Silicon Valley Sells Turnkey Tyranny, Per New Satirical Infomercial

A video circulating this week presents itself as a television infomercial. The product is not a blender, nor a home gym, nor a set of Ginsu knives. The product, the ad explains, is Silicon Valley. The target customer is anyone who has ever wanted their population to sit down and shut up.

The ad, published in English and structured as a parody of late-night cable advertising, runs through a familiar pitch. It opens by addressing aspiring authoritarian leaders who cannot seem to get their critics to fall in line, and then introduces the technology sector of northern California as a solution. The voiceover explains that Silicon Valley can provide “anything to violate human rights,” from artificial intelligence (AI) that strips you naked without consent, to tools that silence your critics simply by request. ^[1]

The pitch is delivered with the deadpan sincerity of a Ronco commercial. There is no irony in the voiceover, no wink to the audience. It is the ad, in the truest sense of the word, and the ad is that someone built it.

From the virtual realm, the spot moves outward. It notes, correctly, that online hatred has a habit of becoming offline hatred. The video points to Facebook’s role in driving an ethnic minority to genocide. The audio’s reference to which group is unclear, but the context points to [UNVERIFIED: the Rohingya in Myanmar]. ^{[2] [3]} It then pivots to Palantir, the U.S. data analytics firm, and its work helping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carry out removals of the populations the current American administration is most interested in removing. ^[4]

The spot closes with a flourish. Silicon Valley, the voiceover says, has turned a place that was “once a beacon of democracy, supposedly” into “the present-day 1930s Germany.” ^[5] And if they can do it there, they can do it anywhere. The call to action: contact your local Silicon Valley tech company today to get a quote on the next downfall of humanity. The slogan, delivered twice: Silicon Valley, where their dreams are everyone’s nightmares.

The video, in other words, is an infomercial. It is selling, in the language of the medium, the complete package. You bring the ideology, Silicon Valley brings the infrastructure, and the deal closes in a single quarter.

The video is effective because it does not exaggerate. The technology exists. The contracts exist. The deportations exist. People are dying. The comparison to 1930s Germany is the kind of line a person only writes if they believe the distance between the two is shrinking rather than growing.

To be fair to the firms named in the ad, several of them have, at various points, issued statements. The statements have generally followed the same shape: an acknowledgement of the criticism, a restatement of values, and a quiet continuation of the underlying business. The statements are not in the video. The business is.

The video’s structure, in fairness, is borrowed from a long American tradition of late-night parody advertising. The form — a problem, a solution, a call to action, a slogan — has been used to sell everything from home gym equipment to survivalist bunkers. The novelty is not the form. The novelty is that the product is real, the customer is real, and the slogan turns out to be the part that is true.

The video, apparently, does not need to name any one country. The point, the spot argues, is universal. Aspiring authoritarians do not shop local. They shop the same catalog. The same firms that built the tools in the ad are available, in the ad’s telling, to anyone with the budget. The video is in English. The customers are not.

Silicon Valley, the ad concludes, where their dreams are everyone’s nightmares. Make of that what you will.