We're building nerd fascism in Ohio
It's becoming increasingly clear that something will have to be done about the Big Tech gremlins.
Say what you want about the 19th-century robber barons. I imagine I would have said a lot. But in retrospect, at least they were captains of industry who helped build the industrial backbone of America. And at least had the decency to build hospitals, libraries and park systems in competition with each other.
You can’t say that about the rancid, repusilve nerds turned wannabe Big Tech overlords like Peter Thiel, an increasingly sweaty man who founded an internet payment platform and now stutters like a meth addict in the back of a police vehicle when asked simple questions like, “Do you think the human race should continue to exist?”
Thiel, who recently got exposed for having deep ties to the world’s most infamous dead pedophile, seeded J.D. Vance’s then-floundering Senate campaign until Donald Trump pulled him from the fire in a five-way race in the campaign’s closing days.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Fewer than three years later, Vance, the most unqualified Vice President of the modern era, is a heartbeat away from the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, tapped Thiel’s company, Palantir, to compile a database on Americans. (We love small government, don’t we, folks?)
Thiel, however, resembles an alpha male chiseled from Greek mythology in contrast to his business partner, Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey, another unfuckable nerd who views himself as a real-life Tony Stark, having invented Oculus, a virtual reality headset primarily used for video games.
I can take one look at Luckey’s header photo on his Twitter profile and instantly discern that this fella has cranked his pink penis to cartoon characters—probably multiple times in the last month.
The Ohio Republican junta and the business geniuses at JobsOhio, fresh off blowing $728 million on Intel plant that will never be built and gifting another $600 million to the criminal organization known as the Cleveland Browns, apparently look at Luckey and see a generational visionary that will steer America’s decrepit military-industrial complex into 21st century dominance.
As Sarah Donaldson of statehousenews.org revealed on Wednesday, Ohio is giving a staggering $850 million in tax credits for Anduril’s $910 million project to build Arsenal-1, a so-called “hyperscale manufacturing facility” in Pickaway County.
Dubbed “Arsenal-1,” the eventual 5 million square foot facility will manufacture advanced military technology driven by Anduril’s centralized artificial intelligence software. The weapons and weapons systems manufacturing plant will be constructed on 500 acres of land near Rickenbacker International Airport.
By pledging to create 4,008 jobs, Anduril takes the title for the largest single direct job creation by a project, held by Intel before.
It’s worth remembering that, when the geniuses at JobsOhio announced the Intel project, the plan was to have two “state-of-the-art” factories, which were going to generate “more than 20,000 jobs in the state,” operational by 2025.
As for Anduril, you’ll notice the discussion about “eventual” square footage, “pledged” job creation, and the absence of any clawback language in the contract, should Anduril fail to meet its lofty expectations.
Luckey has already admitted that at least 80 percent of the 4,008 “pledged” jobs will go to current employees who the company will relocate to Pickaway County.
That equates to the state, at best, paying $212,075 to Anduril for every hypothetical job they bring to Central Ohio. And that’s on top of the $6 billion that federal Republicans just gave Anduril for “border surveillance technologies” in the recently passed National Suicide Bill.
What our leaders have essentially done is give away hundreds of millions of more dollars in public money—funds that could be spent on delivering tangible results to everyday Ohioans—to purchase what amounts to a lottery ticket on an “AI defense contractor” that has yet to put a single functional product on to the battlefield.
In Anduril’s propagandized version of the future, the best jobs will go to coastal elites who are imported to Central Ohio.
The rest of the “hyperscale manufacturing jobs” will go to Ohioans tasked with building bombs and surveillance equipment that will be deployed on the slaughterfields of Gaza and “The Border” before inevitably boomeranging back home on the rest of us.
You can connect those dots in this insane press release on a collaboration between Palantir and Anduril:
Modern battlefield software relies on hardware that can survive and scale in the real world. With Palantir’s stack running natively on Menace systems, government operators get a software-defined solution that’s built to deploy fast, operate anywhere, and integrate with the systems they already use.
Anduril’s Menace-T will be used for on-premises and edge customer deployments, standardizing fielded infrastructure across programs. Anduril and Palantir are also collaborating on a new Menace-I configuration to support Palantir Edge — allowing Menace customers to access Gaia, Target Workbench and Maverick to increase operator lethality and survivability.
To fight and win at the tactical edge, ubiquitous computing and communications is required. The Menace family of systems provides ruggedized, scalable compute and communications infrastructure optimized for austere, disconnected, and contested environments. On Menace, Palantir's Edge Software seamlessly integrates with Anduril's Lattice Mesh networking technology to provide government operators with a single product that can deploy with greater resilience, better and quicker information, and unmatched portability in environments where traditional server infrastructure fails.
The good news is that, despite never working in an office, I am well-versed in corporate bullshit language used to dupe the general public.
That said, typing a sentence as horrendous as “ruggedized, scalable compute and communications infrastructure optimized for austere, disconnected and contested environments” should get someone shot.
Alas.
This is America, where guys like Luckey and Thiel get to roleplay their wildest fascist fantasies because the federal government refuses to tax or regulate the billionaire class in any meaningful way.
The best-case scenario is that Luckey hit a generational lick on Ohio’s Republican junta and the Trump Administration. That our state and federal governments have written checks to a company whose impotent nerd founder can’t cash.
At least we will once again be able to point and laugh at their stupidity, even if it would have been wiser for them to burn $850 million in a bathtub, even if that money could have gone to schools, hospitals, childcare tax credits, or almost literally anything else.
Because the other reality is almost too grim to fathom; our leaders will have sold us into the bondage of panopticon surveillance fascism while calling it a massive win for the state at large.
I’ve seen almost every type of Republican scam, swindle, and boondoggle in over six years of blogging about state politics. This one is the most downright evil.
Eat shit forever, Frank LaRose
You can trace the Ohio Republican Party’s devolution on LGBTQ rights in the career of Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
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