Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Hell, Fascism at times has meant the merging of corporations and the state*. This is the same thing. The important thing to recognize is its groups of power making an alliance - not that its an true economic or military strategy.
* although that's useless as a definition of fascism
ttemPumpinRary · 1h ago
And the MIC is totally powerless . A rainmaking fata mogana like the CIA.
If they had power they would have prevented Trump from devaluaing the us as an reliable ally. Get new material, all you conspirators out there.
cpursley · 4h ago
Full circle. I mean, isn't that the valleys origin?
tharne · 3h ago
Yup, the military is one of the few remaining institutions interested in funding long-term research without an obvious immediate payout.
krunck · 3h ago
That's only because the military is the only institution that get's all the funding it asks for and then it get even more on top of that. Too bad we can't fund civilian science that way.
Yes. And the "militarization" has always been active in Silicon Valley. There has never been a time when tech wasn't heavily involved with the DoD. The only thing that changes is how publicly they talk about it. Currently it is fashionable to talk about it again.
There has been an article like this every few years since at least the 1990s where someone (re-)discovers that Silicon Valley works closely with DoD. Almost every startup delivering genuinely novel technology will have a relationship with some part of the DoD whether they talk about it or not, it has always worked that way. People who think startups are not working with DoD are deluding themselves.
The government has generally taken a "buy one of everything" approach to evaluating new technology. They are actually an interesting early customer to work with, which is why so many startups do.
ecshafer · 2h ago
This is a good thing. The traditional big defense contractors have largely become incompetent. We need software companies with actual expertise in software, machine learning, ai, computer vision, etc. to make these next generation technologies. Couple this with the willingness of SV to pay employees, we might see some actual engineering being done. Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, etc. have already shown they are capable of creating new products below budget, and ahead of schedule, something that Boeing, Lockheed, and friends have been unable to do since the soviet union fell.
rabidonrails · 1h ago
Agreed and this is a good comment.
It's strange that people in SV pretend like if they refuse to build software then nobody else will. Palantir exists (and has been so successful) because the government was trying to build this software (either themselves or through defense contractors) and ended up spending WAY too much money and only delivering a product that put US soldiers at risk.
bgwalter · 2h ago
Microsoft's multi-year Hololens project has failed. Now they are doubling down in a joint effort with Anduril:
I don't see Anduril producing anything like the B2 or the F22 or nuclear submarines, all of which are the really important technologies. Oculus VR isn't really successful, VR is shoehorned into Army applications "because high tech". Given that the army is unliklely to be deployed and soldiers probably hate the VR headsets this is just more waste.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 2h ago
The pendulum of mil-tech has moved solidly to "many & cheap" and away from "few & expensive", so I personally hope that Anduril isn't stupid enough to produce "anything like the B2, etc"
I think many & cheap drones or whatever can be shot down with an increasing array of anti-drone technology (which is often a repackaging of the Oerlikon gun that was already used in the Gepard tank ages ago).
In Israel things that got through from Iran were the ballistic missiles.
If the drones turn into Skynet with hundreds of thousands of mini drones, we are doomed or probably new anti loitering drone treaties will emerge. Recall how nervous Russia already was about the claimed threat of stationing the Tomahawk missile in Ukraine.
There is an advantage for having few and large things that each side can monitor. That's why nuclear bombers were supposed to be parked in the open for observation by the START treaty.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 1h ago
After Ukraine's successful drone strike on Russia's bombers, hardened hangars will be the norm, not "in the open for observation".
ecshafer · 2h ago
The F22 was first flown in 97, it started development in the 80s. I don't think Lockheed or Boeing would be able to make another generational step like that. The F-35 went drastically over budget and schedule.
southernplaces7 · 2h ago
>This is a good thing. The traditional big defense contractors have largely become incompetent.
Say that no incompetence, or at least indifference to usability, exists among the tech companies after using many Alphabet and Microsoft products. Aside from it decidedly not being the best thing in the world to cheer for tech expertise being leveraged towards the refinement of killing people and destroying things, said tech expertise is grossly self-serving enough for one to seriously worry about wedding it to the military industrial and state surveillance apparatus of the world's most powerful government. Sure, pragmatic reality dictates that much of this will happen anyhow, but i'd hardly call it a joyful thing.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 3h ago
Always important to note that when the NYT talks about SV, they're talking about a competitor and an existential business threat.
conn10mfan · 3h ago
not a very useful comment, respond to the claims on their merit, whether NYT sees SV as adversarially really has limited bearing on determining if their critiques are valid, especially given that they are reporting on real phenomenon
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 2h ago
People will generally approach information differently if they know the source of that information has a financial interest in pushing a certain narrative.
E.g. hedge funds or short sellers publishing financial advice is seen as "talking their book" rather than high quality analysis.
moritzwarhier · 2h ago
"Silicon valley" is not a media company though.
I find it absurd to think that the NYT would hope to achieve some commercial advantage by (and being able to) "slander" big software as a whole.
That makes no sense to me.
You could also say that every member of this board should be considered biased towards journalism as a whole, because most work for companies who have nothing to win from independent journalism.
Maybe some even work for direct competitors (online media) or companies with an interest to thwart the independence of journalism?
Framing the NYT as a competitor to SV as a whole also says that SV would be a competitor to journalism: that makes no sense to me.
Which one of the MAG7 is a journalism company? I know Amazon owns The Washington Post and I know that Alphabet and MS want to use content from journalists without paying and best replace journalism with AI or at least become a gatekeeper.
> Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news
(unknown)
conn10mfan · 2h ago
respond to the claims in the article
bgwalter · 3h ago
SV does not have the institutional knowledge, reporters on the ground or the kind of determination for thankless work that makes a newspaper great.
The NYT should do more investigative journalism, but it is better than nothing. SV pundits just recycle and comment on news stories that the mainstream press has reported.
SV outlets will never go after the "deep state" apart from performative complaining because they are in it and get the money from it.
I wish the NYT/WaPo were as good as in the 1980s in terms of investigative reporting, but that is what we have.
biophysboy · 2h ago
This is outdated - NYT is doing great business-wise despite silicon valley. You could even argue SV has helped NYT among its news competitors
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 2h ago
NYT stock is basically flat to the early 2000s. They missed out on 20-years of growth.
biophysboy · 2h ago
Don't get me wrong, digital ads/classifieds absolutely threatened NYT in the 2000s. I'm simply claiming they have adapted and its working (paywalls, subscriptions, talent acquisition, etc)
warkdarrior · 2h ago
NYT competes with SV in the news and entertainment domains, but not in the military domain (to my knowledge). So I do not think this comment is meaningful.
JSteph22 · 2h ago
It used to be that the propaganda needed to launch a war (Iraq) would be published by the NYTs of the world, but even that is no longer needed thanks to social media.
Military drones have a lot of cross pollination with civilian drones, each advance the other. Its inevitable and expected. I think that the fake separation of Military and Civilian technology facade is just ending, nothing really changed except the language of press releases.
vjvjvjvjghv · 3h ago
They were libertarians until they realized that working with a friendly government is even more profitable. We see more and more a merger of business and government. I think there is a name for that but I don’t recall at the moment.
horns4lyfe · 2h ago
So where do people think the money to build all those moon shots came from in the first place?
zombot · 3h ago
Or is it the silicon-valley-ization of the military? I mean, they've corrupted everything else, why wouldn't they be able to corrupt the military as well?
esafak · 3h ago
Both. I guess that makes it the merger of corporations and government, which is called...
dkdcio · 3h ago
the military industrial complex? if only we were warned…
KerrAvon · 3h ago
If only we’d been warned back in the mid-20th century, when rules could have been put into place to prevent it. Maybe that Eisenhower fellow could have said something.
thatguy0900 · 3h ago
I struggle to see what 20th century rules would actually prevent it. We have entered a age where rules are very casually ignored
vjvjvjvjghv · 3h ago
The defense contractors can do corruption just fine without Silicon Valley. SV just wants to join the money party.
electricwater · 4h ago
Wasnt' Silicon Valley born as a military R&D cluster? DARPA, Cold War defense contracts, and space race funding built the region. To me, the consumer internet phase from the late 1990s to early 2000s was actually the anomaly. The so called pacifist tech culture was a product of “peak liberalism” roughly 1991–2001 (fall of the soviet union to 9/11), the unipolar moment after the Cold War but before 9/11. US tech companies operated in a geopolitical environment without military rivals, so they could afford to frame themselves as apolitical, globalist, and focused on connecting the world. That cultural posture began to collapse after 9/11, and it has been eroding ever since under the pressures of great-power competition, terrorism, and the realization that software/chips are strategic assets. The pendulum is swinging... We aren't at McCarthyism yet but we are on a path to it.
stackskipton · 3h ago
It predates Cold War and comes from WWII when US Navy was throwing money around to get better code cracking, radar, gunnery computers and so forth.
pjmorris · 3h ago
Steve Blank's 'Secret History of Silicon Valley' is great background here. [0]
>Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.
>Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.
>The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.
KerrAvon · 3h ago
What do you mean we aren’t at McCarthyism yet? We have blown well past McCarthyism. The US is a bona fide fascist dictatorship RIGHT NOW. Anonymous state agents are kidnapping US citizens off the street for deportation to third world countries. This is wildly and transparently illegal, but there is nothing in place to enforce the law because they’ve corrupted the DOJ, which is supposed to enforce the law.
They haven’t destroyed every vestige of liberal democracy — the states can fight and there are still courtroom battles — but the fascists own the enforcement mechanisms for justice, and don’t feel bound by the outcomes. The guardrails are gone.
Do not harbor illusions that we’re going to return to normality in our lifetimes. It’s possible something new and better will take over once the Trump regime is somehow ended, but I doubt it; they’re trashing the place pretty thoroughly.
OrvalWintermute · 2h ago
There is a paradigm shift that has occurred with the realization of the impending war drums beating for Blocs in East (China+allies) vs West (US+allies) and how it relates to our technocratic centers in SV & other key locations.
In the West if you run afoul of political elites in the worst case:
you get imprisoned & cancelled, potentially bankrupted.
If speaking out mildly:
you may have some dueling op-eds or lose a contract/customer. Big whoop
In the best case:
you'll make tons of money and have great quality of life provided you don't become an overt monopoly, but even if you get broken up you'll make even more money.
***********************
In the East if you run afoul of political elites in the worst case:
you & your family will be disappeared, executed or harvested for body parts
If speaking out mildly:
you may get sent to a re-education camp and lose control of your company & assets, or eat a negative social credit score
In the best case:
you'll make tons of money and have great quality of life provided the Nation does not choose to nationalize you.
***********************
While I may be broadly grouped on the nuanced Paleo-Libertarian R faction, I've been pretty content to work with my very L colleagues, that is the influential in our industry.
But let us not mistake the best case, likely case, and worst cases for the very different world views of East vs West.
As much as I have an anti-Color Revolution approach, I think much of the L has been very conscious of Ukraine / Chinese Nationalization, and State-Owned Enterprise organized theft of IP and lack of a rule of law.
If it comes down to a question of institutions, and outcomes, most of us vastly prefer those of the West bloc to the East bloc.
kridsdale1 · 2h ago
This comment conforms to my worldview.
asciii · 4h ago
I think the title should be the “Re-Militarization” of Silicon Valley, bc that’s where it all came from anyway (as the title describes).
robg · 2h ago
Wasn’t the birth of Silicon Valley funded by military resources?
johndhi · 4h ago
I wonder if this relates heavily to the Wall Street- and MBA-izatoin of Silicon Valley? It's just plain as day that building weapons is a really good business opportunity... so it isn't super surprising that as the companies become more practical and finance focused they'd get into this.
nmeofthestate · 3h ago
It's related to the Ukraine war (and the advance of China's military) showing that the US has work to do to update their military capabilities for future conflicts. Hard to see how the US could achieve this without involving SV.
psunavy03 · 3h ago
Judging by this thread people aren't interested in any kind of serious discussion of the geopolitical reasons for this. They just want to make childish remarks about the "military-industrial complex" and spout tinfoil hat conspiracy theories.
No comments yet
cholantesh · 3h ago
That's the pretext, yes.
nmeofthestate · 3h ago
Please do elaborate.
nemomarx · 2h ago
Generally you sell the public on weapons for foreign enemies and then they get used on domestic enemies after that. Surveillance tech and drones have plentiful police use cases for instance
joshbaptiste · 3h ago
Makes sense.. the elites have outsourced much of the US manufacturing capacity during the neo-liberalism era.. and one of the major exports that still remain is defense and since capital always needs an avenue to exploit, defense is what it is for the capital giants.
moc_was_wronged · 2h ago
It’s not new. The MIC built Silicon Valley.
zhengiszen · 2h ago
Silicon valley has been an active party to the current genocide in Gaza. It is in fact well documented and will certainly be studied by future generations. If fascism doesn't own everything in between.
nemomarx · 2h ago
The US as a whole has been a party to it, so I'm not sure SV will stick out if we're lucky enough to have future generations who aren't fash
morninglight · 2h ago
This is not new.
Does anyone else remember the good old days when the Secretary of Defense would fly to Redmond to meet with Bill Gates?
Well Dark-Enlightenment has been speeding up since trump took office. I am not surprised that the neo fascist movent aiming to transform Silicon Valley tech giants into authoritatian city states would embrace and strenghen its relationship with the military.
Someone is gonna need to defend your company-state proprety against minorities, former employees and the annoying non-fascists.
The only cope I guess I can find, is that there’s a good chance they just blow themselves up or something because they decided to “move fast and break things (TM)” with their weapons.
Jgoauh · 4h ago
yes, they have the old belief that ethics slow down science. Those people are wrong about everything and incapable of science, or progress, even by accident. Their beliefs are incoherent and baseless, this attempt will fail and crumble under its own contradictions, as all the previous ones have.
tolerance · 3h ago
You're on the right track but omitting a crucial element that comes before crumbling failure.
Tactical control and an embedded influence that ensures that "failure" never manifests in the way that it has for civilizations past.
"They" pivot. From keyboards to motorbikes. Nuclear power plants to...'sex toys'.
Pivot in such a way you can't really point a finger at who's to blame and before you've got a handle on it they've spun around into something else again.
Jgoauh · 3h ago
yeah the everchanging nature is hard to keep up with, it always mutates, their failure will hurt many innocents around them, not sure what you mean about the sextoys and motorbikes tho, are there neo fascist sextoys and bikes brand i don't know about ?
sfitz · 3h ago
I think they're alluding to Yamaha and Hitachi, which both made machinery for the Japanese Military in WWII.
pfdietz · 2h ago
"Move fast and break things" is normal for weapons development in time critical situations, like during wars.
Jtsummers · 2h ago
And for special forces, in particular, both in and out of wartime. They'll take systems straight from a lab or buy drones off Amazon or even commission their own cheap $5k (cheap at the time) drones to conduct their efforts.
The rest of DOD has shifted to very conservative approaches to system development and sustainment (for better or worse, mostly worse IMO). It's stuck in the mindset of "This aircraft platform will be around for 50 years." Which is not conducive to the move fast, breaking things or not, approach.
pfdietz · 2h ago
Another problem with that mindset is that in a war, things won't be around for anywhere close to that long. What matters is how fast and cheaply you can build things, not how durable they are.
Jtsummers · 1h ago
> What matters is how fast and cheaply you can build things, not how durable they are.
Nearly 300,000 planes built by the US during that war. Peak production in 1944 approached 100,000 new planes built in one year. The nature of the aircraft also changed substantially across the war, it's not like they took a few 1938 designs and churned out more and more each year. What was being made was constantly changing as their understanding of what was needed and what did or didn't work changed and engineering advances led to better systems (by some measure).
These weren't planes meant to last a century like the B-52 is currently targeting.
The JSF project began in 1993 (studies) with competitions later. First flight training batches delivered in 2012 and it reached operational status in 2015. 22 years from conception to operation. A grossly unsustainable approach for a military capability. It's not even one of the worst systems I'm aware of.
moc_was_wronged · 2h ago
Silicon Valley has always been authoritarian. The difference is that, before 2016, they were disinterested in macro politics and knew that centrist liberalism was maximally socially acceptable. They’re now at the scale where The Big Game matters to them and, surprise surprise, the same people who fire employees over blog posts are also not afraid of fascism.
* although that's useless as a definition of fascism
No comments yet
Yes, discussed in the article, too.
There has been an article like this every few years since at least the 1990s where someone (re-)discovers that Silicon Valley works closely with DoD. Almost every startup delivering genuinely novel technology will have a relationship with some part of the DoD whether they talk about it or not, it has always worked that way. People who think startups are not working with DoD are deluding themselves.
The government has generally taken a "buy one of everything" approach to evaluating new technology. They are actually an interesting early customer to work with, which is why so many startups do.
It's strange that people in SV pretend like if they refuse to build software then nobody else will. Palantir exists (and has been so successful) because the government was trying to build this software (either themselves or through defense contractors) and ended up spending WAY too much money and only delivering a product that put US soldiers at risk.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-holole...
I don't see Anduril producing anything like the B2 or the F22 or nuclear submarines, all of which are the really important technologies. Oculus VR isn't really successful, VR is shoehorned into Army applications "because high tech". Given that the army is unliklely to be deployed and soldiers probably hate the VR headsets this is just more waste.
That said, they are definitely competing against nuclear subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgNCHZBJxsM
In Israel things that got through from Iran were the ballistic missiles.
If the drones turn into Skynet with hundreds of thousands of mini drones, we are doomed or probably new anti loitering drone treaties will emerge. Recall how nervous Russia already was about the claimed threat of stationing the Tomahawk missile in Ukraine.
There is an advantage for having few and large things that each side can monitor. That's why nuclear bombers were supposed to be parked in the open for observation by the START treaty.
Say that no incompetence, or at least indifference to usability, exists among the tech companies after using many Alphabet and Microsoft products. Aside from it decidedly not being the best thing in the world to cheer for tech expertise being leveraged towards the refinement of killing people and destroying things, said tech expertise is grossly self-serving enough for one to seriously worry about wedding it to the military industrial and state surveillance apparatus of the world's most powerful government. Sure, pragmatic reality dictates that much of this will happen anyhow, but i'd hardly call it a joyful thing.
E.g. hedge funds or short sellers publishing financial advice is seen as "talking their book" rather than high quality analysis.
I find it absurd to think that the NYT would hope to achieve some commercial advantage by (and being able to) "slander" big software as a whole.
That makes no sense to me.
You could also say that every member of this board should be considered biased towards journalism as a whole, because most work for companies who have nothing to win from independent journalism.
Maybe some even work for direct competitors (online media) or companies with an interest to thwart the independence of journalism?
Framing the NYT as a competitor to SV as a whole also says that SV would be a competitor to journalism: that makes no sense to me.
Which one of the MAG7 is a journalism company? I know Amazon owns The Washington Post and I know that Alphabet and MS want to use content from journalists without paying and best replace journalism with AI or at least become a gatekeeper.
> Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news
(unknown)
The NYT should do more investigative journalism, but it is better than nothing. SV pundits just recycle and comment on news stories that the mainstream press has reported.
SV outlets will never go after the "deep state" apart from performative complaining because they are in it and get the money from it.
I wish the NYT/WaPo were as good as in the 1980s in terms of investigative reporting, but that is what we have.
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-consumer-...
[0] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
>Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.
>Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.
>The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.
They haven’t destroyed every vestige of liberal democracy — the states can fight and there are still courtroom battles — but the fascists own the enforcement mechanisms for justice, and don’t feel bound by the outcomes. The guardrails are gone.
Do not harbor illusions that we’re going to return to normality in our lifetimes. It’s possible something new and better will take over once the Trump regime is somehow ended, but I doubt it; they’re trashing the place pretty thoroughly.
In the West if you run afoul of political elites in the worst case: you get imprisoned & cancelled, potentially bankrupted.
If speaking out mildly: you may have some dueling op-eds or lose a contract/customer. Big whoop
In the best case: you'll make tons of money and have great quality of life provided you don't become an overt monopoly, but even if you get broken up you'll make even more money.
***********************
In the East if you run afoul of political elites in the worst case: you & your family will be disappeared, executed or harvested for body parts
If speaking out mildly: you may get sent to a re-education camp and lose control of your company & assets, or eat a negative social credit score
In the best case: you'll make tons of money and have great quality of life provided the Nation does not choose to nationalize you.
***********************
While I may be broadly grouped on the nuanced Paleo-Libertarian R faction, I've been pretty content to work with my very L colleagues, that is the influential in our industry.
But let us not mistake the best case, likely case, and worst cases for the very different world views of East vs West.
As much as I have an anti-Color Revolution approach, I think much of the L has been very conscious of Ukraine / Chinese Nationalization, and State-Owned Enterprise organized theft of IP and lack of a rule of law.
If it comes down to a question of institutions, and outcomes, most of us vastly prefer those of the West bloc to the East bloc.
No comments yet
Does anyone else remember the good old days when the Secretary of Defense would fly to Redmond to meet with Bill Gates?
Well Dark-Enlightenment has been speeding up since trump took office. I am not surprised that the neo fascist movent aiming to transform Silicon Valley tech giants into authoritatian city states would embrace and strenghen its relationship with the military. Someone is gonna need to defend your company-state proprety against minorities, former employees and the annoying non-fascists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Tactical control and an embedded influence that ensures that "failure" never manifests in the way that it has for civilizations past.
"They" pivot. From keyboards to motorbikes. Nuclear power plants to...'sex toys'.
Pivot in such a way you can't really point a finger at who's to blame and before you've got a handle on it they've spun around into something else again.
The rest of DOD has shifted to very conservative approaches to system development and sustainment (for better or worse, mostly worse IMO). It's stuck in the mindset of "This aircraft platform will be around for 50 years." Which is not conducive to the move fast, breaking things or not, approach.
Even WWII demonstrated that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...
Nearly 300,000 planes built by the US during that war. Peak production in 1944 approached 100,000 new planes built in one year. The nature of the aircraft also changed substantially across the war, it's not like they took a few 1938 designs and churned out more and more each year. What was being made was constantly changing as their understanding of what was needed and what did or didn't work changed and engineering advances led to better systems (by some measure).
These weren't planes meant to last a century like the B-52 is currently targeting.
The JSF project began in 1993 (studies) with competitions later. First flight training batches delivered in 2012 and it reached operational status in 2015. 22 years from conception to operation. A grossly unsustainable approach for a military capability. It's not even one of the worst systems I'm aware of.