Technologies of Genocide: How Big Tech Profits from Mass Annihilation

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The Genocide Interface

“What does genocide look like in the digital age? Not just bodies under the rubble, open-air prisons, mass graves, or destroyed hospitals, but it’s fibre optics, cables, data centres, predictive algorithms, surveillance apps, and being shadow-banned for having an opinion. Genocide now is not only live-streamed, but it is also monetised.” - Technologies of Genocide.

For close to two years, we have been complicit witnesses to the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The annihilation is live-streamed, surveilled, quantified, and sold. The platforms that host our conversations, the cloud that stores our lives as digital dust, and the companies that promise social connection are also the infrastructure of annihilation.

Palestinians have told us this for years: What is tested on Palestinians, never stays in Palestine; it is exported to Bastar, Kashmir, Xinjiang, Sudan, and beyond. This Genocide is monetised.

For decades, international law has refused to name and address this reality. This denial of genocide in its digital, economic, and algorithmic forms has allowed states to act unchallenged. States do not act alone; they are enabled by Silicon Valley, financed by Wall Street, armed by military contractors, and legitimised by the Western media. From predictive policing to algorithmic targeting, from biometric classification to digital erasure, we inhabit a world where the machinery of extermination is intricately linked to the machinery of profit.

The Technologies of Genocide series begins with the refusal of denial. Our first conversation is with Jalal Abukhater, a Palestinian rights advocate, and Eric Sype, an Organiser, both of whom work with Hamleh, the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media. In this podcast, they trace how the infrastructures of annihilation and extraction are not abstract technologies, but lived architectures of fear: databases that decide if a Palestinian can cross a checkpoint, algorithms that erase their voices mid-sentence, blackout zones where the very possibility of testimony is extinguished.

You can listen to the Podcast on YouTube and Soundcloud