The Manhattan Project Still Shapes The Tech Industry. We Should Fear More Mass Death.
A few years ago, I read an…. extremely long… 500-page book on the development of the atomic bomb; it is called “The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians.” It is a stunning work and I highly, highly recommend it — it is a phenomenal work and as an archivist I commend the contributors and editor to the highest.
Even without reading it, you will able to follow some points we go over here, about the relationship between the field of computer science, Silicon Valley, and the Manhattan Project.
First, I want to make it perfectly clear that the Manhattan Project was very much a technology project and very much a computer science project. It employed a number of early computer scientists, computer scientists provided a number of vital computations to the project, the project was a huge accelerator and first user of emerging computers. Project Manhattan helped develop the MANIAC computer, distinguished from predecessors because it could save programs.
The calculations to create the bomb took 66 days of processing. At the end of it, thew blew up Elugelab Island.
The Monte Carlo method was also developed during the Manhattan Project, a key methodology to run simulations with computers. There are many more examples, readily available in public documentation, and historians all agree that Project Manhattan was a foundational event in computing history.
Yet, Project Manhattan is exceedingly rarely discussed in our industry. Even though much of the innovations and strategies we use today, down to the architecture of modern computers and how we run companies, come not just from military more broadly, but specifically from the most devastating tech project in human history.
War and cold war has long been a major accelerant of “innovation” / technology more generally, and this fact is not lost on venture capitalists, who have already made a fortune off military contracts and are now doing a full private build-out of weapons companies that is going to sell weapons innovated by tech (as opposed to commissioned by the government), directly into the military, policing and other human rights abuse formations. This military build out is unprecedented in the industry and represents a massive shift to an explicit war industry. Now more than ever is a time to worry about what can happen, the terrible terrible results that come from military + technology + war.
Grace Hopper herself, the quintessential “woman in tech”, provided key computations to the Manhattan Project, making her very literally and materially complicit in mass death, yet celebrated to this day as a feminist hero. Furthermore, some of the earliest incarnations of “women in tech” and in computer science, were here; via the Atomic Heritage Foundation:
“Before computers became the modern electric desktops or laptops of today, “computers” actually referred to the people who did computing or calculations of equations. These computers would rely on their own intellect and later, desktop calculator machines and mathematics tables. The people serving as “human computers” were commonly women. While some women had degrees in mathematics or physics, others were recruited mainly because they were a convenient and available source of labor, especially during wartime.”
This is an interesting point, because it affirms the idea that women in tech is and has been intimately linked to war crimes; it also shows that women in tech have always just been used as disposable talent while actually representing the heart and foundation of this field in many ways — it being generally accepted that it was a woman who invented the first computer and women who were its earliest operators, aka, computer scientists.
Even with a16z’s massive build-out of a tech weapons fleet under the “American Dynamism” platform, we don’t refer to any historical consideration of tech as a nexus of discontinuous weapons development; which continues to this day: autonomous drones and vehicles from Anduril, surveillance systems at borders under conflict (also Anduril, at the US/Mexico border), wide-area data collection and surveillance like the Domain Awareness System, AI for war combat, AI for piloting fighter craft, AI for “crime detection” and more.
One of the biggest industry takeaways from the Manhattan Project is the categorical refusal of computer scientists to accept any kind of responsibility or ethical mandate whatsoever for work they are literally doing. The Manhattan Project is where it was determined, definitively, that technologists were not to be responsible for the results of their work; instead, we were “neutral”, owed nothing except to progress itself and the orders of overlords; leaving it up to “politicians”, excusing ourselves on grounds that ethics are not our field, that its not in our wheel house or within our duties; this logic is deployed in our field all the time, in response to ICE contracts, in response to Pentagon contracts, in response to pushback on tech-architected surveillance systems and tech-weaponized super cops.
Manhattan Project’s scientists, engineers, programmers, etc. continuously, over and over and over, refused to accept responsibility of any kind for what they were building; even KNOWING what they were working on, they stated, over and over, that it was a task for others to decide if and how it was used; perhaps people who were in foreign policy, and in the other sciences, in government — anyone but them. This wasn’t even diffusion of responsibility; this was outright passing the buck for what you are, materially, building and making possible, building it FOR THAT PURPOSE and to the specifications of killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Amazing. This framework allowed everyone involved, to simply continue their work, to keep blinders on, focusing on nothing but the mission ahead. You hear it all the time to this day… “It’s time to BUILD” is the tagline of the VC firm leading the tech weapons expansion, a16z.
Joseph Rotblat is a scientist who quit the project on ethical grounds after the Germans had been defeated, but the project carried on with the known goal of bombing the Japanese. He was disturbed by how his fellow scientists of all specialties, consistently pushed off the moral question;
"the groups i have... described -- scientists with a social conscience -- were a minority in the scientific community… The majority were not bothered by moral scruples; they were quite content to leave it to others to decide how their work would be used."
Their only goal was progress, progress at all costs; the pace of the Manhattan Project is described as frenetic, intense, backbreaking, even desperate. We have to build. It’s time to build.
It was these scientists without a social conscious, that brought us to one of the most defining moments in human history. When they exploded the first bomb, and they didn’t know if doing so would literally destroy the world.
Trinity. Cursed name. “The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb” covers this moment in painful detail. I cannot emphasize nearly enough that top scientists and engineers in the country, were conducting an experiment, willingly, an experiment they believed could potentially destroy the atmosphere and bring annihilation to the entire world. And they went ahead and they did it anyway.
Imagine standing there with your finger on the button of a thing that you think could destroy the entire world. And pressing play anyway. Unbelievable and haunting moral depravity.
In Trinity by the Numbers: The Computing Effort that Made Trinity Possible, just recently published, N. Lewis argues that the role of computing in Trinity specifically has been under-reported and dives into a deeper account, concluding:
“The computing effort at wartime Los Alamos, human and mechanized, has received fragmentary examination in the available historical literature, often obscuring the impact of computing on the success of the Trinity test and the completion of the Lab’s mission. Computing was not the sole cause of Trinity’s success, but the simulation data provided material aid to the design and development choices made by the Lab’s scientific and engineering staff for what became the Trinity device, along with the multitude of other decisions that numerical methods helped to guide at Los Alamos throughout the war. Mechanizing the computing effort with accounting machinery greatly accelerated the implosion calculations and helped to complete those problems amid the breakneck pace of the Manhattan Project. This computing effort also had a lasting impact at and beyond Los Alamos in the decades that followed.”
There are obvious parallels to this frantic rush to make progress, discarding all morality, prioritizing innovation (as defined via warfare) as the most sacred job in the modern computing age. As we speak, discontinuous weapons innovations are being pursued by computer programmers and venture capitalists at record speed and no one knows what is going to happen when they unleash the arsenal; this is a decision being made by the bosses of legions of software engineers who refuse to take any responsibility, with no input from the public, in secrecy, in a lab, building death, coding death, everyone pretending that this is neutral, this is just the ordained technological progress of humanity rather than a material thing with material effects that is being DECIDED ON by people, the people who agree to build the things.
Look to artificial intelligence: we sit, once again, as People, at the edge of an innovation we don’t understand and didn’t ask for, yet know instinctually that destruction lies before us; the people who did this busy washing their hands behind the scenes.
Much of Silicon Valley is run on the premise of “throw it at the wall and see what sticks”, “move fast break things”, and an attitude of open experiment unbounded by anything, including mass death — things are made and simply thrown out in the world with devastating effect, that cannot be rolled back. Project Manhatten is the epitome of “move fast break things”. The same thing is happening now: VCs and tech elite have been designing AI in production, in the field, it is being used in active warfighting and in actual policing situations, all the time; it is accelerating quickly and AI of all kinds is going to burst up from every crack on this country very soon.
Like those in the Manhattan Project, they know that they are bringing in a whole new era of weaponry, they are lining up to do it, they are proud to do it, in fact, it is a new industry banner: “American Dynamism”. They KNOW that they are building an entirely new kind of warfare: warfare that is fought with computer programmers conducting drone swarms, AI-piloted warcraft, autonomous submarines, embedded and deep surveillance, organized terrorism of political dissidents, warfare that is fought by shutting off access to currency and the supply chain and communications channels of all sorts, by just one flip of a switch at a Silicon Valley monopoly. This is what the new age of war will look like; it portends ONLY mass death, it can be for ONLY one purpose, it results in nothing else but death and destruction.
I don’t think that tech is currently involved in a singular project to come up with a singular weapon; I think that they are creating a singularly devastating new version of war, one which can be fought with an army of computer programmers alone, with the weapons they came up with without any democratic process whatsoever. And yet tech still pretends to be a neutral industry, it distances itself. No workers at any tech company takes accountability for anything they’ve built. “Technology is neutral”, or, is purely a matter of chain of command; and thus, an entire industry of coders has been propelled at frantic pace into the creation of a new forever-war future it doesn’t claim … except for the money and the glory.
This level of ethical distance, is in a lineage directly from the Manhattan project. The lack of respect you have to have for humanity, the lack of regard and care you have to have for humanity, in order to to make this stand, to make this distinction between morals and material work output, is extremely deep, and its not something we are going to be able to “talk” this industry out of.
They already know its wrong.
They have been told again and again. No Tech for ICE, Project Maven, PRISM, the petitions against Palantir. Their answer is no.
We will need to fight them to stop it.
“We just build the technology, can’t help what’s done with it” falls down quickly in face of the many situations where you are KNOWINGLY building weapons for a specific use case (mass death) and selling them to… militaries, and wars… and still shrugging your shoulders (like you’re a soldier) that you’re doing what needs to be done. “Technology is neutral” becomes a deeply defended political hard-line that enables to tech machine to grind forward with its agenda, to appear as if it is sidestepping and ceding ethics to an unspecified other, while in fact, being the willing instrument of death.
Switching notes a bit to another “innovation” from the Manhattan Project that continues to haunt us to this day, enabling the absolute moral depravity that infects the tech industry — a strategy innovated to its hideous extremes for use in this large-scale weapons development, to “protect the secret” of the atomic bomb: compartmentalization. It was architected to isolate people working on the project from knowing the full scope of what was being worked on; this was a technique to stop leaking/spying, but also performed another vital function: stopping anyone within the outfit from having an ethical reaction or organization to what is being done or built, stopping anyone from putting together the scope and the implications; it is, in short, a war time military strategy, to make sure that workers fundamentally can’t consent to what is being built, because they don’t even know what it is. While many of the engineers eventually guessed what they were working on even prior to the Trinity test, it still performed vital functions like diffusion of responsibility and allowing ethical distance, and sufficed its purpose to have people performing huge amounts of work without knowing much else or having any real power.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation shares:
“General Groves [leader of the Manhatten Project] was the architect of an intelligence revolution that took security measures to unprecedented heights. Congressional leaders agreed to secret budget processes with no legislative oversight. Groves created separate organizations to carry out intelligence, counterintelligence, and surveillance programs both domestically and overseas. These operated outside of regular military channels, kept separate records, and reported directly to him.
As the only person knowledgeable about the entire project, Groves stood at the pinnacle of power. He controlled the project’s pace, priorities, and direction through his decisions. No one could travel from one site to another without the general’s permission. Knowledge was compartmentalized. Workers were told only what they needed to know and were forbidden to discuss their jobs with anyone other than designated supervisors.”
He was the ONLY one who knew about the full scope. Terrifying.
Compartmentalization is ultimately a way to position just one person or a small conspiracy in ultimate power, this has more and more been the result of the tech industry in general, as the direction of the industry increasingly lies with just a few venture capitalists who have been in power since the 90s.
When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, many of the people who worked on the project had no idea that this is what they were working on. They were just as surprised as anyone when they saw it rolled out globally; one of the greatest inventions of our technical generation.
Pause for a moment to think of the lunacy of this; that people at the top of Apple had to very carefully plan and set up a complex architecture, that would enable it to compartmentalize a complex engineering and manufacturing project, perhaps one of the most successful efforts in consumer history; that the iPhone was being shipped globally before almost anyone from the company even knew… even those who directly worked on it.
The use of compartmentalization at Apple alone, has certainly not been a one-time thing for the iPhone. It is how Apple runs. It is said that Apple will have two different teams of engineers, unknown to each other, working on the same things; they will go with whatever team did it faster/better. It is said that several of the tech giants have fake projects, and assign people to work on them, to obscure actual work being done and prevent leaks. This is one surreal scenario that is ALSO not considered enough in the age of non-consensual tech experimentations: the potential that you have people spending years of their lives working into a hole, on a project that doesn’t exist, all for some kind of corporate game.
That is the story I heard in the Valley that always freaked me out the most; the callousness of so alienating a worker from their production, that they literally work on fakery; the worker is not given the option to opt out of non-existent projects; he is simply being used in a larger agenda; his time is valueless to the material world; he is humiliated, and will never even know, perhaps, that it was fake the whole time, or that once it fails, it was because that was pre-destined by management; this is a new level of alienation from work, where you are working on non-work to do unknown work for the corporation’s real work building mass death out of thousands of other people who also don’t know what is going on.
The removal of a worker’s right to know or influence what they are making, as the cost of admission to a living-wage job, is something we need to be thinking much more carefully about. The industry’s ongoing development, innovation and competency in compartmentalizing tens of thousands of tech workers, is a critical missing ingredient in our map of the tech industry and how its workers are isolated from a sense of morality and ethics while being rendered impotent in any meaningful choice whatsoever, not even given any knowledge to whistleblow. It is terrifying how much tech companies have been able to manipulate exposure to information in a way very few people on the *inside* even know what is going on. The lack of regulation in the industry also means there’s almost almost no inspection into what tech is doing; worker reports have been some of the only ways we’ve been able to get information on these programs, and increasingly, we cannot get them, due to draconian measures like not even telling people what they are working on, or that their labor is going to go to production in the forever war; they are powerless to stop it, they never had a chance; the code has been harvested.
Tech has had to deal with some amount of blowback from technical workers over the years, and some of those movements have specifically revolved around weapons production and military production; I.e. The backlash to PRISM, Project Maven massive Pentagon deal, and during the #NoTechforICE campaign, the movement against militarized policing. The tech elite have found this push-back, extremely disturbing to say the least. I think because we haven’t seen the results we want to see from our movements, we underestimate the impact that our resistance has had on THEM — not in changing for the better, but in how they have adapted to make sure that these types of “PR scandals” and potentially contract-threatening acts of resistance, will be prevented in the future, and stopped from growing into a larger movement that could remove power from fascist tech billionaires.
I imagine that one of the efforts to depress dissent, is to keep many more engineers guarded from the implementations of their software or even a full picture of it, more than ever before. I imagine that there has been a big ramp up to suppress internal awareness of customers, sales and implementations that are within the context of human rights abuses. And most recently with American Dynamism, tech companies are just openly saying “We build drone swarms powered with AI to kill a bunch of people! If you believe in the mission, come work for us!!” It pre-selects for psychopaths, one of the major aims of tech’s interviewing processes.
Facebook is doing many things we don’t know about. So is Apple. So is Google. So is a16z, and Anduril. So is OpenAI. They are able to do whatever they want, without having to go to any kind of exterior authority whatsoever, without any license or external body of investigation or approval — the people who run the show can come up with an idea for anything, and they can make their legions of software engineers build it… without even telling them what they’re making.
This operating MO is straight out of the Manhattan Project. It is a wartime strategy, it is a military strategy. It was then, and it is now.
I think we have arrived at a very scary moment in technology history, where we are in very serious danger from tech companies, and specifically tech companies who are building weapons explicitly and implicitly. We cannot rely on computer programmers and other tech workers to tell the truth to US about what is happening, or to get the news to the outside. And, as they have shown us throughout the field’s history, they won’t even consider it their responsibility. Where they might, compartmentalization will be deployed to keep the blinders on these horses of the Apocalypse. Ride baby ride.
We are running out of time before a mass death event from tech.