Silicon Reich: Big Tech and Big Brother's Unholy Matrimony

In this episode, we dig into the origins of the internet as a Cold War surveillance project and trace how Silicon Valley grew up inside the U.S. defense ecosystem. We look at how companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir didn’t just partner with the government and state machinery—they were shaped by it. These tech titans provide the cloud systems, predictive algorithms, and data pipelines modern militaries and intelligence agencies depend on. We answer the question: Why are the world’s biggest tech companies American, and why are they so deeply intertwined with the military and intelligence world?

Pulling from Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we break down how tech giants turned all of us into raw material for trillion-dollar platforms, and how the normalization of constant tracking quietly erased the idea of privacy. From predictive policing and digital profiling to the smart devices that follow us everywhere, we’re living in a system where our clicks, movements, and conversations fuel both corporate profit and government control. The outrage that once met surveillance, from the MIT critics of the 1960s to the Snowden leaks, has faded into passive acceptance.

Underneath it all is a bigger question: What does freedom look like in a world built for permanent observation? The tragedy isn’t the technology; it’s how deeply it’s been weaponized for control, inequality, and empire. This episode asks whether a different digital future is still possible, or if we’re already too deep inside the surveillance machine to find a way out.

Episode Transcript

(00:07):
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly because it's all bullshit and
it's bad for you. Today we're diving into the long
standing ties between Big Tech and the US government, military
and intelligence agencies. I'm your host Lola Michaels here
with comrade Know it All, Ezra Saeed.

(00:27):
Hi, everybody. Hi, Lola.
And our not so Pixie dream girl Cam cruise.
What's up, everybody? Check out our website
unwashedun-ruly.com. You can find all our episodes,
extra content, join our mailing lists, shout at us or praise us.
And don't forget, we're battlingthe big tech algorithms too, so

(00:47):
please rate and review us today.From the beginning, the tech
industry wasn't about communication or empowerment for
the masses. The Internet and the tech that
came with it were born of Cold War spy networks and defense
research. The tech industry has always

(01:08):
been tied to surveillance and counterinsurgency.
Big Tech was built in collaboration with the State
Department, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle.
The Machiavellis who dream of a Silicon Reich are deeply woven
into the military and intelligence web.
Every cloud contract, every algorithm, every new smart

(01:29):
device brings the government, Pentagon, and Silicon Valley
closer together. We're living in a surveillance
empire where privacy is dead, where predictive technology
targets black and brown people and immigrants, where digital
profiling is a tool for political repression,
imperialist war, and colonial projects.
Every click, every message, every search we make fuels that

(01:52):
system. Our phones are tracking devices,
apps and algorithms know our habits, our location, our
health, our money, our relationships, our political
views. What does freedom look like in a
world where everything can be monitored, stored and analyzed
by tech oligarchs and the state?The tragedy isn't the technology
itself, it's how it's been weaponized for profit and

(02:14):
control. The Internet could have been
something different, but in the hands of authoritarian
technocrats, we're left living inside the high tech dystopia
that science fiction warned us about.
So when we talk about power today, it's not just armies or
weapons. It's really about who controls

(02:36):
digital infrastructure, who dominates the markets, and who
holds the patents. The tech oligarchs have an
unprecedented concentration of economic power as well as being
the owners of the mass media, and this started before their
cozy relationship and contracts with the Trump administration.
Now, of course, they're trusted allies and it's all out in the
open. Over the last two decades,

(02:59):
especially after 911, Big Tech has become a permanent fixture
of U.S. military and intelligence strategy.
Modern militaries can't functionwithout the messianic overlords
of Big Tech Palantir, NVIDIA, Intel, Open AI, and all the
others. These companies provide the
cloud networks, the predictive algorithms, the infrastructure,

(03:19):
the data systems. So they're not just contractors
or suppliers, but essential partners in the execution of
state power. So let's start there.
How did we get to a point where private tech companies have
become such indispensable players in the machinery of
capitalist state power, repression and more?
I think there was never a time when they weren't tied to the

(03:40):
state. They were always part of the
state structure from the beginning.
And as the technology advanced and became more powerful and
more intrusive, those ties became deeper because they
became more useful to the state and the government.
So anytime you talk about the tech industry from its very
origins to the present, you really cannot divorce it from

(04:03):
the state. Now, how it expresses itself
over the years differs. There was a time when they would
try to hide the fact that they were essentially tools of the
government. And there was a time when they
would talk about, you know, as Google put it, don't be evil and
things like that. But the fundamental starting

(04:23):
point has always been that theseguys are in mesh with the state.
And in fact, as we go further inthis episode and talk about it,
you'll see that a lot of the technologies that they deployed
today are technologies that wereworked out with the US
government in particular, in order to advance American
government interests. And then they get taken over by
private companies. And these companies then

(04:46):
advance, of course, their interest, which is also to make
massive amounts of profit. Yeah, I think they did in the
past at least try to downplay their involvement.
Google did actually delete Don'tBe Evil from its global contract
very explicitly. But yeah, they're bending over
backwards to get their piece of the action, and they have an
excessive amount of classified information at their fingertips

(05:09):
and all the raw data from tracking and surveilling us.
Yeah, one of the things you should bear in mind is it's
virtually impossible to live as a human being in the modern
world today without being completely tracked in everything
that you do. You can view it as something
that started in a somewhat superficial way, but not
entirely incorrect. Something that started with

(05:31):
Google in the late 90s and how they crawled the web, and then
how they figured how to use thatto then crawl and extract as
much data as they can from theirusers.
All these free services that Google provides in terms of
e-mail, documents and other freeservices are not really free.

(05:55):
What you're giving up in exchange for them is your entire
life you're advertising yourself.
And then around 2007 eight, withthe introduction of the iPhone
from Apple, that took the intrusion to a whole new level
because what used to be an intrusion based on what you did
on the Internet now became an intrusion based on what you did

(06:18):
every moment of your life because the phone was with you
at all times. And we have gone so far beyond
just the phone. Now there's this whole category,
the Internet of Things. Well, that means simple
appliances from refrigerators tomicrowaves to toasters, to
televisions, heaters, etcetera. They're all now connected to the

(06:39):
Internet and basically sharing data about your every moment of
existence. And that data is collated and
that data is then sold to other companies.
And it's used in the first instance by these companies for
advertisement. And one of the lines that a lot
of these companies would in particular Google used to do
this, would say is, well, betterus to have that data than the

(07:03):
government. The problem is that dichotomy is
false. Data being in the hands of
Google or in the hands of Meta or Facebook or any of those
companies is the equivalent of data being in the hands of the
government. Yeah, the line between the tech
executives and military officials and the police and the
government and these intelligence agencies has

(07:25):
completely blurred over. And of course the media
executives, because let's not forget the Jeff Bezos and the
Larry Ellison's and everyone whoare in control of the mass media
and what's being produced, what algorithms are, what censorship
there is, etcetera. So the person running the war
and selling the weapons is the same person, and there was a

(07:45):
bunch of executives from Meta, Open AI and Palantir who were
literally sworn in as Army Reserve officers.
I think you can say this with almost everything the Trump
administration is doing. The groundwork was laid down by
the Democratic Party and Trump, as is the case usually with

(08:06):
Trump and the Republicans more generally, then takes it to the
NTH degree. This open relationship between
the Titans of tech and the US government.
It's very naked and flagrant right now, but it's not really
something that just started under the Trump administration.
If listeners don't remember, in 2013 or so, there were these

(08:29):
revelations that were brought out by Edward Snowden.
He was a contractor working for the NSA, and he showed that the
NSA was using a project called PRISM to basically use the data
collected by Google and other companies to spy on whoever they
wanted to spy on. Yeah, I remember that being a
big deal, that they were collecting phone records from

(08:51):
pretty much every American. Yeah, they were basically
collecting whatever data they wanted.
And it's interesting what the response to that was.
Yes, Snowden was a big deal. What he did was very courageous.
He was driven out of the countryfor what he did when he's now
living in Russia. Now, this is under the Obama
administration. What was the government's
response to that? The way it came out, the prison

(09:12):
project, the way it came out wasthat the government was forcing
Google and Facebook and other companies to share their data,
that it was something that was imposed by the government on
these private companies. The reality, it's probably more
complex than that, But what the Obama administration's response
to this was, let's actually makethe relationship more open.

(09:34):
Let's actually try to just tear down that wall, this idea that
this is something that we force on you.
So one of the books I read in preparation for this was this
book called Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are
Transforming the Future of War. And it's by two guys, Raj M Shah
and Christopher Kerchoff. And the both of them were the

(09:58):
first leaders of this thing called Unit X, which is better
known as the Defense Innovation Unit or DIU, which was the
brainchild of the Obama administration and in particular
the deputy Secretary of Defense at the time, Ash Carter.
And the fundamental premise of the book is that quote, sometime

(10:21):
in the 1990s, Silicon Valley andthe Pentagon stop talking to
each other. The two decade explosion of
consumer electronics that began in the 2000 somehow became
invisible to the Pentagon. Now, that's I think is bullshit.
But what it is getting at is that sometime beginning in the
late 90s to early 2000s, their relationship between the

(10:42):
Pentagon and the intelligence agencies and the US government
more broadly, and these giant tech companies became something
that you kept behind a secret veil.
And basically this program was to say, let's bring it out in
the open, guys. We all share the same values,
the values of supposedly human rights, democracy, freedom.

(11:03):
Monopoly, surveillance, Completepower.
Exactly. And remember, this was in the
wake of things like Twitter revolutions, as they were
calling them. These are all things we can all
work together on. There's no reason to project it
as an adversarial relationship. And so weapons programs,
intelligence sharing programs, etcetera, should be something we

(11:26):
proudly do rather than somethingwe do in the dark.
And Trump has simply taken that to the NTH degree.
Let's talk a little bit about some of those contracts that
exist that we've seen. So these were initially marketed
as counterterrorism partnershipsand they are these massive
procurement deals, these multi billion dollar cloud contracts

(11:49):
with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
There's AI programs like ProjectMaven.
That's where Amazon and Microsoft were contracted by the
Department of Defense to developAI technologies for improving
image recognition and military drones.
We know that open AI, Sam Altman's organization won 200

(12:11):
million with AUS defense contract in June.
Amazon Web Services, they provide their computing services
to U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense.
Microsoft is supplying augmentedreality advisors.
Those are those HoloLens for military activities and digital
tools for armored vehicles. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and

(12:33):
Oracle have all been awarded contracts for defense cloud
infrastructure under projects like joint war fighting, cloud
capacity, The Ukraine, Spacex's Starlink, That's Elon Musk.
They keep the army online. And then of course there's
Israel, which is the big one, right?
So in Gaza, Amazon and Google's project Nimbus, they supply

(12:55):
Israel with AI driven facial recognition and object tracking
tools that's woven into their military operations in order to
murder, massacre Palestinians inthe West Bank.
They use facial recognition for tracking and monitoring every
single Palestinian person in theoccupied territories.
Israel also has a lot of big AI projects with NVIDIA.

(13:16):
So it's just it's all of the map.
Yeah. And one company that you didn't
mention is Apple, which doesn't really do much in terms of the
cloud services, but they do provide the military with a lot
of hardware. And so like the hardware that
Apple sells to the military is not the iPhone that you're going
to buy. It's specially made for the US
military. They also have some of their

(13:37):
biggest R&D systems, especially for their advanced chips in
Israel itself. The other thing is about AI.
I mean, AI now sort of presents a whole other thing that people
have been talking about AI in terms of jobs and things like
that. And that's all very important.
There's also the whole element of how much resources of tech it
takes to build it to maintain these data centers.

(13:58):
And again, that's all very important, but I want to
approach it from a whole other side, which is where as before,
these companies had to work to, to extract your data and share
it with AI. We are basically giving it away
in a way that's that we hadn't done before.
The amount of information that'sbeing shared on AI is really

(14:18):
quite extraordinary in the intimacy of that information and
the depth of that information, maybe not quantitatively, but
qualitatively. And the thing about AI is AI in
the military have been linked from the very beginning.
They basically grew up together,but going back to the 1950s and
60s. So the US Department of Defense,
now Department of War, specifically this organization

(14:42):
called ARPA, Advanced Research Project Agency, which would
later become in 1972, DARPA, same name, just add Defense in
the beginning was bankrolling the first wave of artificial
intelligence research. There were a number of
characters, John McCarthy, Barbara Minsky at the Herbert
Simon and Carnegie Mellon. We're all working on projects

(15:03):
funded by Cold War defense moneythat government wanted computers
that could translate languages, recognize patterns, help make
battlefield decisions faster. By the 80s, DARPA had a
strategic computing initiative trying to build smart vehicles
and digital Co pilots, basicallyearly versions of the autonomous
systems we talked about today. So from day one, AI wasn't a

(15:24):
curiosity, it was about security, national security.
And that connection only has intensified.
So it's really interesting to learn that so much of this
technology is a result of military money because one of
the only places the US invests money is into the military.
So to think that this is one of the last places where America is

(15:46):
kind of leading the pack in terms of AI technology and all
of these algorithms that are like pattern finding algorithms,
of course there has to be military dollars involved in it.
It only makes sense. Yeah, and war is really good for
business. They get a ton of money from
these military contracts and defense industry is considered
for these tech giants to be recession proof and very stable.

(16:08):
And you know, if they don't get enough profits from customers
because people aren't able to invest in tech as much or people
aren't buying the new VR headsetor whatever, the military is
like the perfect customer for. Them a government contract.
You can't beat a government contract, Yeah.
Yeah. So to give you just a couple of
examples, the CIA started something called Operation
Keyhole. Keyhole is what became Google

(16:30):
Maps that we all use today. The CIA also had another AI
based rudimentary research whichbecame a private company through
its in Q Tel. In Q Tel is ACIA front sort of
venture capitalist investment front that the CIA has.
That's what became initially Siri and then Alexa and whatever

(16:54):
digital assistant you want to mention.
That literally just straight line from the CIA straight into
that. The founders of Google, I don't
think you can say they were directly CIA or military, but
the research that they were doing and when they came up
there with their system of web crawling and how to rank the
results that they were getting, that was directly funded by
DARPA. So when your funding is coming

(17:15):
from a particular source, you'regoing to tend to do the thing
that that source thinks is interesting, even if it's in
your mind, not the thing you think is interesting.
See, with the tech industry, people have this image of these
two innovators sitting in a garage working together coming
up with the next great thing. That's not really how it works.

(17:38):
There may have been two guys sitting in a garage coming up
with the next great thing, but behind them was massive
investments coming from venture capitalists.
And behind those, a lot of timeswere military guys were saying,
yeah, that's what we want, so invest in it or that's not what
we want. So this is not really priority
investment for us. So you're getting an interaction

(18:00):
here between some fairly brilliant minds on the ground
who are coming up with ideas, but also the directionality of
those ideas by the military, intelligence services and and
other governmental services thatwant certain things.
And I would say the thing that they want the most is
surveillance. They want to know what is

(18:22):
happening, both for their real or perceived enemies abroad, but
also the ultimate enemy, which is the people at home.
That's. The the biggest threat of all,
yeah, yeah. And like you say, the crazy part
is that we just sign it away willingly when we sign up for
all these apps. Well, but it's become impossible
to live in the modern world without it, and I don't think

(18:44):
that's an accident. Yeah, I think you were alluding
to that before when you were talking about how, you know you
had a choice of being on Facebook or Geo Tag or whatever.
But then at a certain point you get a smartphone and it's
tracking you, and then your dishwasher is like giving
information and you don't reallyhave a choice of opting out
anymore. It just becomes inherently a
part of the world. As you guys probably know, I had

(19:05):
an argument with one of my friends who saw the contract
between Open AI and the Department of Defense and said
that this is a clear reason never to use ChatGPT whatsoever.
And I said, OK, so then have youclosed your Gmail account?
Have you closed every single appthat's spying on you?
You never buy from Amazon, You never go to Whole Foods even
because Amazon and Whole Foods are together and they're doing

(19:28):
all these military contracts. I mean, you basically have an
entire generation of tech Bros who are controlling and have a
say in who gets drone striked. I mean, that's how close the
collaboration is. And you're right, Ezra, that all
of this surveillance technology that's designed for quote UN
quote, counterterrorism or counterinsurgency abroad is

(19:49):
really being used to conduct neighborhood dragnets and to go
after immigrants, black people, you know, anyone who's
considered a political dissidentor oppositionist in any way.
So it's really like a tool of. Domestic control, including on
the predictive policing, which is the big part of Palantir's
whole thing. Yeah.
So to talk about Palantir for a second, it's become very well

(20:11):
known in the last couple of years or in the last year,
especially under the Trump administration.
But it goes back. It was founded in 2003.
It came out of in Q Tel is one of those companies that came out
of in Q Tel. I will refer to it a lot
throughout this episode because I think it's emblematic,
including the people who are associated with it.
But it's kind of emblematic in the sense also of it's one of

(20:34):
those companies that that so many people have heard of, yet
nobody has used any of their products because they don't make
products for the consumer. This is not Apple or Google or
Meta or something like that. This is a company that from day
one was founded for one purpose and one purpose only, which was
to work with the US government, first of all, and foremost, but

(20:55):
also allies of the US governmentlike Israel and Britain and
others to sift through data. So one of the points that I, if
I remember correctly, that Edward Snowden made in his book
on the revelations is that you are collecting so much data and
metadata that at a certain levelit becomes not very useful.
And well, Palantir is the answerto that because their whole

(21:16):
model, they don't collect the data.
Their whole model is data analysis.
And they take the data that anyone has collected, doesn't
matter who and whatever it is, and use it to determine how it
should be collated, how it's best to analyze and to determine
predictiveness. Where is this going to go?
And it's truly frightening because they have their hands on

(21:37):
data coming out of the health industry because they collate
and organize data for the healthindustry all the way to most
recently ICE immigrations and custom enforcement to the to
straight out the military. I have no doubt how much they
work with the state of Israel because they say they do.
I mean, they took out a full page New York Times ad that said
Palantir stands with Israel. So and they basically have

(22:01):
access to everything and are sworn to work with the American
government. One of the clips I'd like to
play is of a recent Palantir quarterly report meeting.
Now, this was something that wasleaked.
We're not supposed to have it. No one is supposed to have it
but it got leaked. It's Yeah day for leakers.
Yeah. Now this is Palantir, which was
founded by the likes of Peter Thiel, who will come to again.

(22:24):
And he is not the CEO. He's not an official officer per
SE, but he's the chairman of thecompany's board.
And Alex Karp, who is the CEO ofPalantir.
The clip itself is Alex Karp speaking.
Is he going to be killing a cat?I honestly can't even imagine.
Like this guy openly talks aboutkilling people so easily.
So like I said, this is from a leaked quarterly report, a

(22:45):
quarterly report to investors where they did stellar, made
tons of money. I'm very happy to have you along
for the journey and you are partners for us.
Every paletarian, we are crushing it.
Everyone else who's listening, we are dedicating our company.
We've dedicated our company to the service of the West of the

(23:05):
United States of America. And we're super proud of the
role we play, especially in places we can't talk about.
And we love our success in the US and globally also, you know,
we are doing what in the United Kingdom and any other places.
Alan Tier is here to disrupt andmake our the decisions.
We partner with the very best inthe world and when it's

(23:26):
necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
Kill the enemies. Yeah, it's literally Palantir
has talked about as the CIA's private equity firm.
And it's another one of those tech companies that there's a
revolving door of staff, which just shows the intersection
where you actually have, like, CIA officials sitting on the

(23:46):
board and vice versa. And.
It's only the most successful one.
There's several. It just happens to be the most
successful one. This is.
A really depraved system too, where the investors are paying
for blood. Like the more blood the better.
Well, that that is literally thewhole point of this company.
The whole point of this company is so that the US abroad has a
better sense of who to aim that drone at, and at home has a

(24:09):
better sense of who to round up and disappear.
Yeah, their surveillance infrastructure is massive and it
has data systems for the Pentagon, ICE, Yeah, although
they're intelligence agencies across the world.
America's allies, America's allies, and as long as they
remain America's allies. OK, so I want to talk a little
bit, Ezra, about how far back this really goes.

(24:30):
You mentioned DARPA, the DefenseAdvanced Research Projects
Agency. One of the books that you read
was Annie Jacobson's The Pentagon's Brain.
And also another book you read was Yasha Levine's Surveillance
Valley, which I highly recommend.
And in both of those books, you get a real sense of the history
of DARPA emerging in the Cold War as the Center for military

(24:53):
innovation and how it helped produce and create everything
from GPS and the early Internet to chemical defoliants, the
first drones. And it really, I think, gives
you a sense that this technologywas never about expanding
freedom, but taking it away. So how far back does this
collaboration actually go? Well, it goes back to the

(25:13):
beginning. So you mentioned The Pentagon's
Brain by Annie Jacobson, and I guess I want to use this
opportunity to say a lot of the books that are written on the
subject celebrate the ties between the US and the tech
industries. So Annie Jacobson's book, The
Pentagon's Brain is not really acritical book, by which I mean,
I mean, I recommend it. People should read it.

(25:34):
There's a lot of useful history in it, but it's not a book that
says, oh, look how terrible thisis.
This is a book that says more ofthis, please.
The other book I mentioned, UnitX, again, it's the same thing.
Interestingly, Yasha Levine's book, A Surveillance Valley, The
Secret Military History of the Internet, which I I very highly
recommend as well, came out in 2017, I believe to the opposite

(25:59):
of rave reviews. It was trashed.
Now I if you look at the reviews, none of them really
trash the facts because the facts are in there and they're
not really disputable. Exactly what they trash is the
interpretation. Fair enough.
You can trash anyones interpretation of the facts
they. Accused.
They accused him of being a conspiracy theorist,

(26:20):
essentially. Of course, of course, of course.
The problem is there's this old saying that time reveals
everything, and between the timethat he published this book in
2017 and what we have today, I think things show that Yasha
Levine's interpretation of the facts have held up very, very
well. 100% as you see, one tech Titan after another fall over

(26:43):
themselves to pledge their allegiance to the US government
and the American way. So before we get into this, I
just want to play another clip. Are we going to get to see how
all the tech Titans kiss the ring?
Yes, so this this is the clip ofthem all kissing the ring, the
ring of the orange one. And this is from a recent dinner

(27:04):
that the Trump administration organized with leaders of the
tech industry. And who you'll hear speaking
here besides the orange one is Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of
Meta, David Sachs, the Cryptozarin the White House, Sergey Brin,
the Co founder of Google, SundarPanchay, CEO of Google, Lisa SU,

(27:24):
CEO of AMD or Advanced Micro Devices, Satya Nadella, CEO of
Microsoft, Tim Cook, CEO of Apples, Sam Altman, CEOCEO of
Open AI, Safra Cuts, CEO of Oracle, and the one and only
Bill Gates, Co founder of Microsoft.
That is a who's who. Yeah, that's that's the A list

(27:46):
right there. Right, so let's just listen to
them kissing the ring. Mark, would you like to say a
few words about the company? Well, thanks for for hosting us.
And this is quite a group to gettogether.
Thank you, Mr. President, it's agreat honor to to work here at
the White House and to to work for you.
Very grateful for your administration support.
We look forward to working together and thanks for your
leadership. We're so grateful for that

(28:06):
support. Thank you so much obviously for
bringing us all together and thepolicies that you have put in
place. Thank you very much.
And also I wanted to thank MadamFirst Lady for hosting.
I want to thank you for including me this evening.
It's incredible to be among everyone here, particularly you
and the First lady. I also want to thank you for

(28:28):
helping American companies around the world for stalls to
echo the comments of Tim and others.
Thank you so much for getting usall together, and thank you for
being such a Probusiness Pro Innovation president.
Thank you. Thank you for everything you're
doing. Thank you for incredible
leadership, including getting this group together.
Thank you, Bill. That is very nice.

(28:50):
And that was live from the Dick sucking collective.
Yeah, And I thought actually TimCook and Sam Altman set up very
well. Tim Cook says thank you for
standing up for American companies because Apple faces a
lot of regulation charges all over Europe.
And Sam Altman, this whole thingabout innovation, you know, in
other words, thank you for cutting down regulations so we

(29:11):
can do what we need to do, building these data centers.
So, you know, it's good businessto work with the government.
It's good business to work with the military.
And it's also useful because forthe military itself, it's a
very, how do you say, symbiotic relationship.
Yeah, symbiotic relationship. And there's also a very strong
syphilitic chain, I might add. With the amount of tech

(29:32):
journalists who genuflect towardthese CEO's without any
criticism and don't have any sense of what this actually
means in terms of their own acceptance and complicity with
the system that is backing theseguys and giving them ultimate
power is just outstanding to me.Yeah, I agree with that.
I really don't see any criticismabout this or any fear about

(29:55):
this in the American media. No, I think the American media,
Stewart Brandt, who we'll come back to later on in the 1970s,
he used to have a saying, we areas gods.
I think the tech industry believes that about themselves,
and I believe the tech journalists and the media in
general believes that about the tech industry.
Yeah, and they promote the idea that they are these genius

(30:17):
innovators who do no wrong. Yeah.
Now, as to the history, I want to actually go back ridiculous
amount of time, which is the late 19th century.
The first time the US used what you can call a rudimentary
computer, which was at the time a tabulation machine, was in
late 19th century when counting the census.
And one of the problems they hadwas there was a huge amount of

(30:39):
immigration coming into the US, which was increasing the
American population. And so you needed to count these
people more quickly. You needed to also categorize
people, where they're coming from and what their ethnicity
is. They were very concerned about
this. Now, most of these immigrants
were coming from Europe. It's just they were parts of
Europe that hadn't been considered white yet, you know,

(31:00):
Eastern Europe, Greece, Jews, Spain, Italy.
And the head of the census in 1900, the 1900 census, was a guy
named Newton Dexter, N He was a wool industry lobbyist.
And he has this quote about how important these tabulation
machines were, which took work that would have taken years to

(31:22):
accomplish and reduced it to months.
He saw these tabulation machinesas a weapon, so he said, quote,
this immigration is profoundly affecting our civilization, our
institutions, our habits and ourideals.
It has transplanted here alien tongues, alien religions and
alien theories of government. It has been a powerful influence

(31:46):
in the rapid disappearance of the puritanical outlook of life,
he went on to say. Without it, it being the
technology, we could never hope to lay bare all the truth we
must have if we are to cope successfully with the problems
growing out of the heterogeneouscommingling of races which our

(32:08):
defective immigration laws are forcing upon us.
So from very early on, advances in technology in the US we're
seen as something to counter thethreat of the other, in this
case the other being what the Nazis would call the
untermention. Now where it comes to something
more recognizable to what we seetoday is really in the post

(32:30):
World War 2 era. One of the questions I would
actually like people to think about is why is it that most
technology companies, almost allthe technology companies in the
world, at least the big ones, are all American?
And, and really the reason for this is they all emerged and
became sort of the dominant force because of their work with

(32:51):
the defense and other American governmental agencies in the
wake of the Second World War, when really nobody else was left
standing in terms of the powerful imperialist countries
outside of the US. So prior to the war, you did
have IBM, which actually grew out of these tabulation machines
that were developed in the late 19th century working with the
American government. They also worked with the Nazis

(33:13):
to tabulate how many Jews were being annihilated in the
concentration camps, how many Jews were being put into forced
labor, etcetera. But what happened was everything
the US did in terms of technological and military
innovation in the post World War2 era was colored by the Cold
War with the Soviet Union and bya technological race with the

(33:35):
Soviet Union. And one of the first things they
did was this thing called Operation Paper clip, which was
an operation to rescue Nazi scientists and bring them to the
US to work with the US in NASA and other institutions to bring
their research and know how to the Americans.
I think they quote UN quote, rescued something like 1600 Nazi

(33:55):
scientists. And they were actually quite
pivotal, particularly in missileresearch.
And that missile research was very much tied to the space race
that, if you remember, was happening between the US and the
Soviet Union in the Cold War. So when in the late 1950's, the
Soviets launched Sputnik, which was the first manned satellite,
and successfully brought back that first person into space,

(34:17):
back to Earth alive, there was huge panic in the United States
under the Eisenhower administration.
There had to be an answer to this.
And the answer was the founding of ARPA.
And this was because the belief was the US had fallen behind in
the technology race with the Soviets, and it was given a
massive budget for its time. The problem is, within a year,
that budget was basically slashed and it was kind of
forgotten about. What really reinvigorated ARPA

(34:40):
were two things. One was the Kennedy
administration and the other onewas the Vietnam War.
And the Vietnam War at that point and when we talk about
1961 or so, was mainly fought bythe French against the
Vietnamese fighters. And ARPA was brought in there.
This name, this guy named Goodell and from ARPA was sent
in there and his main task was to come up with innovative ways

(35:02):
to pursue the war. And those innovative ways
revolves around the use of technology to better equip the
South Vietnamese government, which was the pro US side to
fight the North Vietnamese communists.
So William Goodell was his name,launched something called
Project Agile. ARPA under his leadership
developed things like the thingsthat are still used to this day,

(35:24):
like the AR15 and the M16 rifleswhich are more agile.
They developed sophisticated electronic surveillance system.
They funded all manner of conflict related intelligence.
This was done in the name of, you might know it better as
winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese peasants.
They developed improved militarycommunication technology,
including to make it work in dense forest.

(35:46):
They would develop portable radar installations that could
be floated onto balloons, which was then commercially backed up
by the US. Almost immediately used to
monitor border crossings in the US, they developed prototypes of
of four legged robots that you see today being used in
policing. They developed autonomous
drones, again, very rudimentary,but all this was developed by

(36:10):
ARPA in its war in Vietnam. Now the US, they lost the war.
The Vietnamese peasants and workers beat them.
But this technology didn't just go to waste.
This technology was all about surveillance, and it was brought
to a vengeance at home. One of the problems they had in
Vietnam was figuring out these fighters, which were
indistinguishable from the peasants themselves.

(36:32):
And how do you track them? How do you know where they are?
Where is the Ho Chi Minh trail? Where do they hide?
Now, in the end, the US just took the route of just napalming
and using Agent Orange on everybody, which by the way,
ARPA, they developed Agent Orange too.
That was one of the things they developed.
So it was basically different ways of surveillance to try to
figure out how to root out thesefighters.
Of course, in the end it all failed, but that technology was

(36:54):
then brought home to the US and it was brought home to the US
against our population that was convulsed in protests against.
The Vietnam War. Against the Vietnam War for
civil rights and black rights and women's rights and other
social rights in the country andit was seen as a way to
basically track all the population and help spy.

(37:17):
Well, I think the main thing that was notable to me about how
prevalent this was in the Vietnam counterinsurgency
movement was also that the population at the time, which
there was a tremendous amount ofleftist political movement, that
they saw this as a threat. They saw that Lockheed Martin

(37:37):
was behind, was behind the Internet in some way.
They knew that the surveillance was taking place, that it would
come home domestically. And so on the college campuses
where you had this development, MIT and Stanford and so on, you
actually had a lot of public outrage because they saw what
this was. And that seems so different from
the world that we're living in today.

(37:59):
Yeah, this is the late 60s wouldn't it wasn't called the
Internet yet, but it was the ARPANET.
So one of the things, again, if you're younger than a dinosaur,
that you have to remember, computers at that time were the
size of huge rooms. They were incredibly difficult
to operate. You didn't just sit and click
things or didn't even type commands.
It was using punch cards and they were very slow and all

(38:20):
these things. And each computer basically had
its own language. And so they're collecting data.
They're collecting data abroad. They're collecting data at home
about protesters and and so on. How do you share this data?
How do you talk to each other? And the first thing they
developed was the ARPANET, what was called the ARPANET.
And it was. Yeah.
And you're right, in the late 60s there were protests at MIT,

(38:43):
at Harvard, elsewhere by Students for Democratic Society
and other left wing organizations that saw it as
this massive intrusive. Threat to privacy?
Threat to privacy, spying threat.
Threat to Third World nationalists abroad.
Threat to organizing? Threat to exactly threat to
organizing. They saw it as a means that the
government was using to strengthen its power against

(39:07):
opponents at home and abroad. And you have to understand, most
of these people sympathize with the opponents of the US abroad
as well as at home. But one of the sort of more
interesting things as this ARPANET grew and became
connecting different computers in different systems and sharing
information became more prevalent in different, mainly
academic institutions was it became, how do you make this

(39:31):
easier to use? And throughout all this, all
these processes, the things likeARPA are, they're not just it's
not just engineers and ARPA coming with this stuff.
It's ARPA working with private companies and saying, OK, here's
a bunch of money, develop this because we're going to need it
to do this. And so in terms of becoming
easier to use in the 1970s, theygo to the Xerox Corporation and

(39:53):
the Xerox had the Palo Alto Research Center and they
developed what is essentially the GUI, the graphical user
interface that we used to this day.
Yeah. So it goes way back.
I think also feel like there arethese kind of focal point
moments in history after the Vietnam War between 75 and 90s,

(40:14):
when you have the tech companiesthat are able to still sell
themselves as the innovators andthe protectors and that the
personal computer and the Internet is going to open the
world and to empower you as a user and stuff like that.
And that starts to disintegrate like in the late 90s to a
certain extent. Yeah, 1 can make an argument

(40:36):
that the illusions in tech continued into the 2000s.
I think you can see some of thateven in the so-called Twitter
revolutions that, you know, techcan be used for organizing, tech
can be used. For yeah, from my recollection
of it, there was this real like utopian idea of liberation
around it, that it was going to be this great tool of leveling

(40:56):
things. And there was even almost a kind
of anarchy spirit about it whereit was like, you know, it's free
for all. This belongs to the people kind
of attitude about it. Yeah, they and they devised even
a term for Internet freedom and then it becomes just all full
out the use of this technology after 911 to implement the
Patriot Act and to go after terrorists domestically and

(41:19):
abroad and to use that kind of predictive technology, web
searching, data scraping and everything to try to, you know,
to justify their wars and also to socially control the
population. People started to question
Google too with Gmail because Gmail was selling itself.
As you know, this easy way to integrate everything, but Google
gets the right to look at all ofyour information, all of your

(41:40):
emails and everything else in exchange.
And that's like one of the firstbig consolidations.
Right. But isn't it interesting that we
can remember these little instances where people
questioned Google on this and yet nothing changed.
It just kept propelling forward as though nothing changed.
And then I can't help but think of this line.
It's from Jobs, Steve Jobs, whenhe was launching the Mac in 84,

(42:03):
Apple included a disk in the Mac, the original Mac, that
explained what a mouse is and how to use it.
And one of the engineers said, well, maybe we should have a
disk to explain what type touch typing because, you know, most
people didn't know how to type. You know this was a.
How to use it like how to use a keyboard?
Yeah, how to use a keyboard. And Steve Jobs dismissively
replied, Death will take care ofthat.
Jesus. The old generation will have to

(42:25):
adapt. Or you know.
Tough shit. That's not our market.
We don't care about those. People well, well, you could
sell to that market. They'll just have to adapt.
It's such class bias too, yeah. It's absolutely class bias.
And so, yeah, there's a whole layer of people object.
I don't want Google reading my emails, but there's a new
generation that thinks it's normal.
And if you're Google and you just stick at it and you're

(42:46):
going to, we're going to give you better features and make it
a better e-mail system. But in exchange, we're going to
keep reading your emails. They're going to win out and
they have been winning out. And I think too, maybe people
don't or people didn't realize the big implications of all of
this stuff because there was theYellow Pages, right?
We used to disclose our name andour address and our phone number

(43:06):
kind of willingly, and that was something that we were willing
to hand out. And it's just a snapshot.
But I think what makes this datacollection really, really
dangerous or what makes it so valuable and personalized, It's
just like a constant snapshot ofeverything we're doing all the
time, everything we've purchased, every place we go,
everybody we interact with. And the accumulation of all of
that information is like we've given away everything.

(43:28):
There's nothing private anymore.Yeah, I mean, think of it this
way. Yeah, you can put out your name
and address in the Yellow Pages or the white pages or whatever,
but if you ask somebody, are youwilling to put out what kind of
pornography you watch? People will say no, except it's
already out there. Yeah, I mean, I don't even want
my wife to know the kind of pornography I watch.
OK, but so here's the thing. Your wife may not know, but your

(43:51):
Internet service provider does. Tech Bros know.
Google does every. The government does.
Everybody does. Everybody who wants to know
knows, except the people in yourintermittent circle.
Terrible. Another book that we looked at
was Shoshanna Zuboff's book called Surveillance Capitalism.

(44:12):
And one of the things that she talks about is the behavioral
surplus, which is like the data exhaust of our lives that tell
all these tech companies we are what we want, what we'll do
next. And so it's the the basis of
surveillance capitalism where these private corporations are
using this extensive data collection and analysis to
influence our consumer behavior and decision making.

(44:35):
And, you know, we look at that as sometimes just, oh, targeted
ads, you know, oh, they know that I'm looking for a pair of
shoes. But what if your search for what
kind of ailment you have is going to affect your next
insurance policy? Or your, or your ability to get
a job or any, you know, the Google model is we're going to
give you something for free and in exchange, you're going to

(44:55):
give us your life. Now we're going to make you pay
for something and you're still going to give us your life.
So these services that you pay for, whether it's a washing
machine like a Internet of Things or even online services
like you. Streaming services also Spotify.
These tech companies are all in bed with these big AI giants and

(45:17):
everyone's. So you're paying for it.
This isn't free and they're still vacuuming up your data and
selling it and as needed, makingit available to the government
when the government demands it. So we were talking about how
Palantir is like kind of the shady company that doesn't
really interact with the American public and the average
person wouldn't really know about.
I recently learned about a data broker.

(45:39):
Do you want to tell us anything about how data brokers work?
Well, all data brokers are is people who buy and sell your
data. Probably one of the most
notorious companies in this is Meta or Facebook, because Google
claims that they don't sell yourdata per SE.
Advertisers buy from them and they determine they Google

(45:59):
determine when to throw the ad in your face.
So they claim you know, who knows, but Facebook sells your
data. There's and no qualms about it,
and so does basically everyone else.
And basically data brokers are guys who just buy and sell your
data. As Shoshanna Zubaf put out,
you're not even a product, you're just exhaust and your
life is just exhaust that's vacuumed up and bought and sold.

(46:19):
Now, I do highly recommend reading the book Surveillance
Capitalism, but one of the problems I have with it is that
she presents it as one. That's just something that
started with Google in the late 90s, early 2000s, though she
points out that, you know, it was accelerated by 911 and the
reaction to it by the government.
But as she puts it, surveillancecapitalism is profoundly anti

(46:40):
democratic. But it's remarkable power does
not originate in the state as has historically been the case.
I would very strongly dispute that.
This is the whole thesis of thispodcast episode is that this
very much does originate in the state, is very much tied to the
state, and is very much intertwined with the state.

(47:00):
And she sort of presents it as the surveillance capitalists are
plowing ahead with these things and the US government's
democratic institutions can't pull them back because they're
moving too fast and so on. Right?
No. There's no checks and balances.
Right. No, that's, you know, I'm sure
there's members of Congress thatwish it could be pulled back.
And that's not one of my point. My point is, the US government

(47:21):
as a force, as an institution, they're OK with this.
They share their interests. They need them.
It is a. They are part of the architects
of. This yeah it.
Is a. It is a completely codependent
relationship. 100%, yeah. Exactly.
And that's again why I keep going back to Palantir, because
Palantir is kind of the most naked expression of that.

(47:42):
It exists only to sell itself togovernments, essentially the US
government and governmental institutions, and it was created
by the government to do this job.
Well, I think that you're pointing to a false dichotomy or
a false division. Like the main problem is raining
in the big corporations and havethe government and the spy
agencies come in to protect the citizens, which is now a

(48:05):
complete liberal falsehood. But there is this point where
big Tech, at least the owners ofbig Tech, used to be more
associated with the liberal wingof the Democratic Party and
where you had a big layer of Silicon Valley selling itself as
kind of the land of libertarian rebels, you know, the wild
frontier. And there's no rules and there's

(48:26):
no red tape, and there's just freedom and innovation and even
disruption. And I think somewhere along the
way, that story did start feeling very different, that it
wasn't about innovation. It was about, you know, mass
destruction. And you have someone like Peter
Thiel, who you mentioned in Palantir, calling himself a

(48:47):
techno libertarian, so supposedly someone who believes
that technology should free people from governments and
bureaucracy. But of course, Palantir does the
exact opposite. You have someone like Elon Musk
coming into the Trump administration.
Is he talking about shaking up the system?
Well, he's working hand in hand with it with the Department of
Government Efficiency Doge in cutting agencies and shaping

(49:10):
federal policies. So what is how is like the tech
world's ideology shifting from this libertarian rebellion type
image to the neo con explicit neo con right?
I'm not sure that there's how much of A shift there is, to be
perfectly honest. I think what you're seeing is
different expressions of the same thing, and it's something

(49:31):
that's has always been there in its core.
I would argue that when you lookat the big Titans of tech, you
have sort of two primary political ideologies expressed.
1 is sort of standard neoliberalism of the kind that
you would find with a Hillary Clinton or, you know, a Barack
Obama or something like that. I think someone like Tim Cook

(49:52):
perfectly captured. These guys aren't too fond of
regulation. These guys do believe in America
the good. They're not.
Also not too concerned about building up American industry.
We'll never write a book about how to build American industry
or anything like that. Their main thing is profit.
They are private companies. They want to make profit.
And so if working with the Democrats will make them

(50:15):
profitable, they'll work with the Democrats.
If working with the Republicans will make them profitable, still
work with the Republicans. Yeah, these are partnerships,
and to assume that they're not equally mutually beneficial
partnerships is to assume that the tech giants have some sort
of moral principles. No, no.
They're only guiding principle is profit.
Right. But there is an ideology behind
the profit. So there's the neocons like Tim

(50:38):
Cook and others, but there's also this sort of historic
libertarian ideology to the techindustry, and it goes back to
the 60s, sort of the counter to the guys who were protesting
ARPANET in the at MIT and other institutions.
They were counterculture libertarians who consciously and

(50:59):
purposely rejected the leftist protest movements of the time
and instead position themselves as fighters for individualism,
and they saw technology and technological advances as the
harbinger of the highest form ofindividual freedom.
These were the Ann Rand type people and so they were very

(51:22):
much afraid of anything that's smacked of collectivism.
And so therefore they were very anti communist and that's how
they viewed a lot of the the leftist in the protest movement.
One of their luminaries in the 1960s, and he's still alive to
this day, is Stewart Brand. He is was known in particular

(51:43):
for a work he used to publish inthe 70s called the Whole Earth
Catalog, which celebrated decentralization, individual
empowerment through tools. And these tools were more often
than not technological tools that were originated in the Cold
War military and ARPA funded research and later DARPA funded
research. His libertarian ethos opposed

(52:06):
state bureaucracy, collectivist politics, and at the same time
it aligned him with the Cold Warlogic that equated centralized
control with communism and technological expansion with
freedom. So that overlap made it very
easy for him to, on the one hand, say, get these government
bureaucracies off our backs while at the same time working

(52:28):
with government bureaucracies inthe military like Arpa.
Yasha Levine recounts a very famous article he did for
Rolling Stone in the 1970s wherehe was talking about the really
cool guys who were working in ARPA doing research in various
campuses, and how they don't fitthe image of the stuffy IBM

(52:50):
engineer. And these guys, they like to
play video game. You know that counterculture
image of the computer scientist as not a stuffy scientist, but
as an innovator? Yeah, but they're, but they're,
they're fucking state agents. They are state agents.
Their paycheck is coming from the state.
Yeah, but he was just a state. Agent with long hair and a tie
dye T-shirt? Yes.

(53:12):
Yeah, exactly. This whole thing about the
Pentagon, oh, there's just a side, you know, that's just,
that's not who they really are. Just a JOB.
Yeah, except their whole thing was that, but you could justify
it because of the Soviet threat.That was the thing when you
pushed out into the late 70s into the 80s, Stewart Brand, who
sort of, again, it's sort of a central figure for a lot of

(53:34):
these guys, becomes a techno libertarian of his own kind who
positions himself as part counterculture, part
entrepreneur. And he's part of the whole
entrepreneur generation of the guys like Steve Jobs and others
and Bill Gates and others who sort of viewed themselves as
bringing this massive new technology to the world and

(53:55):
changing the world. One of his biggest fans was
Steve Jobs. Now he comes from a few years
later. He wasn't at the same generation
as Stuart Brent and like things like the famous 1984 Apple
advertisement denouncing IBM as Big Brother, the Super Bowl ad,
things like that. These were very much inspired by

(54:16):
the Stewart brand outlook. By the time you get to the late
80s, early 90's, the Cold War isover, the Soviet Union has
collapsed. And it's part of that actually
comes the deregulation of the the Arpanet, the Internet, and
it becomes a commercial free forall.
A bunch of different companies are created, but again, by the
government to become your Internet service providers, and

(54:37):
you start to have a change. So now you have a generation of
libertarians, particularly expressed by the likes of Peter
Thiel, who sort of espouse a similar ideology but without any
of the counterculture appeal. They're just, you know.
So there's like no pretense of humanity.
Right. They're naked bloodthirsty
monopolist. I mean they strongly believe in

(55:00):
a obscure neo fascist philosophywhere world corporate power is
the only power in the world and the it's actually called the
Dark Enlightenment that they call it.
Yeah, the one that Peter Thiel in particular follows.
So for example, when you look atlike stuff by Jobs and Apple and
those guys in the 80s and into the 90s and even a little bit

(55:21):
into the early 2000s, they'll talk about all these devices are
meant to empower people, right? Nobody today talks about that.
We're done with that empowermentstuff.
And see, this is not such a break as people might think.
It is because the empowerment talk was based on this idea of
meritocracy that it will empowerthose who can be empowered

(55:42):
again. Think of that line about death
will take care of that. Right.
If you don't have enough money to go to school to take a typing
class and you don't know, then you're at the bottom of society
anyway so you don't need the tech.
So think about that line. You have this meritocracy idea.
The best ideas when that's the free market, right?
They all love the free market. Well, by the same token, the
best people win. The brightest and widest.

(56:05):
Well, who loses the worst people?
Those at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom.
If the best people win, well, then it means the worst people
lose. That's the logic.
And so you have, for example, ifI can just find the quote that
Peter Thiel progress would quote, necessarily make the
world more unequal, that's a good thing for him.

(56:28):
That's a sign of progress. It's like justice.
Everybody's getting what they deserve in the world and it's a
natural order kind of mentality.Right.
And this is very much in line with that libertarian ideology
from its beginning. It's just it looks uglier now
because there isn't this pretense anymore of we're
empowering people. It's just you either go with

(56:50):
what we're doing or we're just going to smash you.
So again, to keep go back to Peter Thiel, What are Peter
Thiel's most well known students?
And Peter Thiel is an incrediblysmart man.
German American, grew up in a South African colony under
apartheid region that is now part of Namibia.

(57:11):
He went to school in a in Swakopmund, which was notorious
as probably the last place on the planet where people still
openly greeted each other with Heil Hitler and celebrated
openly Hitler's birthday. Wow, that's really scary.
And so this is where he grew up.Now one of his most well known
students in terms of like peoplehe formed is the Vice President

(57:34):
of the United States, JD Vance. JD Vance is a creature of Peter
Thiel. Was he a student of Peter
Thiel's? No, he saw Peter Thiel speak in
2011. He reached out to Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel, who has no charismaand doesn't have the idiotic
flamboyance of someone like ElonMusk.
He sort of smart to know, to be behind the scenes, spotted

(57:57):
talent and thought this is somebody with a future.
I would argue that JD Vance is Vice president because of Peter
Thiel. That's probably true.
That is probably true. And so this is a clip of Peter
Thiel from 2010 speaking at a libertarian conference,
basically saying, you know, if our ideas are so out there, this

(58:19):
dark enlightenment, we're not going to be able to win the
masses with it and win electionswith it.
And, you know, well, we can use technology to get around this
idea of having to win the peopleover.
The basic idea was that we couldnever win an election on getting
certain things because we were in such a small minority.

(58:40):
But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world
without having to constantly convince people and beg people
and plead with people who are never going to agree with you
through technological means. And this is where I think
technology is this incredible alternative to politics.
Is this where they unveiled their Men in Black Mind Eraser

(59:00):
machine? Give it time, Give it time.
The other person I wanted to talk about as part of this very
dangerous cabal is Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellison was the Co founderof Oracle and with his son David
they've moved into the media space where of course they have
a tremendous amount of influenceover Paramount and CBS and are

(59:23):
responsible for creating a new algorithm for TikTok for US
users. This is a guy who literally says
out loud that citizens will be on their best behavior because
we are reporting everything going on.
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're

(59:43):
constantly recording and reporting everything that's
going on. One of the things I was thinking
about in preparing for this podcast was just how normal all
of this feels right now. Privacy feels very dead.
I feel like there was some opening for some outrage after
the Snowden revelations and thatprivacy is now it had a funeral

(01:00:05):
and like no one showed up to thefuneral, kind of.
And it also feels like there's no way out because every single
app that we use, everything we type into Google, every smart
device is all part of this invisible way.
Web of surveillance that we've agreed to live inside.
It is genuinely frightening. No, dude.
And I think when I was looking into this, what really shocked

(01:00:26):
and scared me was how much of A shadowy ecosystem there is that
is happening with the data brokers, like people just buying
or selling our data to like all these different things and
collecting like any single data point because it's valuable to
somebody. Yeah, because we like search for
things so randomly and in a hazeall the time.
And then we're searching for things that are based on, you

(01:00:47):
know, what someone else is asking, asking us, and we're
looking. But the thing about it is, look
at your search history over the course of a year, which is
something very hard to do for a human being, but it's very.
Easy to do, that's why AI is getting all those patterns.
And most people do fit into patterns.
Most people are not random. Totally.
It's like, I don't realize it, but I am actually like buying a

(01:01:08):
shirt every three months or something like that, you know
what I mean? And these companies are very
good at wedding out those patterns.
So they may anonymize it in a sense, but what they'll do is
they'll take similar patterns and put them together and sell
that. And what they've found is, yeah,
they're anonymous, but you can pretty easily triangulate if you
want to know. And that's takes effort, but

(01:01:30):
that's where the government comes.
Well, if I. Want to know if I you could
triangulate? That I wake up in my house every
day, you know, like. If you want to know, you can
triangulate who the person is, yeah.
Of course, of course. One of the things that I think
Shoshanna Zubov mentioned was inwhen Google was doing the Google
Maps, the Street View, I think it was in Germany.
I forget what city in Germany. So this car is driving and it's

(01:01:52):
taking all these pictures, but in the course of taking all
these pictures as it's driving by apartment buildings and
homes, it's just literally just sucking up all the Internet
Wi-Fi data of these homes. Oh wow, what a nice secondary
function that. It's just a totally secondary
function that has nothing to do.And in that case, it doesn't

(01:02:13):
matter if you're on Google, if you're on Bing, if you're not on
any websites, if you're streaming something, it's just
sucking it. All up, it's so crazy that all
of this stuff is legal, man. And that was another shocking
part. There was this woman I was
listening to named Janine Matthews, who was a computer
science professor, and she was saying that there's no legal
bounds for any of this stuff. So like an insurance company can

(01:02:35):
like have access to your buying and then they can raise your
premiums if you buy a plus size clothing.
There's no law stopping them from doing that and there's no
way to know if they were doing that and.
It's like that's the other thing, a free.
Fetal, you know. You don't have a way to know
what they're doing. Yeah, she said.
Your interest rates could go up if you sign up for marriage
counseling like and that can just happen and you would have

(01:02:57):
no way of knowing or controllingit.
And it's just absolutely, you know, you watch something like
Mad Men, it's like an ad guy's dream come true.
Yeah, but it's being used for somuch more than selling us
jackets, man. But even even if it was just
selling us jackets, it's so fucking intrusive.
Who the fuck are these people towatch my every move so they can

(01:03:20):
throw an ad in my face? Yeah, like even if it was
completely, even if it was kind of whatever, you know?
Even if it was Google and not the government, who the fuck are
these people? Yeah, to basically know
everything about me, everything about my family, everything
about everyone around my your most private intimate habits.
I mean even now there's Kohler just released a thing where

(01:03:43):
it'll analyze your poop. It's so crazy.
Yeah, they fucking have everything.
And you get this thing, you know?
Do you have anything to hide? Why?
Well, everybody has something tohide.
Everybody has a past. Everyone.
If you're a human being, you have something to hide.
All this stuff with surveillance, you have to
collect all this data. What makes it useful is to be

(01:04:04):
able to predict what someone is going to do in one case with the
targeted ads is to predict whether they'll buy this product
or not, or whether they're opposed to the government or
not, whether they might organizesomething, an action against a
government policy or not. It's a horrifying, dystopian
reality that we're in. They have full control and they

(01:04:25):
brag about. It Is there a realistic way to
reclaim privacy? Or if we just completely crossed
a line where surveillance is a permanent backdrop to our life.
I would say yes and no. Let me start with a no.
Any view of this of I am going to install this application,
which is going to protect my privacy or I'm going to buy this

(01:04:46):
product which is better at privacy than others and there
are products that are like that doesn't really address the
fundamental issue. So let's look at the Tor
Project, The Onion Router as it's known Tor was touted for a
long time and still is, though less so today, as a way to
travel the Internet while concealing your your path,

(01:05:09):
basically to give you protectionas.
Does it kind of like mask your IP address or just mask your
activity? It masks your IP address.
It masks other identifiers of who you are or attempts to, and
it does it. It does a relatively good job of
doing that when someone is not trying to break it down.
You know, so it was touted as something that can really

(01:05:29):
protect you from either government spying or snooping
various companies. The funny thing is, Tor was
developed by the NSA, by the American government.
It was a project developed by the American government.
And so why? Well, the reason it was
developed by the American government is that if you're an
American spy and you want to spyon China, and the Internet is
pretty open, it's easy to identify who's who.

(01:05:51):
Well, China can see that you arean American spy spying on China.
For example, let's say you're inShanghai and you're checking
your e-mail. You know when you go to cia.gov?
Well, boom, they know. They know everything about you.
You need to be anonymous. So by having a way to anonymize
who you are, you're being anonymous to, for example, in

(01:06:12):
this case, the Chinese government.
The problem is if the only people using Tor are American
agents, every time the Chinese government sees a Tor network,
well, they know that's an American agent and so you need
more people to use it. I see.
So by inviting citizens or otherpeople in, now they're creating
all these like decoys or red herrings, and you can't identify
who the government officials areand who are just the normal

(01:06:33):
people. Right, so you want as many
people as possible to use Tor and eventually was able to get
quite a bit of traction. Part of the tour thing, too, was
the US government needed to be able to operate really using the
TOUR project, but it was also totry to win over dissidents in
countries of US enemies. I mean, the majority of their

(01:06:53):
funding is U.S. government Pentagon money, yeah.
So they wanted to win over Dissident, Yes.
They also saw it as a way to, I think, to train their own guys.
So you had one wing, some group,some section of the government
working on developing tour. You also had another section
working on hacking tour because it was hard to hack and so you
want to be able to hack it. It was also it acted as a honey

(01:07:15):
trap of sorts. So if spies in other countries
start using it to maybe spy in the US, well, and the US can
hack it or crack it, well, all the better.
So this is all a long way of saying one thing.
Any tool, any lock that you develop, you can unlock.
Somebody can figure out a way tounlock it.
Now, some are harder to unlock than others.
Tor is hard to unlock, I'm not denying that, but anything can

(01:07:37):
be unlocked. It doesn't really resolve the
issue. The issue is the government
spies, and it works with corporations to spy.
And there's an unprecedented amount of data that is being
collected by the government and by these corporations as they
work together on the entirety ofthe population of the US and
arguably the whole world, certainly any part of the world

(01:07:58):
that is connected to the Internet.
So what you're dealing with is not a technical question
fundamentally, but a social question.
Technology, I would argue technology is good, progress is
good, productivity is good. What is bad is a social system
based on profits that twists every advance of the human race
for the interests of suppressingthe human spirit, which is what

(01:08:21):
we're dealing with right now, right now.
So think of what an indictment of capitalism this is.
You have some of the most brilliant mind in terms of
engineers and computer scientists and others out there
in the world working in these companies.
And what are they working on? They're being made to work on
spying on you and fucking throwing ads in your face.

(01:08:41):
They're not working on curing cancer.
They're not working on eliminating hunger, eliminating
homelessness or any of that stuff.
They're working on how to give you personalized ads, vacuum
your data, and work with the government for the victory of
America. The good against the people, the
bad. They're working on how to round
up little old ladies selling Mexican food at the side of the

(01:09:03):
road. And Palestinian kids.
And killing Palestinians and spying on everything you do,
that's what they're working on. Manufacture weapons, kill
citizens. I mean, yeah.
Even though they have the brilliance to work on so much
more. What a waste that capitalism has
produced. Just raw privatization,
monopolization, and the concentration of wealth and

(01:09:27):
power in the handful of a few who have only their interests in
mind. So what you're talking about is
these social systems. So you want to talk about a
solution, you have to talk abouta solution where capitalism is
swept aside as a social system. That's the solution.
Here, here. Agreed.
Yeah, You know, as a young when I before I became a dinosaur,
there were a couple of shows andmovies I remember watching in

(01:09:50):
the 80s before the Internet was Max Headroom.
And so there it was, a dystopianfuture of technology and
computers being expressed mainlythrough television, because this
is before the Internet you had. Those were the targeted ads,
like it was always selling you something.
And and was monitoring you at all times that there was 1
episode where a woman had an offswitch for ATV and police
officer sees and says she'll getyears for that.

(01:10:12):
You're not allowed to have an off switch for ATV.
There was the film in the late 90s, there was the film Enemy of
the State with Gene Hackman and Will Smith.
Later there was Minority Report.All these movies sort of painted
a future that was dystopian and almost like a warning.
This should not happen. It's all happened, guys.

(01:10:33):
Absolutely. It's happened, and it's actually
far worse than any of those movies.
For this episode's installment of Stranger Than the Twilight

(01:10:57):
Zone, we're introducing a new segment, Y'all, where we can
talk about what gets our blood boiling.
It's a 5 minute rant just for our audience.
Ezra, take it away. So imagine you're in the
Twilight zone and it's going to be the football twilight zone
and also the Israel Twilight Zone and also the European

(01:11:17):
hypocrisy twilight Zone. It's November 2024.
An Israeli football club named Maccabee Tel Aviv goes to play
against IAX, a Dutch club in something called the Europa
League. The Europa League is essentially
the second tier of the European Championships.
So some of you might go, wait a minute.
I thought Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East.

(01:11:39):
What's the only democracy in theMiddle East doing playing in the
European Championship or the second tier of the European
Championship? Well, because it really stinks
itself as a European country. So they go, they play.
I believe they lose because theyalways lose.
And riots break out. Riots break out before the game,
during the game, after the game.And these riots consisted of

(01:12:02):
supporters of Maccabee Tel Aviv charging throughout the city of
Amsterdam looking for homes withPalestinian flags hanging out
and ripping them down. Arabs or Arab looking people,
Muslims or Muslim looking peopleto beat up.
And they find a bunch and they beat the shit out of them.
And then what happens? The Arabs, the Palestinians, the

(01:12:26):
Muslims in Amsterdam and their allies mobilize and fight back
and give as good as they got. So what's the reaction?
The reaction is Oh my God an anti-Semitic pogrom broke out in
Amsterdam and the poor just lovely people who are around the
Maccabee Tel Aviv football club just got the hell being out of

(01:12:49):
them just for being Jews. And that's the story that broke
out everywhere. So Fast forward to today, this
is being recorded a few days before November 6th.
November 6th is Thursday. There's a game on Thursday
between Aston Villa and English Football Club based in
Birmingham, England and again, Maccabee Tel Aviv.

(01:13:11):
The police in Birmingham as wellas the club and the organizers
of the venue know what happened in Amsterdam.
As opposed to the bull that was promoted by the politicians, the
Dutch, the British, the Americanpoliticians about an
anti-Semitic pogrom. And so they decide they don't
want to have this happen in Birmingham.
A rather reasonable thing, not least because Birmingham has a

(01:13:34):
large South Asian, mainly Muslimand black population and so they
would rather not have these hooligans and thugs coming to
their city. So they decide that the game is
not going to have any Maccabee Tel Aviv supporters at it.
Cue the Pearl clutching and outrage.

(01:13:54):
The Prime Minister steps forwardand says we will not tolerate
anti-Semitism in Britain, but imagine a British accent.
The minister of this and the minister of that and the
secretary of this and the secretary of that all make the
same pronouncements. They hold hearings in parliament
about it. It's a fucking football game.

(01:14:14):
Since when does parliament give a damn about a football game?
And almost as though on cue, there's a game between Maccabee
Tel Aviv and their local rival called Hap O El Tel Aviv.
Now Maccabee Tel Aviv is known as the ultra right wing team in
Israel along with Betar Jerusalem.
Now we're talking about Israel here.

(01:14:36):
This is Israeli society, a society made-up of ultra right
wing insanity to begin with and they are the right wing of the
right wing. Hap Oil Tel Aviv is kind of
known as the team that's supported by a lot of Arabs in
Israel as well as more left wingand anti Zionist Jews.
The game doesn't even begin. It can't begin because the

(01:14:59):
McAfee Tel Aviv supporters go ona riot throughout the city and
in the stadium and there is video of them running throughout
the city looking for Arabs or left wing Jews to beat the shit
out of. And that's who the Prime
Minister of England wanted to bring to Birmingham as.
It's going to happen. The game is going to proceed and

(01:15:20):
no Maccabee Tel Aviv supporters will be there.
But we live in a world where politicians are praising fucking
racist football hooligans because they're Israeli.
Now I want to end on two things.One, I'm not a fan of Manchester
City, but I can't deny that Erlin Holland is one of the most

(01:15:43):
prolific goal scorers in the world.
And I did appreciate that when Norway was forced to play Israel
for World Cup qualifiers, Erlin Holland used an Israeli defender
essentially as a human shield toforce an on goal by the Israeli
defender. The second thing is, I think it
would be useful to hear one of the most popular songs sung by

(01:16:07):
the Maccabee Tel Aviv supporters.
I won't actually sing it, but I will just give you the lyrics to
give you a sense of who all these politicians from all over
Europe and the United States were falling over themselves to
defend. The lyrics are directed at their
rival Hapoel Tel Aviv. Like I said, it's a team that's
got the support of leftists and Arabs in Israel.

(01:16:32):
You play extreme, sing songs about the Holocaust and also
think it's funny to deny the state.
You are Arab whores. We are ashamed of you.
At the end of the day, gate 5, we will fuck you.
Gate 5 is the gate that Happoel Tel Aviv uses.
At the end of the day, Gate 5, we will fuck you.

(01:16:53):
We will fuck you and then we will drink your blood.
And in the town square we will hang every communist who comes
here. We will take your girls who love
to go wild. Then we will rape them and we
will shout today is the day of death.
Today is the day of death for Hap OL.
But we don't love anybody who doesn't love us.

(01:17:29):
Thank you for listening to our episode on Silicon Reich.
If you decided to delete all your Google and social media
accounts after this episode, please write us a review.
We like making an impact. As always, you can reach us at
[e-mail]. Deleting all these things won't
make a difference. I know, but it's just funny
anyway.