Automating Debility, Automating Death: Technologies of Genocide

The UNSW Media Futures Hub presents a seminar with Andrew Brooks as part of the Palestine Today seminar series.

In April 2024, an investigation by the journalist Yuval Abraham jointly published by +927 Magazine and Local Call revealed that Israel was using an AI technology called ‘Lavender’ in its genocidal campaign on Gaza. The use of AI technologies by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has enabled the automatic generation of potential bombing targets, closing the gap between intelligence operations and aerial strikes. Commenting on the use of similar technologies in response to the Unity Intifada in 2021, former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi has commented: ‘[I]n the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked’ (Lesham 2023). This paper considers how automated systems and operational images are reshaping understandings of warfare, space, and racialised bodies in the West Bank and the Gaza strip. It examines the differences and continuities between the adoption of two automated systems: SmartShooter, which integrates computer vision and machine learning in the form of automated target acquisition and tracking algorithms and has been used at checkpoints in the West Bank city of Hebron; and Lavender, an artificial intelligence program used by Israel to generate human targets in the Gaza strip that began in October 2023. The paper positions these technologies in relation to Marc Andrejevic’s (2020) three logics of automation: ‘pre-emption, operationalism, and framelessness’, showing that these imperatives require the continued expansion of a colonial surveillance apparatus. Building on existing work conceptualising Israeli colonial power as the ongoing management of a surplus population, the paper argues that automated technologies enable both the automation of death and the automation of debility, where debility is as biopolitical form of control in which injury and incapacitation are rendered endemic rather than exceptional conditions (Puar, 2017). Automated technologies are figured as extending the ability to debilitate colonized populations in order to control and impede resistance to colonial rule. I conclude by arguing that debilitation and extermination should be understood as two related expressions of settler colonial power.

Andrew Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of New South Wales. His work is situated at the intersection of media studies, cultural studies, political economy, critical race theories, and aesthetics in order to examine social movements, policing, incarceration, and media technologies. He is a co-director of the Media Futures Hub, a co-editor of Rosa Press, and one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. He is the co-author of Homework (Discipline) and the forthcoming Year of the Ox (Cordite).