Militarised Surveillance as Dopamine Hits

Or Pentagon, tech and surveillance.


As I always say, the Pentagon don't make weapons of peace.


But on a serious note, the US military has a long history of weaponising communications to fight resistance movements. It can be traced back to the US Civil war, 1861-63, where the north used it to outmanoeuvre the southern Confederate army. Over the next three decades, it was directed at the indigenous population. By 1890, it helped to finally suppress a peoples whose number had been reduced by 15 million since the white man's arrival, some 400 years earlier. Further afield, in the Philippines from 1899-1902, the US navy leveraged the telegram to pacify resistance there.


1900 US Signal Corps progress map showing military telegraph lines and cables across the Philippines
source Philippines’s US-built telegram network 1900




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