata data center (documented in the Relational Infrastructures for Sovereign Data Storage zine, IDA/Te Kāhui Raraunga, 2026) takes this further — infrastructure shaped by tikanga Māori (Māori customary values) and governed by Māori community processes, not settler colonial frameworks. The technology is not neutral. The governance makes it relational rather than extractive.
The broader Indigenous data sovereignty movement — articulated through frameworks like the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) — insists that data about Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledge must be governed by Indigenous peoples. Not stored by corporations. Not analyzed by outside researchers. Not sold to agencies. Governed by the communities whose lives it describes.
What data sovereignty looks like in practice — the concrete, bioregional stakes of this history — is the subject of #Data Back → .
The internet was built by the Pentagon. Cypherpunks and Zapatistas and tribal broadband cooperatives and Māori data center builders and Indymedia volunteers did extraordinary things with it anyway. The fight over who controls the infrastructure, the data, the protocols, and the knowledge of how it all works is ongoing. It belongs to us as much as anyone — and in this watershed, it is ours to take up.
Further Reading#
- Viljoen, Salomé. “A Relational Theory of Data Governance.” Yale Law Journal 131:573, 2021.
- Levine, Yasha. Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. PublicAffairs, 2018.
- Rankin, Joy Lisi. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2018.
- Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Knopf, 2010.
- Coleman, Gabriella. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press, 2013.
- Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. Portfolio, 2018.
- Duarte, Marisa Elena. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country. University of Washington Press, 2017.
- Indigenous Data Alliance & Te Kāhui Raraunga. Relational Infrastructures for Sovereign Data Storage. IDA, 2026.
- Indigenous Mapping Collective — community-led mapping initiatives centering Indigenous peoples’ relationships to land
Also on this site: Technocolonialism · Hacker Culture · #Data Back · Animism, AI & Consciousness
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