Nope, Killing People Isn’t Cool

No matter how much funding there is for it

Yesterday, Jasmine Sun published a striking piece in the SF Standard about the growing interest from Stanford students in careers in defense tech— a notable change from past cohorts. As Sun aptly puts it, 'the vibes have shifted.' Just five or six years ago, working for companies like Palantir was among the least desirable career paths for Stanford graduates.

As someone who worked alongside college students to push back against tech companies taking on defense projects, that vibe shift is completely head spinning. In 2017, as Google was moving to help the DOD arm their drones with AI, I collaborated with Stanford CS students on a pledge not to work for the company—my employer at the time— as long as they worked on weapons. Shortly after, I worked with the non profit organization Mijente on the No Tech For ICE campaign. We joined forces with students on campuses across the country to encourage college kids to pledge that they wouldn’t work for Palantir as long as the company contracted with ICE. April Glaser, writing for Slate at the time, covered the Stanford students who led the organizing. They called themselves SLAP—Students for the Liberation of All People. They made zines, organized panels, tabled at career events, and more.

It worked. A ragtag group of students and organizers made some of the most valuable companies in the world uncool to work for—for a time. Palantir even moved their HQ to Denver, Colorado after our protests at their Palo Alto location. In a profile in the Financial Times, Palmer Luckey described how difficult it was to raise money back then. But what happened next explains the shift we’re feeling today, and is an old story in American business: powerful new money moved the culture.

In the same Financial Times piece, Luckey pointed to a moment in 2019 when Marc Andresson decided to invest in Anduril as part of a $120m round. That was, per Luckey, the turning point that reassured other funders in Silicon Valley that it was safe again to fund defense tech.

“After Andreessen Horowitz invested in Anduril in 2019, the mood changed fast. When he wrote on his website, “I believe in the United States of America. I believe in a strong national defence. And I believe in Anduril,” it was the first full-throated statement from an authoritative insider that investing in defence technology was permissible. It was a game-changer for VCs who had been prevaricating on the sidelines, wondering how they would justify defence investing to backers and staff.”

That brings us today, and to Sun’s write up on what’s happening on Stanford campus. Pro defense students are going so far as to do a cultural victory lap, calling those who disagree with them “moronic” and identifying war as a white hot business opportunity.

“People are betting that if anything goes hot in the Pacific, money will flood in, like it did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Stanford business student Andrew Paulmeno, a Navy veteran who was chief product officer for Project Maven at the Pentagon.

The pro-defense culture goes beyond college campuses. Sarah Emerson writing for Forbes and Nitasha Tiku in the Washington Post have written about self proclaimed “gundo bros,” young tech workers who code all night for defense tech, drink energy drinks, work out, and are generally “super pumped” about writing code that’ll be used to kill people. It’s almost hard to escape this seismic cultural shift. This week Politico had a post-SXSW write up titled: “The defense industry has SXSW surrounded”. This VC funded cultural phenomena brings to my mind Catherine Bracy’s new book (World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy) which describes how incentives created by the VC startup funding models ends up selecting companies across all industries that are causing unique harms to society.

Right now, the culture in Silicon Valley is that it’s cool amongst young tech workers to build weapons. But as we saw in 2017, and as we’re seeing with the Tesla Takedown protests, culture can shift again in the other direction in a short span of time. If people—college students, young tech workers, older ex-corporate folks like myself, and anyone who wants to see real change—start simply speaking out and saying “no, technology for military and defense operations actually make the world a far more dangerous place” we could see big results once again.

If you are a student right now, and don’t like what you are seeing, don’t be afraid to talk to your friends about it, organize to discuss, and share your feelings on social media. It might feel uncomfortable at the beginning but you’d be surprised at how many other students on campus who feel the same way as you do. Our side will never be able to offer the riches of a potential IPO one day but at least we won’t be killing people.

AD: Hollow Leg is redefining what is possible with non alcoholic wines. Now available on Boisson.com.

What i’m reading:

Meta Leaders gave Sarah Wynn-Williams a gift from the gods: The former Facebook exec published a tell-all book from her decade working at the highest levels inside the company. In response Meta is trying to stop her by arguing the book violates her NDA. I’m hoping Sarah will now sell millions more copies of her book.

Musk and Trump don’t like the First Amendment. The TeslaTakedown protests are inspiring. JP Morgan described what’s happening as: “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.”. Today one of the protesters targeted by Musk, Valerie Costa, spoke out via a Guardian op-ed. Give it a read, and head out to a Tesla showroom somewhere near you this weekend.

Amazon used AI to stop workers from organizing. Because of course they did. AI management is a wet dream for the oligarchs. All efforts should be made to stop it.

A good look at the deals being done for training AI data: Tech Policy Press has an interesting opinion piece about the deals done for AI training data (eg. in November 2024, the Authors Guild revealed that HarperCollins, publisher owned by NewsCorp, “had struck a deal with Microsoft to use some HarperCollins nonfiction titles to train its AI models. The cost: $5,000 per title for the right to use the prose as training data for a period of three years.” Each agreement undermines the notion that a book can be freely taken and used to train AI under copyright law.

Look into ScaleAI. This is an AI training company that Google and OpenAI outsource AI labor too. They have thousands of contractors spread across the globe working for cheap and without any labor protections. The Department of Labor is investigating them (but they think they’ll get away with it now that Trump is in charge). The CEO, Alexander Wang, has gone full MAGA, and seeks out every and all opportunities to present himself as a pro US military guy. Most recently they got a contract with the Pentagon to help commanders plan military maneuvers. They’re calling it “”Thunderforce” because they think it makes them sound like tough guys.