In the early 1970s, two revolutionary computer networks were taking shape on opposite sides of the Americas. Both aimed to connect distant points for rapid information sharing. Both used cutting-edge technology. Both would transform how we think about communication and control. Yet their fates could not have been more different.

ARPANET, developed under the protective umbrella of the U.S. Department of Defense, would evolve into today’s internet. Project Cybersyn, Chile’s experiment in economic cybernetics, would end in flames during Pinochet’s coup. The key difference wasn’t technological – it was political legitimacy.

The Power of Military Cover

ARPANET enjoyed a crucial advantage: military backing provided both resources and legitimacy. When you’re developing technology for the Defense Department, questions about control and surveillance take on a different character. They become matters of national security rather than political power.

This military cover allowed ARPANET to develop largely shielded from political scrutiny. Its potential for surveillance and control was present from the beginning, but the military context made such capabilities appear necessary and appropriate rather than threatening.

Cybersyn’s Fatal Transparency

In contrast, Project Cybersyn wore its civilian nature openly. Stafford Beer’s vision of cybernetic management for Chile’s economy was explicit about its aims to redistribute economic control and enable worker participation. This transparency, while admirable, made it vulnerable.

The context is crucial here: Nixon’s disastrous Vice Presidential trip through Latin America in 1958 had left deep scars in U.S.-Latin American relations. Nixon himself, a toxic racist, was deeply convinced non-whites were too primitive to be capable of self-governance, even before he was elected President. When Allende’s socialist government began developing an advanced nationwide computer network for economic management, it triggered immediate alarm for Nixon. Without the protective shield of military classification, Cybersyn’s capabilities for coordination and control during the Cold War were seen as purely political threats.

The Hidden Legacy of Wartime Cybernetics

What’s often overlooked is how both projects drew from the same well: wartime developments in operations research and cybernetics. The core ideas about network architecture, feedback loops, and distributed control had been developed during World War II for military purposes. Many of the key figures had wartime experience in these fields.

The difference was in how this military heritage was acknowledged. ARPANET maintained its explicit military connection, which paradoxically made its civilian applications appear less threatening when they emerged. Cybersyn, by transparently adapting military-derived techniques for civilian use, found itself more vulnerable to political attack.

The Pattern Continues

This dynamic – military cover providing political legitimacy for transformative technologies – wasn’t unique to ARPANET. GPS, another technology that enables unprecedented tracking and coordination, followed a similar path. By remaining under military control during its development, it avoided many of the political questions that might have surrounded a civilian positioning system.

Even today, we see this pattern continuing. Many surveillance and control technologies face less scrutiny when developed for military or national security purposes than when proposed for civilian use. The military origin serves as a kind of political shield, even as these technologies inevitably find their way into civilian applications.

Learning from History

The parallel stories of ARPANET and Cybersyn offer important lessons for understanding how transformative technologies gain social acceptance. The political legitimacy conveyed by military backing can be crucial for a technology’s survival and evolution, even when its ultimate applications are primarily civilian.

This history should prompt us to question our different reactions to similar technologies based on their institutional origins. When we celebrate ARPANET as the precursor to the internet while dismissing Cybersyn as an authoritarian fantasy, we’re not just making a technological assessment – we’re revealing deep-seated assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate forms of control.

The next time we encounter a new technology that promises to reshape social organization, we might ask ourselves: Would our reaction be different if this came from the military rather than civilian sector? The answer might tell us more about our political assumptions than about the technology itself.

The Lesson for IT Pros Today

The stories of ARPANET and Cybersyn aren’t just about the past – they’re a warning about how institutional control can be seized through technical means. When Pinochet’s forces moved against Cybersyn, they understood that controlling these networks meant controlling Chile’s infrastructure, economy, and ultimately, its people. The system’s designers and operators faced a stark choice: hand over the keys to power, or resist.

Today, American technical professionals face eerily similar choices. When demands come down to centralize access to critical systems – whether they’re financial networks, health databases, or communication infrastructure – these aren’t merely technical requests. They’re potential preludes to institutional capture. The separation between these systems isn’t bureaucratic inefficiency; it’s a deliberate firewall against concentrated power.

The technical professionals who manage these systems aren’t just administrators – they’re the last line of defense for institutional independence.

Every request for master access, every demand to break down system isolations, every push to centralize control should be viewed through the lens of Chile’s experience. The question isn’t whether such access is technically feasible – it’s whether it preserves the separations that protect democratic governance.

For those who work in American institutions today, Cybersyn’s fate offers clear lessons: Technical architecture is political architecture. System access is institutional power. And sometimes, protecting democracy means having the courage to say “no” to those who would dismantle its safeguards in the name of efficiency or security.

The choice between being a mechanism of control or a guardian of democratic institutions isn’t just a historical artifact of the Internet origin; it’s an ever-present reality.

The confirmation of ultra-paranoid Christian nationalist Russ Vought as OMB Director reveals a disturbing pattern in recent White House nominations that mirrors established tactics of institutional capture. His own words reveal an agenda of right-wing “unitary executive” tyranny:

In the conservative movement, ‘we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,’ Vought argued…’Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.’ ‘I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,’ Vought added later. ‘And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.’

Vought’s statements explicitly advocate for replacing American democracy with a Christian nationalist state, using terminology that mirrors historical movements that sought to replace secular governance with domestic military terror of a racist theocracy.

Vought’s plan is to entirely disable regulatory arms of the government such as the Environmental Protection Agency, while empowering the military to crush domestic dissent. Along the way, he also charts a strategy to put enforcement of immigration policy at the southern border of the country on a war footing, and declares holy vengeance [on diversity, criminalizing anyone he dislikes.] […] A key fulcrum in this strategy is the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants the president wide unilateral authority to deploy the military in enforcing domestic law. Right-wing state attorneys general, working in apparent coordination with Vought and his think tank, have already sought to invoke the act in disingenuous bids to declare the volume of immigration an “invasion,” and thereby trigger [national militant suppression of movement and speech].

As the architect of Project 2025 and now confirmed OMB Director, Vought will control federal agency operations – a position of unprecedented power for implementing institutional capture.

Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating ‘shadow’ agencies.

The secretive nature of Project 2025’s planning phase mirrors classic coup preparation tactics. The terminology is specific and deliberate: “shadow agencies” indicates parallel command structures, while “renewing” serves as coded language for institutional replacement – both standard elements in military takeover doctrine.

The military origins of this approach become explicit in their own description:

After Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the ‘tip of the America First spear.’

This language combines two significant elements. The “America First” slogan directly invokes the KKK’s historical rhetoric and white supremacist ideology.

Meanwhile, “tip of the spear” represents specific military terminology for special forces designed for rapid infiltration to replace a government – the initial penetration force in a violent military offensive operation.

By adopting terminology associated with both white supremacist movements and military operations, Vought’s organization explicitly aligns itself with ideologies and tactics that have historically been used to undermine democratic institutions.

Vought founded the right-wing nonprofit Center for Renewing America and was a key adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump presidency.

The organizational structure reveals classic hallmarks of military-style institutional capture:

• Heritage Foundation providing policy legitimacy and mainstream cover
• Center for Renewing America serving as the operational arm
• Project 2025 providing detailed implementation plans
• OMB position securing control of federal agency operations

This multi-layer approach matches information warfare doctrine used in regime change operations, where different messages target different audiences simultaneously. While policy proposals provide public cover, the military terminology signals operational intent to insiders.

The January 6 insurrection demonstrated the operational capabilities of these networks. Now, with Vought’s OMB confirmation, they’ve secured unprecedented institutional control.

Previous administration extremists – from President Jackson’s genocidal concentration camps along his Trail of Tears to President Reagan’s Iran-Contra – operated within existing government structures. This playbook mirrors established tactics of U.S.-backed regime change operations – particularly Guatemala in 1954 (let alone the 1982 coup for General Efrain Ríos Montt), where religious rhetoric provided cover for corporate capture of state institutions. There, as now, parallel power structures were established under the guise of anti-communist Christian renewal, while military and intelligence operatives prepared to seize control of government functions. The key difference is that Project 2025 aims to apply these tested foreign intervention tactics domestically.

The 1954 Guatemala operation is particularly instructive: John Foster Dulles, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, masterfully combined religious rhetoric with corporate interests through his Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s representation of United Fruit Company. This fusion of Christian messaging, corporate power, and state capacity created the blueprint for “legitimate” regime change that Project 2025 now seeks to deploy domestically.

The 1893 overthrow of Hawaii by American white supremacist businessmen provides an even more precise parallel: missionary descendants, particularly those from families like the Doles and Bishops, used Christian institutions and rhetoric as cover while their Hawaiian League and Committee of Safety established shadow governance structures. These organizations maintained public legitimacy through existing institutions while preparing for the forcible overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy – a model of religious legitimacy masking economic capture that Project 2025 closely mirrors.

The contrast with the Business Plot of 1934 is especially revealing.

Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments… [he] knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.

Wealthy American white supremacist businessmen, aligned with Hitler in 1934 like Trump was aligned with Putin in 2024, attempted to forcibly install fascism through seemingly legitimate means, yet failed precisely because they lacked the institutional control that Project 2025 now possesses.

The plotters simply failed to recruit General Smedley Butler (who exposed them) and thus couldn’t capture federal operations.

Project 2025, with direct OMB control over agency operations, has already achieved what the Business Plot could not – institutional capacity for systemic capture. It has bypassed alignment from military leaders because abusing civilian control means all federal operations are captured, a far more dangerous breach of national security.

What distinguishes Project 2025 is its unprecedented fusion of foreign and domestic tactics. While previous threats like the Business Plot were internal but lacked institutional control, and foreign operations like Iran and Guatemala had sophisticated tactics but external targets, Project 2025 combines deep institutional penetration with proven regime change methodologies. It represents the first time in American history that sophisticated foreign intervention tactics are being deployed domestically by actors with direct control over federal operations.

Project 2025 therefore represents the most dangerous national security threat in American history: a comprehensive blueprint that has studied, refined, and combined historically successful tactics of institutional capture with direct control of federal operations.

This combination of militant ideology, detailed implementation plans, and institutional power poses an unprecedented threat to American democratic institutions.

The confirmation of Vought, with his explicit Christian nationalist agenda and military-style operational planning, marks a critical point in this systematic effort to replace democratic governance with authoritarian control of a militant white nationalist theocracy.