Google, Meta, X and all the Tech Bros

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Silicon Valley Wants Endless War: How Venture Capital Fuels Racist Killing
Anti-Muslim hate is becoming extremely profitable in Silicon Valley as the tech industry pivots towards defense tech and embedding itself with the U.S. war machine. From funding Israeli defense startups to spreading racist conspiracy theories about Zohran Mamdani, VCs like Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire are pushing a new breed of tech militarism.

Defense tech, AI surveillance, and far-right pro-Trump ideologies are merging in the tech world as Silicon Valley’s obsession with profit fuels a dangerous new era of “the war on terror 2.0.” Shaun Maguire and others like him will play a leading role in this new landscape, where human rights are obstacles and endless war is the ultimate market opportunity.

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A mega racist says what?

Who cares. Do evil all the time is Sergey’s motto.

I mean IBM did okay out of genocide so I’m sure he feels pretty confident.

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Maybe the MechaHitler was too much for her.

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Recent? Fuck off futurism. Recent my hole.

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That article completely ignores one of the main factors for people leaving Google Search: the company (and specifically Prabhakar Raghavan) intentionally made the Google Search experience worse starting around 2019 in order to force people to do more searching to get the information they needed and there by drive more ad revenue.

It’s not that AI searching is better than an old Google search used to be, because in most cases it’s not.

Personally I use Duck Duck Go now, which I find to be marginally better than Google, but it’s still not great. Part of that is because the whole damn Internet is full of Search-Engine-Optimized websites that were designed to help their Google result page ranking, and that’s still what you’re stuck with now even if you get to that website through a non-Google search engine.

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I mean, the call is coming from inside their own house? They are injecting AI into their shit and making it worse
 :woman_shrugging:

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So what finally pushed us over the edge? Well, a lot of things. For me, chief among them was music journalist Liz Pelly’s incredibly damning—and incredibly well-reported—recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It details all the ways Spotify has devalued music through the years, helping to turn the most powerful art form we’ve got into another frictionless commodity controlled by tech oligarchs. Like how Spotify created an entire program—ominously dubbed Perfect Fit Content—in which they pushed more and more faceless muzak onto their popular in-house playlists because it was licensed by the company under cheaper terms, taking money and placements away from genuine artists. Or how its hyper-personalized algorithmic playlists forced listeners to burrow deeper and deeper into their own musical comfort zones, dulling the opportunity for personal exploration. Or how their Discovery Mode introduced a shadowy pay-for-play scheme that all but required many independent artists and labels to lower their own royalty rates in order to surface songs on the platform. Every chapter—practically every page—of Mood Music offers revelations on how Spotify purposely undercut music makers in order to bolster their bottom line. I don’t know how any ardent music fan could read this book and not be moved to cancel their subscription.

Unfortunately, there’s more. In April 2024, Spotify enacted a new policy that denied royalties to songs that collected less than 1,000 streams, causing artists to wonder what would stop the company from arbitrarily increasing that number in the future. The following month, Billboard estimated that Spotify was expected to pay songwriters $150 million less in the ensuing year, even as the company raised their subscription rates, and their market cap hit new highs. This January, no less an authority than Björk declared, “Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians.”

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more reasons to quit Spotify, the brutal news keeps coming. Last month, it was reported that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm led a nearly $700 million round of funding for the European defense technology startup Helsing. Which means that when people now pay for Spotify, they are indirectly paying for the manufacturing of A.I. war drones. (What’s more, according to Bloomberg, Helsing’s technology is allegedly overpriced and glitchy, leading me to ask myself: Is it better or worse that the defense startup Daniel Ek invested in is purportedly kind of shitty?! 2025 is so bad, dude.) The disclosure caused veteran experimental rock band Deerhoof to announce plans to remove their music from the platform. “We don’t want our music killing people,” they wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech.”

Speaking of A.I. (sorry), the last few weeks saw the explosion of a 100-percent A.I.-generated band called the Velvet Sundown. As of this writing, the classic-rock entity (which somehow does not sound like a mix between Velvet Revolver and Sunset Rubdown) has more than 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and it doesn’t look like the company is in any rush to completely shut down their page. In fact, this latest abomination feels like both a culmination of Spotify’s anti-artist policies and a precursor of hells yet to come.

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Agree. I’m having to type more and more specific words into the search bar, and it still frequently misses the point.

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