24/06/2025
"The parameters of the tech industry are built on speed, scale and competition. Facebook – now Meta – has built its business around the ethos that there is intrinsic value in getting products to market at speed, regardless of whether these technological ideas are fully fit for use.
The iconic ‘Move fast and break things’ motto remains fundamental in illustrating this ethos. Another one of then-Facebook’s slogans was ”Done is better than perfect,”. This is the essence of the business practice – the Hacker Way: the technology sector must move fast, it is about winning the race to getting a product to market, to getting a contract, to “blitzscaling”, to creating a monopoly from which to extract monopoly rents – that means making extraordinary amounts of money from ultimately not giving customers a choice. It locks the customer into a relationship of dependency and reliance from which it becomes too costly to extricate oneself with ease. From this position, the vendor can extract continuous monopoly rents.
Only by embracing the logic of error and mistakes can those involved move fast enough to gain an advantage over competitors. This is precisely why the military AI industry cultivates the framing of a competition, of the AI arms race. It needs it to make the logic work.
It is also increasingly an attitude that is being fostered for the defence sector, advocated for by those that need this framing. At the US Armed Services Committee hearing, Palantir’s Chief Technology Office gave evidence advocating for “more crazy” and for “letting chaos reign” in the military acquisition and procurement process, so that the necessary incentives can be fostered. Regulatory limitations, he thinks, are too constrictive, and he “would gladly accept more failure if it meant that we had more catastrophic success”. What kind of success this might be, or what the implications are for failure, remains unaddressed, but it is clear that Palantir’s CTO speaks with a venture capital logic in mind.
Shortcuts and post hoc fixes are always justified with the understanding that mistakes can always be addressed later – through updates, and iterative adjustments and so on. The mandate to embrace mistakes and errors is valorised, speed trumps everything. The potential waste produced in this practice is made up for by the promise of high financial rewards.
Overpromising is a feature of this ethos and it relies on the now firmly entrenched idea that, at some point in the future, AI is going to be so good, so perfect – not yet, but it will be, the assumption is – that success, too, will be inevitable. A future with AI is inevitable for success. So, do it fast and big. Speed and scale. And this is precisely what underpins the problematic AI hype cycle – military or otherwise." Elke Scwarz, PhD.
AI-driven weapons born from venture capital logics treat war as a beta test and failure as progress.
