At this very moment, the United States is helping Israel commit a genocide in Gaza. Part of this aid comes in the form of weapons, about which I've written before. Since then, a recent report from 972 magazine documented the use of "Lavender," a so-called AI system that ostensibly chooses enemy targets, but which actually serves to launder the decision to murder innocent civilians through a computer. Lavender is a civilian-murder lottery machine, hosted on American-owned servers. Its sophistication exists to silicon-wash Israel's intent to kill innocent human beings.
It is in this context that Mark Rober, a wonderful engineer and educator with 50 million YouTube subscribers, chose to release his most recent video, which is functionally an advertisement for Anduril, a Silicon Valley "defense" company. Here's what Anduril does, according to Wikipedia:
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril's major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
The video has three parts. First, Anduril showcases its anti-drone technologies, then Rober advertises "Hack Pack," his educational engineering kit for children and teens. Finally, Rober and his friends compete to see which of them can make the coolest anti-drone build. Even before we get into the details, the structure of the video already reveals what is happening. The timing may seem in poor taste, but I suspect that's the point. The American military-industrial complex has rarely been under such scrutiny, and, as Anduril may be looking for more funding, what better way to polish its image than laundering it through that of a wholesome, joyful, and supremely talented YouTube engineer, beloved by children and adults alike. Though the video doesn't say one way or the other, I hope that Rober got paid a lot of money for this, because running advertisements for the military-industrial complex is wrong, but doing it for free is wrong and stupid.
The video opens with Rober standing in front of a fancy-looking box, saying:
Hiding inside this box is an absolute marvel of engineering you might just find protecting you the next time you're at a public event that's got a lot of people.
When he says "protecting you," the video momentarily cuts to stock footage of a packed sports stadium, the first of many "war on terror"-coded editorial decisions, before returning to the box, which opens and releases a drone. This is no ordinary drone, he says, but a particularly heavy and fast drone, designed to smash "bad guy drones trying to do bad guy things." He explains how "it's only a matter of time" before these bad guys' drones attack infrastructure "or worse," cutting to a photo of a stadium for the third time in just 30 seconds.
Rober will continue using this "bad guy" language throughout the video, despite the indisputable reality: American weapons are responsible for millions of deaths (presumably, according to Anduril, all "bad guys"), while there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on a stadium. In fact, the US has an extensive and secretive drone program that regularly kills civilians. Anduril makes both UAS (drone) and counter-UAS systems, but in this video, they've chosen to highlight a counter-UAS system that guards against hypothetical, future threats against Americans, instead of the kinds of systems that Americans use to kill real people today. Bad propaganda lies, but good propaganda emphasizes strategically.
He then goes to Anduril to interview its founder, Palmer Luckey, "who, by the way, you might recognize as the dude who dropped out of school at 19 years old to invent the Oculus VR headset." I don't normally make a habit of commenting on people's physical appearances, but we're discussing a piece of propaganda that he probably paid for, and how he chooses to present himself is telling.
He looks like he's going to corner you at a party and tell you about that mushroom trip at Burning Man that changed his life. He's styling himself as a counter-cultural, college-dropout, Silicon-Valley-style "disrupter." This aligns with Anduril's whole shtick, which seems to be that they're disrupting (so-called) defense by bringing that uniquely innovative tech mindset. They're a start up defense contractor, as he explains in his media interviews.
But you actually don't get to be counter-cultural while getting rich making weapons for the world's most powerful military. That's the complete opposite. There is no more mainstream thing to do than to sit right smack dab in the imperial center, collaborating with the most powerful government in human history. I don't know whether he dresses like that normally, or if he chooses to do it for media appearances, but the only difference between those two is whether he's also lying to himself.
Around the 2 minute mark, Rober and Luckey discuss the various widgets that Luckey's company makes to attack drones, though they of course never use the word "attack." They only ever "defend." This language dovetails with the aforementioned hypotheticals, in which these drones can protect innocent Americans in stadiums. It's easy to conceive of, say, journalists using drones in ways that are both adversarial to the government and for the public good. These nuances are not discussed.
From there, Rober is so excited to see their product in action that they take him to a field demonstration. Now, in my opinion, this thing is not actually that cool. Don't get me wrong, drones are cool, but, in the grand scheme of things, this is just a bully drone, bigger and faster than the other drones. Rober, without the financial backing of the American military machine, routinely makes way more interesting and creative things on his channel. In fact, later in this very video, he and his friends are going to make some pretty cool things, leading me to suspect that his enthusiasm for Anvil is at least partly financial.
The product demo goes on for a couple minutes, with Rober gushing over the details of how it works. He also takes a moment to talk about one of Anduril's other weapons systems, the Roadrunner, which, according to the LA Times, is "a novel combination of AI-powered drone, bomb and boomerang."
The company unveiled the product at its Costa Mesa headquarters to a scrum of journalists, showing videos of what the new machine can do. In one sequence, the Roadrunner takes off vertically from a rocky hillside and then flies out to hit a Reaper-style drone in midair. The Roadrunner itself is destroyed on impact, effectively serving as a guided missile. In another sequence, the Roadrunner takes off, flies around and then returns to its launching point, where it lands nose-up on a series of pop-out landing struts, much like one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.
Rober explains that the Roadrunner system is way better than its competitor, the Patriot Missile, a totally natural thing that I, too, have just felt compelled to mention for no real reason, financial or otherwise. Then he continues:
[Rober speaking] Anduril is taking the SpaceX approach to using cutting-edge engineering to make things way more capable, for way less money. And you know they're doing something right because they have some portion of their solutions currently implemented in a lot of different places.
[Luckey speaking] Southern border [note that the video cuts to footage of the southern border wall], northern border, national parks, military bases, around critical infrastructure, around nuclear energy sites. There's a lot of sensitive places where you don't want to have no idea who's there and what they might be doing.
Lattice, Anduril's surveillance technology, or "secret sauce" as Rober calls it, is bad, actually, as is normalizing the increasing militarization of the American border. Since its founding in 2003, the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement has tripled, from $3.3 billion to $8.3 billion; the Border Patrol budget has increased almost twentyfold from $263 million in 1990 to $4.9 billion. Instead of spending billions a year to help people fleeing bad situations in their home countries, for which, as a general rule, the United States is probably responsible, we give it to companies like Anduril to create a 2,000 mile (3200 km) strip of innovative human suffering, seen here, presented in Rober's characteristically cheerful and playful style. I don't know where else Anduril's technology hurts people, but the southern border could very well be one of its less offensive implementations.
Around the 7 minute mark, Rober tells us that he is going to make his own project to shoot down drones, gives us a quick preview, then pivots to an advertisement for his "Hack Pack! Teens," with which kids and teens can build their own toy version of his drone defense system. This is self-evidently gross. Making a comically uncritical video about American weapons manufacturers is bad enough, but making one that invites children into a STEM-toy-to-murder pipeline is disgusting. I'm not here to hand-wring about toys based on violence in general (toy guns, toy soldiers, every other video game, etc.), but I draw the line well before sanitizing an American weapons manufacturer, then advertising a "build your own missile defense system" kit to children, many of which are presumably interested in future careers in engineering, all while 13,000 of their fellow children (and counting) have been slaughtered in Gaza alone in the last 6 months.
The rest of the video is a contest between Rober and others, where they showcase their very cool anti-drone builds. This is Rober at his best, making cool things with his friends, and demonstrating them with that infectious joy for making things that has earned him the love of some 50 million subscribers, myself included. I have no objections to the rest of the video, but I do want to contrast its playful tone with what Anduril represents.
As my fellow Tolkien-enthusiasts already know, the name "Anduril" comes from The Lord of the Rings. It's the name of Aragorn's sword, and it means "Flame of the West." Here is Palmer Luckey, speaking on a podcast, explaining the name:
When we started Anduril, it wasn't just about the United States. It was explicitly around defending the west, and you know I think that even goes back to the name of the company. We wanted to take this position that, you know, countries aren't just different, that there are countries that are better or worse, that we were going to be on the sides of the ones that were better, as determined by the handful of values that still remain true between those, between those countries today.
Those of you who happen to be both blessed enough to love Tolkien and cursed enough to know about Peter Thiel probably saw this western chauvinist ideology coming a mile (1.6 km) away. For the uninitiated, Peter Thiel is a founder of Palantir Technologies, also an evil "defense" contractor whose name is a Tolkien reference. In the Tolkien universe, a palantir is a crystal ball, mostly used by Sauron (literally evil incarnate) to observe and communicate. Thiel is an investor in Anduril, a billionaire, and an enthusiastic funder of far-right political causes in the US, though his antics are well-documented elsewhere and well outside the scope of this post. For our purposes, just know that he's a far-right villain, that he's well known as such, that his connection to Anduril is obvious, and that this is but one more red flag that Rober chose to ignore in making this video.
I feel comfortable saying that Rober didn't set out to make propaganda. In fact, I suspect that he's actually a pretty nice guy. A few years ago, he made one of the most genuinely touching videos that I've ever seen, in which he spent eight months planning the coolest possible birthday party for a 7-year-old fan with cancer. Here's a line from the very end of that video, which, in his own words, perfectly summarizes what's happening here, far better than I ever could:
I thought about all they'd been through for the past year, and all the people that came together from all across the country to donate their time and energy for a kid they've never even met. And I might not vote the exact same as all of them, but for like 5 inspiring days, none of that stuff mattered. Whenever I find myself short on hope, I find it helps to put my phone down and choose to see the good parts in my fellow humans, and be one of the good parts for my fellow humans to see.
I want, more than anything, to live in a world where that is possible for everyone. Unfortunately, for the people at the border, or for those in worse countries, putting their phones down does not make the bombs, made by people like Luckey, land somewhere else. It does not make the images of suffering disappear from their real lives, nor does it bring back dead family, regrow lost limbs, or rebuild rubble back into homes, schools, and hospitals. No matter how little they might want to care about our politics, our politics cares about them, and people like Luckey and Thiel, bad people, get rich in the process, using people like Rober, a nice person who can't be bothered one way or the other, whenever and however they can.
I want to give the last word to another young boy, Zubair. An American drone strike killed his grandmother right in front of him, wounding him and his sister. Here's a quote from his devastating testimony to the US Congress, back in 2013, when he was just 13-years-old. I remember reading about this testimony at the time, and it has stuck with me ever since:
I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.