ALL HAIL THE PROFIT: PEOPLE-CENTRIC CRITIQUE OF THE MILITARY-TECH COMPLEX

THE CHINA SCARE

One of the crucial manipulations exposed in the video is that leaders like Schmidt and Alex Karp deliberately stoke paranoid fears of a technological arms race with China to justify massive increases in military-tech spending and to bypass regulations, to launder fascism as necessity. This is the oldest trick in the imperial playbook. During the Cold War it was USSR missiles; now it is China AI; the purpose remains identical: to make Congress afraid, to make the public pay, to make the contractor rich. Karp says with sociopathic nonchalance: “Our adversaries have no rules.” Translation: We should have no rules, we should abandon law, we should become the monster we claim to fight. Schmidt’s NSCAI 2021 report demanded exemption from AI ethics for national security, demanded impunity. It is also said that Silicon Valley’s far-right ideology and Elon Musk’s vision for a VIP future is to build their own virtual world while the real one burns. There is another kind of inherent triangular faction which is at grips, a new iron triangle of Religious Fundamentalists, Tech accelerationists, and ethno-nationalists, who are in a frenzied run to disdain, dismantle, and destroy the United Nations and any vestige of international law.

Here Gutierrez helps illuminate the inversion. Father Gustavo Gutierrez, Peruvian founder of liberation theology who dared a theology of protest and liberation in the context of violent US imperialism in Latin America, in \A Theology of Liberation\ (1971) defined: “The very term preference obviously precludes any exclusivity; it simply points to who ought to be first, not the only, objects of our solidarity.” He also wrote with prophetic fury: “Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different kind of social order.” What is the China scare if not the absolute reversal of this preferential option, a deliberate theological and political perversion? Systems of domination are rhetorical and complementary and they fit their own agendas well, they buttress each other. For the Western world, China is an excuse, a bogeyman, a necessary enemy. Instead of preferential option for the poor, we have preferential option for profit; instead of building a different social order, we build the same murderous social order with more expensive weapons and call it a new world order, where people and their accomplices are safe and secure, a lie globalized to justify genocide. Gutierrez said: “Real, material poverty, this less-than-human situation in which most human beings live today, is a challenge which no Christian is free to overlook.” The military-tech complex asks us to overlook precisely this, to avert our gaze, because $1.3B for Maven’s ceiling could fund 13,000 schools, water for 65 million, salaries for 26,000 nurses for 10 years, could resurrect life in Sudan, in Gaza, in any affected place on the planet, but instead it funds artificial intelligence to decide who dies and how many should die in a spreadsheet. Angela Davis, the American Marxian philosopher, said with unflinching clarity: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” AI trained on racist datasets, on colonial archives, on dehumanization, will never dismantle racism; it will automate it, accelerate it, and sanctify it.

THE THEFT

Karl Marx in \Capital\ understands with brutal lucidity: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” What is Palantir if not dead labour par excellence, code written by engineers, sucking living labour — soldiers, drone operators, Gazan children, Yemeni fishermen, Congolese miners — to produce astronomical value for shareholders who have never seen a battlefield? The video also critiques the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” when applied to the battlefield, a culture of sociopathic flippancy wherein, in Silicon Valley, break means bug, but on the battlefield, break means child, means mother, means entire lineage. Anduril’s culture amplifies violence and volatility into doctrine. “Obese military budgets drain vital funding away from critical public services such as education, healthcare, and climate solutions,” which is not a side-effect but the central, people-centric economic truth: every AI bomb is theft from the hungry, every contract is larceny from the living. As Eisenhower said, theft. Ambedkar’s final call to Dalits at the All India Depressed Classes Conference, Nagpur, July 1942, was: “Educate, Agitate, Organize,” which is the exact antithesis, the revolutionary opposite, of the military-tech complex, because the complex says: obfuscate, pacify, monetize; Ambedkar says: Educate means teach people who profits from your death, Agitate means the 4,000 Google workers who resigned rather than build murder-tools, Organize means base communities who refuse to build tools for ICE, for IDF, for Pentagon. Gutierrez added that liberation has three inseparable levels: political liberation from oppressive structures, psychological liberation to take control of own destiny, theological liberation from sin and idolatry. Palantir blocks all three simultaneously: it cements oppressive structures in code, it tells human destiny is determined by algorithm, and it makes sin — murder-automatic, remote, bureaucratic — normal. Boff, the Brazilian liberation theologian, said the poor are “sacrament of God,” they reveal God’s presence in history. The military-tech complex says the poor are target-dataset, are training data, are collateral; the Zionist’s primary agenda is to eliminate the idea of ethical-pro-poor understanding of God, on a different level, to eliminate a religion that asks for justice and accountability, a religion as expected and demanded by Ambedkar.

CONCLUSION: NAME THE CULPRITS, SMASH THEIR MACHINE

Al Jazeera asks politely: Who profits? Who judges? Who fights? Who suffers? Who watches? But we the people, the famished, the bombed, the coded-as-target, ask without politeness, without deference, without forgiveness: Who profits, and how do we stop them?

Who profits? Name them, brand them, remember them, for they realize for themselves what they are. Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, net worth $3B+, a philosopher who sells AI that turns Gaza into a laboratory, contract $480M to $1.3B for Maven Smart System to accelerate the killing chain from hours to seconds. Palmer Luckey — Anduril founder, Oculus child-billionaire turned border-wall builder, $28B valuation on Lattice towers that hunt migrants at the border and loitering munitions for Ukraine, his company literally named after Aragorn’s sword, a fantasy fascism for man-children. Peter Thiel, PayPal/Palantir godfather, CIA In-Q-Tel funded, openly declares democracy and freedom are incompatible, wants sea steading islands for billionaires while the rest drown in rising seas. Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, chairs Pentagon AI boards while simultaneously investing in AI weapons startups, who wrote the 2021 NSCAI report demanding $40B for military AI and exemption from ethics rules, the revolving door incarnated in one man. Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO who begged Congress for more Maven money because “tens of thousands” of soldiers are already addicted to algorithmic killing. The Iron Triangle itself: DoD procurement officers who promise jobs in 46 states to buy Congressional silence, Congressmen on Armed Services who take Lockheed/Anduril PAC money to sell their souls, and BlackRock/Vanguard/Founders Fund who hold the shares and collect the dividends of death. These are not innovators. They are war contractors in hoodies, same as Lockheed, only with better PR and worse conscience.

Who judges? No one. That’s the entire point of their architecture. They lobbied, legislated, and liquidated oversight to make sure no one judges. Schmidt’s commission explicitly asked to bypass AI regulation for “national security.” Karp says “our adversaries have no rules” to argue we should have no rules. This is what Naomi Klein in \End Times Fascism\ calls “wealth rapture,” wherein billionaires prepare bunkers in New Zealand, islands in the Pacific, rockets to Mars, while setting fire to the living world and calling that arson inevitability.

Who fights? Not them. Never them. Not Karp, not Luckey, not Thiel. Fights: Dalit kid from some village who joins Army for salary, Black kid from Detroit for college tuition, Yemeni teen for $50, Ukrainian conscript dragged from street, Gazan teenager with stone versus $100K Anduril drone that sees in infrared. Who suffers? The famished sector. Fanon wrote: the colonized sector is “a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.” Today the famished sector is Gaza where Maven identifies “potential threats or targets, like enemy military vehicles, buildings and weapons stockpiles” — a hospital, a school, a UN warehouse — and a human, anaesthetized by interface, presses OK in 3 seconds. Suffering is not a bug. It is the business model. Obese budgets must drain schools, healthcare, climate as Al Jazeera shows, to stay obese, to stay powerful.

A Revolutionary conclusion is not reform, for you cannot reform an iron triangle forged in blood, you cannot ethic-wash Palantir with a diversity officer, you cannot regulate Anduril while a $1.5 trillion dream military budget is on the table awaiting signature. Ambedkar said: “Educate, Agitate, Organize,” but he also said after conversion at Deekshabhoomi: we will not have faith in Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh. We must say today with equal finality: we will not have faith in Palantir, Anduril, Google defence, we will not have faith in their oracles and their orbs. Gutierrez said: “The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different kind of social order.” Different order means: Expropriate, don’t regulate; seize Palantir Maven, Anduril Lattice, Google Project Nimbus defence code; place them under democratic worker-community control; open-source them for civilian rescue, fire-fighting, flood mapping; no patents on killing, no copyright on genocide. Defund and redirect; cut $954bn US war budget by 75%; every dollar from Maven’s $1.3B ceiling to public schools, water, nurses, debt cancellation; as Eisenhower said, every gun is theft, therefore return the stolen goods to the robbed. Criminalize war profiteering; Nuremberg PrincipleInternational LawA set of guidelines defining what constitutes a war crime, a crime against humanity, and a crime against peace, established after the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders. is clear: private citizens who plan wars are guilty; Karp, Luckey, Thiel, Schmidt, profiting from a system that UN experts say enables targeting without human intervention, raising profound ethical and legal risks, must face a people’s tribunal, not a TED talk. Worker sabotage and solidarity; as 4,000 Google workers did in 2018, as Microsoft workers did against IVAS, as dockworkers refuse to load weapons to Israel, refuse to write code for empire, refuse to make murder efficient. Triple disarmament as Klein and Taylor demand: disarm nukes, disarm AI, disarm concentrated wealth. Fanon’s colonial world cut in two cannot be patched with inclusion; it must be smashed. Decolonization is an agenda for total disorder, not a diversity hires at Palantir. Rubble is not tragedy, rubble is library, as Susan Abulhawa says. Pentagon budget is not budget, it is crime scene, it is confession.

Do we say, All hail the military? No, never, not in our name. All hail the refuseniks. All hail the saboteurs. All hail the famished sector that refuses to die quietly, that refuses to be dataset, that refuses to be target. The choice is not US versus China AI supremacy; that is their false choice, their manufactured fear. The choice is people versus culprits. Name them. Fight them. Win against them.