Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

Featured as a Guardian Long Read in December 2018

EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY.

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives.

But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon.

Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience.

Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it.

Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle.