Foreword: The Person Who Wrote This Book

There is a specific kind of knowledge that comes from having survived a war as a child — and a different kind that comes from spending thirty years inside the industry now building the machines that fight them. I have both. And I want you to understand how they connect, because this book could not have been written without either. I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1975. Five years after my birth, Iran had its Islamic Revolution. In September 1980, Iraq attacked Iran under Saddam Hussein, and I witnessed a war firsthand. Not on a screen. Not as a statistic. I was five years old. My mother was a nurse. She worked in hospitals dealing with the victims of that war — with the wounded, the traumatized, the people whose lives the machine had broken. On Fridays, my day off from school, I would spend it at her side, seeing refugees and people who had taken shelter in hospital corridors. Children my age with injuries I was too young to name. Mothers searching for sons. Men who had walked into that hospital with bodies and walked out with different ones. My father was an engineer. We were a middle-class family in Tehran — but middle-class in a city at war means watching long lines of people waiting for food, means unsafe streets, means a sky that sometimes lit up at distances you could not measure and your body understood before your mind did that what was burning was close enough to matter. The war lasted eight years. In 1986, when I was eleven years old, my family made the decision that every family caught in a war eventually must consider: how do we protect the children? My mother and I came to the United States on a visa. We left Iran to escape the war with Iraq — the same war that the United States government had encouraged Saddam Hussein to start and had armed him to sustain. I arrived in California speaking almost no English. I enrolled in ESL classes. I was an Iranian kid in the Bay Area in the years when the word "Iranian" was a slur, when the hostage crisis had already defined us in American culture as enemies, when a child had to learn not just a new language but a new identity that might be safe enough to walk through a school hallway. I grew up through middle school and high school carrying that weight. We were picked on. There was a lot of discrimination. I did not know what was going on. I did not understand the distinction between Saudi Arabia, between various Arab countries, between Iran — nobody was making that distinction. People were calling me a terrorist. I did not understand why. I was not a terrorist. My family were not terrorists. We had fled a war. And here in the country that received us, a different kind of fear had decided that what we were from was what we were. So when I got to college at age of 16, I focused everything I had on understanding my own identity. Who am I? I started the Persian Club in College. At the end of it, my answer was: I am Iranian-American. America is a melting pot. America stands for values — not for nationality, not for where your parents came from, but for a value system that all of us, as citizens, try to embody. That ideal sadly is not always honored. I want to tell you what my career actually was, because the critics will ask whether I am qualified to say what I am saying. I started selling computers. Retail. Then Apple products. Then I was selling networking hardware for Bay Networks. By the time I was twenty-one or twenty-two years old, I was making close to a quarter of a million dollars a year

working in the tech sector. I want to say that plainly, because people assume that the people who criticize Silicon Valley from the inside are people who were not good at it, people who could not compete, people who are bitter about failure. I was not bad at it. I was very good at it. The financial rewards were real. The energy of building things was real. The camaraderie of working late nights with a team on something that mattered — that was the most rewarding part of any of it. I moved through data center and colocation sales for Exodus Communications and AboveNet — two of the companies that built the physical backbone of the early commercial internet. I sold managed services. I got involved with startups and fell in love with the speed of them, the sense of building something from nothing, the feeling that what you were making was changing something. I was, in the words of a former co-founder at Exodus who said it with genuine warmth, the best salesman they had ever had. My former boss at the same reunion reminded me that when I sold one particular deal I had included in the contract a guarantee of a keg of beer for the client every month they were on Exodus. I don't remember doing this. He found it deeply funny. So did I. That's what building things in the early tech era felt like — absurd and energetic and full of people who believed we were making the world faster and better. Then I built WarrantyNow.com. I raised capital — more than twenty-five million dollars — from people whose names you would recognize: Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET; Marc Benioff, who went on to build Salesforce into one of the most powerful enterprise software platforms on earth; Michael Dell founder of Dell Computers; executives from PeopleSoft etc. I sat across the table from serious investors and serious institutional money and I held my own. I knew how that world worked, what it valued, what it dismissed. Then came BizCloud. In 2008 I went to Belgrade, Serbia, to build a cloud computing company from scratch. We built a real team. We produced over five thousand five hundred articles and videos on the cloud computing industry. We became a cloud broker, a meaningful presence in the space. And then Computer Sciences Corporation — an old-line technology company with billions of dollars in government contracts and a history of work for the intelligence and military complex that I was still learning to understand — appropriated my company's name for its own product line. I found out in 2010. They sued me in 2013 for using my own trademark. My lawyers, looking at the financial reality, made me mediate and settle. I lost as I had to share our good name with CSC. And what followed the loss was not a business setback in the ordinary sense. The pressure of that fight, combined with everything it had cost me, combined with the bankruptcy I filed from my hospital bed — it broke something. I made a decision that I have spoken about publicly, in my film, and in my first book, because I think it matters that people understand what this industry can do to the people inside it when the machine turns on you. After the settlement I made a decision that nearly ended my life. I survived because Stanford University Hospital and San Francisco General and Laguna Honda gave me four and a half months of the best care I could have asked for. I walked out with a cane. As I said at the time, with the dark humor that is the only way to survive such a thing: all the Humpty Dumpty and all the king's horses and all the king's men. When I came out, I said: fine. If I am going to continue, I am going to go to the biggest, most powerful cloud company on earth and understand it from the inside. I joined Amazon Web Services as Senior Alliances Manager in Big Data and Analytics. I sat in meetings with Andy Jassy — who would later become CEO of Amazon itself. I wrote executive briefing documents for Amazon's senior

leadership. I managed multi-million dollar co-marketing partnerships with Splunk, Sumo Logic, Tableau, and Qlik — some of the most important names in the enterprise data analytics ecosystem. I was on the commercial side. I did not touch government contracts. But I watched the machine up close, and what I watched in the offices of Amazon Web Services confirmed everything the New York Times had already described and everything my body had already learned at BizCloud: that these companies treat human beings as inputs, and when the input is no longer needed, they dispose of it. I did not enjoy the time I spent working at Amazon Web Services. Companies like Amazon are slave drivers. They do not value their employees as human beings. Talent is rewarded in Silicon Valley — but only for as long as it benefits the corporation. The moment it does not, you are gone. And if you dare to operate outside the construct that the employer makes for you, to ask questions about what the company is doing and who it is doing it to, your job is endangered. That is not speculation. I watched it. I lived it. --- After leaving Amazon, I founded Ethics in Technology. I organized NSA Comedy Nights after Edward Snowden's revelations — events that brought more than 150 people to each of three evenings, because it turned out people wanted a place to process what was happening to their privacy, to their data, to their understanding of the country they lived in. The nonprofit was formally incorporated in 2018. I published Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof. I believed, at the time, that naming the problem was the beginning of solving it. I believed that public pressure worked. I closed Ethics in Technology in February 2022. What ended it was not defeat. It was recognition. The Ukraine war — and Silicon Valley's response to it, which was not moral reckoning but investor calls and contract proposals and product roadmaps for the defense sector — showed me that the strategy of reform had hit its limit. I launched NoEthicsInBigTech.com. The strategy changed from persuasion to prosecution. --- There is a philosophical framing I have carried throughout all of this work, and I want to name it here because it underlies everything in this book. The real struggle humanity is facing — beneath all the technology, beneath all the weapons, beneath all the political arguments about East and West and Islam and Christianity and NATO and Russia — is between two competing ideas. The first idea is I am one. The second is We are one. The whole of what Silicon Valley's war machine has produced is a monument to the first idea: I am one, my shareholders are one, my quarterly earnings are one. The whole of what this book is arguing for is the second: we are one, and the weapons and the surveillance and the exploitation of workers and the silencing of voices and the targeting algorithms that decide whose children live and whose children die — all of it is a crime against the we that includes all of us. I am Iranian-American. I came to this country at eleven years old speaking no English. I sat in hospitals on Friday mornings with my mother the nurse and watched what war produces in real human bodies. I watched it as a child and I have been watching it every day since, through every form the machine takes — the targeting system, the cloud contract, the content moderation algorithm, the warehouse productivity quota. And I have decided that the only responsible thing I can do with what I have seen is to document it as precisely, as sourced, and as honestly as one person working without institutional backing can manage. The film Forever Peace Now is part of that documentation. This book is part of it. ParentsPlea.com is part of it. The petition to Spain is part of it. None of it is the work of someone who has given up. All of it is the work of someone who understands, from a childhood spent watching what war does to

bodies and a career spent watching what tech does to souls, 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. I have seen enough. I am pushing.