BULLETS, BYTES, AND BUREAUCRATS

If, as Mao famously claimed, power comes from the barrel of a gun, then so too did the computer. Where states are found, warmaking cannot be far behind. However, it was only with the “industrialization of war” from the 1840s forward that technological advances and state militarization became intimately linked (Arrighi, 1999; McNeil, 1982). World War II led to what some call the first modern computer, developed through the work of Alan Turing in British code-breaking activities. The war played a critical role in the development of the computer industry as “the degree to which scientists and engineers were mobilized in support of the Allied war effort and the scale of their activities were unprecedented.” (Flamm, 1987, p. 6).

After the war, support for high-tech research continued; U.S. government support for the emerging computer industry was massive, with the government accounting for the majority of R & D funding and being the primary market during the critical years when the industry was developing after World War II (Flamm, 1987; Langlois and Mowery, 1996). The contribution of the military to the computer industry in the United States was marked by the combination of a massive centralized military side of the state with an economic ideology that theoretically favored the “free market.” The result was a form of military developmentalism with a dominant role for government in both funding development and purchasing the products of that development, but in which technology development remained largely in private firms that held the proprietary rights to the technology (Gordon, 2001, p. 19).