Comment by ozgung

3 days ago

Is there really a clear separation between tech companies and surveillance/military or is it wishful thinking?

I've recently rewatched Steve Blanks's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" talk [1]. Until 80's most SV startups seem to be financed directly by the military. This changes only after the rise of private VC. But for strategic technologies like internet, search, communication, social media and finally AI, they still have to have control over them. "User Data" everyone talks about is not limited with consumer behavior. The real money is on how we think and act as citizens of this world. The whole world wouldn't give all their data to an app named Uncle Sam or CCP. But we are happy to give the same information to Facebook, Google, ChatGPT or TikTok. They are free and they don't want our money.

[1] https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=ZfRNgpqJOP6hVLKC

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ozgung

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aleph_minus_one  3 days ago

> Is there really a clear separation between tech companies and surveillance/military or is it wishful thinking?

The separation was never completely clear, but there was a time when the separation was much more marked.

The reason was simply that programming culture at that time was more "chaotic", "anti-authoritarian", "open-source"/"free software" (in the erstwhile understanding of this being just a part of a bigger movement, not in the verbal sense), "radical privacy" (cypherpunk), "hacking" (including the legally dubious aspects) etc.

These values were quite opposite to those of the military-industrial or surveillance-industrial complex, so there was a lot of friction between the cultures of the tech companies at that time and these complexes, which made it not particularly attractive for these sides to partner - if only because of the frictions between the sides that were to overcome.