The Mapmakers Against The Meme Making Defense Tech Con Artists and Grifters
Just say no to the military industrial complex redux and build real tech with the map making nerds to save the planet
I’ve been getting a lot pitches about defense tech. Something is stirring out there. I don’t think it’s a good thing.
While I agree that we can’t have the greatest minds of our generation optimizing ads, we also can’t have them building bombs. The machinery of death takes a heavy toll, especially on the young. It’s the duty of all aristocrats, of all nobility to do what it can to prevent wars.
I want to explain why I’m not a believer in the defense tech trend and to suggest another alternative for inquiring young people and fund managers — National Security Agency-preferred technology.
Today I took a call from a European defense tech entrepreneur and fielded another request from a young man who wanted me to fund his syndicate to spot promising new defense companies. Last week it was two different ex-military people trying to convince me that their small scale contract was enough to justify an investment.
I tell them that the patriotic thing to do is to oppose defense tech. If you want to be contrarian, work on technology that helps, not kills.
We don’t need a military industrial complex redux but we do need new technology that we use to help disrupt organized crime, to strengthen the rule of law and to aid refugees suffering from climate change.
In any event I offered to help the European if only because I think that there’s going to be a lot of joint European and American companies that come about. There’s this weird anti-European attitude with some of the technorati. Of course Peter Thiel is dismissive of the European model while he quietly does more in Europe. Gotta love Peter.
“An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift,” he and Blake Masters wrote ten years ago in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Doesn’t it seem to you with the NSA taking over Palantir’s backend and Palantir moving into the United Kingdom that Peter might be America’s man in Europe?
Doesn’t it seem as if he avoided the fate of Musk by resisting the efforts to make him the next Sheldon Adelson?
The U.K.’s National Health Service is now delivered, in part, by Palantir. How much longer before that becomes a model for the whole world’s national health services?
How soon before someone ingests the genetic data? Might America buy 23 & Me and give it to the world’s health services? Might the focus on tech community’s me, me, me give way to a more communitarian impulse?
Were I a U.S.-aligned wealthy country I’d join in on buying 23 & Me and “make it into the largest open genomics and chronicle disease health research platform on the planet.”
I’d also use it to identify potential espionage threats and expand it from human beings to all living things. You could imagine all ports of entry hoovering up the DNA and making the identifications of flora, fauna — and people. Such genomic surveillance would help us preserve the crucial biodiversity we need to combat invasive species and delay an extinction level event for humanity.
For all the talk of the long-termists they are nowhere to be found here. Instead, they obsess about AI. At best it’s a luxury belief masquerading as a humanitarian one. At worst it’s the sort of myopia and navel gazing you do right before the whole world dies off.
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I’d argue that many of the problems within Europe came from free riding off of American security guarantees. We effectively subsidized the European welfare state with the American warfare state. How’s that working out? Not so well!
My sense is that the American welfare state will look more European welfare state and the European warfare state will look more like the American one.
In recent years the allegedly avant-garde thinking is that the U.S. military spends so much that this might be a fertile ground for investment. Is it? I don’t think so.
But let me let you in on a secret — none of these defense contracting firms are getting the production contracts. Defense Tech booster Trae Stephens is worried about the field being oversaturated. He’s right to worry. At a certain point the public will figure out that Defense Tech isn’t delivering on the hype. I suspect when that happens that Stephens will be the scapegoat.
The truth is that most of the technology of the defense tech players doesn’t work all that well and the Ukrainians are telling us as much in the after action reports. (Those companies which do work — the facial recognition company Clearview.AI is a stand out but it’s allegedly too controversial, of course. I wonder is it controversial because it actually works? You can’t have things which actually work if you’re grifting off the taxpayer.
What does work in the American arsenal? The crown jewels of the American intelligence apparatus are the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. (It remains to be seen if Space Force is working though initial reports are promising. Oh, you thought those big Ukrainian war bills were about the Ukrainians?)
The reason these systems work is that they specialize in collecting actionable signals intelligence and in making maps.
Any practitioner of signals intelligence knows that the entire universe can be rendered in zeros and ones. This is the central insight of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory and the essential practice of Bletchley Park and Government Communications Headquarters. Most of biology has yet to be rendered into zeroes and ones. When it is you can imagine a world where AI can process the most common occurrences in humans and animals and help solve our collective health problems. There should be a concerted effort to map all of biology—and quickly.
The masterful nation is the one which is successful at making more of the world legible to preserve its advantage. Small wonder then that the NSA played a key role in building up Google and that that role continues in their favoring certain technology companies today.
Take a short break and read about “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance” or read the Lunch with the Financial Times interview with Signal’s Meredith Whittaker who says she sees “AI as born out of surveillance.” Ask yourself if maybe Marc Andreessen was correct — that the U.S. government is taming artificial intelligence by installing ex-NSA director and US Army General Paul Nakasone and ex-CIA officer Will Hurd to its board.
But if the NSA is taming the tech companies and their excesses might there be those that they are promoting?
You can see my own investments in Traitwell, Censys Tech, Skydweller Aero, and LAND Moto as reflective of the U.S. government’s interest in genomic surveillance, drone-enabled mapping, solar mobility, and battery-powered electric transportation. It’s easy to see why a state would want to be dominate in these key areas. But might other states want to participate in shaping the material conditions that make the whole world less precarious? Might these joint agreements help us stabilize things before they really get out of control? Might these agreements act as a kind of map for the modern times as we chart our into the unknown?
Maps are about restructuring the material reality so that no conflict is even necessary. Property rights are clear. So too are territorial ones. There’s no point in going to war over the waterways which have already been mapped. Maps are ultimately about advantage building upon advantage and promoting mastery. To kill is to have failed. This is not what we are meant to do and this is not a game.
For all the talk about a looming conflict with China, few seem to have made a study of their most famous book, The Art of War. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Maybe it’s best to do that by making the enemy a partner in a new world order that makes space for everyone.
This is decidedly an optimistic vision of a world we could live in if we wanted. It’s a world led by America with consultation from the other great powers. Such a world order respects the sovereignty and diversity of the world’s smaller nations, too, and works with them to preserve their civilization too.
I love my country and I have taken great risks in many domains to keep its way of life from disappearing and even thriving. Nobody would believe the things I have done in its service but if someone can live your life you haven’t lived it.
But we need more mapmakers — more adventurers — and less defense hawks or armchair analysts, more problem solvers, less trigger pullers.
We need to move beyond a politics of apartheid, of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and towards a world of rapid detection, accountable institutions and immediate justice.
Only technology — doing more with less — points the way of a more equitable planet. This isn’t a call for techno-optimist cult where thought leaders buy Malibu mansions and fleece Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Silicon Valley has been there, it’s done that. And we have precious little to show for their GenXploitation and instant gratification indulgences.
This is instead a plea for a global partnership using scarce resources, American know-how and Chinese industrial capabilities before it is too late.
We can be good stewards for subsequent generations with the right strategy and team.
Amen