A brief history of how warmongering tainted the promise of technology...
(Pleasure To Burn) In 2025, “Big Tech” is almost invariably a dirty term. The entrenchment of the most powerful tech companies with corrupted government agencies leaves many uneasy about the looming technocracy—and those building it. As modern as this problem appears on the surface, it is not a recent development. It’s a foundational feature of the American tech industry.
Last century, the promise of technology permeated American society. In post-World War II America, rosy expectations for the future were commonplace. Disneyland’s Tomorrowland embodied this optimism as innovations in the real world—from kitchen appliances to cars and space travel—indicated the future held ease, contentment, and new frontiers for humanity. Even before this era, at least some people were confident that technology would liberate and serve the people.
Such enthusiasm surged again with the development of the internet, but in between and beyond these historical bookends lies the tragedy of Big Tech.
The Military-Industrial-Technology Complex
Despite President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of the military-industrial complex, it grew steadily after World War II. The military-industrial complex typically evokes imagery of bombs, weapons, and tanks, but its influence over the development of the modern technology industry is difficult to understate. Silicon Valley began to thrive significantly during the Cold War and military-industrial boom.
For example, one early Silicon Valley tech company, Fairchild Semiconductor, relied heavily on defense contractors to succeed. This military-dependent business model became standard for the industry. Even as civilian markets grew, technology developed for consumer products often filtered back into the work tech companies were doing for the Pentagon. With Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars military spending came a fresh wave of defense contracting, further sealing the industry’s ongoing dependence on the American empire.
Breaking Free or Building a Prison?
Despite the tech industry’s deep ties to the military, the development of the internet came with hopes that technology could help usher in a new paradigm of human freedom. Some technological optimists believed such progress could liberate humanity from the chains of past eras—government and authoritarianism. They believed technology could empower individuals and humanity at large with the tools to break free. As John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), famously wrote to “Governments of the Industrial World” in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
The first iteration of what would become the internet actually came from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the military’s precursor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Even so, it was decentralized, and other innovators had high hopes for it. Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee built upon the military’s “ARPANET” to develop the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee envisioned a decentralized internet that was inherently anti-authoritarian, and he brought that “web” to the people.
Ideologies like “technological utopianism” and “cyberlibertarianism” believed that the internet and other technologies could help liberate the people and disempower authoritarians, acting as a bulwark against encroachments. In these visions of the future, technology was a liberator, not an oppressor.
Critics at the time doubted these optimistic visions, warning that they would simply reinforce old power structures. Other critics admonished the hypocrisy of these beliefs, highlighting how much the tech industry relied upon government contracts (at least one biting criticism of this variety years later waxed pro-government rather than anti-corporatist). What really might have happened is unclear because much of the industry was tainted with government influence and dependence from the start.
In more recent decades, more government agencies have commissioned the assistance of Big Tech. By the mid-1990s, intelligence agencies—like the military before them—were funding research in academia. They especially provided support for supercomputing developments, “guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community,” Quartz reported. In the years following 9/11, massive corporations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft ate up government contracts as the Department of Homeland Security, for example, gained power.
In another example of the entanglement of Big Tech and government, the CIA had long benefited from the longstanding defense-tech-industry partnership, such as using Lockheed planes for spy operations. But the CIA eventually ventured into the tech industry on its own. The agency’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, founded in 1999, infused fresh federal money into the tech sector. Palantir, currently one of the most reviled Big Tech companies, enjoyed early funding from the agency. So did Anduril, which is currently developing AI drone weaponry for the military.
Additionally, as with many industries, the revolving door of business and government swings through Big Tech. Numerous tech executives have become involved in government. Just this year, four Big Tech executives were sworn into the Army’s “Executive Innovation Corps” in June. Government officials have also left their public positions to join tech firms.
“Don’t be evil”—a case study
Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, benefited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA research funding by way of Stanford University. The now-monolithic company embodies many of the worst qualities of the ongoing government-tech partnership.
The founders’ early research before launching Google benefited from CIA and NSA funding from the agencies’ quests to capture and analyze data online (as well as DARPA funding in an effort to build an online library). Google originally held up the mantle “Don’t be evil.” The company initially dropped that motto in 2015, further abandoning it in their code in 2018. That same year, employees revolted against the company’s work on the Pentagon’s Project Maven, and Google opted not to renew the contract.
Only three years later, the tech giant was seeking contracts with the Pentagon, and this year, they accepted a Pentagon contract worth up to $200 million for cloud computing and AI (this contract was part of a batch of deals with other AI companies). Long before this, they were involved in building surveillance infrastructure that would serve intelligence agencies. Google was built with the intent “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” but the company has since expanded its ambitions and serves the most powerful institutions.
Is Government Really the Problem?
The tragedy of Big Tech is the contamination of innovation, creativity, and the possibility of helping and freeing humanity with the violence and control of the State.
Whether tech firms form to exploit the military-tech-intelligence-industrial complex or cave to the temptation of defense and other government contract profits, one thing is clear: the government, politicians, bureaucrats, and their addiction to warmongering and control have played a massive role in shaping and corrupting the industry as a whole.
OpenAI went from banning their technology for military and warfare purposes, as stated in their usage policy, to removing that language last year. This year, they won a contract worth up to $200 million with the Department of “War,” joining Google, Anthropic, and xAI in the military’s push to incorporate artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly, many Big Tech players have branded their efforts as noble patriotism as they race for defense contracts, appealing to longstanding militarist propaganda and the nationalism that underpins it.
None of this is to discount the reality that one does not have to work for the government to be corrupt or have a broken moral compass. Bad actors exist in every industry because they exist in humanity at large. Many Silicon Valley executives and their companies behave terribly all on their own without the influence of government.
This reality leads many to believe we “need” government to protect us from bad people. However, this is all the more reason to distrust and reject the idea of government and authority: If people can’t be trusted, why should we grant some of them an exclusive right to control and use violence against the rest of us? People have trusted the “authorities” with such power, and unsurprisingly, it has gotten us to the current dystopian system.
Even so, while the current technological paradigm is a long way from achieving some of the more optimistic predictions of the future, many entrepreneurs and companies are working to develop tools to help the world and humanity. On occasion, they resist government encroachments.
The technoutopians and cyberlibertarians of the past may have misread the future of technology, government, and freedom. However, I believe it is not because the technologies they promoted were inherently oppressive. Rather, they were developed within the statist paradigm that extends its tentacles to most corners of society. This paradigm also conditions people to tolerate coercive authority. The current reality is at odds with the fundamental promises the technological optimists envisioned.
Just as artificial intelligence is mirroring the human consciousness that created and uses it, the statist paradigm filters through other technological developments, as well. It is unlikely that technology itself will ever free people all on its own, but as more people evolve past the current political system, these tools may become vital in the path forward.
*Note: This article is intended to be a broad overview of the history of the tech industry and government. There are undoubtedly exceptions to the dynamic explored here—they were just not the focus of this piece.
