"On June 13, 2025, a strange military ritual took place in Conmy Hall at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia. A group of tech executives from some of the most important Silicon Valley firms including Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer (CTO) of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, adviser at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI, appeared in military fatigues in front of a large group of soldiers. They were sworn in as army lieutenant colonels as part of the newly constituted Detachment 201: the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps (EIC).
The initiative was presented in typical neoliberal jargon as part of the effort to “leverage private expertise” to the benefit of the “public sector.” But the reality is much more disconcerting. This commissioning signals that there is no clear barrier between the private and public sectors: the prodigal son that is digital technology may long have been estranged from its military roots, but now it is coming back home. Why? Because it is, by and large, the military that is paying its bills.
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These companies represent the worst both of capitalism and of state intervention. They operate in shadowy industries, where there is almost zero competition, and live off military procurement — a sector with basically no transparency and which is notoriously prey to corruption and heavy forms of political interference. This is ironic given that their moguls such as Thiel style themselves as libertarians against the state. In fact, they are so intertwined with the state that they are better understood as financialized outgrowths of the security state apparatus than truly autonomous private firms."
