IM IN UR HI SCHOOLZ, RECRUITIN UR STUDENTZ

I'd somehow picked up somewhere along the line the knowledge that the military had something to do with the internet, but it wasn't until reading Abbate's account of the r&d leading up to packet switching and the ARPANET that it sunk in just how tied in this wonderful magical invisible thing that I use to interact with my friends and family and to stalk people from high school and to do like almost all non-grocery-related shopping is to saber-rattling nationalism and Cold War paranoia. It kind of blows my mind a little to think that something so integral to my day-to-day life grew in part out of research designed to keep the higher-ups of military command in contact with one another just in case people somewhere went batshit insane enough to try to blow up the world and we needed to, you know, finish the job.

And staff at colleges and universities helped finish the job--Abbate at one point remarks that "the ARPA approach exhibited the weakness and the advantages of an 'old boy' network" (54), explaining how "graduates of the IPTO-funded programs...became a major source of computer science faculty at American universities, thereby extending ARPA's social network into the next generation of researchers" (55) and further promulgating the idea that any research agenda in CS needs to be justified in terms of benefit to the military--that's where the big bucks are, after all.

Hence the picture up top/title of this post--so often we think of high schools as the place where the military does their recruitment. And while that's most likely true as far as straight-up enlistment is concerned, doesn't Abbate's account just bring it home that maybe aspects of the university system are just as much a playground for disseminating militaristic ideologies, or at least ideologies that get us used to the military as a benevolent supporter of oftentimes incredibly beneficial or useful r&d (present case included) while simultaneously obscuring the fact that they're only interested in that r&d so much as it might somehow give them more efficient ways to wage war?