Palantir CEO rips Silicon Valley, accuses it of selling out America

Google's initial investors included the CIA (InQTel). The internet itself was a defense (DARPA) project. The Bell Labs work on the transistor emerged from war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units.

I can go on and on about the inventions spawned by defense funding. Silicon valley itself owes its existence to Northrop Grumman and their ilk, who were early tech employers seeding Intel, Xerox, HP, Apple, with crucial tech talent.

Today's tech aversion to defense agencies is one of the most paradoxical philosophies to ever exist. Instead of demanding more accountability from defense agencies, they outright refuse to sell/engage with the very people providing national security, and hence allowing a civilized society with a stable government to exist.

There are certainly many people who work for defense contractors and they are necessary. But, other people don't want to do that. If they join a company that's not a defense contractor, and it becomes a defense contractor, it feels like a bait-and-switch. That's not what they signed up for.

And it does seem like, in a large industry with many different kinds of jobs that need to be done, it's clearly not necessary for everyone to work in defense.

On the other hand, the funny thing about large companies is that they do many things, but by reputation they're treated as a single entity. So you get into a somewhat weird situation where people care what some distant part of the company does that has almost nothing to do with their work day-to-day.

I'm reminded of Paul Graham's classic essay, "Keep Your Identity Small" [1]. If you join a large company and identify with it, this is making your identity larger than it probably should be.

For better or worse, many employees of these companies feel responsible for things they have little control over. They feel good when the company does something good and bad when the company does something they don't like. So they decide the problem is that they need to have more control and this results in a rather problematic kind of company politics.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Pot, meet kettle.

Demonstrate how those programs do keep the country safe. Just because someone wants to do it doesn't mean that it's actually valuable work. ------ "Karp, whose Palo Alto, California-based company provides services to the Defense Department, CIA and FBI, blasted tech companies that refuse work with the federal government to keep the country safe."

irony.