The New Military Industrial Complex with Dr. Roberto J. Gonzalez
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Mitt Romney saying the quiet part out loud: Congress was motivated to force TikTok to sell because they didn't like how they couldn't control the media narrative. They then welcome on the show Dr. Roberto J. Gonzalez of San Jose State University, who is the author of War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future. They discuss his article "How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex": https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Silicon%20Valley%20MIC.pdf
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It's always a good day when we get to sit down and talk about something.
We get to chat.
We get to talk about what a calm period of time we're in.
What a non-troubling time.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
And by the way, because of that, it does feel like it's harder to find days where it just feels like okay.
But there are.
There are some days it just kind of feels okay.
Certain things can kind of move out of the way a little bit.
Hopefully we can all find moments of that.
You have to find moments of that, and thank you all for including us in those moments.
We've got a show today.
We're bringing on Dr. Roberto J. Gonzales of San Jose State University, the author of a recent article in the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University titled, How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex.
I thought it was a very good conversation about what's going on in our current environment, and I hope our listeners learn from it.
For sure.
I mean, you know, Dr. Strangelove or Real Genius or Don't Look Up are very good primers if you want to prepare yourself.
Nobody has ever loved and talked more about the movie Real Genius.
I'm guessing the people who made it, starred in it, wrote it, you loved that movie.
You know, I am so happy that you say that.
It doesn't feel like I talked about it that much, but whatever you express that I might have feelings for are exactly accurate.
I couldn't love it more.
Well, everybody, we have a full show here.
Reminder, go to patreon.com slash whatgreatpodcasts, support the show, keep us editorially independent, ad-free, and continuing to grow.
You also gain access to The Weekender Show on Fridays, as well as exclusive analysis and post events and post-election events.
It's going to be a doozy in the next few months.
Nick and I have some things planned and hopefully some travel that we're going to get into in order to see this thing unfold live.
In the meantime, Nick, this clip that we're getting ready to listen to and dissect, for people who are listening to this and not watching on YouTube, and a reminder, you can go to YouTube and watch our shows as well, see the video, me and Nick hanging, you know, mixing it up.
This clip is between sitting Senator Mitt Romney And Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
And this took place at the McCain Institute, named after, you guessed it, John McCain.
This was during a discussion about activities in Gaza, what is happening with pushback against Israel and the assault on Palestinians.
And Nick, there is a lot, lot happening in this clip.
We will start with this discussion and we'll break it down as we go.
Why has the PR been so awful?
I know that's not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that, which is, I mean, as you've said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception?
An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel.
It's like, why aren't they screaming about Hamas?
Accept the ceasefire, bring home the hostages.
It's all the other way around.
Typically, the Israelis are good at PR.
What's happened here?
How have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?
So real fast, Nick, before we move on to Blinken's answer, a couple of things.
Hamas has accepted the offer for a ceasefire.
It seems like Israel is not interested in doing it.
I want to break down what we're talking about when we're talking about public relations, what Romney is saying, when we're usually so good at it and Israel is so good at it.
But how do you interpret the beginning of this?
I mean, it made me laugh when he says that Israel is usually really good with PR because generally they're not.
I mean, I don't know if, you know, it's just the way it's all set up that they're going to sort of be the bully bad guys most of the time.
By the way, oftentimes rightfully so.
But the bottom line is when we're talking about strictly PR, if that was our business and we were analyzing, like they always get beat by that.
They're never great at doing that stuff.
So I don't know why McCain is trying to portray them in that role at all.
Or Romney, yeah.
Or Romney, excuse me.
Yeah, well, I know.
I kind of put them together as well.
You know, first off, I want to say, yeah, the issue is multifaceted.
Why, quote unquote, the PR isn't working?
I want to make sure that everybody understands that PR stands for public relations.
And public relations is how the powerful and the wealthy work in order to try and spin stories and events in the way that they want them to.
This was a field that was pioneered in the early 20th century.
It was spearheaded by people like Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who believed that you can create emotional stories That don't necessarily give a larger idea of what's going on.
This has a ton of implications in how our policy and government and power has worked and the economy has worked for years.
There's an idea that people cannot understand rationally what's happening when they receive too much information.
It needs to be managed by elites in order to go ahead and forward a story.
The fact that we have a sitting senator Right now, saying all this out loud, and for people who don't understand, the reason I said this was at the McCain Institute, is that this is where the elites go to talk to each other, right?
The people in the crowd are other powerful people who have come to listen to powerful people talk about a situation.
This is them communicating back and forth.
I also want to point out, it's a Republican senator talking to a Democratic member of a Democratic administration.
And this is about how these sort of conversations are going and where they're losing it.
And we're very lucky, Nick, that places like the McCain Institute stream this stuff online.
We're not supposed to hear this.
We're not supposed to watch this.
This is for powerful people to communicate with each other.
And this fact that they're saying, how can we not control a story better?
I think that's really telling and something that we need to get into deeper.
An intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond.
And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative.
And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost and the emotion, the impact And we can't discount that.
I just want to jump in there for a second, because even though he's complaining about what social media is today, and how images and impacts, we've seen this from Vietnam era times.
When we finally got actual images of what was going on over there, that was essential to turning the country against the war, right?
Because before that, you had Westmoreland controlling the PR of Vietnam, and people thought it was going well, and so Ellsberger and the footage started coming out.
I'm really glad you brought up Vietnam, because actually, you know, what happened with Vietnam is that powerful people in the American government, the lesson they learned from Vietnam was not don't get into Vietnams.
It wasn't don't don't do things like this.
It's, oh, we have to control how these things are communicated.
So, for instance, the next major American conflict, of course, was the Persian Gulf War, the first Iraq war.
What did they do?
They went ahead and they embedded reporters with the troops, and what ended up happening was the major cable news network, CNN, gave a 24-hour commercial to the U.S.
military and the U.S.
government that portrayed them as, you know, heroes who were using all this cool technology.
By the way, Roberto Gonzalez in a second is going to talk about some of the new technologies we have to look forward to in that regard.
But you're right.
It's the idea that they have lost control of how communication is done.
And Nick, they're not wrong.
As we've talked about on this show, like these old mainstream legacy media companies, they don't hold the sway that they used to.
You know, it was funny when CNN started rolling out their like streaming network and we laughed that we have more listeners than they had subscribers, right?
And we're like a small independent political show.
But that's where people are turning because they no longer sort of trust those communications.
And by the way, they have a right not to trust them.
They do.
There's a reason why they don't trust them.
And so what Blinken is saying about how social media has started giving too much to the people, this does bring to the surface a concern that elites have had for forever, starting with not just Edward Bernays and other PR professionals, but people like Walter Lippmann, who believe that you needed to shape ideas for people in order to manage democracy.
And this freakout Right, and very quickly, you know, it's the same reason why the death of rock and roll in my mind has happened.
It's because the radio doesn't have any influence like it used to.
It's true.
They have lost the ability to shape these things and the people are starting to make decisions on their own. - Right, and very quickly, it's the same reason why the death of rock and roll in my mind has happened.
It's because the radio doesn't have any influence like it used to.
Just like they don't have the same kind of way of shaping this stuff, which is good.
There's a weird Venn diagram, right?
Because there's a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left who believe that the government is lying to us, right?
And why, by the way?
Why do they feel that way?
Because they are.
Because the government's lying to us.
Right.
But it couldn't come from totally opposite areas, though.
That's what's interesting about this.
And so then now your allegiance has become a thing about what you're willing to believe.
The only thing that I got concerned about with this thing was with COVID is they, in earnest, you know, Twitter and a lot of the social media platforms wanted to try and keep the right, correct, medically sound information out there.
And what's happened now as COVID has receded and become less of a thing that kills people, you see now it's been very effective, the PR campaign on social media to make it seem like it was never dangerous and it was all a lie and all a sham, which continues to play into the lying by the government, at least from a very certain subject in this country.
So, it's an interesting thing, and I don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but it'll probably continue to evolve for the next, you know, 20 years.
Well, and what you're bringing up is, you know, you're talking about Venn diagrams.
There's so many different things that are interlocking in this thing.
First of all, I say all the time whenever I'm doing a radio interview or a TV interview and people say, Jared, can you believe that people don't trust institutions?
Yes!
Yes, I can!
And why?
Because they've given us reason not to.
At the same time, my God, does that really cause a problem when it comes to everything from democracy to public health to investment to, you know, legislative debates?
All of it.
That loss of gravity is what has sent us into an absolute tailspin right now.
The problem is that that authority was misused.
And by the way, Nick, one of your favorite periods of time is when that came to a fever pitch.
It wasn't when it started.
You know, people point at Watergate and they're like, that's where the trust was broken.
No, the trust was broken before that.
You know, and again, man, I didn't realize Dr. Gonzalez's interview today was going to play into what we're talking about as much as we are.
But the CIA and National Intelligence Apparatus and Military Industrial Complex has been screwing around with reality and the use of their authority since they were instituted.
And because of that, people don't trust them.
And so, yeah, it is an earned loss of trust, but at the same time, there are incredible consequences that come from it.
But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature.
If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok I'm going to make a prediction, Nick.
I don't make a lot of predictions on this show, but first of all, I'm going to guess that this clip at some point or another gets entered into evidence whenever ByDance, the group behind TikTok, ends up suing the United States government for their ban and forced investment.
Second of all, Mitt Romney has a long, long history going back to makers and takers and, you know, people not wanting to work.
He got in the—I don't know if you heard it—he got in the middle of that rejoinder and realized that he shouldn't be saying the shit that he was saying.
That that was one of the reasons why they went after TikTok is because they felt like it was destabilizing of official narratives and power narratives.
But he said the quiet part loud.
And I personally, like when I first saw this, my jaw dropped.
He knew almost immediately.
Blinken was trying to dance around it a little bit.
He didn't want to get into it.
And Romney went ahead and said the quiet part loud.
T-stabilizing the narrative, whatever that term was.
I mean, that sounds like you're working for Romney at this point, because what did he say?
He said they were talking more about Palestinians than Israelis, right?
Why the hell would that matter at all, whether you're going to pull a plug on a platform?
It's gross.
Now, was there more nuances?
Like, is he concerned that there was too much misinformation coming out about this?
It's not the reality and maybe they have the real thing because they get to have the foreign intelligence?
Well, then that's what you maybe have to say, but he completely bungled this one.
This is a Joe Biden-level bungle of words coming out of someone's mouth.
It's rough.
It's really rough.
And what you just said, I think is correct, because there's a ton of reasons why TikTok landed in the crosshairs of the United States government.
Tons of reasons.
And we talked about it whenever all this was starting up.
Why did this end up happening?
It's protectionism.
It's basically a protection racket, saying we're going to protect American social media.
We're also going to make sure that American companies And by the way, probably the Saudis are going to make money off the divestment that comes from this.
But also one of the reasons why they do not like this is they truly look at TikTok and they see it as a destabilizing agent.
They truly in their minds have created a story in which China and all of these foreign agents are radicalizing young people as opposed to, oh, it's part of a larger situation that's been brewing because of what you and I have been talking about.
No, Romney absolutely shot himself in the foot on this thing.
He got too comfortable is what happened.
I really, really implore people to go back and listen to that answer because you can hear him realize in real time that he was saying way too much truth in that moment.
Right.
And by the way, the only reason why they wanted to have TikTok sold or whatever is because they're afraid of like data, the data mining, right?
The connection that TikTok has, which it kind of always seemed a bit tenuous.
And when they had the head of TikTok come and speak before Congress, like it didn't, it didn't.
Listen, they're all polished and trained as well, but it didn't really feel like that.
And besides, you and I know that our information is probably so exposed at this point to everything that we only can hope that in future generations we'll have some better protection, because what's done for me, I'll tell you that.
No, we got screwed over by the same people who are talking right now.
Like, they should have protected us, and instead we're living in a world... Nick, I mean, like, half the things that you and I are talking about, like, right now, are gonna get, like, thrown into ads for me in a little bit, and I'm gonna have to look at my phone and be like, oh, that sucks.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's the environment we live in.
I want to ask you a question, just to go a little bit deeper on this story.
Because I think that this is a nice introduction for people to really hear how these people talk to each other when they think that nobody's really paying attention in these institutes and meetings and all that.
My question to you is this, and I've got thoughts on it.
I want to hear yours.
I think one of the defining issues of this moment, and there are tons of issues below, right?
Like tons of votes and rights and protections.
A large part of the problem right now, it feels like, is that the powerful are on one side of the ledger and literally everybody else is on the other side.
The coalitions are starting to fall apart.
Sort of the devotions and the loyalties and even the belief that these people can be on our side is starting to fall apart.
And I think by talking about whether it's Israel and Gaza or Ukraine or even what's happening, you know, in any sector of power, Our belief that these people are working on our behalf as opposed to carrying out their own sort of agendas, it is crumbling by the day.
And I feel like this is indicative of that.
And I guess my question is to you, I think there are certain ways that that could be won back or it could be reinstituted.
But do you see that changing anytime soon?
How do you see this playing out?
Because I think this is like one of the defining questions of our moment.
Right.
Well, is the beginning of that moment that the assassination of JFK?
I mean, I think there are different chapters of it.
I think that was one of the first moments post-World War II where a lot of people looked up and they were like, maybe something is happening that we don't understand.
Right.
Okay, so if we plotted that or charted it, whatever, there was probably a growing, whatever degree, you know, 40 degree thing of more and more people starting to wrack their head around that as we progressed through time.
I guess your question is, has there ever been a moment where that chart dropped dramatically down again before it started going back up, right?
Like, really, because It seems kind of inexorable.
It seems like, again, when you mix capitalism and democracy together, it's just going to continue to add more data as we go through time.
And all that data, it seems to point in the same direction entirely the whole time.
What's weird, though, is that you do have, depending on what affiliation you have politically, you'll have faith in certain parts of government where other people will not and will never have.
Right.
And that's an intractable argument, too.
So is someone going to come along?
I would be a little bit afraid if someone could come along and convince more and more people that the government really does want to work for them.
It would be really amazing if it really was true.
And that could happen.
But I just don't know the way it works.
People enough people to do that.
So I guess the answer is no, I don't see how you're going to be able to reverse it.
You know, because who like how who who could do that in this in this climate and convince enough people that they're actually out there to help him.
Well, I mean, I think, you know, we're talking about the chapter that you had brought up, which begins with the assassination of JFK.
That chapter ends with the election of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter.
And what Ronald Reagan does and what neoliberalism does is it takes the story of distrust, right?
The distrust of power and the distrust of government and says, you're right.
You shouldn't trust these people.
And matter of fact, we're going to dismantle this thing, but we're also going to tell you a happy story.
Trump is another chapter of that story in a different section in a different book, and I just wonder if the reinstallation of authority is going to take some sort of authoritarian crackdown.
That's what I worry about.
Or can it take the shape of reform?
Which is, you know what, for too long you have been managed.
For too long, you have had people who have lied to you and kept things from you.
Like, and again, I'm really excited for people to hear here in a couple of minutes this interview with Dr. Gonzales.
One of the things Gonzales brings up in his research is, you know, he can track only so far how much money is being given to all these like military projects and others just are off books.
They're just completely classified.
We can't know what's going on.
And I wonder if there is the possibility of some sort of a reform movement that could say, hey, guess what?
Your lack of trust in institutions is completely earned.
We need to do something about it.
And I feel like that's the one way out of this.
And the other way out of it is you will obey us or else you're going to, you know, you're going to feel the wrong side of a rifle.
And that's the concern.
Well, if you were going to run for any kind of office, that would be your platform, without question.
I think it would resound very strongly with a lot of people.
I think at some point we figured, oh, a really wealthy guy could do that, because he's not beholden to all these things, right?
Yeah.
And that's how we got Trump, pretty much.
Although it also is how we got a lot of— Well, for the record, that's also how we got Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Right, okay, fair enough.
I mean, like, you were gonna go ahead and be clear about this.
Yeah, and a ton of people, like, in the Senate and in Congress in general, like, as well, like, who are really rich, like, I'm not beholden, I can run my own campaign, I can finance yadda yadda, Trump is a whole different story, but that's, that was part of that appeal, I think, that he brought, and that's what's frightening, because it doesn't, I don't think that's gonna work.
But let me say one thing, Warren Buffett, though, It is kind of the real deal.
You hear him talk about, especially about taxes, which does apply to this.
Here's a guy who has every reason to cheat, lie, whatever you want to call it, you know, file your taxes in a certain way to hide as much money as possible.
And he seems to be very transparent in his, you know, desire to want to pay taxes, to recognize that there is value living in this country versus a lot of other countries in the world.
And that he would expect, it's too bad that not everybody does agree on his level that that would do it because he said, If the 800 big companies would just pay their fair share, you wouldn't have taxes on anybody else in the country.
And I probably intended to believe he probably is right on that.
And he's more than willing to continue doing that.
And so there's a guy that could that actually seems to represent what I'm talking about.
Well, and I wonder because, you know, you bring up Buffett and I couldn't tell you, is Buffett in his 80s?
Is that correct?
He's got to be at least, you know, he doesn't sound great.
He looks... Well, right.
But I kind of wonder, because one of the things that's happening here also, and Nick, you know, every now and then I like to use an example, you know, from your original world and like basketball, you know, as well as anybody that like there are some points where like a general manager or a leadership team Just exhaust their time, you know, and like it's they maybe they've been successful.
Maybe they haven't been successful and there's just a period of time where like both parties have to walk both ways.
That's one of the problems that we have in leadership right now.
We it's not just age.
That's the whole point.
Like, you know, Romney and Blinken aren't necessarily that old, you know?
It's just that there is a staleness to how things have been done.
We've watched the neoliberal consensus, going back to Ronald Reagan now, for 44 years.
And that way of doing business has gotten us to where we're at now, and where we're at now doesn't work.
And so you wonder, can somebody articulate something that is different and feels different?
Now, of course, some people are at home and they're yelling Obama.
Obama had the aesthetics of that.
That's the thing, right?
Like it felt different.
It felt like it looked different.
It sounded different.
And meanwhile, it was still in the same room.
Speaking of John McCain, it was like, no, it was a lot of this old sort of like management style.
And in fact, with a little bit of technocratic flair, but even that feels removed.
from people.
And I just wonder, I wonder if somebody can articulate something different.
Because watching, I'm sorry, but even watching Romney and Blinken talk about this, I think it's important.
But my god, you can almost smell the cobwebs on it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, oh, they just don't get it.
They just don't understand what the narrative is.
And we've lost this control.
That doesn't, that doesn't breed confidence.
That doesn't inspire, I don't think.
I hear you, and you know Warren Buffett is not in his 80s, he's 93.
93.
So he's representing the great society, you know what I mean?
Like he's representing, I fought in World War II for this country, and that's what I remember, that's what I believe in, and that's what he chooses to believe in.
So there's a lot of different approaches, you know, angles that people are coming from on this one, and certainly, you know, Buffett's not going to be, not everyone's going to be able to connect with where he's coming from anymore because he's so old.
But actually, I want to point something out real fast, and I think it's important.
I just flippantly threw out FDR.
What was FDR?
FDR was a class traitor.
FDR was a wealthy person who came in and said, the wealthy are out of control, everybody else is getting screwed.
And every now and then when it comes to terms of power, it takes a class traitor.
You know?
It takes somebody who can come in and have a little bit of independence and are able to say something, you know?
I think there's a lot of people in this country who root for someone like a J.B.
Pritzer.
And, like, they're excited about the possibility of someone exorbitantly wealthy who can, like, go in and try and change things around.
But it's going to take something.
Yeah, no, your friend and mine, Mark Cuban, who, no matter what I hear or say, when you read the threads he's writing, it just reeks of, I am going to get into a race at some point and, you know, maybe earnestly help people.
Get him on the podcast, Nick!
I'm sure we could have a great conversation.
We could duke it out on a few things and we could talk about a few other things.
Listen, I'm on my basketball podcast first.
Let's see, maybe I can do a split one for him.
I don't know.
We'll see.
I love it.
We'll talk about roster development for 20 minutes and then we'll talk about redistribution for the other 20.
All right, everybody.
That is going to bring us to our interview with Dr. Roberto J. Gonzales of San Jose State University, the author of War Virtually, The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarized Data, and Predict the Future.
Stick around.
I hope you enjoy this.
Hey, everybody.
As promised, we're here with Dr. Roberto J. Gonzales of San Jose State University.
The author of War Virtually, The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarized Data, and Predict the Future, and the most recent article that we're going to be discussing today, How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex.
And that is from the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Dr. Gonzales, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for inviting me.
I'm glad to be here.
Well, before we begin and get into this article, which I found absolutely vital, thank you for writing it.
I think this is the type of stuff that needs to be looked at and really discussed and particularly communicated.
So we're very excited to talk about that.
At the beginning of the piece, You say, quote, a new political economy is emerging driven by the imperatives of big tech companies.
You list a few of the larger ones, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle.
Billions of dollars are involved, and it is, quote, leading to costly high-tech products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe.
Can you, for our audience who maybe hasn't read this article yet, can you talk a little bit about what that new political economy is?
Well, I'm sure as many of your listeners will know, the military industrial complex is the defense industry, which for many years has been dominated by companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, which is now called RTX, Boeing, and others like BAE Systems.
What's happened over the past 10 years is that what I call the center of gravity of the military-industrial complex has been shifting from the Capital Beltway around the DC area to Silicon Valley, as you see A larger and larger contracts being awarded to the tech industry.
And so really, what we're seeing here are is a kind of parallel phenomenon, one in which the big tech firms like the ones you've mentioned, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and others are really taking on these contracts that are Pentagon contracts that are worth You know, in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Alongside that, you've got a separate set of tech firms, which are much smaller by comparison.
These are defense tech startup firms, almost all of which are financed by venture capital.
So in both cases, you know, the many of these firms, whether we're talking about the big tech companies, which are all household names, or whether we're talking about the smaller defense tech startups, the vast majority of them are based on the West Coast with a few exceptions. the vast majority of them are based on the West And also venture capital, one third of all venture capital investment dollars come from the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from Silicon Valley, essentially.
So that really is the shift that I'm exploring in this article.
Again, it's been a few years in the works now.
I think 10 years is probably a reasonable estimate, but it's actually been happening from even further back.
But the thing that I'm trying to draw attention to in this article is the fact that this process is accelerating, and the technology is accelerating, and a lot of it is being adopted by the Pentagon, I think, without adequate testing and then Adequate understanding of whether this stuff really works as advertised.
Well, does it surprise you, Dr. Gonzalez, that Silicon Valley itself, which may or may not have a reputation for being or trying to do good in society, does it surprise you that a capitalistic firm like those places are would then realize there would be a lot of money to be made in developing, you know, things for the military industrial complex?
It doesn't surprise me all that much.
I write about this in my book, War Virtually, that Jared mentioned earlier.
The fact of the matter is that Silicon Valley, despite its public relations efforts over the years and its self-image as a force for good in American and even global society, if you look at the big tech companies, almost all of them got their start from funding.
That came from either the Department of Defense or the CIA or other members of the U.S.
intelligence community.
And for example, in War Virtually, I go into the story of how Google got its origins.
And we, I think many people until recently, didn't really think of Google as benefiting from the largesse of the Department of Defense or, you know, the military-industrial complex.
But I detail in my book, War Virtually, how that in fact is the case.
And I would also recommend another great book that's out there.
Been out there for a few years called Surveillance Valley by a journalist named Yasha Levine, who's also written about this history.
I'm hardly the first person to point out this history, but I've always thought of it as kind of a hidden history because the public relations efforts of the tech industry have been so successful over the years.
And part of this is, I mean, they invest huge amounts of money in portraying themselves through public relations as a force for good.
That's not to deny that some of the products that they produce have been beneficial to society.
But what's happening at the moment is that those historical ties to the Pentagon Are becoming tighter than ever as the defense and intelligence dollars flow into these into these firms.
So, most recently, you know, you've seen this play out if we focus on Google for the moment, and I don't want to give the impression that Google is the biggest of the tech contractors by any means.
Microsoft, I think, hands in a way, would win that award.
But Google's been in the press a lot lately because for so long, you know, its mantra was do no evil, or, you know, that was kind of the If you want the slogan that was used internally.
And what's happened recently with the revelation, not only that US Pentagon funding has gone to Google for things like Project Maven, which was an AI program that was designed to basically employ pattern recognition and image recognition from drone footage that was being beamed in from Afghanistan, that the Pentagon's
It was applying Google, but more recently the $1.2 billion deal that Google signed with the Israeli Defense Ministry for a project called Project Nimbus, which provides cloud computing services and supports the ongoing war in Gaza.
So, you know, Google protests recently have protested this.
Actually, they've been protesting Project Nimbus for several years now, but it's really come to a head over the past five to six weeks.
you may have seen in the headlines recently that Google fired several dozen employees who were involved in protesting that company's involvement in the war on Gaza and the Israeli Defense Ministry and Defense Forces.
So, you know, again, to get back to your question, it doesn't really surprise me, but I think the fact that it's making headlines shows that much of the media is surprised by this connection to not only the U.S. military industrial complex, but also foreign governments like the Israeli but also foreign governments like the Israeli government that are involved in these operations in Gaza.
Yeah.
And Dr. Gonzalez, I'm glad you started to move in that direction to talk about this long-term relationship, because I feel like this is something that experts or people who research this are necessarily familiar with.
We talk about it a little bit on the show without necessarily always diving into the specifics, which is one of the reasons I cannot recommend enough that people read this article.
The relationship between big tech and the government, particularly in the era of privatization, where, you know, American empire has to rely on these tech companies in order to carry out these ideas, people might not know.
And just seeing it in written print was stark for me, the quote unquote, wild and stormy operation, which was going to move the NSA.
Which is like one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world, moving their information to the Amazon cloud, which if you really try and wrap your head around that like the, you know, the intelligence might have the United States being moved on to the Amazon cloud just thinking about that is wild.
But like the reliance on big tech and this sort of like intertwining of both goals but also financial fortunes, it's hard to see how it doesn't reach the place that you're documenting right now.
It feels like this is a long sort of evolution that unfortunately is reaching sort of a fever pitch at this point.
I think you're right about that.
And, you know, part of this has to do with global geopolitics, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, what's happening in Gaza right now, all of these things are fueling this process and really turbocharging it.
And that really is what motivated me to get this piece done at this moment, particularly, you know, I've been working on a book on this topic, but when the opportunity came to write this report for The cost of war project at Brown University, I jumped on it because I do think we've reached a critical moment.
We haven't talked about one other point of geopolitical tension, which is also driving this process as much as anything else, which is the, and I touch on this towards the end of my report, is this rhetoric about an AI arms race between the US and China, which you want to talk about fever pitch, That is just front and center right now among the vast majority of top brass in the Pentagon.
This narrative that, you know, if we don't just pull out all the stops on our AI research, forget about regulation, forget about ethics, but we're going to fall behind and we're going to lose our dominant place in the world political hierarchy.
Not only is it the Pentagon officials, the high civilian officials at the Pentagon that are talking about this narrative,
But it's also the tech executives, with Eric Schmidt, you know, the former CEO of Google, being at the top of the list, but we can also include Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and all these other folks that have been parroting the same line, that if we don't act now on AI, if the military doesn't get on board with this, you know, then all hell will break loose and China will be the only remaining superpower, et cetera, et cetera.
I think that's very dangerous rhetoric.
Dangerous that I think it's really concerning some contrary voices within the defense establishment.
And so that this is and I think we all need to understand that when we talk about the Pentagon or when we talk about the intelligence community, these are not monolithic institutions.
There are people within these institutions that are sincerely concerned and want to hit the brakes on this stuff.
Because they are truly concerned, if not frightened, about the speed with which all of this is playing out.
Well, I just wanted to say real fast, Dr. Gonzales, and I'm so glad that you brought up the quote-unquote new Cold War with China, because everything that you just said about this AI arms race, you could replace going back into the 1950s with the missile gap.
And one of the things that you see with the investment in American, the construction of the military-industrial complex in the first place, is overestimating what the enemy is doing.
I mean, during, you know, our face-off with the USSR, there was this belief that they were an invincible, you know, arm-to-the-teeth machine.
And it turns out that those, you know, sort of estimates weren't just wrong, but they were misleading for certain purposes.
And like the rhetoric that you're talking about, it sounds like it's a one-way trip to, like you said, supercharging, investment in this stuff, and in the process, actually going ahead and escalating the problem in the first place.
Does that seem correct?
That's very much part of the point that I'm making in that part of this report is that it's, you know, when you speed things up that much and when you create such an overhyped situation, this runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And that's really concerning.
And you're right.
The Cold War analogy is clear.
The so-called bomber and missile gaps of the late 1950s and early 60s Which, incidentally, is part of, I think, what motivated Dwight Eisenhower to come up with this concept of the military-industrial complex.
We forget sometimes that it was a Republican president of that time, decorated military veteran, who expressed his concern about the growing role of the private sector In defense policy and in political life in the U.S.
I mean, he saw this industry as a threat to democracy.
And I don't think it's too far of a stretch to draw parallels between that moment and the moment we're living through now with the vast financial resources that a company like Microsoft or Amazon have, not to mention the data that they own about us and about people in other parts of the world who use their services and platforms and so forth.
I mean, that should really be a wake-up call for us all.
I'm curious.
I was reading through the report, and we're talking about the big titans of industry who are involved in the military development of potential weapons and AI.
There was one name that was decidedly absent in this, and I was curious if that was by design that Elon Musk doesn't come up in what you were reporting on.
Well, Elon Musk, I mean, he's an interesting, interesting character.
Clearly, I mean, he's played a role as half his enterprises.
But what I'm looking at here, you know, by comparison, his ventures would be very small compared to the kinds of contracts, at least the publicly known contracts between Microsoft, if we compare them to his enterprises versus, say, Microsoft or Amazon or Oracle.
Now, this raises a whole question, which is how difficult it is to gather this research.
And it may well be that Musk's companies and his interests are on a par.
I don't know.
And the fact is that we don't know the extent to which Microsoft or Oracle, or if we look at the startups, the Palantir's and the Andruel Industries, we don't know the full extent to which those companies have contracts because so much of what is being spent is classified.
And it takes a long process to try to get those documents declassified.
The source I've used the most for this report has been the research done by a terrific organization that I would recommend to all of your listeners called Tech Inquiry.
You can find them easily online at techinquiry.org.
And the interesting thing about this research group, it's classified as a non-profit, as you'll see, but what the person that founded or co-founded the organization is actually a former Google chief scientist, a senior scientist, who actually stepped away from a very lucrative career there because of his Objection to that company's involvement in the business of war.
This was back in 2017 or 2018, and his career has taken an interesting turn in that now, you know, he is one of the key researchers and co-founder of Tech Inquiry, which uses the same tools of AI, but to scour the internet for publicly available information and contracts that involve the tech companies And the Department of Defense and intelligence community.
So again, it's a really valuable research for journalists for reporters for academics.
I would highly recommend it.
It's been very useful to me, but not even that provides the full picture because of the question of classification of many of these projects.
Oh, absolutely.
And you know, I brought up Musk because he did make the news at some point around the Ukraine-Russia conflict, where he seemed to have some version of control over whether Ukraine could then carry out an attack on Russia or not.
And we also know that the State Department had been blanching at the fact that he's been involved in some of these high-level talks.
This all deals with the internet and how drones could work with his Starlink system.
And so it makes me wonder, what is your biggest nightmare scenario or fear out of this?
If we're talking about drones, we're talking about AI, what really is going to keep you up at night as this thing progresses?
And it's not just me, I think, who has this concern.
I think there are plenty of people within the different armed services, within the branches of the military, even within high rankings, a few high-ranking Pentagon officials, that the momentum will, to adopt these AI-enabled weapon and surveillance systems, that the momentum will build up to the point
That the Pentagon, the acquisitions people, contractors within the Pentagon, start adopting these technologies without a full understanding of what the consequences might be once they're unleashed out in the real world.
It might well be that some of these technologies are easily fooled or hacked.
It might be that some of these technologies wind up killing innocent civilians or U.S.
military personnel themselves.
So there are lots of fears around this kind of thing, even within a Brave voices within the military people, one of the people that I quote in the report is a retired US Air Force Lieutenant General by the name of Jack Shanahan.
Who on a couple of occasions has expressed misgivings about the speed with which the AI technologies are being adopted.
And this from someone who was a staunch supporter five years ago.
And I don't want to say he has stopped providing support, but I think he's one of a few voices trying to hit the brakes on this.
And I haven't had any conversations with him personally.
But I've read enough of what he's published, and you can find some of these sources again cited in my article, that made me realize this isn't just academics like myself that are expressing concerns or people that have long been critical of US militarization or militarism, but also people from within the institutions themselves.
And I think that really should be a worry.
I agree.
And Dr. Gonzales, I wanted to go ahead and commend you, first of all.
I feel like a lot of the research and documenting of these things, oftentimes numbers can sort of become so large and abstract that it's almost impossible to wrap your head around them, and it becomes like so many drops of rain in a storm.
And one of the things that I really admired about your piece is that as you were talking about the money and the development, You also continued to remind readers that there are costs to this that go beyond the money that's being moved around.
How like moving specifically towards weapons technology actually keeps us from other innovations.
The ones that you cited is that by focusing on these things we're losing chances for dealing with climate change, dealing with epidemics, and also creating a sustainable society.
Well, also bringing up the fact that a lot of our developments, including things like the internet, which is allowing us to talk right now and to broadcast and publish this interview, were created with military investment but also have civilian benefits.
Can you talk a little bit about how that's changing and your concerns about how that is sort of escalating?
Well, you know, great question, first of all.
I'm glad you're asking it, because I've had some people along the way ask, you know, what the heck does a cultural anthropologist know about this stuff?
You know, he ought to be out, you know, doing his fieldwork in a small village someplace.
You know, why is he getting involved with this?
Let's leave this to the, you know, the political analysts, or the international relations people, or the policymakers, right?
And for me, that's always That's always made me think just, you know, how, how much, how far we need to go as a society to understand the benefits, not only of political science, that kind of an approach to international affairs or to these kind of big questions, existential questions, in fact.
But there are also social sciences like anthropology that can contribute to the conversation.
Here's where I'm going with it.
One of the things cultural anthropologists do is to compare societies and to compare different regions around the world.
My graduate research was conducted in rural Mexico.
Long story, I won't lose time there, but I will say that I've had the opportunity to travel to Europe and give talks there at different EU and NATO countries and have been Really impressed on many levels with the kinds of questions they ask and the kinds of critiques and concerns that they have about these processes right now.
And in those travels, and any of your listeners that have had the opportunity to travel to other parts of the world, whether it's Latin America or European Union countries or Asian countries, you're often struck, among other things, by the fact that, hey, you know what?
They've got pretty good infrastructure here.
Or, you know what, they've got a pretty good educational system here.
Or, you know what, they don't have problems with the kind of gun violence that we do here in the U.S.
And so, as an anthropologist, you know, those kinds of cross-cultural comparison questions are always really fascinating.
And I think part of the reason that it's important to reflect on this in a critical way is because so many of the problems that we have, the conversation that we're having right now, is in large part driven by this force, this culture of militarization that has been at the core of U.S.
society, I would say, since at least 1947, since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947.
That's when the whole country was reoriented around the question of building up the military, whether it was science, whether it was healthcare, whether it was the production of energy.
If you look, comparatively speaking, at the amount of money that's spent on Pentagon research and development, Compared to money that's allocated to the National Science Foundation, this is the biggest scientific government-funded research institution in the U.S.
It's a travesty.
I mean, the ratio, it's a small percentage.
The whole budget for the NSF, the annual budget, is somewhere along the lines of $9 or $10 billion.
Compare that to the Pentagon's annual budget, which is now pushing almost a trillion dollars a year.
At the moment, it's at about $900 billion, give or take a few tens of billions.
But if you compare that to a country like the Netherlands, just to take one example, or Germany or Belgium, it's mind-boggling, the amount of resources.
So that many of the scientists, for example, they get funded at my own university at San Jose State, actually get funded by the DoD for doing, you know, work in social science or for doing work in biology.
And they're getting, you know, they're getting funded by the Pentagon.
Why is that the case?
Why aren't they getting their money from other sources?
And the answer to that is the militarization of the society itself, which again, we're many decades into now.
To undo that is going to take a really concerted effort and a lot of activism and I think a lot of soul searching, frankly, on the part of our fellow citizens to get there.
But I think for me, as an anthropologist, I've had the luxury and the ability to travel and make those comparisons and And I also feel responsible for sharing these critical views with my fellow citizens here at home, not to critique for the sake of critiquing, but to maybe get people thinking about, hey, it doesn't have to be this way.
We can fund other aspects of the society using different institutions, different public institutions, whether it's the Department of of education or whether it's a Department of Health and Human Services, there's other ways that this can be done.
And I think that's a really important lesson out of all of this.
And part of what anthropology can contribute as a science to these kinds of ideas.
Wonderful.
Well, Dr. Gonzalez, thank you so much for joining us on the Muckrake podcast.
The article is How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex.
You can find that at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Dr. Gonzalez's book is War Virtually, the Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future.
Thank you again for this work and presenting this.
I hope it's read far and wide and best of luck.
I appreciate it again.
Thank you, Jared, and thanks, Nick.
All right, everybody.
That was Dr. Roberto J. Gonzales of San Jose State University.
Again, the article is How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex.
I cannot recommend this to enough people.
I feel like Dr. Gonzales' work is absolutely vital.
I'm so happy you got to come by.
Oh yeah, that was a really great chat.
And you know, it's funny when I keep hearing military-industrial complex and we think about Eisenhower, you know, I've been, again, this is my obsession with JFK, but there is some indication to me as I'm going through some readings that, you know, he was predicting where we are now, right?
And how it would become a very capitalistic thing and they'd cut corners and they wouldn't be testing things that'd be dangerous.
He might've been also predicting the JFK assassination.
Well, he was predicting the start of something and, you know, we didn't get it.
We didn't have enough time with Dr. Gonzales to get into this in totality.
But there is a momentum that builds with stuff like this.
You know what I mean?
And for the record, I can't believe I'm getting ready to say this, but regardless of who assassinated John Fitzgerald Kennedy, regardless of it, the one reason that we talk about it is that JFK got into office and at one point goes, holy shit, what the hell is going on here?
Something is happening and I don't have the power that I should have.
The American people are being lied to.
The CIA and the military industrial complex is completely out of control.
They're a dog off a chain.
And to understand that that took place in the 1960s and now we've been living in over 60 to 70 years of it.
It gains a momentum of its own and as it does like sometimes you look up and it's It's not even somebody making a choice.
It's just where things lead.
And I just want to tell everybody, if you're interested in what's going on right now, go and look at the Soviet Union and look at administrative bloat before it fell apart.
It just kept building and building and building and building until it became so unstable that it fell apart.
And it feels like right now, not only are we being co-opted and our funds are being co-opted, but this thing has had a trajectory all of its own that is not necessarily subject to control.
It just builds and builds and builds like a snowball from hell rolling down the side of a mountain.
Well, I will say this, I'll play devil's advocate for a second, because are you aware of some of the more common but vital household items that we have that have been developed basically out of military applications?
Absolutely!
And, you know, I thought Dr. Gonzales talked about this a little bit, but I think that there's been a ton of stuff that we enjoy that has come from military research.
It doesn't mean it's great, but sure.
We would not have had silly putty, Jared.
Silly putty.
How about sanitary napkins?
That's cool.
Microwaves, those are important, right?
Aviator sunglasses apparently came out of military, I think.
What else am I looking at here?
Superglue.
Superglue is really important, right?
It saved all of our lives.
How about computers?
Computers themselves?
The one thing that we're so afraid of right now with AI were actually developed militarily, you know, in the imitation game.
Nick, I don't know that I could possibly come back from your first example being silly putty.
And all I can think about now is Silly Putty, the first moment.
You get it out of the egg, you love it, and then the first time it gets hair on it, and it's just like, done.
That's it.
Yeah, that's a... I don't even think... Thank you.
I didn't want to have that thought.
I don't think I've ever had that thought, but okay.
You know what I really wish was?
I wish Slinky... The Slinky was also a military thing.
I don't think it was, but that would be a really cool thing too, like, you know.
You just want to live in that world.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I have ideas, man.
I have ideas about all these things.
It'd be interesting shows about this.
Like, how did they develop Silly Putty?
It'd be funny, you know, little eight episode thing on Netflix where you realize what it is, you know, and then, you know, I don't know.
But yeah, listen, every once in a while, sometimes those things do really well.
But I have to imagine that the environment that Silly Putty was invented in, Wholly different than where we are now, where everything is much more bottom line and, you know, focused application.
I would make the, I would, I would make a safe bet that the environment that Silly Putty was created in is a lot different than the one that we are.
And you're not, they were trying to build like a explosive, you know, thing that you put in the bottom of your shoe and then it kills somebody.
I cannot wait to log off of here and do a deep dive into the history of Silly Bunny.
That's wonderful.
All right, everybody.
Well, thank you for listening and your support.
We will be back on Friday with The Weekender.
I just want to tell people, Nick, you don't know it, but I've got some really interesting articles to send you that we might go over on Friday.
I, I, because The Weekender occasionally lets us let our hair down and talk about some weird shit.
There's some weird shit out there that, uh, I'm kind of excited about, so.
Oh, I cannot wait.
Send it over.
Yeah, hopefully the world doesn't, uh, fall into flames.
All right, everybody.
Until then, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSVH, and you can find me at JOSAxton.
