Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

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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.

Reviews

Contentious... forceful... salutary * The New Yorker *
'Surveillance Valley is perhaps one of the most deeply disturbing books of the year. It leaves no illusions intact ...' -- Scroll.in
Gripping and hugely readable, Surveillance Valley is an essential book which painstakingly pieces together the complex origins, and current role, of a technology that has become so ingrained in our lives -- All About History

Author Bio

YASHA LEVINE is an investigative journalist and author who has written for Wired, the Baffler, and ALternet, among others. He has appeared on network television, including MSNBC, and has his work profiled by the New York Observer, Vanity Fair, and the Verge