Carole Cadwalladr: The Entire Business Model of Silicon Valley Is Surveillance

Links for Friday, February 13. Is High Tech now part of the State?

I want to put Carole Cadwalladr on your radar. You may remember her from the 2016 election; she was prominent for helping expose the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal. A good overview of that story can be found here. Misuse of the data collected, including by the Cruz and Trump political campaigns, is summarized here. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting.

Cadwalladr believes that manipulation of the public opinion by high-tech entities is a danger to democratic rule. That’s not the only danger, as I see the world — the State itself is designed to frustrate self-rule.

But her study of this subject matters. It’s well worth your time.

Cadwalladr and the Brexit Vote

Consider this TED talk by Cadwalladr regarding the Brexit vote:

How much did Cambridge Analytica’s illegally acquired data influence the Brexit outcome? Cadwalladr makes a good case that it mattered a lot. She calls this “the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years,” and she’s right. Yet no one remembers it now. Conclusion? Get ready for more.

Cadwalladr on Palantir

Cadwalladr is now on Substack — How to Survive the Broligarchy — and here’s what she has to say about Palantir. In a January piece called “Peter Thiel’s New Model Army” she writes:

The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. Actually, it’s not a contract, it’s more than that. The UK government describes it as “a strategic partnership”. A “partnership” entered into without any sort of competitive tender that was announced during Trump’s visit to the UK and which disastrously compromises our entire national security infrastructure.

We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company whose founder is a close ally of President Trump into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.

Regular readers know the danger Palantir represents to the U.S. Cadwalladr’s focus is Britain, which she calls a “vassal state” of the U.S.:

It sounds like writerly hyperbole to describe the UK as a vassal state, but I mean it in its most literal sense. It’s explicitly stated in the ur-text of Trump’s White House’s foreign policy, the National Security Strategy document, that US companies will be used as instruments of state power. There is no hidden agenda here: Trump has set it all out. (For a breakdown of this document and what it all means, see this week’s piece in the Nerve by former British diplomat, Arthur Snell.)

What will it mean to embed American software into the UK military? Well consider, Tesla. You don’t really buy a car when you buy a Tesla, you rent the software that remains the property of Elon Musk industries who can choose to immobilise your car or any feature of it at any time.

Palantir is the most terrifying of the US companies but it’s also just one of a whole raft of compromising, self-sabotaging deals that the UK government has entered into. The UK ‘Sovereign Cloud’ has been contracted out to Oracle, owned by another key Trump ally, Larry Ellison, the man whose son is behind the disastrous buyout of CBS and the upcoming US TikTok takeover. And then there are deals with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, BlackRock, Nvidia and Scale AI.

Again, just putting Cadwalladr on your radar. Someone worth your attention.

Seduction and Assimilation: Become Partners of the State

One point from this should be emphasized. Above, Cadwalladr writes (emphasis mine):

The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. … The UK government describes it as “a strategic partnership”.

That partnership is not with the U.S., not formally. It’s with Palantir, a private company, that’s nonetheless an arm of the U.S. state.

This one word — partnership — defines today’s corporate state. Many so-called “private” entities are part of the State: they do its will, perform its surveillance, report on its citizens, and act to extend its power and control. This state is an octopus; its arms are many.

The Twitter Files made this point too. Here’s part of a letter from the FBI’s Twitter-assigned agent, Elvis Chan, to Yoel Roth, the company’s Head of Trust and Safety (highlights not mine):

Note the phrase “industry partners,” which appears twice. Note also how information will flow. Chan states that the USG (U.S. government) can pass information from other government agencies, not just itself, to its “industry partners” — plural — through the FBI. From many to many, both ways. Partners? Or quite a bit more?

This is the process of seduction and assimilation. This is how high tech companies, less eager to join, are nonetheless folded into the burgeoning State.

Music

Today we offer a remaster of a Pink Floyd concert performance of “Another Brick in the Wall.” The title’s primary meaning is clear — you are the brick. But consider a second meaning — that companies like Palantir are also bricks, in the wall of the State. Enjoy.