I think it is worth questioning to what extent it is possible to reconcile a mission of benefiting all of humanity and a mission of benefiting the military of one individual country.

I would suggest that it is not possible to reconcile that those two things are irreconcilable.

You have to sort of choose whether you're, you know, team world or team America.

Yeah. choose whether you're, you know, team world or team America. 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 Sam Biddle.

Sam is a senior technology reporter at the Intercept.

There are many stories dominating the growing relationship between Silicon Valley,

the Trump administration, and, you know, this extreme right wing more generally. We've talked about Doge. We've talked about the consequences for the American government.

Obviously, there's a lot of talk about the trade war. But one aspect of this that probably isn't

getting the attention that it deserves is the growing effort by a number of companies and

influential people in the tech industry to remake the way

that military contracting works in the United States. As you're probably aware, hundreds of

billions of dollars are spent every year to support the American military to make sure it has the

hardware and the software that it needs. And the tech industry wants a bigger piece of that pie.

So they are arguing that they would do this

much more efficiently than the existing companies that tend to get those contracts, and that it's

about time that the military get more innovative, more cutting edge, embrace these AI tools and

these new ways of making weapons that the tech industry says it can deliver.

Now, obviously, that is a big shift from the way the tech industry used to want to position

itself.

And previously, there would be a bit of a clash as to which side of the tech industry

might win out here, you know, these new right-wing folks or the more libertarian

...