Is Silicon Valley manufacturing desk killers?

About this episode

The episode explores the emergence of 'desk killers' in institutions and the role of Silicon Valley in this phenomenon.

In 2025, Nate Cavanaugh—a 27-year-old college dropout and tech entrepreneur—was handed control of the U.S. Institute of Peace and told to cut it apart. He had no government experience, no expertise in diplomacy or foreign affairs, and by his own account in a now-viral deposition , nothing informed his judgment except his judgment. Within days, a man named Mohammad Halimi lost his job , his name was amplified to 222 million Twitter followers as a Taliban sympathizer, and his family in Afghanistan was abducted and beaten by Taliban security forces. In this first episode of Omnishambles, based on a recent post by Cy on her Substack , Cy and Virginia ask how this could possibly happen. They trace how institutions produce “desk killers,” drawing on Hannah Arendt, scholar Gitta Sereny’s interviews with Nazi perpetrators, and Dan Gretton’s research on organizational killing. Then they turn to what Silicon Valley has added: not just the conditions for desk killers, but an explicit ideology that celebrates them. Listen now on Spotify and Apple . Thanks for listening to Omnishambles! Sign up now to receive our weekly episodes. Sources: * “The Desk Killer Gets DOGEd,” Cy Canterel, Abstract…

People in this episode

Hosts: Virginia Heffernan, Cy Canterel

Topics covered

• Silicon Valley
• desk killers
• diplomacy
• organizational killing
• technology ethics

Keywords

• Silicon Valley
• desk killers
• Nate Cavanaugh
• Mohammad Halimi
• Hannah Arendt
• organizational killing
• technology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U.S. Institute of Peace, Taliban, ProPublica

Books & works: Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind, Into That Darkness, Web of St

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