those protests that we saw around Project Maven and during the Trump era, those were an

aberration, you know, compared to the majority of the time, you don't get to be a giant

multinational conglomerate by listening to a minority of your workforce, right?

Music of your workforce, right? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us,

made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Natasha Tiku.

Natasha is a tech culture reporter at The Washington Post, who has been involved in a number of stories lately, looking at Silicon Valley's relationship to the military, its turn back to the Middle East for funding.

And I thought that these form the foundation for a really

important conversation to understand what is happening in Silicon Valley right now, how things are

shifting, and how it plays into this broader geopolitical moment that I think it's fair to say we've

been talking about quite a bit on the show lately, because the United States is putting itself into conflict

with China over broader geopolitical issues, but also over technological issues. And that is affecting

a lot of things within the tech industry and also broader relationships that these companies

have that are happening between countries. And obviously, when it comes to the Middle

East, that is an important thing as well. Now, when I say the Middle East, I should be clear

that, obviously, we are still watching what's happening in Israel and in its bombing campaign,

its genocide in Gaza. We don't talk about that so much in this conversation, though it certainly

comes up near the end, our focus is more on

how these figures in the tech industry are really returning to Saudi Arabia and to the

United Arab Emirates in a very prominent way in order to get more funding for the projects that

they want to carry out, particularly around AI and all of the investment

that's not just going into developing these AI products, but building out data centers and

...