Art rock legend Brian Eno has called on Microsoft to sever its ties with the government of Israel, saying the company’s provision of cloud and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense “support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal.”
Eno’s connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.
“I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”
Eno referenced Microsoft’s May 15 statement “on the issues relating to technology services in Israel and Gaza,” in the which company acknowledged providing Israel’s Ministry of Defense with various technologies and services but denied any culpability in IMOD’s ongoing attacks on Gaza—although it also said that it “does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices,” essentially admitting that it doesn’t really know what’s going on at all.
Regardless, Eno clearly isn’t interested in Microsoft’s protestations of innocence: “Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual’. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes.”
Eno called on Microsoft to “suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law,” and said he “stand[s] in solidarity with the brave Microsoft workers who have done something truly disruptive and refused to stay silent. They risk their livelihoods for people who have lost and will continue to lose their lives.”
Two Microsoft employees interrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event in early April to protest its entanglements with the Israeli military; both were fired less than a week later, but in spite of that similar protests occurred earlier this week at Microsoft’s Build developer conference. The fate of those employees is not yet known.
Eno invited “artists, technologists, musicians, and all people of conscience” to join him in the call, and pledged that his fee for creating the Windows 95 startup sound will “go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one.”
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