The Internet, previously known as 'the information superhighway' or just 'cyberspace' to friends, is an inseparable component of contemporary life.
Commercially, it is almost entirely an advertising business, generating its primary revenue that way, but major monopoly/surveillance platforms maintain the delusion that they are homes for 'innovation' and other such concepts supposedly beneficial to human existence.
There are no shortage of standard histories of the Internet to peruse, both ones from a historical perspective, as well as technical guides. As we will do many times on this site, we will suggest you start with the regular ol' Wikipedia entry.
Stack Overthrow seeks to define an understanding of the Internet that challenges conventional narratives, or at least illuminates some of the less overtly visible structures, motivations, and ideologies behind its development and current status.
to be expanded -- discuss the public investment into research facilities and their military use
The age of platforms.
(a fucking nightmare)
The distinguished Alaskan senator Ted Stevens referred to the Internet as 'a series of tubes' in 2006.
What is the Internet, actually, materially? Who owns the data centres: the land, the buildings, the equipment? What transparency is there regarding these structures?
Benjamin H. Bratton's 'The Stack', as described in his brilliant 2016 book The Stack: On Software and Sovreignty, is an 'accidental megastructure' of planetary-scale computation.