New circuitries of apartheid: politically analysing hostile technology

As technologies of genocidal terror lay waste to Gaza, Adam C. Jones argues for a decolonial Luddism; one that is not abstractly anti-technology, but which cuts through the hype and bluster of the tech-economy of today to unearth the extractive circuits of imperialism within.

Aimé Césaire remarked in Discourse on Colonialism that brutalities committed by the colonisers against the colonised would ultimately generate a ‘terrific boomerang effect’. As a result of this effect, the techniques of genocidal dispossession, racial apartheid, and perpetual social murder would find their way back to the imperial core from the periphery. Césaire believed this to have already occurred in the catastrophe of Nazism which led the continent to a near-unprecedented level of destruction, where elements of the German bourgeoisie allied themselves with Hitler in order to enact those same colonial techniques within the sphere of Europe itself. Let us not forget the German genocide in Namibia in the same century, and the British invention of the concentration camp in South Africa. 

The events described by Césaire’s boomerang were invoked by him as a warning to Europe as the seat of the old colonial powers. Today however, the return of the techniques and technologies of such vicious and bloodied forms of capitalist accumulation is no longer something which Europe fears. Instead, the return of technologies trained by genocidal terror is welcomed by Europe as a sound return on its investments. These technologies no longer threaten to fracture Europe, but rather are seen by the European Union as essential to the very unity of its territorial project. Sally Hayden provides an apt summary of how Israeli ‘Heron’ drones which are tested in Gaza – both for surveillance and as mobile missile-launchers – are now being used in the Mediterranean Sea for the sake of border protection. Far from being content with making the Mediterranean the world’s largest mass grave following the NATO destruction of Libya, the EU – that land of quaint pastries, Après-skis, and Odes to Joy – has decided to refine their border technology with Israeli killing machines, to the tune of a €100 million deal.

At the time of writing, the British government has recently announced that they are seeking procurement partners to enhance their ability to maintain sizable ‘watchlists’ of people on the move, to investigate passengers, and to detect ‘threats’ to border security. Given that firms in Britain such as Leonardo and Elbit already operate in the production of drone weapon technology as well as BAE Systems’ ongoing provision of F-35 parts to Israel, and the alleged involvement of British surveillance planes launched from RAF bases in Cyprus, we know that our government would have no qualms in buying technology refined through genocide. They already produce it.

Further, given that Britain, regardless of the party in government, has socially murdered hundreds of thousands through austerity, war, deportation, police violence, the active withholding of safe asylum routes, and COVID this century alone; it may be apt to reflect on Tony Benn’s warning that we should look at how the government treats refugees. Benn remarked that the government treats refugees in the way that they would also treat the rest of us within the border, if only they could get away with it. I contend that they have gotten away with it, and will soon realise this with even greater impunity and refined technological brutality. 

Technology, however, is as much technique as it is gadgetry, and by saying ‘technology’ here one could also talk of the techniques of training and the sharing of intelligence between Israeli and American police. This is not to say that American officers would be so meek and mild were it not for Israel. Such an analysis would be idealistic, antisemitic, and ultimately advertising for the Israeli military as being exceptional police officers. Rather, practices of policing are tested at the limits of their impunity in occupied Palestine. At the same time pushing their own techniques of impunity at home whilst simultaneously accelerating the conversion of the police to what they always and already were since Robert Peel’s experiments in Ireland: an occupying force.  

As a creature of the Balfour Declaration and British and US imperialism, Israel is by no means alone in what it is doing, and it is not an aberration in the history of capitalism. Properly speaking, there is no solely ‘Israeli’ technology, because the Zionist Entity, which likes to call itself ‘the start-up nation’, is precisely that. Israel is a colonial tech start-up, a node for transnational capitalist interests and investments. It requires global cooperation and guarantees of impunity in order to do what it is currently doing. If Israel has any world-historical significance, it is as one of many laboratories in which world powers, from Europe to America, from China to India, test technologies for home use. This is why Palestine Action held aloft a banner saying ‘Tested on Palestinians, used in Kashmir’ when targeting the British branches of Israeli firm Elbit. 

One area where there has been substantial fear about the development and redeployment of Israeli technologies has been in the realm of so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (this is a marketing term, not a technical one). With a border as digitised as that of Britain, the idea that our government could use such systems as ‘Lavender’ or ‘Where’s Daddy’, which algorithmically generate targets marking Palestinians for death specifically when they enter their family homes, should give us cause for alarm. Yet the British state is already making use of these systems. A CNN report from July 2023 highlights how Britain’s South-Eastern border is already peppered with unarmed camera towers which supposedly use ‘AI’ to mark small boats, and ‘AI’ powered drones regularly scan the Channel. These are respectively  provided by a US start-up Anduril, which operates along the US-Mexico border, and the Portuguese company Tekever .

Thankfully, when it comes to partnerships with the private sector, governments tend to be wowed with all kinds of techno-babble and  hyped-up gimmicks such as so-called ‘AI’. We have no idea whether these machines would be effective at all. The tech economy, flooded as it is with hype men and Elon Muskovite fanboys, is mostly an economy which sells the images of technologies which work, rather than a working product itself. ‘AI’ is no different. They at best sell rudimentary prototypes which require subsidies to keep in development. Then they eventually crash and burn whilst the money runs out, the bubble bursts, and the CEO has stripped enough copper wiring out of the wall to hawk the next line of vaporware (tech which is announced, but rarely ever arrives) to unsuspecting suckers. Whilst we should pay significant attention to the forms of technology proliferated through war, dispossession, and genocidal capitalism, we should also take care not to do advertisements for them by means of our fear. The Israeli military uses ‘AI’, and allows this fact to be reported, in order to boost hype for their own domestic AI sector, which boasts VC firms such as Remagine Ventures who highlight that the Israeli ‘AI’ market has raised over five billion dollars across over 200 start-ups.

Our analysis should not advertise the technology of the enemy as being able to do what it claims to do. Israeli ‘AI’ may generate kill lists, but the military has never needed such a technology to do so, for it already has the data-set extracted from its surveillance of Palestinians and its system of facial recognition checkpoints called the ‘Wolf’ (itself composed from Dutch and Chinese tech imports). These new technological imports and exports do not pose new threats in the sense of a novel means of enacting violence, but they may accelerate digital processing of targets algorithmically, or simply provide a cybernetic shine to forms of violence that make them seem more clinical, neutral, or effective. 

Further, we should pay attention to their environmental effects, such as the incredible energy consumption of data-centres which provide the computational power of all such data-machines. Additionally, we must demystify the idea of ‘artificial intelligence’ as something that names no new social relation between humans and technology, but rather obscures the fundamental labour relation of worker and capital. For this, we should focus our analysis on the invisibilized forms of labour which go into the moderation and correction of data-sets – predominantly carried out by people in the global south, many of whom have been confined in refugee camps due to displacement by war and climate catastrophe. It is these new forms of proletarianisation and data-driven capital accumulation which sit at the heart of the global tech-economy. Palestine is itself exploited as a data-set for the testing and correction of new imperial technologies, but the walls of that data set can fall, and have been felled, as we saw in the demolition by bulldozers on October 7th of the so-called ‘smart fences’ along the border of Gaza.

All technology is political, and the use and abuse thereof is a political matter before it is a technical one. We cannot simply be technological determinists, believing that whoever has (or claims to have) the most developed machines will necessarily be the victor. Often, contemporary technology is a better advertisement for its own marketing than it is genuinely effective. But even where there exists a higher calibre of weaponry in the hands of the enemy,  history testifies that this does not seal the fate of the decolonial resistance. This remains true in the victories of the resistance against the US and Israel (the embarrassment of Operation Prosperity Guardian by the Yemeni forces who have maintained their successful blockade against Israeli shipping is a sublime example), or the success of the Algerian forces against the French (cited by Fanon in his critique of Engels’ rather simple ‘revolver beats sword’ logic in The Wretched of the Earth). 

As Tom Gann argued, revolutionary literature has a duty to report the victories of the resistance against these technologies, and in doing so we damage the very branding that the Israeli military uses for its own tech-economy and its exports on the world market. Gann notes: 

‘We hear a lot, even in critical outlets, about the successful application of repressive ‘Israeli’ technologies. But what happens when surveillance and border technology is battle-tested (and proven inadequate) by Hezbollah, by Palestinians in paragliders, and by the Resistance groups’ defeat of the IOF? Can ‘Israel’ continue to cash in on the IOF brand?’ 

To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze, a revolutionary relation to such an economic-technical complex is neither to fear the machines nor hope that technological wonders alone will save us, but to look for new weapons of struggle, practical and analytical. The most rational thing to do with these machines, these toys of cybernetic governance and tech-bro hype, is to break them, and to reject the fantastical cultural images of them which make them seem more powerful than they are. Thus, we might begin undermining their operations as a part of the arsenal of capital in its war upon the world. It also necessitates that we incorporate into our analyses those victories that have already been achieved. What is required is a critical and thoroughly decolonial Luddism; one that is not simply and abstractly anti-technology, but one which cuts through the hype and bluster of the tech-economy of today to unearth the extractive circuits of imperialism within.