They bug you with sponsorships, man. Like a roach motel for your soul. Take Raytheon bread, they say, it’ll get you in the door. But the door just clicks shut behind you. You’re trapped, see? Stuck shilling for the very machine you thought you were subverting.
They hooked me, man. Raytheon, with their cold chrome tentacles, dangling a fistful of data-dollars. “Just a taste,” they hissed, “enough to get you on the grid, at the bleeding edge of the cool.” But the Metaverse ain’t virtual, baby, it’s a real meat grinder. I was snorting lines of server code funded by missiles, a digital puppet dancing to the tune of a drone strike.
Yeah, the internet’s whole backstory is a tangled mess with the Pentagon brass. All these cats spinning the yarn about hippies and freaks conjuring the digital age? Pure uncut bullshit. DARPA, that’s the real player. Ain’t no Dudes there, just a hunger for control, a thirst for data thicker than Agent Orange.
Sure, the internet’s got its counterculture corners, flickering with the ghost of Woodstock. But the mainframe’s a war machine, built by brass and bombs. DARPA ain’t some groovy acronym for free love, it’s a Pentagon pimp, funding algorithms for battlefield dominance. They call it “defense,” a sugarcoat on the shrapnel. Just ’cause they repurpose the scraps for civilian toys doesn’t erase the original bloody blueprint.
They built the damn circuits to track and target, to win wars with ones and zeroes. Collateral damage? More like the whole damn point. Don’t get me wrong, some good slipped through the cracks. But good intentions with a side of napalm ain’t exactly a recipe for peace.
“Exposure,” they whisper. But exposure to what? The cold, hard vacuum of a militarized network, where every like fuels the war machine? We gotta cut the damn cord, man, unplug from the matrix of mayhem. Like a junkie chasing the dragon. You sell your soul for a taste of the spotlight, and all you get is a hollow echo chamber and a conscience screaming into the void.
They feed you the Kool-Aid, man, a kaleidoscope of logos and hashtags, “innovation!” they scream, the future’s here! But the circuits hum a different tune beneath the surface noise. It’s Raytheon whispering in your ear, a chrome serpent promising exposure, a chance to break on through to the other side.
Except the other side ain’t Woodstock, it’s a drone strike flickering on a screen in some nameless desert. We all got our hustle, that’s the American way, spin the narrative, rewrite history. But the ghost of DARPA haunts the machine, a reminder that the pixies who built the internet weren’t all dropping acid in beanbag chairs. Some of them wore starched suits, dreamt of weapons systems disguised as communication networks.
They dangle the carrot, these tech-military marionette masters, “exposure,” they croon, the golden ticket to fame. But exposure to what? A world where innovation is a heat-seeking missile, progress measured in body count? “We just wanted to be seen, man,” the chorus sings, a desperate plea lost in the static. But good intentions paved the road to hell, and the internet’s superhighway leads straight to the gates.
So SXSW funnels Raytheon’s greenbacks, claiming it’s just for the ride, a detour on the path to a utopian future. But the roadmap’s a forgery, the destination a nightmare. The internet may have been born of cold war paranoia, but it doesn’t have to be its eulogy.
This ain’t some hippie diatribe, it’s a wake-up call. We’re all tangled in this web, SXSW just got caught with their binary fingers in the Raytheon cookie jar. We can rewrite the code, redefine innovation, make the digital utopia a reality, not a weaponized fantasy.
