No Escape

Hey y’all, I am deep in the weeds putting together No Escape‘s first major retrospective right now, a book I’m calling Escape Velocity, so I haven’t really been playing many video games or writing about much here except for some errant thoughts I needed to clear out (see the post about Maximalist Hardcore from last month, or the one about the now much bigger porn ban from before that). But I wanted to circle back around to talk about something that kind of fell off, attention-wise, from earlier this year: the BDS Movement’s call to boycott Xbox Game Studios, Game Pass and flagship Xbox-owned titles like Call of Duty and Minecraft.

As there often is whenever participants in a consumption-based hobby are asked to stop consuming something, there was a lot of pushback and handwringing about the BDS campaign against Microsoft, in part because the Redmond, WA-based tech company’s influence is so ubiquitous, especially at the enterprise level, and in part because the knock-on effects of everyone suddenly dropping out of Game Pass seemed to be more likely to harm the individual game studios, and not Microsoft itself.

Since then we’ve seen multiple rounds of massive, sweeping layoffs, including to various areas of Microsoft’s games division, in spite of what turned out to be a “great” year for Xbox specifically. In the intervening months since the boycott was called, we’ve gained greater insight into Microsoft’s overall business strategy going forward (a death march over the cliff labeled “AI”), but more importantly, we’ve learned exactly to what degree Microsoft has been aiding and abetting the fascist Israeli state thanks to a new report in the Guardian in collaboration with Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 and Israeli Hebrew-only publication Local Call.

According to the report, Microsoft’s Azure storage platform has been pivotal in the creation of a nationwide surveillance dragnet across the occupied Palestinian territories that has the capacity to collect scrubbable recordings of millions of phone calls daily.

According to the report’s intelligence sources, this dragnet relies on Azure’s “near-limitless” storage capacity in overseas data centers to even exist; “Unit 8200’s leadership turned to Microsoft after concluding it did not have sufficient storage space or computing power on the military’s servers to bear the weight of an entire population’s phone calls.”

What’s more, the Guardian and others found, with the power of Azure backing the system these recordings can be stored functionally forever—allowing the Israeli state to form a living archive of every Palestinian’s call data and social network, “[allowing Unit 8200] to go back in time and retrieve the phone conversations of people who become of interest.” (ed. note, emphasis added.) This program has collected an estimated 11,500 terabytes of recorded data as of July 2025, according to the Guardian. Most relevant:

Unit 8200 sources said intelligence drawn from the enormous repositories of phone calls held in Azure had been used to research and identify bombing targets in Gaza. One of the sources said that when planning an airstrike on an individual located within densely populated areas where high numbers of civilians are present, officers would use the cloud-based system to examine calls made by people in the immediate vicinity.

And most damning:

…according to internal Microsoft records of the meeting [between Unit 8200 leader Yossi Sariel and Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella] seen by the Guardian, Nadella offered support for Sariel’s aspiration to move so much of the elite surveillance unit’s data into the cloud, described earlier in the meeting as including sensitive intelligence material.

“Satya suggested that we identify certain workloads to begin with and then gradually move towards the 70% mark,” one record states. It adds that Nadella said “building the partnership is so critical” and “Microsoft is committed to providing resources to support.”

It is important to recognize that what is happening in Gaza right now is unequivocally a genocide. It is an honest attempt at complete eradication of the people living there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the Palestinians totally eliminated from the Gaza Strip, proclaiming just yesterday that “Israel intends to take complete control of Gaza.” He has the full support of the United States government. The Israeli state has bombed, shot, and starved a population of nearly 3 million people half to death, corralling them in smaller and smaller “safe zones,” preventing them from getting access to food and water, crippling the region’s ability to respond to medical emergencies, forcing people of conscience to collaborate with oceanographers to know precisely when and where to throw bottles of rice and flour into the Mediterranean Sea in such a way that ensures they reach the Gaza shoreline. Microsoft’s support of this regime’s surveillance dragnet is on par with IBM’s participation in the Nazi German census that facilitated the rounding-up of Jews during the Holocaust. We can no longer pussyfoot around calling this what it is.

The BDS Campaign, bless their hearts, is very limited by design. It doesn’t want us to swear off any and all Microsoft products, knowing that for many of us that is impossible—Azure doesn’t just run a surveillance dragnet, it’s also an enterprise platform that many, many businesses use to run their back-end bullshit, and getting those companies to switch to something that works worse (though it’s hard to imagine Teams running any shittier) is a very big ask. Instead, BDS just wants consumers to drop Xbox stuff: stop using Game Pass, don’t play Xbox Game Studios releases, stop playing their tentpole games. But honestly? Reading this shit and seeing just how extensively Microsoft is involved in facilitating Israel’s ongoing war crimes? Seeing that it has full support of executives including Satya Nadella himself? Nah man. I’m done.

Unplug your Xbox. Unsubscribe from Game Pass. Delete your Microsoft account. Install Linux (I like Mint Linux, personally) on your Windows computers; you can use a combination of the Proton compatibility layer from Steam, a program called Lutris, and something called “Heroic” for GOG and Epic Games Store games so as to not lose access to (most of) your games. If you’re a games journalist or critic, STOP COVERING XBOX GAMES STUDIOS TITLES. This isn’t about a single boycott anymore, it’s not just some small principled stand you can take that may or may not have any impact on Microsoft’s bottom line. It’s about the ethics of it all, the morality of continuing to lend your tacit approval to these ghoulish motherfuckers who so gleefully assist with the summary deletion of human life seeing nothing but dollar signs in their eyes. You should be disgusted that this is what they do with your money. You should be fucking horrified. Divestiture is genuinely the least you can do here, barring committing major property damage or becoming another Aaron Bushnell or Luigi Mangione (allegedly). Fuck Microsoft. Fuck Xbox. Fuck Phil Spencer, Matt Booty and Sarah Bond. Fuck Satya Nadella. I’m not letting them pour another drop of the blood that should be covering their hands on mine, and neither should you.