01.05.2025
State-of-the-art genocide
The revelation of Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza massacre is merely the latest evidence that big tech is entirely dependent on the state, argues Paul Demarty
Earlier this month, Microsoft held a grand old birthday bash for itself - it is now 50 years since the IT behemoth was founded as a scrappy startup.
The endless self-congratulation was briefly interrupted, however, when an employee began loudly heckling the company’s AI chief; later on, a similar stunt was pulled during a cosy roundtable discussion between current and past CEOs Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. (Gates’s philanthropy is famous, but Ballmer has made his own generous donations - to the Jewish National Fund.) The grievance of these brave staffers? The extensive use of Microsoft’s technology by the Israeli state in its military operations. Hundreds of MS employees have organised to put internal pressure on executives to wash their hands of this particular customer; several have been fired. We expect the protestors of April 4 - Vaniya Agrawal and Ibtihal Aboussad - to join that list, if they have not already.
Microsoft is not the only cloud giant to profit from the suffering of Palestinians. Its main rival, Amazon Web Services, and Google’s less successful Cloud Platform, also provide extensive services to the Israeli war machine. Off-the-peg AI is used to identify ‘terrorists’ under programmes with charming names like ‘Where’s Daddy?’ - a task to which the AI brings the accuracy and precision we have all gotten used to.
The story of the Microsoft protestors is all too familiar. According to a recent interview, courtesy of the New Arab, their efforts date back to 2023, unsurprisingly, during which time they have assembled petitions, raised awkward questions at company events, and engaged in physical acts of protest. The company has mostly responded by quietly stonewalling them - petitions are met with the ‘We see you, we feel you’ kind of verbiage that indicates a desire to be seen to take something seriously, when one has no intention of actually doing anything about it. Questions on Palestine are quietly edited out of ‘ask me anything’ events with executives. Public acts of protest result in dismissal.1
Money and power
People with long memories may recall similar ructions at the various cloud companies during the first term of Donald Trump, which had a strongly radicalising effect on the middle class professionals who staff these great corporations. The ‘Great Awokening’ has become the butt of many jokes - I have made fun of it many times myself - but there were always extremely serious issues involved (the silliness was more in the methods than the motives). In one salutary example, back in 2019, Google employees attempted to warn their bosses off competing for a major contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. ICE’s recent record of chilling thuggery is a timely reminder of why the agency was so despised among liberal tech workers. Google made the pro forma emollient noises, and ploughed on regardless.
To ask why is to invite one blindingly obvious answer: money. These are publicly traded companies, who do quite genuinely compete with each other for big contracts - among them naturally government contracts - in order to generate returns for their shareholders. Google was more vulnerable here, its cloud business distantly trailing those of Microsoft and Amazon. It was particularly unable to withdraw from the tender process. Yet, despite the best efforts of Elon Musk, the US budget is a staggeringly enormous pile of money for these oligarchs to fight over. Yes, Google adopted the motto, “Don’t be evil” - because they thought it would help them make money. They quietly dropped it at around this time. Fancy that …
There is a little more to it than money, however, which is illustrated better by the Israeli connection. After all, big American companies can only be expected to compete for American government contracts. Why Israel?
Sure, the state of Israel has plenty of money to throw around itself. Yet it is hardly unique in that respect. It has favoured status as a buyer precisely because it is a strategic ally of great importance to the United States. The fact that the cloud hyperscalers are up to their necks in Palestinian blood indicates their dependence on the American state, and especially the military state, which plays out in part through the close integration of the tech industries of America and its most belligerent ally.
The link between tech and the military is well-established and quite old - indeed, it predates the modern computing era entirely. Military need, particularly since the era of totally-mobilised modern warfare, has always been a driver of technological innovation in the wider economy. The retreat of the American state from such total mobilisation, during and after the cold war, has if anything deepened this relationship. Fighting wars mostly from the air places a huge premium on intelligence - on knowing where to drop the bombs. That may be a matter of spy-planes and satellite photos, or it may come from signals intelligence; and so on, through the vast surveillance apparatuses run by governments and contractors like Palantir, to suicide drones and all the rest.
The internet itself is a strange by-product, having first been created by the defence department in the late 1960s. Though its importance for human civilisation has vastly outstripped its limited initial application of maintaining lines of communication during a nuclear exchange, it remains under the control of the US for practical purposes, and is an instrument of both soft and hard power in that respect.
Unit 8200
The Israeli state has moved in a similar direction, seeking to protect itself from engagements where significant casualties are expected - since especially their bruising encounter with a well-entrenched Hezbollah in 2006. That was also the year that Hamas took power in Gaza, and between then and 2023, Israel’s general approach to the Strip was to wall its inhabitants in, develop an army of informants by means of blackmail, and subject the population to constant and intolerable surveillance. The status quo was punctuated by occasional episodes of punishment bombing - a practice known to the Israel Defence Forces brass as “mowing the lawn”.
In this period, Israel’s tech industry thrived, particular in the general area of military and surveillance technology. The line between the state and private industry is, to put it mildly, blurry. There is the particular case of the IDF’s Unit 8200 - an intelligence unit that mostly recruits the very young and very bright, as the time comes for their military service. Alumni of the unit then move into private industry, many presumably retaining close relationships with their old colleagues. Companies founded by Unit 8200 people include Waze, the GPS service acquired by Google, and NSO, which created the infamous Pegasus spyware.
Google has only recently dipped into this pool again, acquiring Wiz - a well-established cybersecurity firm, whose founders, again, hail from Unit 8200. Concerns may legitimately be raised about the likelihood that Google has thereby gained a bunch of senior executives who are plausibly Israeli spies; but, of course, that was probably true anyway. The utility of Israel to the US leads to a remarkable level of tolerance of such espionage, and foreign agents of multiple countries are probably endemic at the tech giants.
One case we know of concerns not Israel, but Saudi Arabia. In 2022, A Saudi national by the name of Ahmad Abouammo was convicted as an unregistered foreign agent for using his employment at Twitter to funnel information to the Saudi state. He was caught after he was paid for services rendered with the gift of a $50,000 watch, which he attempted to sell on Craigslist - presumably Israeli cybersecurity boffins have better brains for opsec (and, in any case, they seem all but exempted from the Foreign Agents Registration Act).
Dissonance
As I have noted before, this strong dependency of the tech industry on the state presents an odd contradiction to that industry’s elite. Their self-image is of brave pioneers out on the frontier - not imprisoned by the stolid certainties of the old elite. They are great men of destiny, who will turn empty lands into a new world in their own image (and at least the internet, unlike the American continent, really was empty). Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars - whether Jeff Bezos has such grandiose aims for his own space programme remains unclear. Several Silicon Valley oligarchs are captivated by the idea of a ‘network state’ - a great secession from the prevailing regime; they want to coin their own money in the form of cryptocurrencies; and so on.
Yet a cold, hard look at the business interests of these men belies their self-conception. All of Musk’s businesses - above all the space programme - are utterly dependent on state largesse of different types. Cryptocurrencies have never amounted to anything more than asset bubbles, and never will. The real money is denominated in dollars.
It has become common to describe these men as oligarchs, but in fact this is misleading for the same reason the phrase, ‘Russian oligarch’, has been since Vladimir Putin’s purge of the post-Soviet nouveaux riches. They are suffered to maintain their fortunes, so long as they are useful - so long as they kiss the ring when required. This does not seem to bother Jeff Bezos terribly much, but the cognitive dissonance seems to have driven Musk raving mad. He is the closest thing to a true oligarch, having taken on a government position as reward for his ample financial backing for Trump’s re-election and waged all-out war on the administrative state; but it is starting to look like the administrative state has won. You cannot buck the market, goes the old saw, but the market cannot buck the state either.
Of course, the fact that the core repressive and military activities of the state are conducted via favoured partners in private industry has its effects on the host organism as well. What results is a system of quite staggering and brazen corruption. It need not be very grand-scale to catch the eye. Over several years, a Malaysian contractor by the name of Leonard Glenn Francis - better known as ‘Fat Leonard’ - systematically bribed US Navy officers in the Pacific to obtain classified information about ship movements, which information he then used to drive business to his firm. The bribes added up to a cool $500,000 in cash, plus gifts in kind of the usual sort (wild parties, prostitutes, and so forth); after years of lethargy, the US finally prosecuted a few dozen people for their role in what is, in principle, a catastrophic security breach. (It seems never to have occurred to ‘Fat Leonard’ to sell the secrets to the Chinese: why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?)
Compare Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency people, who - during their campaign against “government waste” - attempted to sneak a nine-figure contract for armoured Tesla vehicles into the budget. Musk was found out, because he is an idiot; but the amount of money sloshing around here all but ensures a bonanza for those on the take. It is ‘Fat Leonards’ all the way down. In return, what do the governments get? Many things: indulgence from the investor class, for giving them their percentage, for one. But another thing is deniability - responsibility for disasters can be offloaded.
Which returns us to Israel, and its ‘AI-targeted’ murders: what better excuse for ‘accidentally’ reducing a hospital to brick-dust or starving a thousand children to death than to point at a computer and blame it? Everything must be kept at arm’s length; by such a conjurer’s trick, everything is permissible.