The lines have been drawn
Silicon Valley must decide which side it's on
Th execution of Alex Pretti has made one thing clear, if it was not already, and that is that the lines have been drawn.
When ICE killed Rene Good, there was horror of a boundary transgressed. ICE was willing to shoot a white woman in the face, in broad daylight, for what amounted to a traffic violation, and the White House was willing to lie about it, lazily, in the face of all video evidence to the contrary. Still there was the dull shadow of relative novelty, the movements of a vehicle that could be willfully misinterpreted, the question of whether the administration would react to its overreach with any sort of correction, optical or otherwise.
With the execution of Pretti, there is horror of systematization. Horror that we are entering a new normal, of unaccountable, incontrovertible, open-air state-sanctioned terror. After Good’s death, the administration was explicit: federal immigration authorities would have “absolute immunity,” and now we know for certain that they will to use it.
A nurse in the intensive care unit at a veteran’s hospital, summarily executed in the street, in front of a half dozen iPhones taking video. Another deliberate and brazen lie of a statement from Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and the White House that contradicts every shred of evidence collected from multiple angles. So this is how it’s going to be. All of the pieces were on the table already, and now they have all been slotted together. Trump says he’ll only take ICE out of Minnesota if they hand over the voter rolls. The lines have been drawn.
At the very least, this is instructive. Take a look online. Whether state officials or rightwing influencers or tech billionaires or anonymous X reply guys, those willing to deploy pretzel logic to justify the shooting in the back of a man who had never made an act of aggression, or to subjugate logic itself to their ideology and brush the killing aside, behold our modern state propagandists. These are the voices party to the rise of actual, dyed-in-the wool, American fascism. These are the individuals and groups lining up to embrace Orwell’s famous edict1, denying their senses because the party tells them to, or on behalf of their hate.
This can be clarifying, understanding finally and fully that there is indeed already a large network of powerful and public figures willing to support unalloyed authoritarianism, no matter the injustices it perpetrates. You cannot argue with these parties on grounds that the excessive force and summary killings and detainments of American citizens is antidemocratic or unconstitutional, they do not care. That is not their project. You will never convince them with argument or evidence that their side cannot kill its enemies at will, and that too is clarifying. The pro-monarchist, anti-democratic voices in Silicon Valley have at least been open about this.
In Silicon Valley, the silence from the tech industry over the last two weeks has been deafening. There have been a few left-field voices condemning the ICE occupation and the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretti—VC Paul Graham and former Meta AI chief Yann Lecunn among them—but the leadership and CEOs of big tech firms have all been silent. Some, like Khosla Ventures VC Keith Rabois and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, have been actively fanning the flames. After the Pretti killing, Rabois said that "no law enforcement has shot an innocent person. illegals are committing violent crimes everyday.”
We have discussed at length in these pages the bond between Silicon Valley and the White House, and on those terms, tech’s silence is unsurprising. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft; all of these companies have lucrative contracts with the federal government, to say nothing of tech defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril.
But now that the lines have been drawn, these tech companies and those who work for them have a decision to make: Do you continue to help build the architecture of authoritarianism? Last year, when the tech CEOs flew to the inauguration to stand applauding in the front row, it was not yet entirely clear the precise nature of the project their wealth, services, and clout would help enable. Now it is.
(After hearing nonstop outcry from the terminally online Silicon Valley set online over a proposed tax on billionaires in California, the quiet is particularly grating. Sometimes the shape of this moment is made all too painfully clear.)
OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others worked with the Trump administration to push a moratorium on AI laws, all but announcing their contentedness with an antidemocratic program. They’ve all donated large sums of money. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman donated $25 million to a MAGA Super Pac directly. That money is supporting a government overseeing the execution of American citizens in the streets, the detainment of children as young as five years old, the filling of concentration camps with families wailing “let us out.”
Americans everywhere must weigh their personal responsibility in this moment, and some must weigh their complicity. I would like to believe ICE agents who joined believing Trump’s lies about an invasion of violent immigrants are quitting in droves after realizing they have instead joined an agency rife with death squads. I would like to believe that. I know people in communities around the nation are seeking out their neighbors, sending funds to mutual aid groups, and putting their bodies on the line in places like Minneapolis. You can donate to some of those efforts here. Find your own closer to home. Talk to your neighbors. Even if you are not political, get political.
I will add that if you work in Silicon Valley, you likely already know that AI in particular is uniquely important to Trump’s project—if you are not okay with what is happening, it’s time to consider what you can do to help slow or dismantle that project.
The lines have been drawn. American fascism—or authoritarianism, or autocracy, or whatever you want to call its equivalent—has materialized. This does not mean it will be invincible, or even durable. But it’s not going to relent without organizing, without struggle, without a fight.
Follow Hamilton Nolan’s reporting from Minneapolis here. Read Anya Kamenetz’s guide to doing politics as a nonpolitical person here. Stay safe out there. But keep those hammers up.
You know the one, and if it’s gauche to quote Orwell these days whatever, I don't care: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”
The systematization you're describing is built on infrastructure — and that infrastructure has names.
Palantir's FALCON system lets ICE agents draw shapes on a map and target everyone inside. They've received over $300 million in ICE contracts. Their co-founder Joe Lonsdale is actively fanning the flames while his company provides the targeting architecture.
The $1.2 billion Fort Bliss detention center — built on military land to limit oversight — had 60 federal detention standard violations in its first 50 days. One death there was ruled homicide by asphyxiation. ICE is trying to deport the witnesses.
Stephen Miller screamed "TORTURE!" at DHS officials in 2019 and demanded "quantity over quality." This is the system working as designed.
You're right that the lines have been drawn. But Minneapolis is showing something important: the architecture of authoritarianism depends on controlling information, and that's exactly what they can't do there. Legal observer networks built after 2020 released footage within hours. The lies collapsed before the press conferences ended.
The same tech that enables targeting can enable documentation. The question for Silicon Valley isn't just complicity — it's which infrastructure they're building.
I've been documenting both sides: the pipeline that built this, and the resistance infrastructure that's exposing it.
The targeting: https://theramm.substack.com/p/ice-agents-drew-shapes-on-a-map-to
The resistance: https://theramm.substack.com/p/minneapolis-banned-chokeholds-after
Once again, I really wish you and Carole Cadwalladr could talk. You're doing the same work, just on different continents. She's on Substack now, too (How to Stop the Broligarchy) and has an independent outlet called The Nerve with other Guardian alumni.