After World War II, the United States became the biggest military industrial complex. The U.S. is by far the biggest arms dealer to this day.  Max Weber argued that the key invention of the modern age (1880-1890) is information management, or record keeping. He said the world is rationalized. After the Civil War, the north has to deliver pensions to the widows or injured soldiers. This was a big big job! Montgomery Meigs was responsible for making sure the union army was well supplied. He is low key given credit for letting the north win the war. You’re excited about the Civil War. How do you join? You join as a member of the state division. Uniforms are not standardized; you could make your own. Meigs starts to change that. He imagines people as a “collection of sizes.” He makes everyone wear the same uniform and measures them. This is an example from Weber’s record keeping and rationalization. Another example is how back in the day when they were trying to store millions of records, they had nothing to store them in. They need a file cabinet. This is starting to be rationalized. Vannevar Bush during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, through which almost all wartime military research was carried out, including the Manhattan Project. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers and for the memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. In 1945, Bush published the essay “As We May Think” in which he predicted that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified”. He was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.