Damn, this is scary:
Iranian strikes have rendered two Amazon Web Services availability zones “hard down” in Dubai and Bahrain and the company expects them to be “unavailable for an extended period,” according to internal Amazon communication reviewed by Big Technology.
Within Amazon Web Services, the strikes have rendered so much damage that employees have been advised to deprioritize both regions.
The second lesson is that we are in an age when those “hard industries” matter. Yes, Big Tech stocks have soared in recent years amid excitement about AI. But the Iran war shows that countries are very vulnerable if they lack industrial processes, however old-fashioned. “The old economy begins to take its revenge,” Jeff Currie, analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle, recently noted. “You can’t print molecules,” even with AI.
Brilliant piece by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi:
In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s objectives would be achieved swiftly or decisively. The assumption of inevitability has replaced the burden of argument.
The absence of justification is not incidental. It is a morbid symptom of an international system in crisis. The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the ‘international rules-based order’ have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide, but no alternative architecture has cohered in their place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.
Brilliant editorial analyzing the pathetic nature of American actions in Iran through the lens of Simone Weil’s prophetic writing.
Read the note →We don’t give a shit about anything anymore because we are bored, distracted and getting dumber by the second in the flickering shadow of the screen.
Read the note →