How War In Silicon Valley Came Out of Facebook

As I’ve been pondering the venture capital military build out, I have been thinking about how we got here. This is a question that history will revisit again and again. 

One important thing that should go down in the annals is that, more than any other single source outside of the CIA and a very small group of VC firms, it was Facebook that has provided the fulcrum for tech’s emerging war games, Facebook which has been the technical, financial and political fulcrum to the venture capital military. 

The main two pillars of the VC military are Anduril and Palantir. They are designed to work together and did so both at the US/Mexico border and in Ukraine. Similarly to how Hadrian, a weapons factory company founded a few years after Anduril, was founded to provide the manufacturing backbone of the new VC weapons companies; the two just announced a major deal, in fact. 

These companies are the indisputable foot forward on a new vision of technofascist war, focusing on autonomous warcraft, AI-piloting, drone swarms, artificial intelligence, a new world of blanketing, high resolution satellite imagery everywhere on earth, and AR/VR technology. Other startups are forming around these pillars but these are the definite giants — giants already — in this space. Without them and the money behind them, there -is- no venture capital military build out. They are foundational, essential, pivotal, mandatory. 

 For our purposes today, Anduril is focused on weapons manufacturing — said lethal drone swarms — Palantir is obviously more of an intelligence op. They are undoubtably, the leaders in this sector of defense companies. Palantir of course was founded by Peter Thiel in 2003. Anduril was founded in 2017. Both of these companies and their backers are tied to Facebook in very serious ways. 

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was the first investor in Facebook. He made that first investment in Facebook around the time of founding Palantir, coming in hot off the PayPal money. In fact, Palantir was founded the year before he funded Facebook. And in 2005 Thiel launched his Founder’s Fund, a venture capital vehicle to scale surveillance and fintech startups, as well as various culture ops like getting deeply involved in women’s fertility issues. (For context, Peter Thiel very literally hates women and has expressed that sentiment for decades.) So, this entire time that Peter Thiel is running an actual weapons company and starting a venture capital firm to build even more surveillance and weapons, he is getting rich off of Facebook and he is sitting on the board of Facebook. 

Which means that this interest in war and intelligence was very much at the front of his mind not only when he made the Facebook investment but throughout, as he remained a core part of the leadership team for nearly 20 years. Being a board member of a publicly traded company is not a fucking joke. They are in there in the thick of battle, period. Peter Thiel being on Facebook’s board during this whole era cannot be taken with enough gravity. Nearly 20 years elapsed between when Peter funded Facebook to when he left it in 2022. And during that time he and that team took the company to being one of the largest companies in the world, setting new records for how much revenue and profit could be generated by a company. 

This is extremely serious shit and Facebook would have been the daily of Peter Thiel’s life just as much as Palantir and Founder’s Fund, all of which were started at about the same time in Peter’s life. 

So from Peter Thiel’s place on the board, he has this mission to create the CIA v 2.0/3.0 — this is the theme that suffuses his life’s work — and he just happens to be first in line for the largest citizen surveillance apparatus in actual factual history, undoubtedly seeing the platform’s full potential beyond what Zuckerberg could grasp with so little experience and at his age? 

Down the road, Thiel still on Facebook’s board, Palantir is implicated in the 2013 PRISM scandal regarding intelligence agency spying on civilians, using Facebook as a data source and obtained and delivered by Palantir.

In fact, the PRISM revelations discussed *direct access to Facebook servers*. While Thiel is on the board of Facebook. 

Cool!!! 

So in this situation we have Thiel helping to build up an absolutely massive data store on civilians, at the very same time that he is building companies whose goal is turning information on civilians into actionable intelligence for use by a hostile nation-state level apparatus, aka the enemy and the evil empire, etc. And is turning over the data from one, to the other.  

Facebook could perhaps have gone a different direction than the dystopia that it is. But from the very beginning one of its major operators, Peter Thiel, an essential part of the company, was setting up a CIA 2.0 apparatus inside of Facebook itself.

 It’s obvious how Facebook provides the natural context for Palantir; specifically, gaining access to private data and making sense of huge stolen data sets like Facebook’s. These are the technical problems that Palantir responds to; bridging the gap between the consumer market and the intelligence apparatus. Of which is data is the most valuable piece.

 — And yet… it seems like all of this detailing has gotten lost in the mix… particularly as in the wake of PRISM, one of Thiel’s PayPal buddies backed the Intercept to diffuse tensions, in the most obvious op ever, which the Left is STILL in categorical denial about — 

 Again and again, where there has only been one small degree of misdirection, people have missed the exact same venture capital conspiracy, operating in the very worst corners of our industry: surveillance, spying, weapons, war and collaboration with war criminals and human rights abuse.

 Decades of shady backwater deals are now culminating in the emergence of an entire weapons manufacturing imperative across the entire field. 

You also can’t leave out the issue of capital as Thiel’s early Facebook investment was incredibly, incredibly lucrative obviously, and pushed him into stratospheres where he has continuously been able to deploy weapons startup after weapons startup, CIA startup after CIA startup, in conjunction with Founder’s Fund’s “sister firm” a16z. People don’t understand how close a16z and Founder’s Fund actually are; it founders Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel are *best friends* and they have gone in on hundreds of efforts together, whether mutually investing in startups, developing new verticals and funds, partnerships between startups, sharing of executives, sales cycles with the Pentagon, various political ops, etc. Founder’s Fund and a16z are not actually materially different entities for most purposes of analysis. 

And yes, Marc Andreeseen was ALSO an early investor in Facebook and was also on its board for many, many years before stepping down around the same time Peter did; in fact, he was the longest running board member at the time he stood down. 

The connection between Facebook and Palantir could not be a more perfect example of the link between consumer technologies and nation-state intelligence agencies and how a specific group of venture capitalists has nurtured and capitalized on making that link. Importantly, Palantir took In-Q-Tel money, with In-Q-Tel being the CIA’s venture capital firm. 

The weapons build-out has not been a phenomenon across the entire industry. It is coming from a very specific group of people: Facebook, broadly, a16z, Founder’s Fund and InQTel, the CIA’s VC firm. All of these venture capitalists building these surveillance and weapons startups, are taking CIA money, are selling into the CIA and other government and military environments.

And eventually we arrive at Anduril, the leading weapons company in the venture capital world. 

Anduril is by one of our best and brightest tech founders, Palmer Luckey. His previous startup was Oculus, founded in 2012. Funded by…. Founder’s Fund, and a16z. So Oculus was very much doomed from the start to be enmeshed in this whole violent agenda, and keep in mind at this point Palmer Luckey is like literally a teenager, so just as much as the technology trajectory was influenced by the money, so was Palmer. In both the cases of Facebook and Oculus, you could argue that these were young men starting projects out of their homes and dorm rooms, who were essentially pounced on by web 2.0 billionaire venture capitalists and yoked to this whole vision. Though I bet no one wants to think of it that way. 

Anyhow, it will come as no surprise to you my friend, that Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014, yes, with two Facebook board members as investors in the company. This purchase of Oculus is what now informs Meta’s entire corporate strategy; but its technology is being dutifully carried in the war zone by our bloodthirsty VC conveyor belt into hell. 

Palmer Luckey left Facebook at some point after the acquisition, having quite a severe fallout with Zuckerberg, actually, and founded Anduril in 2017. Taking money from a16z, Founder’s Fund and InQTel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, of course. 

This seriously is only coming from a very small number of people. That is extremely important to know as we explore this space. 

Anduril established itself immediately as the most important player in the venture capital military build out and it, along with Palantir, are the shining jewels of the portfolios, first movers, that have opened up this category for us by breaking into new military markets, and put into place all the pieces for a lethal weapons boom, which I wrote about the other day.

 I’ve written pretty extensively about Anduril on this site so I won’t go into details, but they are already delivering lethal drone technology, militarized border surveillance towers, battlefield operating systems, live in combat and conflict zones. They are the monster; Palantir will stay somewhat in the shadows but Anduril is the face and the bulk of our heft into the weapons market. Anduril is the new Lockheed, Raytheon; in fact, they aim to replace all of these legacy companies in a discontinuous disruption in how war is done. They are sitting on one of the biggest markets in history — the global weapons market, which is terribly out of date — and are leading the way authoritatively forward.  

I fully expect Anduril to be one of the biggest companies in the world within the next 10 years.

Here again, Facebook, its people and its money, have provided a critical incubation for the weapons boom that is about to come out of Silicon Valley; its partnership with Andreessen and Thiel, giving birth to both Palantir and Anduril. VR/AR remains a critical part of the Anduril strategy as they have a number of use cases for it for the “war fighter”, using these tools for surveillance and piloting, battlefield awareness, comms, mission training, and so on. 

This new war — the new war that venture capitalists are creating — has Facebook very deep at the core and I think that’s a really important thing to keep in mind as we study these phenomenons. Everything comes from something. And all of the blood on the industry’s hands right now leads right back to Facebook. 

Maybe something we should consider before heading happily into the metaverse.