The internet, like its big sister, the electronic computer, is a Little Frankenstein of the Cold War – one of the countless bright ideas brought shuddering to life with the financial backing of the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the feverish aftermath of the launching of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957. And why did the US military finance the research and development of a medium that would, thirty years down the track, turn the Amazon into a cheap place to buy books and forever pervert the meaning of a humble can of Spam? In a word: Armageddon.
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