Introduction by Norman Solomon

You don’t need to know a lot about digital technology or the world of multibillion-dollar finance to understand what is most important about this book. No Ethics in Big Tech is a profound moral statement, acutely relevant to everyone on planet Earth.

Vahid Razavi had dug deep below the surface allure of vast wealth and power to explore the underlying terrain of crucial choices. He takes us on a grim reality tour of Silicon Valley and its entanglement with inflicting faraway suffering. Companies gain trillions of dollars in value from direct collusion with aggressive wars.

The lack of accountability and the need for it are central themes of No Ethics in Big Tech. This book explains why notions of reform from within the tech industry and hopes for self-correction are delusional. As a former insider, Razavi draws on painful knowledge that the obsessions with market share and maximizing profits function as the opposite of any moral compass. The warfare state is completely integrated with Big Tech.

“The military industrial complex of the 21st century is not Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing alone,” he writes. “It is Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Palantir. The weapons are cloud computing, artificial intelligence, targeting algorithms, biometric databases, and surveillance infrastructure. The ammunition is data.”

The bombs and bullets that have enforced genocide in Gaza, largely courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, are just one factor in the ongoing U.S.-Israeli alliance. “What the world calls genocide, the military industrial complex calls a revenue cycle,” Razavi writes. “What Raytheon calls backlog growth, I call the rubble of hospitals in northern Gaza. What Boeing Defense calls expanded market share, I call the ruins of universities that will not reopen.”

Denial of genocide does not change its reality. And the facts are horribly clear that many of the biggest and most widely esteemed Big Tech corporations in the USA have been integral to inflicting genocide on Palestinian people. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as well as the Israeli human-rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel all unequivocally concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Ironically, yet predictably, the digital tech industry that depends on verifiable mathematics simply refuses to acknowledge the basic facts of crimes against humanity that it avidly — and so profitably beyond imagination – aids and abets. As Razavi points out: “This is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic. The bombs fall on civilian buildings. They are manufactured by American companies, purchased with American taxpayer money, delivered by American-supplied aircraft, guided by AI targeting systems built by American technology companies. The entire supply chain, from the server farm to the crater, runs through American corporations and American government contracts. And the executives who run those corporations are compensated — in salary, in bonuses, in stock options — based in part on how much of that supply chain they own.”

And so, the author is being matter-of-fact when he writes, “Without Amazon Web Services, the Israeli military’s intelligence infrastructure does not function at its current scale. Without

Palantir’s data fusion platforms, the Gospel and Lavender targeting systems do not have the operational picture they need to generate a hundred bombing targets a day. Without Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, the surveillance data cannot be processed at the required scale.”

The corporate complicity outlined in this book is a constant reality that grows more serious on a daily basis. The vastly destructive hunger for evermore profits is insatiable. It is a feature not a bug.

“Corporate complicity in state violence is not an accident of capitalism,” Razavi observes, a statement based not on theories but on his firsthand experiences of seeing up close such complicity. “It is one of capitalism’s most reliable features. The only thing that has ever interrupted it is accountability. Legal, personal, financial, criminal accountability.”

This book calls for accountability.

Norman Solomon June 2026

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, progressive activist, and former U.S. Congress candidate. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. He is a co-founder of RootsAction.org