Google’s true origin partly lies in gov grants for mass surveillance (2017)
Finally that kind of stuff starts landing on the main page of HN.<p>I highly recommend a unique book: &quot;Surveillance Valley&quot;, Yasha Levine. Although not without cons, the book makes a very strong case for the Internet to be planned from the very start as a surveillance vehicle of the future. The founding grounds of some well-known companies are at lest surprising.<p>The first 50% of the book is about (rather unknown) history of the net industry, 1950-1990, with focus on three letter agencies and their impact on tech. The remaining half is about a broader picture regarding what we&#x27;ve found ourselves in and how the future is going to be like.<p>Surveillance capitalism is just a tip of an iceberg...<p>If you&#x27;re someone who gets that the future by necessity will be both totalitarian and technocratic and you have a high-level technical ability &#x2F; awareness of how one can plan for that, please LEAVE A COMMENT HERE, so I can at least take a look on your profile, read your entries on  HN and follow you in the future.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly hard to try to be a cypherpunk today due to a lot of BS people tend to recommend. A lot of awareness once quite common in the past has been forgotten. If you can help in any reasonable way, please do. I still have some time to make myself knowledgeable enough to be able to operate in that new world, but the topic is so huge and I truly think that one day my life is going to depend on that knowledge -- so I&#x27;m stressing too much instead of methodically work on it.<p>(I&#x27;m a web dev, I get some Linux, maybe even more than a little bit, I&#x27;m to some degree knowledgeable about both networking and security, unfortunately more on the level of enterprise products than fundamentals. I know a little bit about everything, which is far from thorough understanding of what&#x27;s going to be really important in the future, and I have a persistent feeling that obscure &#x2F; not well known solutions &#x2F; tools are going to be a cornerstone of making it right).