Exploited, Extracted, Erased: The Global Logic of Big Tech · #dnl36 #Technoviolence
“This panel traces the systemic and extractive logic of Big Tech, examining how today’s digital infrastructures are weaponised against vulnerable communities. Topics include AI systems accelerating warfare, targeting campaigns on social media, erasing Palestinian voices, building techno-colonialist utopias in Central America and exploiting workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Speakers unpack the intersections between digital repression, xenophobia, and platform complicity, while offering critical tools for understanding and resisting technoviolence in its many forms.
In the presentation “Targeted by Design: Technoviolence, Xenophobia, and Algorithmic Injustice in SWANA“ Rima Sghaier explores how Big Tech and social media advertising enable and reinforce information disorder, fuelling xenophobic campaigns targeting vulnerable communities, while erasing the narratives of others, namely Palestinian voices. By unpacking platform design choices, extractive data economies, digital militarism, and feminist critiques of power in tech, the talk traces how communities are profiled, policed, and profitably excluded.
Sarah Ciston presents her artistic project AI War Cloud Database with her talk “Mapping the Techno-Imperial Boomerang”. AI War Cloud Database catalogues the AI decision-making systems used in warfare, which have been shown to accelerate and amplify death and destruction. The project details 50+ systems based on the type of machine learning tasks they use; who develops, deploys, and funds them; and their military and commercial purposes – in order to show how global technoviolence traces directly back to our mobile phones and social platforms. With the spotlight now on systems like Palantir’s Foundry and Israel’s Lavender, the stakes for AI tools are becoming increasingly urgent and personal.
Shifting the focus from digital infrastructure to the real world, Lya Cuéllar will trace this scenario. From private cities in the Caribbean, through a failed experiment with crypto as legal tender, to the transnationalisation of the carceral state, these actors in the US and Europe work with local elites to turn the region into a blueprint for their plans at home. Communities are being displaced and criminalised in the name of techno-colonialist utopias while the parallel erosion of democratic institutions leaves them with few options to fight back. And yet, everyday people are showing creative possibilities for resistance in a new global dystopia.
In the talk “Digitized Divides: Revealing the trade-offs of a tech-dependent world”, Safa Ghnaim shares stories of the exploitation and extractivism of technologies: from the mining to manufacturing and applications, painting a picture of the devastation left in its tracks by the owners and operators of these tools. In particular, focusing on technoviolence in the DR Congo and in Palestine gives an insight into how business models, power structures, and systems of oppression make our global struggles interconnected.
None of these stories are new, but they are lesser known, hidden on the feeds of social media and painted over by Big Tech marketing campaigns. Listen to just a few critical cases and you’ll find out what’s really beneath the shiny surface of technology.”
