In the mid-1990s, I was asked to compose a short piece of music for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. Millions – possibly even billions – of people have since heard that short start-up chime—which represented a gateway to a promising technological future. I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company. I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.
Today, I’m compelled to speak, not as a composer this time, but as a citizen alarmed by the role Microsoft is playing in a very different kind of composition: one that leads to surveillance, violence, and destruction in Palestine.
In a blog post dated May 15, 2025, Microsoft acknowledged that it provides Israel’s Ministry of Defence with “software, professional services, Azure cloud services and Azure AI services, including language translation.” It went on to state that “It is important to acknowledge that Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices”. These “services” support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organisations, United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal. The collaboration between Microsoft and the Israeli government and army is no secret and involves the company’s software being used in lethal technologies with ‘funny’ names like ‘Where’s Daddy?’ (- guidance systems for tracking Palestinians in order to blow them up in their homes).
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.
We now live in an age where corporations like Microsoft often command more influence than governments. I believe that with such a power comes an absolute ethical responsibility. Accordingly, I call on Microsoft to suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law.
My new start up chime is this: stand 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.
I invite artists, technologists, musicians, and all people of conscience to join me in this call.
I also pledge that the fee I originally received for that Windows 95 chime will now go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one.
Brian Eno