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silicon valley
The Military-Industrial Complex 2.0: Big Tech's War of All Against All
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings.
Mar 10, 2026
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, “if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.” (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) Yet Karp’s speculation hasn’t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that “our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: “I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren’t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC—executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but—as Karp suggests—a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a “rules-based international order.” Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” And those running it want us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.
Alex Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world’s unrivaled political and military power.
Karp’s answer to what’s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don’t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It’s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America’s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.
Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it’s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century—wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place—they still mouth platitudes about pursuing “peace through strength” and using US military power to undergird a “rules-based international order.” Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.
Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?
Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril—a protégé of Palantir founder Peter Thiel—made headlines recently when he told an interviewer from CNBC that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the “wrong things.”
The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey’s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Luckey’s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates—led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon)—that now receive 1 out of every 3 contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. “Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better?” it asks. “…These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed…These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.”
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry.
The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.
But spending less on weapons—as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities—can’t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.
Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector’s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging—safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was “trust but verify.” In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be “mistrust and verify.” We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.
The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids
Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn’t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption—from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by—yes!—Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance’s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.
Then came Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn’t at that agency. Instead, Musk’s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.
There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)
The problem with the new techno-militarists isn’t that they’re mistaken about technology’s power, but that they’re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we’ve heard this story before—from Cold War nuclear strategists, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts, and the architects of the “shock and awe” doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.
What makes today’s moment especially dangerous is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with—and die from—the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates.
The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It’s produced by diplomacy; restraint; adhering to international law and economic justice; and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.
Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don’t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine’s version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should frighten us all.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can’t afford to take.
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The Data Lords Are Taxing Our Water and Power to Build Their Castles
Data center dukes and barons appropriate land and resources while indirectly taxing the middle and lower class through higher utility bills.
Feb 22, 2026
Data centers are the modern equivalent of feudal castles. They dominate the landscape, consume resources, and aggregate power. Unlike medieval barons, though, today’s data dukes don’t live in their castles. Their “court” is in Washington and Silicon Valley, but they expect their local vassals to pay tribute through higher utility rates, water, and electricity consumption. A data center complex is being built near my home. I feel like my village is being colonized.
Data Centers have huge moats, which indirectly consume vast quantities of water, electricity, and land. I’d like to know—in addition to utility rate impacts—what their carbon footprint is over time. Yet, like a lot of non-tech-engaged citizens, I have more questions than answers.
“Unmitigated data center growth puts the public at risk of large cost increases, from higher utility bills to public health costs to climate impacts," according to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a national nonprofit advocacy group. In Illinois alone, where I live, the UCS estimates that electric utility rates could soar:
- "From 2026 to 2050, data center load growth will increase electricity system costs in Illinois by $24 billion to $37 billion, or 15% to 24%."
- "Based on current trends, data centers will account for up to 72% of electricity demand growth in Illinois by 2030."
- "Overall electricity demand could increase by more than half by 2035. Data centers will still account for up to 65% of that growth by 2035 as electrification of other sectors starts to play a bigger role."
Data Centers typically have voracious electrical and water demands. They need huge amounts of electricity to power their citadel of computer servers and water to cool them. According to an analysis by CLC JAWA, the local water agency for Lake County, the proposed Grayslake data center near my home will use up to 1.6 billion (giga) watts of electricity in its first phase. When completed, the first phase will use about 50,000 gallons of water daily, which is roughly equivalent to an average-sized health and fitness club.
Worse yet, since there are no national or state regulations on data centers, their power consumption could increase the burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal and gas)
Yet the demand for water in the “T5” Grayslake data center around the corner from my home will spike when it pumps water into its “closed-loop” (recirculated) cooling system. Filling up that system—what the operators call a “flush and fill”—will require an estimated 3.2 million gallons over several days. Keep in mind that’s treated Lake Michigan water, which is not billed at a higher rate for industrial use. Will that outsize water consumption raise rates for residential water users? That’s not clear, although the combined water and power usage will be enormous for a 470 acre-complex (approved by the local village board) with up to 10 million total square feet in less than 20 buildings.
Worse yet, since there are no national or state regulations on data centers, their power consumption could increase the burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal and gas). That means more pollutants and greenhouse gases flowing into our atmosphere. At the very least, local residents need more detailed information on utility and environmental impact.
Across the border in Wisconsin, there’s been an outcry over lack of information on data castles. Meta, the holding company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has proposed a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, reports Wisconsin Watch. It’s 1 of 7 major proposed data centers in Wisconsin that are worth more than $57 billion combined. Local governments in the Dairy State, though, which already has 40 data centers, have been reluctant to disclose details.
There’s also been pushback against data centers in New York state, where a tough data center law is being drafted. At least 19 have been cancelled in Michigan. Although action this year is unlikely, a stricter federal data center bill called the “Power for the People Act (S. 3682) was filed in the US Senate. The bill is supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Citizen’s Utility Board in Illinois.
Back in Illinois, legislators and environmentalists are mobilized. Gov. JB Pritzker announced a two-year pause on data center tax breaks in his recent budget address. In the Illinois General Assembly, the introduction of the POWER Act would set some guardrails on water use and environmental impact. It’s being sponsored by Prairie Rivers Network and the Clean Jobs Coalition.
The Illinois General Assembly is also considering data center regulation this year. “By requiring data centers to supply new carbon-free electricity resources,” the UCS report notes, “Illinois can protect other electricity consumers and stay consistent with its clean energy goals, while at the same time seeking improved federal policies.”
Data Center operators are concentrating their expansion in Great Lakes states because that’s where the water is: They need fresh water to cool their hot, thirsty servers. According to a new study by the University of Virginia:
At the end of 2024, the Great Lakes region was hosting approximately 20% of all US data centers and had 500+ operational facilities. By 2030, Illinois and Ohio together will account for about 50% of regional sites, and planned and under construction facilities will increase by 42% regionally. More than 95% of data centers are located in large or medium metro counties, anchored by Chicago, Columbus, New York City, and Minneapolis.
Unlike the legendary story of Robin of Locksley, who robbed the rich to give to the poor, data center dukes and barons appropriate land and resources while indirectly taxing the middle and lower class through higher utility bills. Yet these “reverse Robin Hoods” don’t do this on roads winding through dark forests. They do it in plain sight during daylight, although they hate the transparency of sunlight and community activism.
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Khanna Hits Back as Silicon Valley Oligarchs Threaten Primary Challenge Over California Billionaires Tax
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where... healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," the San Francisco lawmaker said.
Dec 28, 2025
US Rep. Ro Khanna defended California's proposed tax on extreme wealth Saturday after a pair of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists threatened to launch a primary bid for his California House seat.
The proposal, which advocates are gathering signatures to place on the ballot in 2026, would impose a one-time 5% tax on those with net worths over $1 billion to recoup about $90 billion in Medicaid funds stripped from the state by this year’s Republican budget law. The roughly 200 billionaires affected would have five years to pay the tax.
While higher taxes on the superrich are overwhelmingly popular with Americans, the proposal has rankled many of California’s wealthiest residents, as well as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said earlier this month that he’s “adamantly” against the measure.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that two of the valley's biggest powerbrokers—venture capitalist and top Trump administration ally Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page—were threatening to reduce their ties to California in response to the tax proposal.
This has been a common refrain from elites faced with proposed tax increases, though data suggests they rarely follow through on their threats to bail on cities and states, even when those hikes are implemented. Meanwhile, the American Prospect has pointed out that the one-time tax would still apply to those who moved out of the Golden State.
Khanna (D-Calif.), who is both a member of the House's progressive faction and a longtime darling of the tech sector, has increasingly sparred with industry leaders in recent years over their reactionary stances on labor rights, regulation, and taxation.
In a post on X, the congressman reacted with derision at the threats of billionaire flight: "Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt] said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, 'I will miss them very much.'"
Casado, who donated to Khanna’s 2024 reelection campaign according to OpenSecrets, complained that “Ro has done a speed run, alienating every moderate I know who has supported him, including myself.”
"Beyond being totally out of touch with [the moderate] faction of his base, he’s devolved into an obnoxious jerk," Casado continued. "At least that makes voting him the fuck out all the more gratifying."
Casado's post received a reply from another former Khanna donor, Garry Tan, the CEO of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator.
"Time to primary him," Tan said of Khanna.
Tan, a self-described centrist Democrat, has never run for office before. But he is notorious for his social media tirades against local progressives in San Francisco and was one of the top financial backers of the corporate-led push to oust the city's liberal former district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022.
Casado replied: "Count me in. Happy to be involved at any level."
Progressive commentator Krystal Ball marveled that “Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against Ro Khanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax.”
So far, neither Casado nor Tan has hinted at any concrete plans to challenge Khanna in 2026. If they did, defeating him would likely be a tall order—since his sophomore election in 2018, a primary challenger has never come within 30 points of unseating him.
But Khanna still felt the need to respond to the brooding tech royals. He noted that he has "supported a modest wealth tax since the day I ran in 2016," which prompted another angry retort from Casado, who accused the congressman of "antagonizing the people who made your district the amazing place it is" with a tax on billionaires.
Khanna hit back at his critics with a lengthy defense of not just the wealth tax, but his conception of what he calls "pro-innovation progressivism."
"My district is $18 trillion, nearly one-third of the US stock market in a 50-mile radius. We have five companies with a market cap over $1 trillion," Khanna said. "If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other [House] members or 100 senators."
"The seminal innovation in tech is done by thousands, often with public funds," Khanna continued. "Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation... But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2% tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory."
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where 70% of Americans believe the American dream is dead and healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," he concluded. "What will stifle American innovation, what will make us fall behind China, is if we see further political dysfunction and social unrest, if we fail to cultivate the talent in every American and in every city and town... So, yes, a billionaire tax is good for American innovation, which depends on a strong and thriving American democracy."
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