The Militarization of Silicon Valley

Yup, the military is one of the few remaining institutions interested in funding long-term research without an obvious immediate payout.

Yes. (Military) necessity is the mother of invention. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

> I mean, isn't that the valleys origin?

Yes, discussed in the article, too.

Yes. And the "militarization" has always been active in Silicon Valley. There has never been a time when tech wasn't heavily involved with the DoD. The only thing that changes is how publicly they talk about it. Currently it is fashionable to talk about it again.

There has been an article like this every few years since at least the 1990s where someone (re-)discovers that Silicon Valley works closely with DoD. Almost every startup delivering genuinely novel technology will have a relationship with some part of the DoD whether they talk about it or not, it has always worked that way. People who think startups are not working with DoD are deluding themselves.

The government has generally taken a "buy one of everything" approach to evaluating new technology. They are actually an interesting early customer to work with, which is why so many startups do.

not a very useful comment, respond to the claims on their merit, whether NYT sees SV as adversarially really has limited bearing on determining if their critiques are valid, especially given that they are reporting on real phenomenon

SV does not have the institutional knowledge, reporters on the ground or the kind of determination for thankless work that makes a newspaper great.

The NYT should do more investigative journalism, but it is better than nothing. SV pundits just recycle and comment on news stories that the mainstream press has reported.

SV outlets will never go after the "deep state" apart from performative complaining because they are in it and get the money from it.

I wish the NYT/WaPo were as good as in the 1980s in terms of investigative reporting, but that is what we have.

NYT competes with SV in the news and entertainment domains, but not in the military domain (to my knowledge). So I do not think this comment is meaningful.

This is outdated - NYT is doing great business-wise despite silicon valley. You could even argue SV has helped NYT among its news competitors

Agreed and this is a good comment.

It's strange that people in SV pretend like if they refuse to build software then nobody else will. Palantir exists (and has been so successful) because the government was trying to build this software (either themselves or through defense contractors) and ended up spending WAY too much money and only delivering a product that put US soldiers at risk.

Microsoft's multi-year Hololens project has failed. Now they are doubling down in a joint effort with Anduril:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-holole...

I don't see Anduril producing anything like the B2 or the F22 or nuclear submarines, all of which are the really important technologies. Oculus VR isn't really successful, VR is shoehorned into Army applications "because high tech". Given that the army is unliklely to be deployed and soldiers probably hate the VR headsets this is just more waste.

>This is a good thing. The traditional big defense contractors have largely become incompetent.

Say that no incompetence, or at least indifference to usability, exists among the tech companies after using many Alphabet and Microsoft products. Aside from it decidedly not being the best thing in the world to cheer for tech expertise being leveraged towards the refinement of killing people and destroying things, said tech expertise is grossly self-serving enough for one to seriously worry about wedding it to the military industrial and state surveillance apparatus of the world's most powerful government. Sure, pragmatic reality dictates that much of this will happen anyhow, but i'd hardly call it a joyful thing.

This comment conforms to my worldview.

Both. I guess that makes it the merger of corporations and government, which is called...

The defense contractors can do corruption just fine without Silicon Valley. SV just wants to join the money party.

It predates Cold War and comes from WWII when US Navy was throwing money around to get better code cracking, radar, gunnery computers and so forth.

From the article:

>Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.

>Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.

>The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.

What do you mean we aren’t at McCarthyism yet? We have blown well past McCarthyism. The US is a bona fide fascist dictatorship RIGHT NOW. Anonymous state agents are kidnapping US citizens off the street for deportation to third world countries. This is wildly and transparently illegal, but there is nothing in place to enforce the law because they’ve corrupted the DOJ, which is supposed to enforce the law.

They haven’t destroyed every vestige of liberal democracy — the states can fight and there are still courtroom battles — but the fascists own the enforcement mechanisms for justice, and don’t feel bound by the outcomes. The guardrails are gone.

Do not harbor illusions that we’re going to return to normality in our lifetimes. It’s possible something new and better will take over once the Trump regime is somehow ended, but I doubt it; they’re trashing the place pretty thoroughly.