Will Big Tech follow public opinion on Gaza?

Reporting of Microsoft's surveillance in Palestine this week could be the spark that changes the Big Tech silence on Gaza.

An in-depth piece of reporting in The Guardian this week gave us the most detailed picture yet of Microsoft’s role in the Gaza conflict, and underscored the critical question tech companies face in this new, highly charged era.

The report, which involved extensive sourcing and documentation, laid out in detail how Israeli intelligence officials persuaded Microsoft to give it special access to a warehouse of secure cloud storage on the company’s Azure platform, which Israel then used as a repository for a vast trove of data it was collecting from the surveillance of Palestinian citizens.

The searchable database stored the recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, and it has been used extensively as a source of intelligence and evidence gathering during the siege of Gaza, The Guardian reported.

“According to three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to the control it exerts over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the indiscriminate new system allows intelligence officers to play back the content of cellular calls made by Palestinians, capturing the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians.”

This story was concerning on many levels, not the least what happens when nearly infinite powers of data collection are used in the service of violence and repression.

As a former tech worker, it underscored to me the profound choice that tech companies face, in this new era of conflict and increased technological capabilities.

Do U.S. companies have a social mission or obligation outside of their bottom lines — a duty to ensure that their products are used responsibly and not for violence, conflict and legal and human rights violations, as is likely the case in Gaza? Or are they in the business of simply selling their services to the highest bidder, including repressive foreign governments and militaries, letting international law, and potentially the lives of innocent people be damned.

In previous times through pandemic and even in the immediate years after, it seemed like the answer to this questions, was, if not simple, at least straightforward for companies: corporate America, and particularly “idealistic” Silicon Valley, espoused a sense that their products should add value and meaning to the world, paying, at a minimum, lip service to the importance of various social causes and missions. Much has and will continue to be written about how legitimate that commitment actually was. But even as a gesture, it mattered. It could be called upon. Pointed to. And used as a reference point as companies navigated increasingly thorny issues as technology grows more pervasive and powerful.

It’s a new time however. The apologetic CEO is out of style. The company that cares is no longer cool. And firms are now able to acknowledge the cold, and sometimes ruthless pursuit of profit, a push draped in its own pseudo-philosophy about production and achievement, or as Palantir describes it “software that dominates”, in a way that would have been more controversial before.

Make no mistake, this is a choice. And one that many tech companies may end up regretting as an overcompensation amidst the feverish political climate of the second Trump era.

In Gaza at least, there are signs that public opinion is turning. Approval in the U.S. of Israel’s actions in Gaza recently sunk to the lowest level — 32 percent — since Gallup began asking the question in November 2023 after Hamas’ deadly assault on Israel the month prior. Trump has a higher approval rating, and that’s not saying much. And interestingly, moderate Democrats have completely changed their tone.

Even in Israel, where a dominant right-wing and a climate of victimhood after the attacks created an environment with little in the way of resistance or pushback to its brutal military campaign, the tide may be shifting, as institutions, cultural figures, activist groups, and former military leaders grow increasingly vocal about the moral implications of the country’s assault.

Tech companies increasingly play a role in these conflicts, with cloud software and increasingly, artificial intelligence. They used to feel chagrin when called out — I know personally from my time pushing Google, where I worked for a decade, to end a proposed contract for A.I-powered drones with the Department of Defense. It’s harder now. But the glaring exposure of Microsoft’s connection to the atrocities in Gaza has the potential to be a spark that starts a small fire. Coupled with the change in public opinion in the U.S., if just one of the major tech firms gave some signal they were no longer behind everything Israel is doing, it could open the space for others to follow suit.

The ethical and potentially legal questions these companies face are significant. And even if it isn’t immediately expedient to acknowledge these thorny issues, companies do ultimately respond to public pressure, market imperatives, and general cultural mores. If that equation begins to shift, anything is possible.

Here’s a few other things I’m reading this week:

On a similar but lighter note, Bloomberg explored the return of three “girlbosses,” who all fell off / were canceled during the social justice wave that crested around the time of the pandemic. All three are back again — and what’s different? They’ve dropped any pretense of a social mission along with their work. No ideals, no larger mission? Much harder to be called to account now. Seems analogous to what we’re discussing about tech, above.

This time around, the girlbosses are doing it differently. The lesson they seem to have taken from their first flameouts is not that they should now build the kind of inclusive companies they initially failed to create; instead, it’s that they should shake off their connections to the kind of progressive politics they once embodied.

The change-the-world vibes have vanished. [Reformation founder Yael] Aflalo no longer talks about sustainability or a desire to cater to a customer who wants to be “a good person.” [Outdoor Voices founder Tyler] Haney seems unconcerned about what being labeled “Elon Musk’s reply guy” might signal about her own politics.

[The Wing founder Audrey] Gelman’s transformation is perhaps the most telling. She was the first visibly pregnant CEO to grace the cover of a business magazine, projecting an image of rise-and-grind and having-it-all culture. Her new enterprise leans cottagecore and tradwife and, as the New York Times has noted, is missing any social or political mission: In The Wing’s “fantasy world, women had board seats and book deals, leaning in or on each other to get ahead. Her new world harks back to eras when a woman’s domain was her home, before she had suffrage or a credit card.”

Ezra Klein sometimes trends a little bit too much to the center, but I really enjoyed his interview with Columbia student and activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was targeted by the Trump administration for his activists.

Khalil grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus; it’s a fascinating piece, and that gives a much broader view of the people behind these activist struggles, regardless of where you stand on the issue. And I appreciate that Klein, who has the ear of the Democratic establishment, gave Khalil space to tell his story. Klein also underscored a central point, worth repeating here:

Khalil was not followed into his building by plainclothes officers and taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana for more than a hundred days — imprisoned there while his wife gave birth — because the U.S. government feared him. He was imprisoned there because the U.S. government wanted others like him to fear them. It wanted noncitizens and immigrants to stop speaking out.

It wanted everyone to ask: If they could do this to Khalil, could they do it to me? If they could detain him on such flimsy grounds, could they not come up with a reason to detain me?

An interesting piece in the New York Times this week about an influential A.I.-obsessed tech commune / cult in Berkeley explores the near-religious like tenor that technology has for some of the people driving the biggest decisions about its use. Comforting.

The City Council in Tucson, AZ unanimously voted down approving a massive Amazon data center that would have sucked up the area’s limited water resources after public outcry and concerns about the project’s impact. This feels like it could be a turning point, and a sign that the coverage of the issues these data centers are raising is making an impact.

Protesters in San Francisco gathered yesterday outside Scale AI’s office to call the company out (and one of their investors, Peter Thiel) for their work helping to DoD to train AI.

Here’s an internal email from Uber written in 2021 in response to increase sexual assaults during Uber rides: “Our purpose/goal is not to be the police,” stated a 2021 brainstorming document about Uber’s global safety standards. “Our bar is much lower and our goal is to protect the company... " Uber received a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States almost every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022, the story from the NYT reveals their efforts to not only do as little as possible to protect people but to also go out of their way to message to the public that taking an Uber is safe.

When Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey was due to speak at a university campus in Taiwan on Monday, protestors were there to greet them.

The firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner because Trump didn’t like the recent jobs report won’t obviously prevent the economy from souring, if that is indeed where it is headed, Nate Silver writes in his newsletter, in a piece about the importance of this data source. (Take it from the data nerd, not us). “But it will reduce American economic leadership and increase uncertainty for businesses, workers and investors,” he writes.”

That’s all for this week.