By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on May 22, 2025 from Havana
Like Mambrú, Zuckerberg went to war, and who knows what other perversions he and his cyber cronies will get up to. photo: ap
Big tech companies are no longer hiding their alliances: business is at war, and Meta knows it. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads has launched a direct offensive to integrate itself into the US war architecture. According to Forbes this week, Mark Zuckerberg’s oligopoly has begun hiring former Pentagon officials and national security advisers, such as Francis Brennan, a former Trump aide, to manage its relations with the state and military apparatus (https://acortar.link/f97cBV).
This corporate shift coincides with the opening of its open-source artificial intelligence model (LLaMA) for use by military and intelligence agencies, as well as government contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Leidos, and Palantir. Meta has justified this decision, according to Forbes, as a contribution to “global democratic security,” in a clear reference to competition with China.
The news is not really surprising. Companies such as Meta are moving decisively towards integration within the industrial-digital-military complex, an evolution of the classic concept of the military-industrial complex, formulated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, but adapted to the age of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and information warfare.
In New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018), James Bridle denounced the alliance between the military and the civilian sectors, with technologies such as AI, facial recognition, mass surveillance algorithms, and cyberdefense systems, which originate from military contracts but are applied in civilian and commercial sectors. Ultimately, Bridle argues, “the network was built for war, and it has never stopped serving it,” but only now have technology platforms made public their relationship with the military and their blatant link to the state, the main financier of innovation through government contracts (especially with the US Department of Defense, NATO, and allied governments).
This reconfiguration is taking place in a context of accelerated growth in spending on artificial intelligence (AI) by the US government, led by the Department of Defense. The goal is clear: to ensure US primacy in the global race for AI, with a tectonic shift in federal spending. According to a report by the Brookings Institution (March 2024), the potential value of federal AI contracts skyrocketed 1,200 percent between August 2022 and August 2023, from $355 million to $4.561 billion. The Department of Defense accounted for 95 percent of the total, with 657 contracts in a single year (https:// acortar.link/6FyErz).
This gave rise to projects such as JEDI, a Pentagon investment to manage the military cloud (Amazon and Microsoft bid for the contract); the use of private satellite technologies (such as Starlink) and digital data for military intelligence; algorithmic surveillance, which works in collaboration with Facebook, Twitter, and Google with certain governments to “detect threats”; and contracts between OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies with the US government to adapt their models for military use.
This week, Microsoft reported in a statement that it sold advanced artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli army for the war in Gaza (https://acortar. link/o4ZMOz). This shift marks the transition from an experimental stage—where smaller contracts for pilot tests abounded—to a phase of massive and strategic implementation, characterized by high-value framework agreements designed to accelerate the deployment of technology in the military sphere on a large scale.
The Brookings study warns that in practice, the federal AI market behaves in a “chaotic and fragmented” manner, guided by defense logic rather than regulatory or civil principles. Meta’s integration into the military apparatus is no coincidence, but a clear example of “techno-authoritarianism disguised as innovation,” a concept coined by analyst Evgueni Morozov that describes a new era where the boundaries between the civilian and the military, between the public and the corporate, are perhaps forever blurred. Meta, with its dominance in immersion technologies, social media, and language modeling, is a key player in this emerging military architecture.
Like Mambrú, Zuckerberg went to war, and who knows what other perversions he and his cyber cronies will get up to.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English