Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.

Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile.

Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question.

I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well.

That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.

Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.

To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.

It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.

People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.

What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.

Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?

Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.

Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.

Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).

Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.

- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.

- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).

Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.

Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.

As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.

Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.

Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.

There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.

In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.

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

There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.

" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.

But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.

The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)

If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that

I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.

Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.

I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...

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Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.

Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"

This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.

You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"

Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...

it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).

they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.

no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.

I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.

endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.

This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.

I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.

The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.

In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.

Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.

The U.S. military spends about $800bn a year [1]. That's up about $300bn from ten years ago.

American consumers spend about $21 trillion a month [2].

If you look at VC, most of it still goes to B2C and B2B. DefenseTech is a headline because it's novel.

[1] https://www.warcosts.org/us-military-budget-2026

[2] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categor...

It's been an open secret for over a year that a cheque from Thrive buys tariff exemptions.

One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".

Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.

[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.

first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.

second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.

third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.