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Business Standard

Tales of influence, ambition: 3 books about tech, politics and big business

Germany's big businesses profited thanks to their collaboration, and after the war most executives escaped blame, keeping much of the plundered wealth even after millions died UNIT X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, OWNED: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, PROFITS & PERSECUTION: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust NYT By Max Chafkin UNIT X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War Author: Raj M Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff Publisher: Scribner Pages: 319 How did Donald Trump win over the technology industry? How did the country's most future-minded companies — managed and staffed by immigrants, and led by CEOs who had embraced corporate diversity policies — come to embrace a nationalistic, transactional view of power and a president whose scattershot trade war threatens their hugely profitable businesses? Put simply: What happened to Silicon Valley? A tempting answer is Elon Musk. But three recent books suggest that Musk's right-wing turn is probably more symptom than cause, the latest manifestation of reactionary forces that have simmered, mostly unnoticed, within the tech industry. Blessedly, Musk is not the main character in Unit X, a chronicle of efforts by the authors — Shah, an entrepreneur, and Kirchhoff, a tech adviser — to persuade Silicon Valley companies to make surveillance and weapons systems for the government. The book reveals how a left-leaning industry became enthusiastic about the military-industrial complex. When rank-and-file Google employees put up an early resistance to weapons work, Amazon and Microsoft saw an opportunity to double down on military contracts. Some tech leaders at companies like Palantir and Anduril were always on board. Shah and Kirchhoff were hired to run the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (Unit X for short) shortly after its creation under Barack Obama in 2015. Their goal was to make inexpensive consumer technologies, like tablets and productivity software, easily available to the military. But, as Unit X shows, it's not a huge leap to go from using AI to analyse drone footage to using AI systems in weapons. Anduril, backed by another Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel, and staffed by several of Thiel's close allies, recently announced that it had agreed to take over an Army contract worth up to $22 billion. Given the company's close ties with the new administration, it seems almost certain there will be more money to come. Tech industry reporters tend to view the power of Silicon Valley billionaires as a byproduct of their addictive apps. In Owned, Higgins, a tech journalist, makes a compelling case that more attention should be paid to the campaign to influence their critics. He focuses on two targets of Musk and Thiel's patronage, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Greenwald and Taibbi were seen as leftists early in their careers. Their evolution, Higgins argues, was spurred on by money from conservative sources. Greenwald is paid to produce videos on Rumble, the anti-woke video platform that counts Thiel and Vice President JD Vance as investors; Taibbi's move to the right coincided with his becoming, in Higgins's account, essentially an in-house journalist at Elon Musk's X. (Neither man's work is monolithic. Greenwald has been critical of the Trump administration's immigration policies; Taibbi fell out with Musk over his management of X.) When Jeff Bezos revamped The Washington Post's opinion page and Mark Zuckerberg began tossing out Facebook fact checkers, it was hard to say whether these moves suggested that Bezos and Zuckerberg had finally revealed their true selves, or whether they had changed tack because it seemed inadvisable to do otherwise. (It's worth remembering that last summer, while running for president, Trump threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison for life and his company is on trial for alleged antitrust violations.) Either possibility is grim, as are the parallels one can find in Profits & Persecution by Hayes, a Holocaust scholar. Studying the relationship between the Nazi state and about 100 of the largest German companies, Hayes convincingly shows that German businessmen were sceptical of the Nazis, but tended to approach Hitler's rise with an eye to the bottom line, seeking to preserve their financial advantages within the regime and, in doing so, slowly acquiescing to its most insidious demands. His book is both horrifying and riveting, in part because the rationalisations offered by business leaders will sound eerily familiar. Of course, these impulses helped prop up a government that destroyed the free-market capitalism it once sought to protect. Germany's big businesses profited thanks to their collaboration, and after the war most executives escaped blame, keeping much of the plundered wealth even after millions died. In many respects, Hayes makes clear, they won the war, even when Germany lost.