OBSCENE: Conference Of Big-Tech War Criminals Portray The Moral Vacuum Of America
Gathering of top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that’s not how they would describe it.
(Editor’s Note: I was a little shocked to see this piece in The Guardian, but — hey — good for them. The article is a devastating portrayal of the soulless corporate monsters running this country. They are, truly, the personification of Jewish intellectual and writer Hannah Arendt’s classic book ‘The Banality of Evil’. — Mark Taylor)
I’ve written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body.
By Caroline Haskins
The Guardian (5/17/24)
On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city’s biggest convention hall welcomed America’s military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that’s not how they would describe it.
It was the inaugural “AI Expo for National Competitiveness”, hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the “techno-economic” thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference’s lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that’s best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump’s family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.
The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the US military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software.
At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered – they assume they’re in a safe space, among friends and peers. I was curious, what would they say about the AI-powered violence in Gaza, or what they think is the future of war?
Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels in a large room toward the back of the hall. In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one. …
I also went to a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone. They also used countless euphemisms for bombing and death. The woman described how Palantir’s Gaia map tool lets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process”. She meant it helps people choose which places get bombed.
This dovetails with today’s story of the brutal attack by police on peaceful marchers in Brooklyn. Sickening. Disheartening.
US President Eisenhower, a General during WWII, in his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation warned that the United States must “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex”. That ship has sailed. It is the greed, avarice and idiocy of the MIC that runs US foreign policy via the permanent US bureaucracy, it's extensive security and surveillance apparatus and the CIA. This will continue until either the money runs out or the idiots commit collective suicide. Any system that puts profits above empathy will end in disaster.