The myth that innovation is "...the province of maverick individuals, not stodgy legacy players and certainly not cumbersome government bureaucracies..." Or as my informatics professor used to tell us back in the day, "slow and steady wins the race", she was also fond of, "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."
I.e. the military industrial complex (MIC). The only good thing about it, is that many of the technological innovations we enjoy today can be traced to advances made in government and military labs. People shouldn't take it as some kind of vast conspiracy, it's just the way our system of research and development happens to be set up, err I should say, the sick amount of budget that gets dumped into military spending rather than arts, for example. Personally I do feel that with the advent and gearing up of the internet, places like Silicone Valley have stepped in. The problem is that they're as much a good ol' boys network as anyplace, and indeed the argument can be made they're simply an extension of the MIC.
Oh, 100%. The phones that I'm guessing most of us use to access this site are my favorite examples. Most if not all of the core technologies that allow smart phones to do what they do were borne from shit that was originally developer for use by the military. The idea behind pointing that out is of course not to sing the praises of the MIC, but rather to bust through decades of pro-privatization propaganda by pointing out the (to us, rather obvious) observation that of course the private sector rarely innovates. It isn't profitable. It's more profitable to get the government to give you access to tech that's already mature and market it back to the taxpayers who payed for it, while of course denying them any kind of equity share, and in fact denying that they paid for it at all.
Yes agree.. In fact the opposite we must keep the war hawks contained.