ConflictTour

Everything in this book, up to this chapter, has been an argument about what is broken. The targeting systems. The cloud contracts. The revolving door. The censorship. The propaganda. The money. The immunity of the people at the top of every one of these systems from any consequence for what those systems produce.

I am aware that a book of this length about systems this broken can leave a reader in a particular kind of despair — the despair of understanding exactly what is wrong with no clear sense of what to build instead. I have felt that despair myself. I felt it in February 2022 when I closed the nonprofit. I felt it every time I watched a company fire an engineer for having a conscience and replace them with someone who did not. I felt it on the days when the petition signature count was moving slowly and the bombing of Gaza was not.

But I have never felt it for long. Because alongside the documentation of what is broken, I have always been building something.

This chapter is about the newest thing I am building. It is called ConflictTour. And it is, in my judgment, one of the most direct answers available to the question that has haunted this entire book: what do we build instead of a war machine?

How They Are Already Recruiting Your Children

Before I tell you what ConflictTour is, I want to tell you how the machine gets there first.

In my documentary Forever Peace Now, I interviewed Chris Velazquez — a veteran and lifelong gamer who spoke at one of our Ethics in Technology events about what he had witnessed from the inside of the gaming world. What he described was not a conspiracy. It was a strategy, documented in public, operating in plain sight, aimed at a very specific target: young men who play video games.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2020 there were an estimated 214.4 million video game players in the United States. Shooter games were the third most popular genre on the market. Military and war-themed first-person shooters accounted for 26.9 percent of all games sold in the U.S. in 2018. An estimated 80 percent of male gamers aged 18 to 34 — and 61 percent of men aged 35 to 54 — play first-person shooter games on a regular basis.

The U.S. military recognized these numbers and acted on them. It launched its own e-sports teams, competitive gaming tournaments, Amazon Twitch channels, and dedicated social media accounts — specifically for advertising on streaming platforms and recruiting from the gaming community. The result, as Velazquez described in the documentary: 13,000 new recruiting leads generated in the first six months of 2020 alone.

Velazquez — speaking as both a veteran and a gamer — put it plainly: "As a gamer, I don't want to see our hobby used to promote anything other than fun and community. As a veteran, I don't want to see another generation of veterans. I don't want to see more children pulled into a system that leads to 22 individuals taking their life each day."

That figure — 22 veterans dying by suicide every day — is the number that the recruiting Amazon Twitch stream never shows. What young gamers see are military personnel playing alongside them, the simulation of combat made glamorous and frictionless, the skills they have developed for entertainment presented as directly transferable to the battlefield. What they do not see are the odds: the far greater likelihood that military service produces trauma, injury, military sexual assault, or other serious and life-altering consequences than it produces an e-sports career.

The military recruiter meets a young person before they have seen what war actually does to the people it reaches. That is the sequence ConflictTour is designed to interrupt.

The Question That Became a Program

In Chapter Thirteen, you read about the families on ParentsPlea.com — the parents who submitted the profiles of their children, the siblings who wrote the testimonies, the spouses who provided the photographs. The stories on ParentsPlea are read after the loss. But I kept asking myself: what if someone could have read them before the choice?

What if, before a young person enlisted in the military, they could sit beside a refugee and hear what fleeing bombs actually sounds like? Not on a screen. Not as a clip that the algorithm serves between advertisements. In a room. At a kitchen table. From a person who survived something that the recruiter's Amazon Twitch stream never mentions.

What if, before signing up to serve a government's military-industrial complex, they could serve a family instead?

What if they could document the testimony of a genocide survivor — add that testimony to a legal archive, understand that it might be used in a future prosecution, feel in their bones that this survivor is not an enemy but a human being exactly like them — and then decide, from that position of knowledge, what kind of service they wanted to give their life to?

That question became ConflictTour.

What It Is

ConflictTour is planned to be a six-month structured humanitarian service program — an alternative to military enlistment. It is not a gap year. It is not tourism. It is not an adventure program for people who want a story to tell at dinner parties. It is intensive, demanding, emotionally costly work that requires the same courage as military service and produces something entirely different.

The program is planned to run in two tracks.

The Local Service Track keeps participants in their home country, working alongside refugee families and war-affected communities — people who arrived with nothing and are navigating a government system that was not designed with them in mind. Local Track participants help families apply for asylum and benefits, provide language translation support at medical appointments, document stories for legal advocacy, connect families to community resources, and build the relationships that reduce the isolation that displacement produces. This track launches in January 2027.

The International Track sends participants to former war zones that are currently deemed safe by international travel advisories — where they work alongside local partner organizations to document the impact of war on civilian infrastructure, interview survivors for legal and

historical archives, and assist with community-led rebuilding. This track is expected to launch in September of 2027.

Both tracks begin with two months of structured training: trauma-informed communication, legal documentation basics, refugee resource navigation, cross-cultural language skills, and — critically — self-care and vicarious trauma preparation. This last element matters more than most programs acknowledge. The work of sitting with grief changes a person. The training prepares participants for that change, rather than pretending it will not happen.

Upon completion, participants receive the ConflictTour Certification in Humanitarian Witness — verifiable training in trauma-informed communication, refugee advocacy, and ethical documentation. But more than the credential, they carry the lived experience of having stood beside people in their hardest moments. That is not something a resume line can fully capture. It is, however, something that changes how a person votes, how they talk about war, how they process the news, and what they are willing to demand from the people who govern them.

Why This Is the Answer to Chapter Six

In Chapter Six, I documented Jim Taiclet's April 2026 earnings call, where the CEO of Lockheed Martin called the current geopolitical moment a "golden opportunity" for the defense industry. I documented the $901 billion FY2026 Pentagon budget and the $1.5 trillion proposed for FY2027. I documented the no-bid contracts, the NATO shakedown, and the merger of Silicon Valley with the military industrial complex.

ConflictTour is my direct answer to all of that — not a political answer, not a petition, not a legal argument, but a structural one. The military industrial complex depends on a supply of young people who are willing to enlist. That supply is not unlimited. It is produced by a specific set of conditions: economic precarity, cultural glorification of military service, the Amazon Twitch streams Chris Velazquez described, the FPS gaming pipelines the U.S. Army built deliberately — and the absence of any visible alternative that offers the same sense of purpose, service, and belonging that the recruiter promises.

ConflictTour proposes to fill that absence.

A young person who has spent six months helping a Syrian mother navigate an asylum system in their own city, who has heard her describe what she left behind, who has watched her children learn to trust adults again after witnessing things that adults should never let children witness — that young person makes a different decision at the recruiting office than one who has not had that experience. Not necessarily the same decision. But a different one. An informed one.

That is what ConflictTour is built to do.

The Pledge

Every ConflictTour participant makes a commitment before they begin. It covers five things.

They commit to their role as witness and servant — not combatant, not tourist. They explicitly agree not to participate in military service or take up arms during their enrollment.

They acknowledge the risks of the International Track with clear eyes — ConflictTour does not provide insurance, medical evacuation, or extraction services. Participants are adults who assume full responsibility for their own safety. This is not a liability waiver buried in fine print. It is a direct, honest statement that this work is serious and that the organization respects participants enough to tell them the truth about what it costs.

They pledge to treat every refugee, survivor, and community member they encounter with dignity and respect — that their stories are not content to be consumed but sacred testimonies to be honored.

They understand that their work may include documenting testimony for legal purposes — contributing directly to the kind of evidentiary archive that ParentsPlea has been building and that future prosecutions will need.

And they understand the consequences of violating any of this: immediate dismissal, no refund.

The pledge is not bureaucratic. It is the foundation of the work. A ConflictTour participant who breaks it is not just in breach of a terms of service. They have betrayed the families who trusted them enough to let them in.

What the Partners Bring

ConflictTour will work with partner organizations that have been doing this work for decades. Trauma counselors who understand what listening does to a person over months of sustained exposure to grief. NGOs with deep roots in the communities being served — the kind of organizations that know which families are ready to share their stories and which are not, which interpreters are trustworthy and which are not, which questions cause harm and which create space for healing.

These partners are not travel agents. They are not evacuation services. They do not manage participants' logistics or personal needs. They do something more valuable: they open doors into communities that international visitors cannot access alone. They provide the context that turns documentation into understanding. They share expertise that took years of field presence to earn.

In return, ConflictTour asks them to accept participants who arrive prepared and self-sufficient — people who have done the training, read the risk acknowledgments, and shown up ready to serve rather than ready to be managed.

The relationship is one of mutual respect between organizations doing different parts of the same work. ConflictTour trains the witnesses. The partners place them where witnessing matters most.

This Is Technology in Service of Humanity

In Chapter One, I argued that AI can be used for extraordinary good — for medicine, for climate, for bearing witness to war crimes. I argued that the question is never whether technology is good or evil, but who builds it and what they intend.

ConflictTour idea is built on that same argument, extended to organizational design. The training curriculum uses digital documentation tools — including platforms like ParentsPlea — to teach participants how ethical archiving works. The program uses technology to match participants with partner organizations across time zones and geographies. The legal documentation training teaches participants to use open-source intelligence tools and digital archives in ways that serve human rights rather than military targeting.

This is technology in service of humanity. Not the technology of Palantir, which builds AI to find and kill people. The technology of ConflictTour, which trains people to find and document the stories of the people Palantir's technology kills.

That contrast is not accidental. It is the point.

An Invitation

ConflictTour is new. It is built by one person who believes that the alternative to the military industrial complex is not passivity — it is a different kind of service, built with intention, grounded in witness, and offered to young people before the recruiter's Twitch stream gets there first.

If you are a young person reading this book: the Local Track launches January 2027. You do not need to travel to a war zone to do this work. You can do it in the city where you already live, alongside families who arrived there with nothing and who need someone to stand beside them.

If you are a parent reading this book: this is the alternative you have been looking for. It is not risk-free — honest service rarely is. But the risks are documented, the training is real, and the work is meaningful in a way that the recruiter's pitch will never tell you about.

If you are an NGO, a trauma counselor, a funding organization, or a service provider who wants to build this with us: the partnership inquiry form is at ConflictTour.com. We need field partners, trauma professionals, and organizations willing to help train the next generation of humanitarian witnesses.

If you are one of the executives named in this book — the architects of the Gospel and Lavender and Project Maven and Project Nimbus: this chapter is also for you. Not because I expect you to change. I have spent enough time in this industry to know better. But because I want you to understand that for every system you build to make war more efficient, there are people building systems to make peace more visible. You have more money. We have more time. History suggests that matters.

What ConflictTour Cannot Do — and What It Can

I want to be honest about the limits of what I am building.

ConflictTour cannot stop a war. It cannot pass a law. It cannot freeze an asset or issue an arrest warrant or compel a billionaire to answer for what his company's targeting algorithms did to a family in Rafah. Those instruments are what the earlier chapters of this book are about.

What ConflictTour can do is change who shows up at the conversation about war — and what they know when they get there. A generation of young people who have sat with survivors, documented testimony, navigated asylum systems alongside refugee families, and carried the weight of witnessing real consequence — that generation votes differently. Advocates differently. Demands differently. Refuses differently. And they do not enlist on the basis of a Twitch stream.

The military industrial complex calls genocide a golden opportunity. ConflictTour calls it a reason to show up with a notebook instead of a weapon and make sure the record is kept.

That is service. That is courage. That is what peace looks like in action.

Witness. Serve. Choose Peace.

ConflictTour.com

--- The documentation on ParentsPlea, the petition to Spain, the European regulatory revolt, the ConflictTour proposal — these are not a single campaign. They are expressions of a single conviction: that evil men and their machines do not prevail, but that they do not stop on their own, and that the arc of history bends only because people push it. Chapter Eighteen is how I push mine — and how I am asking you to push yours.