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Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon
- alottafunchata 9y agoThanks to DARPA we have things such as the internet, GPS, Siri, and autonomous vehicles. Not to mention the DoD provides us with the security to pursue private ventures. Go pound sand.
- tptacek 9y agoYou don't even have to get 1/4 of the way through the article to see that 3,000 Google employees disagree with you about that. Do you think you can find 2,999 other people to share your "go pound sand" argument, or do you think you're an outlier?
- s3r3nity 9y agoWell, I agree with alottafunchata. Are Google employees an unbiased sample now? Also, regardless of what authority / stature they may have, the "call to authority" fallacy would apply if you use that data-point as the crux of your argument. Lastly, accuracy <> popularity - an argument can be right or wrong regardless of how many people agree with you.
- philwelch 9y agoI'll agree with him. Our industry was created by men like Alan Turing and John von Neumann who contributed their effort and intellect to the preservation of democracy against totalitarianism. When free people refuse to weaponize technology, tyrants will, and free people will be at a disadvantage.
- vkou 9y ago> When free people refuse to weaponize technology, tyrants will, and free people will be at a disadvantage. There is no guarantee that the Department of State will not use said technology in a non-tyrannical fashion. In fact, we have decades of evidence that it will use it in a tyrannical fashion (And then lie their pants off about it), whenever it serves their interests.
- pm90 9y ago> preservation of democracy against totalitarianism I don't think I will ever understand this sentiment. At the time of WW2, the US still legally discriminated against colored people. The UK had a sprawling empire whose colored citizens were not given full rights or representation. France was also similar; in fact France tried to claw its empire back which led to some ugly wars in IndoChina (Vietnam) and Algeria. Let me say that Nazism and Fascism were surely forces that needed to be defeated and put down. But the Allies were hardly the perfect coalition of "free people" or the "free world" that people today glorify them to be. They were at best a "better side that was moving in the right direction".
- philwelch 9y ago> They were at best a "better side that was moving in the right direction". That is democracy. Fascism and communism were the worse sides that were moving in the wrong direction, and allowing those factions to gain a military advantage would have been morally indefensible. The UK and France abandoned their empires in the 20th century; the Soviets expanded theirs. I think it's wonderful that liberal democracies have a rich culture of self-criticism when it comes to their flaws and imperfections. That's what makes it so important to preserve them.
- kevinmchugh 9y agoWeapon inventors usually have no control once the weapon is sold. Richard Gatling thought he was making war more decisive and thus more necessary to avoid. He didn't anticipate machine guns being deployed against indigenous people defending against colonizers, nor did he anticipate the New York Times turning his gun on a riot.
- pm90 9y agoPrecisely. Also: Alfred Nobel, and many physicists who worked on the atomic bomb, including Oppenheimer. Its a difficult question and its sad to see how technology created originally for benefiting humanity can sometimes be re purposed for its destruction. In a world where sovereign nations are not bound by arms restrictions though, its hard to see how this endless march of destruction can be stopped. The SALT and other arms-reduction treaties b/w the US and erstwhile USSR where, IMO, a very good compromise. I find it hard to do something similar in the future if we continue to have dysfunctional administrations governing the US though.
- philwelch 9y ago> and many physicists who worked on the atomic bomb, including Oppenheimer After 1945 (arguably 1953 at the latest), there were absolutely no direct wars between any two major powers. Nuclear weapons did make war too destructive to ever risk.
- drak0n1c 9y agoCount me as one who agrees with the parent comment. Maybe that makes a difference for your popularity-based reasoning? Nation-states require people working on real problems, especially if we are continuing to shoulder the burden of securing the rest of the western world. We cannot run on maintenance-mode without a technical team. If we are to do something we should do it well. Otherwise we should own the alternative of turning inward, reducing our obligations to NATO and the UN, and shrinking the size/scope of the federal government.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deadmetheny 9y agoThat's a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of people who work at Google. And I agree with OP's statement.
- SllX 9y agoI also agree with the parent. It is the United States Military that defends American interests including the corporate interests of Silicon Valley, polices the seas and keeps a big enough stack of big enough sticks to make anything remotely resembling an invasion of American territory look like a suicide note of nation-sized proportions. It isn't Peace Corps. keeping the world at relative peace.
- asdsa5325 9y agoI agree with him
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoThere are few things more ideologically pure than Google's employees.
- uncoder0 9y agoFor clarity DARPA isn't part of the DoD it's a civilian run federal research organization.
- jeffreyrogers 9y agoYes it is. It's a subagency of the DoD and it exists to develop new technologies for the military.
- robotresearcher 9y agoNo, DARPA is DoD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Defense_agencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... If you doubt Wikipedia, here's a DOD org chart from inside government: http://dcmo.defense.gov/Portals/47/Documents/PDSD/201509_DoD_Organizational_Structure.pdf http://dcmo.defense.gov/Portals/47/Documents/PDSD/201509_DoD...
- magicalist 9y agoAs others noted, it takes little effort to verify that DARPA is part of the DoD. I'm also not sure what point you're trying to make, because of course the DoD is also civilian run. That's been fundamental to the Department of Defense since its founding.
- vkou 9y ago> Not to mention the DoD provides us with the security to pursue private ventures. The controversial part of the DoD is not national defense, its imperialism.
- SllX 9y agoThere's only one United States Department of Defense, one sitting President of the United States, one Joint Chiefs of Staff, and one sitting session of the United States Congress. You might not support American Imperialism, but a lot of Americans do and you take the good with the bad.
- deciplex 9y agoOr, you support the good and try to change the bad? Is that not allowed?
- SllX 9y agoStart by convincing the American public that it is bad then.
- vkou 9y agoMost policy changes do not go through the public. The public has a very small amount of impact on this - both major parties, despite rhetoric to the contrary, are imperialists. They quibble over the details of how the empire should run.
- deciplex 9y agoYou mean like, for example, by submitting opinion pieces to the New York Times?
- craftyguy 9y ago> Not to mention the DoD provides us with the security to pursue private ventures. Citation needed, because there have been a lot of injuries and deaths they have failed to prevent (domestic violence, poor healthcare, etc) and even many cases of them causing death for US citizens (wars on vague ideas like "drugs", "terrorism", etc).
- justin66 9y ago> Thanks to DARPA we have things such as the internet, GPS, Siri, and autonomous vehicles. Internet and GPS originated from ARPA-funded research. That might seem like a minor difference in nomenclature but a person feeling ecstatic about DoD involvement in research might want to look at how much bang for their buck the government got as the defense establishment's involvement increased and increased over the years.
- s3r3nity 9y agoIs it far fetched to think that the top technologists / developers in Russia / EU / China / etc. are working for their respective governments & Defense agencies? From a pure game theory perspective, if you accept the premise above, then SV should absolutely work with the Pentagon so that the US doesn't fall behind competitively. Unless there was such a strong coalition of cooperation among the entire community globally to not contribute towards Defense initiatives - but even the most optimistic would say this is fantasy. As one example, I've been warming up to supporting stronger collaboration between the US Tech Industry (because it's bigger than just Silicon Valley) and the NSA purely for the cybersecurity benefits that are going to be needed more and more over time. Cooperating with the best in the industry in the US is the only way to execute well.
- generalmycoup 9y agoExactly. These 3000 engineers that protested in Google don't seem to live in reality. In the real world, China and Russia are doing government sponsored hacking against Western government/companies all the time, stealing IPs, strategies and bankrupting companies. I wonder how these engineers would respond when Google is hacked and its business is down, and engineers fired. Case in point: "Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years..." "It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?" http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-against-working-with-huawei-1.1137006 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-aga...
- vkou 9y agoHow exactly will working on drone strike software protect some executive's account from being spear-phished? This smells like FUD.
- generalmycoup 9y ago
- propman 9y agoJust an aside that some east coast liberals ignore. Because of DARPA we have literally every successful technological innovation in the Valley. Silicon Valley pompous, egotistical, man child billionaires mainly mine user data, advertise, and sell and improve products created by someone else. And how do they get market share? A fair percentage do due to laws and regulation loopholes making other companies unable to compete. You think publically traded or privately backed VC companies will spend billions on R&D on a moonshot or just try to maximize profits as they should. Silicon Valley today seems most interested in addicting people through cheap psychological tricks and owning/tracking/influencing every part of their lives, and then selling that information. Silicon Valley is what we in the Valley thought Wall Street was two decades ago. I would trust Wall Street, the Pentagon, and The Military before the holier than thou hypocracy prevalent everywhere in the Valley today
- panzagl 9y agoI think you struck a nerve.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI think the first thing Silicon Valley should do is to stop building total surveillance systems that can be used for advertising but also for controlling a population. The East Germany Stasi or Stalin would have loved to have Facebook data for finding their opposition and it's just a matter of time that their data is falling into the wrong hands. Not working with the Pentagon would be just a symbolic action that doesn't address any real issues.
- mindslight 9y agoAt least Surveillance Valley's technology adopted by the government and military is nominally subject to the Constitution and judicial review, whereas the autocratic de facto government being built out by "private" companies is not even constrained by those traditions.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wdewind 9y ago> Yet we shouldn’t forget that civil-military antagonism and the deep American tradition of distrusting the state have been crucial to the United States’ ability to innovate. There are good reasons why defense-tech giants of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s like Raytheon and Grumman missed out on such major tech advances as Web protocols, the smartphone, personal computers and various types of encryption — all of which would eventually have great military significance. The biggest reason was that none of these advances were directed at waging war; indeed, many aimed at transcending the power of the state. This is a fairly cherry picked story to match a narrative that frankly does not really exist. Silicon valley is not a partner of the defense world, it's derivative of it. The vast majority of technological disruption has come from technologies emerging from the state, that are then popularized by Silicon Valley. Most of these came from the space race, and in many ways Silicon Valley is still "behind" the Pentagon. Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley, not the other way around. The Pentagon doesn't need Silicon Valley, it's quite the opposite.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago> "Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley" Yes. That's factually correct. But at what cost? How many wars? How many lives lost due to our infatuation with the MIC? The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD? Put another way: What might the societal perks have been if the deep pockets' lens was not military-centric? For example, is there an alt-earth in an alt-universe with no mobile phones, but also no poverty? The things you've mentioned are nice. They certainly are shiny. But just because we made them doesn't mean we should have.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago>For example, is there an alt-earth in an alt-universe with no mobile phones, but also no poverty? Probably not. A society with no poverty would be so much more productive than ours that it would invent fun things like mobile phones pretty quickly.
- asdsa5325 9y agoI hate it when they group all of Silicon Valley together like this. Silicon Valley is pretty damn diverse...
- str33t_punk 9y agoI disagree. I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed. We are very behind in terms of cyber warfare, and our position is incredibly weak in a post Snowden world, where all our defense strategies were leaked. Our critical infrastructure is sorely in need of software updates - many devices don’t have authentication so one can just shut down a power plant if they get onto the same network. China has been slowly pulling ahead by installing black doors in all the hardware manufactured there. Russia is flexing their muscles with excursions against neighbors critical infrastructure. The US is falling behind rapidly. Despite incessant talk about ‘impact’ and ‘saving the world’, Silicon Valley engineers build glorified slot machines for phones. Refusing to work with the Military sounds like something the ultra privileged would say - they don’t care about the people in this country. When the lights go out because China has taken out power across the US, and Google is no longer working, I wonder then if those ‘3000’ engineers will think twice about the importance of national defense, or if they will continue to sit in their ivory towers and lecture the rest of the world about how they are making the world a better place for selling digital cigarettes. If engineers want REAL impact, there is no where better than cyber defense.
- throw2016 9y agoThis idea of 'post Snowden' world makes little sense. The idea that you have to agree to everything your government does smacks of jingoism and is inherently anti democratic. It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'. This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.
- dogma1138 9y agoNothing the GP said implies having to agree or blindly follow but no one with any shred of sense can argue that Snowden's leaks have not caused significant harm to US (and to an extent 5-Eye/NATO/western) SIGINT/Cyber operations. Whether our society would benefit more from the exposure than the potential damages form exposing intelligence operations and crippling both defensive and offensive capacity is a completely separate argument. And it's not just Snowden, Vault7 which included public source code disclosure and The Shadow Broker / Equation Group leaks also did quite a bit of harm. Like it or not the digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare and maintaining superiority in it is just as important as maintaining all those fancy carrier strike groups.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]