Empire of Ones and Zeroes

In late January, Drop Site News obtained documents revealing that Microsoft increased its support for the Israeli military during its genocidal campaign in Gaza. According to the documents — which were shared with Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, the Guardian and Local Call — Microsoft scored a $10 million contract after Oct. 7, with an additional $30 million under consideration, to supply cloud computing and storage to multiple military units, covering everything from combat operations and intelligence to cybersecurity and population registries used to police the movement of Palestinians. They also showed that Microsoft employees have worked with Israeli forces to develop products and systems that probably include artificial intelligence, and that OpenAI, a recipient of Microsoft’s billions, has supplied the Israeli military with tools for data analysis and language translation.

There should be no surprises here. Militaries have long incorporated cutting-edge technology into modern warfare. Pretty much every major tech company, from Intel and Dell to the super-giants like Google and Amazon, supply militaries with products and services to the U.S. and its allies across the world. What goes underappreciated is the fact that this was a drop in the bucket for Microsoft, a company that has been — and continues to be — shielded by “digital justice” public relations agents masquerading as “scholars” who are complicit in genocide.

Microsoft’s connections to war go back decades. As scholar Yarden Katz has reported, the company opened its first research center outside the U.S. in Israel, back in 1991, and has since inked multiple contracts with the Israeli state. The relationship is so close that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described Israel and Microsoft as “a marriage made in heaven, but recognized here on earth.”

While much about Microsoft’s military collaborations has been hidden from the public, it’s clear that it has emerged over the past decade as an integral part of the U.S.-Western war machine. The longstanding connections to Israel only scratch the surface.

“Whether it’s NATO or European Union countries, whether it’s in the Indo-Pacific region, whether it’s Latin America, [Microsoft] is operating around the world,” Angus MacGregor, a former British Army officer who now serves as Microsoft’s general manager of Worldwide Defense & Intelligence, told the military news outlet Defence24 in 2021. “It might sound a little arrogant, but there’s not an area of the military spectrum that I don’t think we’re operating in.”

In 2007, the tech mega-giant provided its developer platform for “Microsoft™ Flight Simulator” to Northrop Grumman, the world’s second-largest military corporation, “to develop enhanced capabilities for joint military command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR) and route and mission planning.” Two years later, Microsoft followed suit with the world’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, which also acquired intellectual property to adapt Flight Simulator for its Prepar3D software interface. Prepar3D was subsequently used for military training by organizations like the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft has since partnered with a number of weapons manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, with whom it arranged to offer 5G technology across terrestrial and space-based networks for “joint-all domain military operations” at the “tactical edge.”

Among its direct dealings with militaries, Microsoft inked a $700 million contract to service the U.S. Navy in 2012. In 2014, the company boasted that it is “at the heart of NATO’s Connected Forces Initiative,” based on its commitment to “support [NATO’s] peacekeeping missions throughout the world.”

Reporting and activism around Big Tech and the military is an exercise that can be described as “empire washing.” The tech pseudo-left made a huge splash in 2021 when workers for Amazon and Google launched #NoTechForApartheid to protest against their companies’ contracts for Project Nimbus, a cloud computing service to provide storage, processing and AI services for the Israeli state. While Amazon and Google took center stage, Microsoft was strangely left out. More generally, #NoTechForApartheid operated under the false pretense that U.S. tech giants can somehow be made “moral” — that, if not for Project Nimbus, Google would be what one of its Nimbus protesters called a “dream job.” 

In reality, U.S. tech giants have imperialism baked into their DNA. 

First, U.S. tech companies cannot be effectively excluded from supplying technology to Western militaries without undermining them. There is no modern military without the latest and greatest technological products, services and infrastructure. Instead of opposing the U.S. Empire as a whole, tech pseudo-left opposition has selectively focused on a handful of collaborations between Big Tech and the military: Google’s “Project Maven” drone analytics contract; a contract for the Department of Defense’s proposed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud; Microsoft’s contract to supply its HoloLens augmented reality goggles for combat; and services for the Israeli military like Project Nimbus.

Focusing on a few individual contracts misses the point that digital technologies form part of a larger machine, like an orchestra with individual parts functioning as an integrated whole. Cloud computing, AI, big data analytics, advanced semiconductors, edge computing, 5G, satellites, drones, advanced sensors and other sophisticated technologies work together, in harmony, to service modern militaries.

How, then, would it be possible for a 21^st century military to operate without the full array of digital technologies? It’s like not having radios or phones. The only way to cut off advanced tech to the military is to end militarism altogether.

Which brings us to our second core problem: Economic plunder cannot be separated from military aggression. The U.S. is constantly at war because it has just 4% of the world’s population, but about 31% of the wealth and 45% of the financial assets — a disparity that cannot be maintained without violence.

“Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security,” wrote U.S. diplomat George Kennan in a 1948 national security memorandum. In the 21^st century, American tech corporations are helping to fulfill that task as the most wealthy and powerful corporations in human history. American tech giants have unipolar dominance, with wealth, revenues and global market share far exceeding any other country, including China. The fact that they supply technology to the U.S. military is a necessary function of their dominance.

This stark reality has not been acknowledged or interrogated by the leading tech “left” influencers and activists, who, often backed by Big Tech and ultra-rich dollar foundations, have erased the systemic dominance of the American Empire from the picture.

Instead of centering opposition to the American Empire, U.S.-centered “digital justice” intellectuals and activists reinforce American tech supremacy through selective outrage coupled to mild reforms, like antitrust. Microsoft helped to establish the hegemony of this perspective by pouring money into “tech ethics” research centers (like Data & Society and AI Now) in the 2010s and minting renowned “scholars” like danah boyd (founder of D&S, who uses lower case), Kate Crawford (co-founder of AI Now) and Glen Weyl (an influential Web3 advocate).

To get a flavor of this, boyd recently left Microsoft Research, but only after heaping praise on the company’s “vivacious” intellectual environment while pledging she may never “fully leave MSR.” In 2014, she deflected Israel’s clear-cut oppression of Palestinians in a mystifying “the issue is complex / violence isn’t the answer” op-ed, and has since been silent about Israel’s ongoing genocide, aided and abetted by her paymaster. Crawford is likewise silent on the genocide. Weyl has called the genocide label “reckless” and “problematic.” Last month, he promoted “awesome opportunities” to work for Microsoft.

We should be clear that, no different than much of the mainstream media, leading researchers in the digital justice movement are complicit in genocide, and nobody is saying anything about it. That’s U.S. intellectual culture.

Beyond Israel-Palestine, the seamless integration of tech corporations into the American Empire project as a whole remains off the table across the intellectual spectrum. That the U.S. gets to dominate the wealthiest and most powerful part of the global economy comes natural to its intellectual class, who feel no need to investigate the matter, let alone oppose it. This is a sad comment on the state of the American left. It badly needs addressing, and any news on Big Tech’s connection to military aggression provides ample opportunity.