Omnishambles

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On Feb. 28, a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, was struck three times during school hours. The roof collapsed, killing between 175 and 180 people—most of them girls aged 7 to 12. The U.S. eventually confirmed it had hit the site.
This week, Cy takes Virginia (and you) deep inside Project Maven—the Pentagon’s AI-powered targeting system, how it was built, who built it, and why the school was just the tip of a very bloody iceberg.
What we cover:
* The origin story: Marine intelligence officer Drew Cukor in Afghanistan in 2001, blind on the battlefield with nothing but Microsoft Office and Google Earth, and his two-decade obsession with solving that with technology.
* How Palantir—Peter Thiel’s data company, bootstrapped with CIA venture capital—became the backbone of the most expensive targeting system in U.S. military history. And why they nearly didn’t make it.
* What a kill chain actually is, why compressing it was always the point, and how layering large language models into Maven took targeting from 20 targets a day to 5,000.
* The Millennium Challenge war game of 2002 — a $250 million exercise where a retired Marine general sank the U.S. fleet in 10 minutes.
* How Pete Hegseth gutted the civilian harm teams, fired the JAGs, and eliminated the “roadblocks”—the people whose job was to check whether a school was still a school.
* And the fundamental question underneath all of it: is any of this actually making us safer, or is the product never really the point?
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Mentioned in this episode:
* Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, by Katrina Manson
* AlphaGo (Netflix)
* Millennium Challenge 2002
* Operation Spiderweb (Ukraine, 2024)


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In this episode, Virginia and Cy explore the power of propaganda, the psychology behind war, and the cultural narratives shaping American and Iranian perspectives. They analyze recent propaganda videos, the role of culture in conflict, and the societal impact of patriarchal violence. Subscribe to receive new episodes at omnishamblespod.substack.com!



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

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.
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Sources:
* “The Desk Killer Gets DOGEd,” Cy Canterel, Abstract Machines
* Cavanaugh’s Jan 23, 2026 deposition from the MLA, LHA, and ACLS lawsuit
* “How DOGE Left Mohammed Halimi’s Life in Tatters”, ProPublica, Aug 22, 2025
* Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
* Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
* Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness
* Gitta Sereny, Web of Stories interview, pub. 2017
* Dan Gretton, I You We Them, 2019
* “Marc Andreessen: The World is More Malleable Than You Think”, David Senra interview, March 15, 2026
* “Meet the 24-Year-Old Trying To Disrupt the Intellectual Property Industry”, dot.LA, Jul 6, 2020
* “Body cam video shows takeover of US Institute of Peace”, NBC4 Washington, Mar 6, 2026
* The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, 1949, scene
* Lancet study overview, and “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis”, The Lancet, Jul 19, 2025
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

This is the final episode of What Rough Beast—and the first of something bigger. We’re becoming Omnishambles: same commitment to getting inside what’s huge, opaque, and frightening. Wider aperture. No more holding back. Virginia and Cy are co-hosting from here on out, and the new show launches next week. If you want to come with us, subscribe (it’s free!) at Omnishambles—link below.
For this finale, Virginia and Cy are joined by Siva Vaidyanathan—Robertson Professor of Media Studies at UVA, author of Antisocial Media—to ask: when a bomb drops on a girls’ school in southern Iran on day one of a new war, who is the author of that decision?
In this episode:
* How AI-assisted weapons systems are being used in Iran — and why authorship of the strike may be genuinely unanswerable
* The thread from Palantir in Afghanistan → Gaza as AI laboratory → Iran
* Why the 70 days it used to take to make a decision was a feature, not a bug
* Deliberative democracy, the kosher laws, and putting a brake on zeal
* Why these tools are a siren song for anyone who doesn’t want accountability
This is the last episode under this name! We’ll see you at Omnishambles.



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