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

costsofwar.watson.brown.edu

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

#81

Post by antonvs »

monideas wrote: post #71
PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best? The other thing is, you built your nest egg takin…

[flagged]

> They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism.

It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.

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

#82

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

Fraterkes wrote: post #44
1234letshaveatw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach

Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.

I would go so far as to call it a privileged perspective

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

#83

Post by monideas »

antonvs wrote: post #81
monideas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism. It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.

Putting energy into your family is generally the opposite of psychopathy, it's actually a good thing to do. On the other hand you can actually find a lot of psychopaths who find their outlet in political activism

"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7369609/

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

#84

Post by antonvs »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #37
slowin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a 68 working on consumer products, but it was still too much for me. Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure. Every day I woke up to go to work after I found that out, I was sick to my stomach. I eventually couldn't take it any more. I took a pay cut and I'm still in the tech industry working for a startup, and still facing e…

TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach

> TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse.

It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.

Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?

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

#85

Post by ForHackernews »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #50
pfdietz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. 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.

The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities. Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.

This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics.

This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932441

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

#87

Post by monideas »

antonvs wrote: post #78
monideas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's good you just left on your own accord, basically you fired yourself rather than wasting their time having to do it. There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. There are some very intense ideological dynamics within big tech companies among the employee base but I alwa…

> the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work. There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.

I mean non-Europeans/non-Anglosphere

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

#88

Post by istjohn »

chanakya wrote: post #22

Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?

If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global landscape.

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

#89

Post by sippingabonedry »

slowin wrote: post #8

It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.

On the contrary, you will do exactly as you're told if you expect to cash those sweet MSFT paychecks, which I assume you did prior to this epiphany, otherwise you would have returned all the money.

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?"

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

#90

Post by pphysch »

stickfigure wrote: post #55
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other countries probably focus quite a bit more on the defense aspect. How many times has the US military countered a hostile attacking force? Instead, I can think of significantly more instances where the US was instigating the situation.

US military power does most of its heavy lifting without throwing bombs. We're seeing the end of Pax Americana and it isn't pretty.

The two major ongoing wars are due to US foreign policy and could be over tomorrow if US government fully stopped supporting their respective belligerents.

A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.

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