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Streaming giant Spotify is no stranger to controversy. Over the years, the company has incited public indignation for a litany of reasons. Since its founding, nearly two decades ago, Spotify has faced sporadic criticism for its meagre payouts, an average of $3 for a thousand streams to artists. The company has also come under fire for offering right-wing conspiracy podcast hosts splashy contracts. In 2022, Spotify users threatened to jettison the platform owing to a contract the company provided to the Joe Rogan Podcast. Spotify currently faces another blitz of criticism, but this time, the source of public ire comes from the investment overtures of its CEO, Daniel Ek, as opposed to any direct action of the company.
Ek has announced that he led a funding round of some $700 million, through his investing firm, Prima Materia, into European defence firm Helsing, which specialises in AI-driven autonomous weapon systems.
In a world currently ravaged by wars and conflicts on multiple fronts, the travesty in the Gaza Strip and the civil war in Sudan being prominent examples, Ek’s decision to lurch into what many are calling an “arms race” has rubbed many the wrong way. Social media is awash with incandescent criticism of Ek’s move. A growing number of users have also threatened to quit the app; some have left altogether.
Several artists have also joined the fray, criticising Ek and pulling their discographies from Spotify. “So here we are, artists helping to build algorithms to sell our music,” says David Bridle, one such artist who has redacted his body of work from Spotify, “ and the success of that algorithm determines the flow of wealth to a man who invests in building machines that could kill people.” “Ek is investing in technology that can cause suffering and death. Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil. By association, it now just seems evil,” Bridle continues, in his op-ed for The Guardian.
Deerhoof, an acclaimed band based in California’s Bay Area, has also pulled its catalogue from Spotify. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Greg Saunier, the band’s founder, said: “Every time someone listens to our music on Spotify, does that mean another dollar siphoned off to make all that we’ve seen in Gaza more frequent and profitable?”
In 2022, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, directed a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, putting an end to decades of relative world peace. Despite signs of an imminent invasion in the preceding months, the invasion left the world reeling with shock. Western world powers, most notably the United States, quickly rallied around Ukraine, condemning Russia and supplying Ukraine with aid, funds, weapons, and safe passage for its fleeing citizenry. Given the outpouring of support towards Ukraine’s cause as well as the blitz of sanctions that were placed on Russia, the thinking was that in no time, Russia would sue for a ceasefire on account of military exhaustion and the impacts on the economic straits imposed on it. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Instead, the conflict in Ukraine has escalated, confounding even Donald Trump, who during his 2024 campaign trial, claimed he would “have that war settled in 24 hours.” Since 2022, the world has exploded in wars and the spectre of military aggression. Sudan is currently steeped in a devastating civil war heralded by the factions of the country’s military. Since 2023, when the war began, an estimated 150,000 people have been killed and millions more have been displaced. The middle east is similarly fraught with conflicts and tensions, ranging from the war in the Gaza Strip; which many have referred to as a Genocide, to the more recent joint action between the United States and Israel, in which they pulverized Iran’s nuclear program by sending a hail of bombs down Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the Esfahan complex.
Tensions between China and the island country of Taiwan, located 100 miles off the coast of Southeastern China, continue to rise, with China increasingly conducting “military exercises” close to Taiwan’s coast. China and India similarly share tensions over certain borders and have in the past few months bolstered their military presence in the disputed regions.
The implication of this is that war is now big business, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, famed for their uncanny and often unscrupulous capitalist sensibilities, have flocked to the arms business. Peter Thiel, who has been a longtime investor and proponent of the arms industry, even at a time when it made him something of an oddball amongst his software-leaning counterparts, has been joined by stalwarts like Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Palmer Lucky, Daniel Elk, and a host of others.
While Silicon Valley’s overt tilt towards the defence industry might seem entirely bad, there is a spate of upsides. Palantir’s technology was deployed, to great success, in the aftermath of 9/11, helping the U.S. Army make sense of a litany of fragmented data from its numerous agencies. U.S.-supplied drones have also offered tactical advantages to Ukraine, helping them counter Russian airstrikes and delivering precise attacks against Russian forces. If anything, the events of the past few years show that Daniel Ek and a vast swath of Silicon Valley investors, despite their putative commitment to saving the world, are simply following the money, wherever it leads.
