The Internet seems so now, so happening, so information age, that its Gen-X devotees might find the uncool circumstances of its birth hard to grasp. More than anything the computer network connecting tens of millions of users stands as a modern—albeit unintended—monument to military plans for fighting three wars. Specifically, the Net owes its existence to Allied battle strategies during World War II, to the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War, and to preparations for the postapocalypse of nuclear holocaust (the never-fought “final war” with the Soviet Union).

This is not a lineage the cyberenthusiasts dwell on. An effusive profile of the father of the Internet in The New York Times in September 1994 skipped entirely the circumstances of his cyberpaternity, while an extended account of the birth of the Internet a month earlier in Newsweek mentioned U.S. military sponsorship in one tangential clause but said not a word about why the Pentagon funded the project in the first place. Perhaps these strange omissions—we’re almost tempted to say Strangelovian omissions—are understandable. Internet boosters have created an instant mythology, featuring a fiercely libertarian “hackers’ ethic” and the “freewheeling, untamable soul” of Cyberspace (to quote a recent paean in Time magazine). The G.I.—government issue—stamp seems to let some of the hot air out of the hype.

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