Repeat Play
I enjoy reading Noema essays but this one had me confused and then, on reflection, less confused than I should have been. They ran the interview in June 2026 and introduced Eric Schmidt as a former Google CEO and NSCAI chairman who has made many trips to Ukraine. What the introduction didn't mention: Schmidt runs White Stork and Swift Beat, companies that build AI military drones for Ukraine, and is CEO of Relativity Space. A reader who didn't know this going in would have no way to place his perspective correctly, and Noema didn't help them.
This is, it turns out, a recognizable Eric Schmidt move. At Google, he spent years presenting the company's expansion into search advertising, mobile, and cloud as natural evolution, even inevitability, while the underlying business logic was acquisition and lock-in. The framing was always: we're describing how the world works, not arguing for our preferred version of it. We were all supposed to believe this fiction.
The Noema interview runs exactly the same play. He raises the World War I poison gas parallel, notes that once one side used it the other felt compelled to match, and says democracies should understand "this is the dynamic we risk walking into." That sounds like a warning. But follow it to its end and there's no alternative offered, no argument for holding a line or negotiating limits. The warning is also pitch is for the thing his companies make.
If Noema had simply printed his company affiliations at the top with a single disclosure line, the interview would still be worth reading. As a reader I am disppointed that they chose not to do that.
This is, it turns out, a recognizable Eric Schmidt move. At Google, he spent years presenting the company's expansion into search advertising, mobile, and cloud as natural evolution, even inevitability, while the underlying business logic was acquisition and lock-in. The framing was always: we're describing how the world works, not arguing for our preferred version of it. We were all supposed to believe this fiction.
The Noema interview runs exactly the same play. He raises the World War I poison gas parallel, notes that once one side used it the other felt compelled to match, and says democracies should understand "this is the dynamic we risk walking into." That sounds like a warning. But follow it to its end and there's no alternative offered, no argument for holding a line or negotiating limits. The warning is also pitch is for the thing his companies make.
If Noema had simply printed his company affiliations at the top with a single disclosure line, the interview would still be worth reading. As a reader I am disppointed that they chose not to do that.
Filed under:
Reflections