[AfterHIA]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCR_Licklider

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield

If you know; you know. #ARPA

[ricksunny]

I remain perpetually perplexed why people who invoke Mansfield's name almost universally shrink from describing why they feel it is relevant to invoke Mansfield's name.

Yes, there was a Mansfield amendment and a would-be 'nother Mansfield amendment. It had some (waves hands) ever-unarticulated effect on defense funding of research. Motivations of Mansfield are never articulated. Seems so self-defeating to not describe.

[AfterHIA]

Going into the specifics of what motivated Mike Mansfield requires going beyond the conversation we're having about R&D into the domain of politics and ideology. I want to stick to relevant realities related to people in technology:

1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decline in technology and science innovation that has occurred since the beginning of the neoliberal assault. In 1961 we get SketchPad at the University of Utah. In 1968 we get the Mother Of All Demos. What's been developed since with the same kind of impact? I'd argue, "not a whole lot."

2) This has inevitably led to a decline in the public's enthusiasm for technical innovation. I remember the early 1990's World Wide Web. I remember the feeling that a non-marginally better future was, "months away." Now the government and Google collude to spy on me and my family. Now I have a short-form video feed that is paid to deliver content meant to extremize me as a young adult.

The Mansfield Amendment is the technical glitch that may have cancelled a better future for technologists and especially technology literate young adults. It's difficult to say and we may never know. My feeling is that some day some country might achieve a level of social democracy where-in, "we get back to that." Time will tell. The irony is that it's the Adam Smith Societies pushing the hyper, "privatize everything agenda" that reifies the problem. Adam Smith actually advocated for strong public institutions- especially educational institutions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x

https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decl...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-...

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151a...