Solidarity in the Age of Digital Genocide
It’s day 425 of the genocide in Palestine, exactly fourteen months. Reports show that Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza has been ethnically cleansed. IDF killed a Palestinian journalist filming the expulsions. The UNRWA health care facility in Jabalia has been completely destroyed.
This week Amnesty International released a 300-page report: “concluding that there is sufficient evidence to believe that Israel’s conduct in Gaza following 7 October 2023 amounts to genocide.” All this was barely mentioned by mainstream US media.
I’m sure you did see that this same week, martial law in Korea came and went. The French government fell on a left motion supported by fascists. These seen and unseen (in the “West”) violences are nonetheless directly connected. This is what the age of digital genocide looks like. In this moment, the practice of solidarity becomes “analog,” meaning grounded.
The West Is Genocide
Let’s begin at the beginning. The digitally-enabled genocide in Palestine builds on half a millenium of racial capitalism, structured around genocide. The late Patrick Wolfe, scholar of settler colonialism, taught us that. From the genocide of the Indigenous in the Americas, via Atlantic slavery, and the slaughters of high imperialism, to the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, the history of the “West” is that of genocide.
“Whiteness” is the name for the elimination of all persons not designated “white.” That whiteness may or may not correlate to skin tone. It may eliminate by removal. It may be content to let the slow violences (as Rob Nixon has it) of environmental collapse, epidemics and poverty do its work. Or not, as now.
When genocide becomes “fast,” violent and deliberate, as it has since October 7th, whiteness mobilizes, catalyzes, and accelerates. In these past 14 months, it has been enabled by AI, the cloud, drones and “smart” bombs. Digital genocide is not virtual. It mobilizes digitally-enabled violence to shatter lived reality and the possibility of life.
Digital Imagination
Digital genocide is, then, both old and new. Its imaginary is one of chaos, allegedly caused by migration, gender and ethnic diversity. This is a modest update on Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 call for the Hero, or autocratic leader, to put an end to chaos by means of his (always) capacity to visualize.
The visualizing today is done by machines from quadcopters to uncrewed aerial vehicles and satellites. If the erasure of what can be seen remains consistent, there is no longer a single viewpoint but an endlessly multiplied digital surveillance rendered knowable by artificial intelligence.
The presumed chaos remains structured around a racial hierarchy in which those in and for the nation can claim varieties of whiteness. To be “white” is to be inside the border with documents.
In all cases, “they” (the non-white, non-straight, non-citizen) are to be denied in favor of “us” (the old and new white people). This “us” is the digitally-imagined exclusionary nation, whether in “France for the French,” “Make America Great Again,” or Brexit. Or, in its now exemplary form, the Zionist concept of Israel as a country where only Jews can be citizens.
This digital-genocidal imagination is activated at the intersection of cable TV news and the internet via the televised rally with the leader. The “rally” formed by all of this mediation creates the doubled desire to be led, as Carlyle would have had it, and the compulsion to violence.
This compulsion is what the psychoanalysts call a “drive.” It manifests in the persistent pattern of sexual abuse, assault, harassment, and rape, on the one hand; and the paranoid insistence on the colonial binary of gender as always and already one or the other of male and female, on the other.
This colonial will to masculine domination has been part of white genocide since its inception, visualized as white men taking possession of the Americas by raping indigenous women. The genocide in Gaza has generated a renewed disinhibition around this compulsion. No aspect of patriarchal violence is too extreme for the mainstream these days.
In the United States, the theater of cruelty formed by this imagination and its drives will be played out in 2025 by the detention and expulsion of immigrants. What will matter to those claiming whiteness is that this been seen to be done across the rally platforms in as violent a way as possible. Logistically, it will fail but that simply reinforces the imaginary of chaos.
Such imaginaries have come to seem possible real because of what has been seen of the genocide in Gaza. Driving people out is a daily activity. Revenge fantasies, as cultivated in the digital “manosphere,” can be seen live for those willing to identify with the IDF. International and legal institutions can be scorned at will. Dossiers describing genocide are just evidence of antisemitism.
Digital Genocide
As recently as 2017, Enzo Traverso saw violence as the “exception” to what he called “post-fascism.” Five years later, just as Palestine is exemplary, its experience of violence is exemplary. The genocide is everyday. It is wholly disproportionate to any threat. It is extra-judicial. And it is digital.
The digital genocide is driven by AI. Attacks on cloud-identified targets are then delivered by digitally-enabled vehicles ranging from consumer quadcopters via drones to 2000 pound “smart” bombs.
The IDF first tried cloud-supported AI targeting against Hamas in 2021. Finding it to be a force multiplier, the Israeli regime embarked on a $1.2 billion Google and Amazon cloud platform called Nimbus, of which over $500 million comes direct from the IDF.
Astonishingly, Google voided its usual contractual requirement that its cloud not be used to do harm. The only possible reason to request such an exemption would be the intent to use the AI to do harm.
Younger readers may not remember but Google once had a motto “Don’t be evil.” They dropped that back in 2015. By 2021, it now appears the company went all the way over to “Be evil.”
The Nimbus platform uses AI to analyze still images and video to detect objects. Even in its own demonstrations, Nimbus had no better than a 64% success rate at such identifications. Together with an indifference to Palestinian life, such heads-or-tails outcomes account for the apparently haphazard and lethally indiscriminate use of force in Gaza.
Other applications include the innocent sounding “Gospel,” used to identify targets; “Lavender,” which identifies human targets to be bombed; including a sub-program called “Where’s Daddy?” enabling the IDF to attack targets when they were at home, maximizing the chance of civilian casualties.
Staff at Google know what the use of their software means. Forming a “No Tech For Apartheid” (NOTA) group, their slogan was “Googler Against Genocide.” Over 1100 signed a petition demanding an end to Israel’s access. Google fired 50 of them.
Socially Mediated Genocide
When those of us opposed to the genocide watched it unfold on digital media, it felt as if we were seeing it in its “natural” habitat. Our association with the victims of what was depicted was, however, not the only association available. It was also possible to associate with the perpetrators.
As much as social media give an intimate and inescapable view of conflict, they are also structured to enable forgetting. Some apps remove posts once seen. Chats can be set to disappear. Algorithms are deployed to make sure most people don’t see material from Gaza in the first place.
In posts from and about Gaza by Palestinians, I see a repeated question: “are you seeing this?” Meaning: if you can see this, why are you not stopping it? Seeing is only one part of the process. You then have to decide what it means and take action accordingly.
But not for everyone. While over 50% of the US public condemned the Israeli action in Gaza in March 2024, another poll in October found 17% saying their actions were not harsh enough, with another 22% saying they were about right. Only 32% of those asked in October said they were “too harsh.”
What’s happening here? Has sheer repetition deadened the shock and dulled the sense of outrage? Did the repression of the Gaza solidarity encampments undo some solidarity, as university presidents must have intended? Is there a sense of identification with the genocide for that 39% who think it’s not harsh enough or about right?
The Practice of Solidarity
Given the continuance of the digital genocide, many are turning to the analog. I think of this not as the impossible rejection of the digital but as the understanding of its exploitative conditions of production.
To be analog is to be grounded, the counterpoint to Palestinian attachment and association with the land. By this, I mean first the reclaiming of terrain as far as is possible by its first inhabitants, those who became Indigenous when settler colonists arrived. In North America, that begins with the practices of acknowledgement.
Next, there should be a revitalizing and restoration of the land, enabling non-human and other-than-human life to flourish. And there should then be a process so that what was the colony or plantation becomes common ground.
In visual media, the ground creates the subject. In a photograph, for example, the ground is in relation to the figure or subject, making it perceptible by means of distinction.
By extension, groundwork is the affective, cultural and political labor that makes (visible) relation possible. This work was once described by the Spanish feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva as “a desire for common ground when the common ground is shattered.” The commons is ground to which all have access.
My colleague Fred Moten calls this the “practice of solidarity.” You have to do it where you are present, taking a metaphorical “stand.” It means making connections between the visible and the unspeakable.
In recent weeks, two high-profile art workers have made such stands. First, Nan Goldin spoke out against the genocide and against the repression of pro-Palestine thought in Germany at the opening of her career retrospective in Berlin. She refused the separation of her activism from her “art.” If you haven’t had the chance, watch all of it.
Drawing directly on Moten’s concept of solidarity as a practice, Jasleen Kaur spoke out as she won Britain’s Turner prize, calling on Tate to divest, for a real ceasefire, and for an arms embargo: “I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery, but when that dream means life, we are shut down.” Good question.
It’s the right people practicing solidarity in the public eye, people with a platform who can, in the end, afford to lose a little bit, rather than graduate students and adjuncts who really can’t.
The Clock of the World
This struggle did not start on October 7, 2023. For me, it began when Jews like my great-great grandfather started moving into Palestine in the early 20th century. They were not driven out, starved and terrorized.
There’s an entire neighborhood of Jerusalem today called Bukharim, meaning people from the emirate of Bukhara (roughly equivalent to Uzbekistan). From there, my grandmother and great-uncle became Zionist fighters—or terrorists, as the British called them.
We didn’t start this, and we may not get to finish it, but we don’t get to give (it) up.