Remember that off-hand reference to "a short phone call with my dad" where I helped him "think through a valuable piece he's working on"?

Well, that piece is out today in Quartz here.

The article identifies how some early national security funding was crucial to the early development of Google and Silicon Valley. It's a smart, well-researched piece that concludes in this way:

[T]he collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.

Earlier this week, I wrote about why I think the "attention war" is a better framework than the "attention economy."

As the Quartz piece demonstrates, the origin of Silicon Valley (and, as a result, the actors in our attention war), is intricately connected to our war machinery by way of the mass surveillance state. As a result, I'm doubling down on this idea of the attention war.