I am not scared of AI. I am scared of us.

Avik Jain Chatlani

Jul 1, 2026

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Former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller don’t look threatening. They are pasty, meek, bland; physically unremarkable in every way, probably incapable of committing violence with their hands. And yet, the former was an architect of the Gaza genocide, and the latter oversees one of the most public and vicious deportation campaigns in modern history. 

History and the present are filled with unassuming functionaries such as these, who put together the conditions for systemic, widespread violence. Certainly, there are foot soldiers—be they the Hutu militia members in Rwanda, or the settlers in contemporary Palestine—who use weapons to tear people apart. But the commanders, the leaders, the operators behind the scenes, they rarely fit the images of brutality and evil that populate our minds. They usually wear ties, sit behind desks, issue memos, and speak without energy. 

The cartoonish manic persona—demonstrated by politicians such as President Donald Trump or Sen. Lindsey Graham, or propagandists such as Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro and Zionist Trump supporter Rabbi Shmuley Boteach—is rarely found when we examine the structures of power and violence. For example, Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s rantings and ravings, dedicating his company to the service of “the West and the United States of America,” are anomalies. Most executives who are involved in the selling, buying, programming, or dropping of weapons, be they in boardrooms or parliaments, tend to keep their mouths shut. At the very least, they tend to keep their public comments as neutral as possible … or they even cater to liberal sensibilities. Lockheed Martin, for example—the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, which supplies Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia with F-16 and F-35 fighter jets—opens its investor documents with a land acknowledgement. 

The Palantir manifesto championing U.S. military dominance that has circulated recently seems like it’s meant to taunt us, not merely to sell something to shareholders. It’s almost as if the company’s leaders are confirming that the days of backlash are over. They feel that the docile population—trapped in a surveillance state, disconnected from each other—will limit their repudiation to the online sphere or to peaceful protests. 

This is, of course, nothing new. Weapons companies operated with impunity before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite the biggest anti-war protests documented. Same with BP, even after the destruction wreaked on animals by its oil spill (the largest in history) was met with outrage. 

Oligarchs have been around for a long time; their grip on power, in most societies, has rarely weakened. And, if there are restrictions—if their power is checked—this tends to be temporary, or cyclical, depending on the pliability of the politicians of the day. 

Violence isn’t sustained by disturbed head honchos making bombastic declarations. It is sustained by very ordinary people, who live seemingly placid lives. The kind of person who is capable of unleashing violence—who would very happily cast a vote in 2028 for [insert respectable pro-war candidate here], and maybe write them a fat check—is expertly described by the author of “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,” former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis:

I was talking to somebody who worked, until very recently, for Palantir. And he was telling me that the Gaza “event”—that’s how he described it—was very exciting for technologists. And while trying to avert a stroke in my head, I managed to ask him to explain to me why. And he said, “Look, what’s happening in Gaza is terribe… but it was fantastic for us.” I said, “Please, continue, explain this to me: why was it fantastic?” And he said, “When you bomb people, massively, in a densely-populated area, they do a lot of things.” And he pointed at my phone that was sitting there—just like it is now, on this table—and he said, “Your phone is not moving [right now]; it’s useless to us. It’s only when you move with it that it produces data for us, to be able to train the algorithms. If, in a densely-populated area like Gaza, you bomb people, they—if they’re not dead—they run around, they try to escape, they are moved from one place to another, they make phone calls, they try to find their loved ones, they rush to the hospital, the hospital is not there, they run even more… there is a lot of movement that we can train the algorithms with.” 

Varoufakis expands on this disturbing point, noting that “Palantir, using AWS, Amazon services, Oracle Services, and so on and so forth, are training their own AI programmes… to do what? To be able to be useful in producing AI commodities—products—that they then sell, let’s say, to the British National Health Service (NHS)—to hospitals. For what? For managing personnel inside the hospitals during emergencies. Let’s say there’s a bad traffic pile-up; they deal with that panic [by using] the Palantir algorithms for organizing the manner in which the personnel operate.”

“These people,” Varoufakis warns us, “are not immoral. They’re worse: they’re amoral.” 

Indeed, they would like to subject us all to the experience of Palestinians, running for our lives, trapped in their algorithm. But these amoral people are not, by any means, original. And despite the fact that, in my gut, I agree fervently with Varoufakis’ description—as someone who (like you, probably) despises these companies and their detached way of thinking—I sometimes find myself wondering if this new breed of “technologists” truly matters at all. 

While significant legacy media attention has been paid to firms such as Palantir, I’m skeptical about why. Why does an outlet like The New York Times, for example, seem so frightened about this company, when its editorial board, reporters, and columnists, time and time again, have expressed anti-Palestinian racism, apologized for the Israeli regime’s genocidal expansionism, and cheered for the bombing of civilians in Iran and Lebanon? It’s impossible not to be skeptical when so much attention is paid to a company like Palantir, but there’s far less scrutiny of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Elbit Systems, and so on.  

It’s true that the manifestos and public interventions made by Karp and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—as well as their closeness to the Trump administration—make for good clickbait. When Karp smirks and wriggles with joy at being called “evil” for his company’s support of the Israeli military, or when it is reported that Thiel, a major benefactor of Vice President JD Vance, is obsessed with the Antichrist, it’s difficult for media outlets to resist criticizing the firm. But is this company, in the grand scheme of things, really so big and scary? Is it truly revolutionary? 

Publicly disclosed information puts Palantir’s employee headcount at just over 4,000. That’s only about a tenth of the size of the National Security Agency’s workforce, or 3% of Lockheed Martin’s. And the company has been receiving multimillion-dollar federal contracts under four consecutive American presidents, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Trump. Such a firm can only thrive if it is accepted by a society’s institutions. And this is why, perhaps, all the attention that the despicable company attracts may be a distraction from the governments who give it life. 

The triumph of the disturbed has long been a feature of civilization. In his lectures, physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté reminds us that “individuals who are troubled … they very often are the ones who rise to the top of the system. There are a number of studies on CEOs that show that a lot of them have sociopathic tendencies.” Acknowledging this reality means that, upon examining deliberate destruction, we recognize that the specific tools used are of lesser importance than the immorality behind the decisions. 

Low-tech killing 

During the American carpet-bombing campaign in Vietnam and Cambodia—which killed and maimed at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people—the bombs dropped were the exact model as the ones that the Israelis have been dropping on Gaza for years now, wiping out entire neighborhoods. Hence, Palantir helping collect data from strikes doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to the capacity and will to wipe out whole populations. 

The rape of Vietnamese women, girls, and toddlers by American soldiers—casually described by a veteran as “an everyday affair”—has continued in Abu Ghraib, in Sde Teiman, and in U.S. immigration custody. These acts of sexual violence, these sexual crimes, are done with bodies, and with objects. They have little to do with data-collection or AI weapons. 

From Rwanda to Guatemala, from Gaza to Lebanon, it is clear that acts of genocide can take place with rudimentary farming tools, or with dynamite and sniper rifles. The videos of Chinese-made martial arts robots may be frightening, but those robots and their inventors (for now, at least) haven’t committed anything remotely similar to what Western nationals have done in Gaza and the West Bank, or what American security agents continue to do at home. And the advanced technology on display at conventions hasn’t been deployed to kill hundreds of thousands of people, like the bombs churned out by dingy American factories and American factory workers in states ravaged by fentanyl. 

The digital world has brought about new ways of making money, new ways of harvesting data, new kinds of behind-the-scenes low-paid work, new tools, new obsessions. But fundamental attitudes are unchanged. The revolving door between weapons companies and the military continues to spin. The sickness of the soul remains uncured. 

There has been pushback with data centers. On a small scale, in municipal politics, there have been successful efforts to deter all kinds of polluters. Simultaneously, many North American communities continue to be trapped in perverse economies that encourage the building of military bases, jails, and weapons factories. Hopelessness means that old habits die hard. 

Broadly, it’s not productive for us to simply blame the technologists for finding new ways to surveil, bomb, and study us. Rather than focusing on a few nerds, a few firms, or a few new ways to treat victims as data points (even if we are rightly appalled by it all), we cannot forget that we have free will. There is nothing stopping our governments from treating these firms as public ills, just like there’s nothing stopping Utah residents from pressuring their governor to block Kevin O’Leary’s data center (a project that he isn’t even capable of explaining). Countries could even nationalize Big Tech firms that have grown too large to be responsibly administered. But when, in so-called democracies, we routinely elect corrupt people en masse, these options aren’t even possible. If anything, greater government involvement in the platform economy usually tends to result in more harm being done, such as with Trump-aligned allies taking over TikTok, or India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi making the presence of social media firms conditional on their willingness to censor his opponents. 

When we struggle to even keep children away from phones, how can we expect societies to crack down on conglomerates that are partnered with the governments in power? 

Our imperfection 

Like Varoufakis’ experience with a Palantir employee, during my years in the U.S., I met a few people of color—even Palestinians—who worked for the Department of Defense, usually as engineers or researchers. I met heads of academic institutions who had begun to use AI to correspond with others and draft their remarks. And, on my runs, throughout the Gaza genocide, I saw young commuters heading to the State Department or to the Congress in office clothes, usually staring at their phones, bobbing to whatever played through their headphones. 

At a certain point, I stopped feeling anger and loathing. Instead, I began to feel a terrible sadness, which I tried to stomp out mile after mile. But it weighs on the heart, when you realize that so many of us have allowed ourselves to become not always complicit, but certainly complacent. It is disturbing that a basic civility can coexist alongside ruthlessness, and that our feeling appalled about a software, a drone strike, a data center, exists right beside our powerlessness. They are neighbors. 

We have spent years talking in circles about the dangers of AI, the wastefulness of AI, the malevolent uses of AI. In the fields of history, education, literature, publishing, media, medicine, and commerce, we have talked ourselves to death. And I write the word “death” because I don’t see a reversal. I don’t see an end to this yearning for our own zombification and enshittification and destruction. How is it possible to escape from an algorithm that has trained itself by analyzing us? 

We all bemoan the presence of AI in the classrooms. A friend of mine recently told me that her husband, a community college professor, has caught practically all of his students using AI. But I wonder, aren’t we all capable of cheating? I would never have used AI to write an essay for a history or literature class when I was a student—the subjects were, and remain, close to my heart—but I know that, had there been a way to pass math or science (subjects that I very nearly failed) with the help of some magic program, I would have jumped at the opportunity just to get that shit out of the way and move on with my life. 

AI taps into something very real that exists in all of us. But instead of changing the education system to get this urge under control—pushing reforms that cater to students’ strengths, rather than making their weaknesses mandatory obstacles to following their passions—and instead of passing the strongest possible bans on the use of AI in school assignments (enforceable by altering the nature of the assignments), our societies almost seem willing to accept that reading, writing, memorization, in-class exercises, critical thinking, and blue book tests are going to slowly disappear. 

This is a kind of fatalism that permeates so much of our modern life. Most decent people recognize a genocide when they see it, but nothing is done to stop it. Most consumers are appalled when they find out where the minerals inside their phones come from, but they keep buying the latest models. 

We have more knowledge and awareness and connectedness than at any other point in history, yet we continue to behave in a manner that belongs to a previous century, when we had the excuse of maybe not really knowing. This is not because we’re evil (although evil people definitely exist). This is, simply, because we are human. We have limited attention spans, we have day-to-day concerns, we have financial problems, we have family issues. We feel lost. 

None of this new tech can make us better. And, if it hurts us, it is because we have allowed it to. We have allowed the data center to be built on our land, we have allowed our politicians to take money from the companies that wanted it built, and we have allowed our children to be exposed to it. It made us ill, but we couldn’t face it, couldn’t fight it. Who would want to? We would much rather turn away from ugliness. But if we’re not careful, not so far from now, there will be no escape. 

I do find a small hope in the handful of high school and university students who refuse to use AI. Some are holding on to reading for the sake of reading. Others are protesting data centers in their communities and shouting down speeches written by robots. They have seen the truth about the ugly alliances in our world, and they aren’t willing to let beauty die out. They will not be so easy to control. 

There may not be so many of them, and they will most probably lose. I am under no illusions. But still, I am with them, because they make me feel less afraid.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Sahar Fatima, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

Avik Jain Chatlani