Tech sector and university cooperation with military means innovation fuels militarization, risks nuclear suicide

[Marko; August 11; Lecturer at the university of helsinki’s department of social research and author; The Digital Age and it’s Discontents, “The Blind Spots of Digital Innovation Fetishism,” Ch. 2, P. 40-41] TC

Those who want to defend high-level military and intelligence spending often claim that military R&D has positive economic effects, since it creates spin-off technologies for the civilian sector, as in the case of advanced defence research projects that gave birth to the Internet. There is no need to disprove this argument completely, but it is very problematic from the perspective of democracy and citizen well-being. Indeed, one of the key reasons why the US elites have favoured military Keynesianism and its continuation in various forms is that massive state spending on the military is a better alternative for them, for reasons of power and privilege, than spending on social welfare. This is because social spending may

arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighbourhoods, but has no opinions about the choice of missile and high-tech fighter planes. (Chomsky 1994: 100–101)

In other words, spending on the military helps to keep power and profits in the hands of coercive state and corporate elites, rather than distributing them more democratically.

Spending on the military has also had undesirable effects for higher education. Writing about the United States, Henri Giroux (2008: 58) argues that ‘the university has become an intense site of militarization’. The repercussions of this are not limited to the United States, for besides military research contracts in the home country, in 2006, the US Department of Defense had contracts with 161 universities in 33 other countries around the world, while a study found that, in the early 2000s, 26 UK universities had 1,900 military-related research projects, amounting to a total value of £725 million (Smart 2016: 467). In the countries so affected, the militarization of universities has a negative influence on academic freedom and democracy, especially in the current neoliberal conditions where direct government funding for higher education for civilian purposes is decreasing and funding for research with military purposes, with private sector weapons-manufacturer involvement, is increasing (ibid.). What this means in concrete terms is demonstrated by an event involving Johns Hopkins University, the largest recipient of Pentagon funding of higher education. In 2013, a professor of computer science was asked by the dean of the university to take down from the university’s server his blog post that was critical of the NSA’s effort to defeat the encryption of online communication (Rosen 2013).

Today, former military enthusiasm with war machines made of steel and aluminium has given way to digital war imagery that is displayed in tech magazines, tech sections of mainstream news sites and military industry advertisements. Thus, a Fox News report lists ‘the 5 coolest military innovations of 2016’, including ‘surveillance drones that terrorists cannot escape’ and synthetic ‘Superman-style vision for combat helicopter pilots’ (Barrie 2016). Similarly, an online brochure of Accenture, a global consulting firm, waxes lyrical about ‘five trends that stretch the boundaries of digital defense’. These include software intelligence and data analytics that ‘apply computer vision algorithms to video surveillance feeds’ to ‘enhance response capabilities’—innovations that The Blind Spots of Digital Innovation Fetishism 47 can be used both on the battlefield and for crowd control in the cities, as the same brochure favourably notes (Accenture 2015). Even US President Trump’s megalomaniac and racist ‘border wall’ idea is welcomed by tech magazines and Silicon Valley start-ups as an opportunity to develop advanced digital surveillance technologies with state backing. For example, a Wired article from 2018 draws a flattering portrait of a start-up company that works on a pilot programme for the US government to develop an all-seeing ‘digital wall’ at the US–Mexico border, with the help of virtual reality and artificial intelligence (Levy 2018).

How technological rationality has become fused with collectively destructive actions and undemocratic structures of social control was a central theme for early Frankfurt School critical theorists. Ernst Mandel continued on this theme in the 1970s in light of the centrality of ‘permanent arms economy’ for late capitalist societies. For him, the ideological sphere of late capitalism is infested with beliefs in the omnipotence of technology to offer solutions to complex economic and social problems and ‘to integrate rebellious social classes’ (Mandel 1975: 501). In terms of military technologies, such ‘fetishism arises when it is presumed that all geopolitical problems have a military solution and that military solutions are guaranteed by superior technologies’ (Harvey 2003: 9). In reality, however, such solutions are partial and temporary ones at best, and ’superior’ military technologies have often been defeated by less-advanced countermeasures. Such persistent ideological thought forms demonstrate how modern capitalist rationality is split between partial rationality and overall irrationality. The most dramatic military expression of this is the development of ever-more effective weapons systems in an ‘effort to organize the collective nuclear suicide of humankind with the greatest possible “economy of human labour”’ (Mandel 1975: 510). The overall social irrationality of capitalism—the preference for short-term profit-making and military spending on warfare instead of general welfare—is now carried forward with the help of the latest digital technology innovations, without proper discussion concerning the (in)human purposes that they serve as fetishist objects of capitalist and authoritarian state desire.