#Tech Industrial Complex

[justinspoliticalcorner]

CHRIS MEGERIAN, ZEKE MILLER and COLLEEN LONG at AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden used his farewell address to the nation Wednesday to deliver stark warnings about an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy taking root in the country and a “tech-industrial complex” that is infringing on Americans’ rights and the future of democracy. Speaking from the Oval Office as he prepares to hand over power Monday to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden seized what is likely to be his final opportunity to address the country before he departs the White House to spotlight the accumulation of power and wealth in the U.S. among just a small few. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said, drawing attention to “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.” Invoking President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex when he left office in 1961, Biden added, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well.” [...] Biden sounded the alarm about oligarchy as some of the world’s richest individuals and titans of its technology industry have flocked to Trump’s side in recent months, particularly after his November victory. Billionaire Elon Musk spent more than $100 million helping Trump get elected, and executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have donated to Trump’s inaugural committee and made pilgrimages to Trump’s private club in Florida for audiences with the president-elect as they seek to ingratiate themselves with his administration and shape its policies.

President Joe Biden gave a heartening farewell address about the dangers of an oligarchy taking over the US that could imperil what remains of our democracy.

[bonsystems-blog]

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[firstoccupier]

President Biden Addresses Misinformation and AI Threats in Recent Remarks

By, WPS News Staff Reporter Baybay City | January 20, 2025 On January 15, 2025, President Joe Biden expressed significant concern over the growing threats posed by misinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting the urgent need for regulatory measures to safeguard democracy and civil rights. His observations resonate with ongoing discussions among experts about the implications of…

[thewordenreport]

The tech industrial complex was unusually visible at the inauguration, sitting between Cabinet secretary-nominees and Trump's business family. Dorothy: Pay no attention to the men mingling behind the curtain. https://thewordenreport-governmentandmarkets.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-tech-industrial-complex-plus.html

[sciderman]

Yk, I hate that adaptations keep making Peter a high schooler, and not just because it means he never evolves, but because the adaptations now also include wider Marvel, whitch usually (thanks to the MCU) is at the modern day stage with legacy characters and new age teen heroes, meaning that Peter is taking up Miles' spot and you can really tell when they put him next to someone like Kamala Khan or Sam Alexander who are Miles' pals. Tho Peter taking Miles' stuff is just a modern issue overall, just look at MCU whitch just stole and re-skinned Miles' personality, characters, story-beats, even the costume to an extent and then made it worse.

agree 👏

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Gary Wilson

The United States military has shifted toward AI and “data driven” warfare. A new revolving door is putting senior Pentagon officials into executive positions or as advisors to the Big Tech companies.

Over the past two years, global events have further fueled the Pentagon’s demand for Silicon Valley technologies, including the deployment of drones and AI-enabled weapon systems in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the Pentagon’s AI arms race directed against China.

[stone-cold-groove]

Front cover: UNIVAC Defense System’s CP-890 shipboard computer brochure - 1967.

[nando161mando]

CAPTCHAs tech companies exploiting free labor to train AI vision for defense contractors military drones and autonomous weapons

[lalalipuyofgulg]

Ameren sends a flier every month to "give" me a smart thermostat for "free".

We got our first computer in the late 1980s from my grandpa, an engineer for the military industrial complex. (That company got bought out by Boeing after he died).

He was a super big weirdo. Definitely would have been diagnosed with autism if he was alive today. (Like all of his grandkids)

Once I saw a friend of my uncle's ask him about the moon landing being fake and he laughed his ass off.

"no no no. That technology is real but the moon landing wasn't really the point. That was just to get funding."

Anyway. He was well known to be an abusive maniac, but his paranoias about the true purpose of the space program were maybe not unfounded? After all, we are all carrying surveillance devices in our pockets 24/7.

He sucked though, not gonna lie. But a broken clock is right twice a day..... So....?

I can't say that to my parents about him being right, though. They totally hate him even though he has been dead for 30 years.

He deserves their hatred. He was a real piece of crap. (No wonder the boomers are so fucked up).

[techdriveplay]

Why Quantum Computing Will Change the Tech Landscape

The technology industry has seen significant advancements over the past few decades, but nothing quite as transformative as quantum computing promises to be. Why Quantum Computing Will Change the Tech Landscape is not just a matter of speculation; it’s grounded in the science of how we compute and the immense potential of quantum mechanics to revolutionise various sectors. As traditional…

[firstoccupier]

President Biden Addresses Misinformation and AI Threats in Recent Remarks

By, WPS News Staff Reporter Baybay City | January 20, 2025 On January 15, 2025, President Joe Biden expressed significant concern over the growing threats posed by misinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting the urgent need for regulatory measures to safeguard democracy and civil rights. His observations resonate with ongoing discussions among experts about the implications of…

[deepspaceboytoy]

I need to get more into naval warfare

[stone-cold-groove]

A page from UNIVAC Defense System’s CP-890 shipboard computer brochure - 1967.

[readingsquotes]

There was no student protest, for instance, when colleges in both the North and South financed their establishment and expansion with the profits of slavery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. That very much includes the Ivy League, and it includes this school of ours as well. “Slavery permeated almost everything about Harvard’s early history,” Sven Beckert said in 2022 after the release of the report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. Outside Wadsworth House you can now find a plaque commemorating four enslaved people—Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba—owned by two Harvard presidents, Benjamin Wadsworth and Edward Holyoke, in the early eighteenth century. There were no student protests against their bondage. And if Titus, Venus, Bilhah, or Juba had revolted against their masters, we must imagine that Harvard authorities would have availed themselves of the violence of law enforcement to repress their resistance—one more crime, surely, for which today’s leadership would express regret.

.....

"The fundamental historical reality is that mass student protest—especially at elite schools like this one—is a relatively recent phenomenon and a product of the belated and incomplete diversification of American universities that began after World War II. All of a sudden there were students on campus who didn’t have any reason to accept their institutions’ historic commitment to oppressive hierarchies. In some cases, they even came from the very communities who were victimized by the violence that universities profited from materially and supported ideologically. And they revolted.

In December 1964, months of student activism at the University of California, Berkeley, reached a boiling point. Activists had been galvanized by participation in the civil rights movement that summer and sought to continue to organize for racial justice when they returned to campus, only to confront the university’s extremely restrictive policing of political speech. At the time, a law was still on the books requiring UC faculty, like other California state employees, to swear a loyalty oath, as a result of McCarthy-era crackdowns on left-wing thought throughout American higher education. On December 2, thousands of students occupied Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. On the front steps, where today there is another encampment in solidarity with Gaza, a student leader named Mario Savio delivered a famous speech. I’d like to read some of his words here:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

What stands out to me from this early period in the 1960s student movement is the pervasive feeling that students were placed on a kind of conveyor belt, that they were raw material in a factory that was producing a certain sort of person as its product: the compliant, complicit professional worker.

...

The way we narrate the 1960s campus antiwar movement today foregrounds specifically student activism. That’s as it should be: students supplied the movement with most of its energy and especially with most of its courage. Like we see today, students are often more willing than faculty to take risks for the causes they believe in. But I think sometimes a one-sided emphasis on student activism can reproduce a condescending attitude toward protest, framing it as an expression of youthful exuberance—as if there were anything wrong with that—rather than the necessary corollary of eminently reasonable political and moral principles. So I want to note that opposition to the Vietnam War—and to universities’ material complicity in the American-backed slaughter—transcended all boundaries on campus.

...

By that time the Vietnam War was over and the activist movements of the ’60s and early ’70s were in abeyance. One major reason was the coercive use of state power against these movements. Black radical leaders were murdered by law enforcement and incarcerated, and the National Guard infamously killed four antiwar protestors at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. After this wave of repression, militant student activism came to be memorialized by universities as a relic of an earlier age that had now ended.

....the crystallographer John Desmond Bernal, called The Social Function of Science. There Bernal makes an argument that I think is even more important today than when he first wrote it:

The fact is that we are emerging from a period when war was a specialized task affecting a small portion of the community, and are now reverting to one in which every member of the community, tribe, or nation is primarily a warrior. Under modern industrial conditions war is no longer fought only by the men in the field of battle but by the whole national industrial complex. The indirectness of participation is a very convenient mask.

That is the mask with which Harvard hides its complicity with the American military-industrial complex and its investments in Israel’s war machine. And it is the mask that you all are threatening to remove. I hope you succeed.