Recent coverage of heavy drug use among the young white men of Silicon Valley, as highlighted by Elon Musk’s ketamine news, has focused largely on narratives of innovation and mood optimization while leaving out things like major side-effects.
At high doses, ketamine may cause psychosis, a mental illness that causes a person to lose touch with reality. Frequent recreational ketamine use can lead to delusions that can last to up to one month after a person stops using it.
While side-effects may seem like an obvious omission, reporting on Silicon Valley’s institutional embrace of performance-enhancing drugs has another missing element — a complex and troubling history of chemically-induced exceptionalism that deserves proper examination.
The Nazi regime, notably, provides one of the most thoroughly documented historical examples of systematic drug culture. Under Hitler’s regime, methamphetamine (marketed as Pervitin) was widely distributed to his adherents to improve their mood, modify performance and stamina. Hitler himself, as well as many high-ranking followers, were regularly juiced on various stimulants and chemicals including Eukodal (oxycodone) from rather careless and selfish physicians like Dr. Theodor Morell.
This wasn’t merely incidental drug use, just like Silicon Valley narratives about exceptional elitism today aren’t incidental, because it was so integrated into Nazi ideology and narratives about the need for superhuman performance and “optimization” of human capability. Leaders simultaneously promoted an image of racial purity and clean living while systematically administering unclean drugs to differentiate themselves from “others”.
Today’s Silicon Valley narratives around ketamine and psychedelics frankly echo very disturbing historical precedents that seem to get left out of social channels as they endorse so much drug use they cause shortages. We should see more coverage of clearly problematic themes:
The language of human optimization and enhancement
Institutional normalization of drug use for performance
The gap between public image and private practice
The intersection of drug use with ideologies of exceptionalism
While Silicon Valley’s drug culture still occurs in a vastly different context than Nazi Germany’s “chemical enhancement” program (at least for now), both cases demonstrate how institutional drug use can become entwined with ideologies of discriminatory human “superiority” patterns. Adding historical context allows up to raise important questions about what’s really being discussed in news such as this:
Silicon Valley elites are reportedly taking ketamine and attending psychedelic parties to bolster their focus and creativity.
The article fails to touch any of the most important themes, like a herd of elephants in the room nobody wants to talk about.
How does institutional drug use reflect and reinforce power dynamics?
What are the implications of normalizing drug use for workplace performance?
How do organizations reconcile public messaging with private practices?
What are the human costs of institutional performance enhancement?
Understanding historical patterns is far less about drawing direct equivalences (Nazis really, really hate being called Nazis), but rather about recognizing how institutional drug use often intersects with highly toxic ideologies of optimization and performance enhancement.
The drugs themselves might not harm you as much as the drug promotion culture pushing it with a very hidden intention of harm to certain segments of society. As ketamine and other psychedelics gain mainstream acceptance, we must carefully consider the ethical implications of institutional promotion and distribution.
When major tech publications celebrate the rise of heavy ketamine use, even just passively giving it headlines of “bolster focus and creativity” without examining historical contexts, they miss an opportunity for critical analysis. The “innovation” and “output” story really is far more about power, institutional control, and the complex relationship between drug policy and organizational ideology.
We would do well to remember that any enhancement short-cut circling around high-performance communities deserves careful scrutiny, especially when embedded in groups that appear to be prone to science denial. We don’t actually need to open the door to harmful, even deadly, fantasies of magic “happy” pills.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped an eXcrement (formerly known as a Tweet) at 1AM about the Jevons Paradox, apparently hoping to reassure shaken American investors that efficient AI breakthroughs will drive benefits to Azure’s centralized and inefficient AI empire.
Source: eX-Twitter
There’s delicious irony here – Nadella just predicted his own disruption. It’s like watching Microsoft circa 2006 reassure investors about their Vista strategy (later known as the “smell of death”) meant to corner all access to the Web, just as Unix was ramping to completely eat their lunch (Linux, MacOSX, etc).
Source: The Guardian
“Where do you want to go today?” Clearly not to Azure’s premium-priced AI plantation.
…a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. …in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies.
History. It matters.
William Stanley Jevons, of paradox fame, wasn’t writing about maintaining monopoly power. He was documenting how efficiency improvements democratize access to technology, sparking waves of decentralized innovation that reshape entire industries. In other words if you reduce the cost of technology by half, demand may be expected to more than double. History repeatedly shows this reshaping actually and usually dismantles, not reinforces, incumbent power structures.
AT&T insisted only their premium hardware could be trusted on their precious network. Thomas Carter, blocked from this artificial scarcity, created an elegantly simple acoustic coupler that worked better than AT&T’s “premium” solutions. Sound familiar? DeepSeek just did the same thing with AI, achieving GPT-4 level performance on “inferior” chips while spending 6% of what OpenAI did.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hated the Carterfone economics so much he literally penned an angry open letter saying anyone trying to “hobby” or innovate in tech was his powerful Seattle lawyer father’s worst enemy.
Letter from Bill Gates of Microsoft addressed to the members of the Homebrew Computer Club and hobbyist in general. (Click to enlarge). Source: Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 1, January 31, 1976.
The Gates family’s pattern of using legal force to maintain barriers and monopoly went beyond technology given how they curated Microsoft’s workforce to be only 2.6% Black, as documented in a $5 billion discrimination lawsuit. I think I recently read an insightful book about exactly the kind of hard-working person the sprawling Gates’ family empire tried to hold down: Percival Everett’s “James” cleverly tells the classic American story about the systemic barriers erected by elites in power who practice willful ignorance.
And on that note consider how rural communities around the world repurposed “premium” national telegraph wire suppliers into barbed-wire fences to keep the fancy hats out, as well as build early “local area” inexpensive networks for private communications. Innovation meant technology made to work for the people, rather than being controlled by distant corporate masters.
…Washburn adopted Bessemer steel for continuous rolling, creating “a revolution in the wire business, substituting … a better and cheaper material for very many purposes.” Most notably, Washburn acquired patents for barbed wire and greatly expanded its fencing-wire business during the peak decades of America’s westward expansion—showing that efforts to improve telegraph wire also yielded significant spillover effects in other economic sectors.
The pattern has been clear for decades if not centuries or more: when monopolists try to maintain control through Silicon Valley notions of “digital moats” and artificial scarcity, they unintentionally spark innovations that ultimately undermine the de-regulator’s push to centralize power. A power struggle naturally ensues.
Microsoft was in a position to have led the charge toward more efficient, democratized AI. Instead, they poured billions into an unnecessary artificial scarcity model with notions of primarily enriching a tiny group of tech oligarchs who greedily predict “societal disruption”, sounding like modern slavery dreams on ketamine. Now they’re looking down the same slope of reality that AT&T, IBM, and countless other would-be digital plantation owners discovered: humanity wants freedom and inevitably innovates toward independence from those intoxicated by oppressive control.
The real Jevons Paradox is that more efficient AI will accelerate the exact decentralized innovation that historically dismantles corporate empires built on artificial scarcity. Just as the Magna Carta forced kings to recognize they couldn’t maintain artificial scarcity of rights and justice, American tech barons are about to learn they can’t maintain artificial scarcity of computing power. While Silicon Valley elites educate their children about the divine right of VCs, places like DeepSeek are demonstrating that AI, like law and liberty before it, becomes more powerful as it becomes more distributed.
Will cheaper AI increase usage and benefit Azure? That’s like asking if the cheaper phone benefited AT&T or led to its breakup so that a cheaper phone could benefit from freedom of choice with infrastructure providers.
Perhaps that explains the 1 AM timing of the CEO’s eXcrement using some random inexpensive phone using some random inexpensive network.
I’ve spent decades studying how societies descend into authoritarianism and as a security professional, I’m watching patterns that I know all too well emerge at unprecedented speed in American institutions.
Consider what we’re seeing in Ukraine: young North Korean soldiers carrying handwritten loyalty pledges, documenting each other’s “disloyalty,” removing protective gear to prove dedication, and detonating grenades rather than being captured.
A handwritten page found on one of the North Korean soldiers recorded acts of disloyalty by North Korean subordinates. Rebecca Wright/CNN
These aren’t just tactical choices – they’re the end result of a system that values loyalty to false prophets above all else, including human life.
These parallels aren’t subtle to an expert in authoritarian dangers.
Here’s what makes this moment uniquely dangerous, requiring additional expertise in cybersecurity: technology is accelerating institutional collapse beyond anything we’ve seen in history.
Radio codes found on one of the North Korean soldiers. Rebecca Wright/CNN
When Mao deployed Red Guards, when Stalin conducted his purges, when the Shah’s SAVAK began its campaigns – these transformations took years. Today, a centralized email system can expose every federal employee to loyalty tests instantly. Social media can identify and target “disloyal” staff within hours by running a single query statement like “DEI”. A teenager with an assault rifle can be placed in charge of critical systems with a single administrative decision.
By the time most people recognize automation of decline and destruction, the professional expertise needed to prevent catastrophic steps – like a button-click to end hundreds of thousands of lives – already may be done and unrecoverable.
When Twitter’s $44B purchase led to 80% value destruction, pundits laughed at Elon Musk as incompetent and cruel. They missed his actual intentions dog-whistled by him for years.
Hitler’s 1933 ‘Volksempfänger’ program was giving away radios at a 75% loss to destroy democracy and replace it with Nazi adherents. Both sacrificed billions to gain control of communication infrastructure, celebrating deceptive and illegal “exit package” tactics meant to accelerate end of freedom.
Seemingly “bad business” decisions of massive devaluation and loss make perfect sense when viewed as evil charity – tools for rapid institutional control and cult-like loyalty enforcement rather than profit-seeking ventures. The toxic exit packages are institutional suicide pills, similar to how Hitler’s “Night of Long Knives” eliminated opposition through emphasis on rapid “exits.”
The new appointees – averaging 29 years old compared to the typical 52 – are specifically being selected to lack the knowledge that would recognize catastrophic risks someone wants them to make… again (e.g. MAGA). When a 26-year-old was placed in charge of nuclear command protocols they didn’t understand how keeping authentication systems separate from general communications networks is critical to safety – literally the most famous catastrophic design flaw in all hacker history (e.g. 1983 NORAD near-miss and the infamous 2600 phreakers).
The patterns are clear: when loyalty becomes the only metric that matters, when youth are elevated specifically because they lack the judgment to resist, when technology enables instant implementation of control systems – you’re watching the death of professional judgment and institutional knowledge in real time.
Some will say this analysis is alarmist. They’ll say American institutions are resilient. They’ll say we’ve survived previous challenges. But they’re missing how technology has changed the game. The speed of institutional collapse in the digital age isn’t even comparable to historical examples that were measured in months and years. We don’t have the luxury of analog and physical warning signs.
The North Korean soldiers show us exactly where America is headed at warp speed because, unlike their 1980s view of the world, we are throwing $500 Billion at AI “end of society” announcements: young people primed to throw away lives based on loyalty tests alone, unable to adapt or think independently, following long-outdated patterns even as they die.
The time to recognize deadly devotion to loyalty over competence, to recognize the prioritization of control over effectiveness, is before it becomes irreversible. History is clear on this point: once institutional knowledge is purged, once professional judgment to protect lives is replaced by suicidal loyalty tests, once the young and inexperienced are given authority specifically because they lack the context to resist – the rushed slide into full institutional collapse becomes nearly impossible to stop. Even physical coercion becomes digital:
[Czechoslovakian] President Hácha was in such a state of exhaustion that he more than once needed medical attention from the [Nazi] doctors, who, by the way, had been there ready for service since the beginning of the interview. […] At 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Hacha, in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections, resigned himself with death in his soul to give his signature [for Hitler to seize power and invade].
We need to name what we’re seeing. This isn’t normal administrative change. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. This is the deliberate installation of North Korean-style loyalty systems in American institutions, accelerated by technology to a speed we’ve never seen before in human history.
The question isn’t why Trump regularly praises authoritarian leaders including North Koreans and what he would do to be like them – history has answered such questions too many times to count. The question is whether enough people recognize it right here and right now to prevent America’s institutions from following North Korea’s path towards youth rushing to blow themselves up and take down democracy, just to prove their absolute loyalty to Musk and his assistant Trump.
Tesla design failures allegedly cause an unpredictable veering into trees and poles, causing catastrophic fires that trap occupants and kill them. Three young Piedmont students were burned to death in their brand new Cybertruck… among the nearly two dozen people tragically killed in their Tesla “Swasticars” in October and November of 2024 alone. Image source: Harry HarrisSwasticars: Remote-controlled explosive devices (REDs) stockpiled by Musk outside Berlin.
The history of warfare teaches us one lesson repeatedly: fixed defenses fail catastrophically if they can’t address mobility of opponents. If you thought “build a wall” ended in corrupt failure (it did) here we are in 2025 watching the same characters prepare to pour $500 billion into the “gate” – a massive fixed AI infrastructure project that manages to ignore virtually every lesson from both military history and information security.
The Digital Fortress Fallacy
As someone who has spent many decades analyzing technological risk while immersed in global information warfare, I can state unequivocally: Stargate represents the single largest strategic miscalculation in the history of warfare technology. It’s not just a mistake – it’s a mistake of such magnitude that future military historians will likely use it as a canonical example of strategic myopia.
The parallels with historical blunders are not just striking – they’re identical in their fundamental misunderstanding of how advantage is gained and lost in technological warfare:
The Maginot Line cost France 3 billion francs and the illusion of security
British battleship programs consumed vast resources just as naval warfare was being revolutionized by carriers
Soviet heavy armor investments in Afghanistan were rendered obsolete by mobile insurgents with Stinger missiles
Libyan armored divisions were humiliated by Chadian forces in Toyota pickups
Going backwards in time has been a hallmark of Trump, so I must ask whether suddenly driving to make these same old mistakes, at a scale that dwarfs all previous examples combined, is really what Stargate represents.
This certainly would be worse than the “build a wall” rhetoric of fraud that self-defeatingly redirected American security staff away from critical airports and seaports to stand in the empty desert wondering where all their money went.
Bannon never faced federal charges because he was pardoned by then-President Trump on Trump’s final night in office during his first term. The pardon only applied to the federal case and did not preclude state charges. Bannon had told donors to the We Build the Wall campaign that their money would 100% go toward building a wall along the U.S. southern border, while prosecutors say some of the $15 million in donations was secretly funneled to himself and the campaign’s president, Brian Kolfage.
That scam wall is bascially set to repeat as a gate with 33x the scale of losses (from $15M to $500B).
Realities of Open Source Warfare
The recent DeepSeek developments out of China have abruptly exposed the obvious and fundamental flaws in Stargate’s dubious conception. Timing of the announcement is notable. A reported ability to achieve competitive AI performance at a fraction of the cost isn’t an anomaly – it’s the expected outcome of open source warfare principles that have governed technological conflict for centuries. And it means Trump already is creating catastrophic weakness.
When analysts like Gavin Baker try to dismiss DeepSeek’s $6M achievement by pointing to “prior research costs,” they’re making the same deadly mistake military planners make when they focus on R&D budgets instead of deployment effectiveness. Baker argues this cost “excludes prior research” and required “hundreds of millions in prior research” – as if that somehow diminishes the achievement. The Nazis claimed a lowly graduate student alone invented their jet engine when everyone knows German spies stole it from Cambridge, England. Today’s analysts are making the same mistake, pretending DeepSeek’s achievements don’t count because they built on existing research.
Imagine sitting in London as the V-1 falls, arguing “but Hitler didn’t account for prior research costs”. This is exactly equivalent to claiming the Mujahideen’s effectiveness against Soviet helicopters should be discounted because they didn’t invent the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or account properly for R&D budgets.
In warfare – whether physical or digital – what matters is effective deployment, derivation and adaptation, not who paid for the original art.
American intelligence funded extremist Islamic radicalism developing into violence, disseminating leaflets like this of a giant mujahid with “God is great” written on his jacket, shown defending Islam and God from Soviet assault. The text in the top right says “Shield of God’s Religion,” implying faith of the mujahideen will protect him from bullets. Source: FP.
Historical Precedent is Asymmetric Victory
Let’s be explicitly clear about what history teaches us:
Mission 101 (Ethiopia, 1940): at most 20,000 irregular troops utterly routed hundreds of thousands (~300K) Italian fascist forces through clever mobility and tactical adaptation
The Toyota War (Chad, 1987): Pickup trucks and rocket launchers decimated Soviet-supplied armor columns
Ukrainian Drone and Bike Warfare (2022-present): Consumer drones and motorbikes with adaptable tactics render Russian billion-dollar air, land and water defense systems largely irrelevant
Each of these examples demonstrates how agile forces using adapted technology consistently defeat massive fixed investments. And that’s before we account for the scale of corruption fraud expected from Trump. The Stargate project ignores the whole history of warfare lessons at a scale that beggars belief.
Don’t get me started on knights in armor sinking into the mud of 1415 Agincourt or how Napoleon’s Navy repeatedly was a sitting duck of disasterous miscalculations while Nelson literally ran circles of fire around them.
Perhaps France’s infamously aggressive dictator should be referenced today more often as Mr. Napoleon Blownapart? The gargantuan French warship L’Orient explodes at 10PM. Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Digital War Veteran Reality Check
From an information security perspective, Stargate represents everything we know doesn’t work in cyber defense. Concentrating resources in massive overpriced fixed infrastructure of our grandparents’ fears creates:
Single points of failure
High-value targets
Reduced adaptability
Resource drain from more effective defensive measures
It’s as if we’re building the world’s most expensive castle while our opponents are already fielding artillery. It’s like celebrating WWI veteran and politician Maginot building a concrete line from his past while opponents simply launch radio directed fast attack planes and tanks of WWII. How hard is Putin laughing at Stargate right now?
Strategic Cost of Watergate Stargate
Stargate isn’t just replicating the strategic errors of fixed fortifications – it’s potentially worse because it represents the privatization of core national security compute infrastructure. We’ve seen how this story ends before with military contractors: the taxpayer gets the bill, the private entity gets the profit, and the actual security capabilities often end up compromised. Imagine if the NSA had outsourced its core computing infrastructure to a private contractor in the 1960s – that’s effectively what we’re contemplating here, but at a far larger scale and with far higher stakes. The lesson from France in the crucial years just before WWII is that every dollar poured into a digital Maginot Line is a dollar not spent on:
Distributed AI development capabilities
Asymmetric technological advantages
Adaptive defense systems
Actual technological innovation
Ask a Historian or Lose
History’s judgment of fixed fortification strategies is universally harsh. Maginot’s Line, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, Israel’s Bar Lev Line, Israel’s Gaza Wall, South Korea’s DMZ… and countless other massive fixed defenses share one common feature: they have failed spectacularly when overconfident and unable to address asymmetric mobility. Stargate appears poised to join this list, but at a scale that would make even the most wasteful military planners of the past blush.
The truly tragic aspect of the Stargate project is that we know better in the same way that tying our shoe laces is better than tripping over them. Once you know, you know.
American special forces have demonstrated daily how distributed, adaptive approaches work. Our cyber warfare units understand the superiority of mobile defense. Our best military historians and technologists have documented these lessons repeatedly.
Yet here we are, like Teapot Dome never happened (another case of private interests corrupting national resources)…preparing to build the most expensive fixed fortification in human history. Not just concrete and steel this time, but centralized chips and software. The lessons of history could not be clearer: this way lies disaster.
Do I know whether Stargate will fail at stated objectives? Did ChoicePoint get breached? When we privatized and centralized critical data processing infrastructure without diligence or regulation, it led to catastrophic security failures. History gives us that answer with crystal clarity. The real question is how much damage this strategic misallocation of resources will do to American technological competitiveness before reality forces a course correction.
Palantir sued the U.S. Army to Force itself in and then promised as a monopoly on intelligence it would find terrorists. Instead it created them and destroyed any chance of peace and stability (a darling of Wall Street bulls known as “self licking ISIS-cream cone”). Stargate could unleash an even bigger stock pumping bullsh*t avalanche destroying society as we know it.
Past is prologue. Look at my record since 1995: history is the best predictor. When faced with Nazi Germany’s overwhelming conventional superiority, many “realists” urged Churchill to negotiate from a position of weakness. They saw only the massive fixed infrastructure of German power – the tanks, the planes, the divisions. But Churchill understood something deeper about asymmetric warfare that applies perfectly to today’s AI arms race:
A former assistant private secretary to Churchill, Crawshay-Williams had written a letter cravenly pleading with the prime minister to make terms with Hitler — ‘I’m all for winning this war if it can be done … But it does seem to me, and, I know, to others, that “if and when” an informed view of the situation shows that we’ve really not got a practical chance of actual ultimate victory, no question of prestige should stand in the way of our using our nuisance value while we have one to get the best peace terms possible. Otherwise, after losing many lives and much money, we shall merely find ourselves in the position of France — or worse. I hope this doesn’t sound defeatist; I’m not that. Only realist’. Churchill’s response is brief and brutal: ‘I am ashamed of you for writing such a letter. I return it to you — to burn & forget’. Source: Christie’s Auction
Churchill’s brutal response – “I am ashamed of you” – came from understanding that apparent power imbalances can be overcome through unconventional approaches. He knew that Britain’s real strength lay not in matching German industrial might tank-for-tank, but in mobility, adaptation, and unconventional warfare. Today’s architects of Stargate are making the same mistake as Churchill’s doubters – assuming that massive fixed infrastructure (digital rather than industrial) is the path to security.
Stargate at first blush sounds like the worst boondoggle, even worse than the fragile Cybertruck, gifting future historians the ultimate example of how not to approach technological warfare in the information age.
A little rain in 2021 destroyed a brand new high-cost Trump wall, foreshadowing the fraud known as a Tesla Cybertruck. Source: Gizmodo
Unfortunately, that huge sucking sound seems to be $500 billion of taxpayer money being flushed, along with America’s technological leadership position. The people who couldn’t build a wall without it falling down, while they stuffed its budget into their pockets, are back with an even bigger fraud.
As if to prove the main point here deeper, OpenAI just announced ChatGPT Gov – another massive centralization of government AI infrastructure into fixed, high-value targets. They’re proudly announcing 18 million messages from government agencies flowing through their system, as if concentrating sensitive government communications in private hands while deregulating safety was something to celebrate rather than a huge strategic vulnerability.
