The Violent Horizon: AI, State Violence, and the Authoritarian Machine

The time to change the future is now. Before it's too late.

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This weekend I’ll be doing a subscriber-only Q&A. Please reply to this post or email me at jysexton@gmail.com with your questions and topics. Parts of this article emerged from the research behind my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and The Coming Crisis from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. For more on these subjects, get your copy today.

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The scenes emerging from the violence in Gaza are intolerably awful. To be confronted daily by starving people and brutalized children takes a toll and leaves the observer wracked with an inescapable question: who could possibly do this to another human being?

History is littered with atrocities in which people hurt others in unimaginable ways. Murder and oppression have, unfortunately, gone hand-in-hand with human civilization, but it is within the last century that we have truly glimpsed something that almost defies explanation. With the Holocaust in Europe, we witnessed a truly industrialized genocide in which the powers of the state combined with the cold efficiency of technology, science, and mechanization, creating a tragedy of immense proportions. Our understanding of that tragedy is limited by so many things, including nationalist mythologies that tell us America had nothing to do with the rise of Nazism and Fascism, Manichean morality that cloaks us in convenient stories, and religious narratives that conveniently places the blame on “The Other” while keeping us from looking within.

It was inevitable that our next technological advance would bring new ways for humanity to torture itself. And so, discovering that artificial intelligence (A.I) has already been utilized to these ends is hardly a surprise even as it is appropriately disturbing.

+972 Magazine and Local Call released an essential report last week revealing that Israel has developed an A.I. program codenamed “Lavender” that has been utilized to paint and neutralize targets in Gaza. The program has already targeted at least 37,000 people as “terrorists,” a process that reportedly only involves “20 seconds” of human scrutiny before approval. In an atrocity that has claimed an untold number of lives - conservative estimates put it at over 31,000 killed and more than 72,000 injured - the whole thing takes on an inhuman pall, and perhaps it is the specter of this program that adds to that undeniable revulsion.

Israel’s behavior, however, is far from an isolated event. It is an evolution. One that builds off a long history of state power using technology to amplify itself. The story of this process is the story of how our system has become so destructive and dangerous, of how we reached this point of crisis, how authoritarianism has ridden on the back of that state power to reach its full and awful potential, how democracy has become so threatened, and a warning of what could come. And, hopefully, the story of how we might regain control over this beast, turn back its momentum, and realize a better future.

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First, some foundational understanding.

When we discuss state power and these things, we need to hold onto multiple ideas at once. Yes, we are discussing actions like Israel’s aggression in Gaza. Yes, we will discuss the United States, the global American Empire, and its allies and conspirators. It’s impossible to chart the history of these concepts and their consequences without relying on these specifics.

But as we do so, we must also grasp that nation states are also representations of a larger process at play. The United States, for instance, has been the main front for global capitalism since it took over the responsibility from Great Britain following World War II. That union of capitalism and the nation state means that notions of “conventional politics,” or the belief that we are simply watching two parties “hash out their differences,” obfuscates what is often happening below the surface. Developments often feel bewildering because we’re part of a process that is intentionally mystified, leaving us wondering why principles and promises are so often jettisoned.

Here this: the intertwining of capitalism and nation states means that our politics, our culture, and our institutions have been co-opted to carry out actions that are counter to the national interest, or at least the interest of us, the citizens, in favor of achieving goals that are beneficial to the interests of capital.

An example: our military and intelligence agencies tirelessly cooperate with capitalist interests in arranging outcomes on the latter’s behalf, oftentimes hurting the nation state and its citizens while setting the table for the wealthy and powerful to become more wealthy and more powerful.

In this way, a momentum has built that ensures, regardless of what happens politically, the process will continue. That process is aided by politics, aided by culture, and certainly aided by technology, including computing and now A.I.

Allow me a quick example. The following clip is from 1995’s Nixon, an Oliver Stone movie starring Anthony Hopkins. The scene depicts an actual event from May 9th, 1970, in which President Richard Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial during the Vietnam War and engaged with protestors. Of course, the movie takes liberties with what happened, but it is instructive.

What is being alluded to here is a widely-shared anecdote that Nixon, when speaking about the war and what we have come to call the Military-Industrial Complex, would refer to it often as “a wild animal.” Nixon, one of the most control-centered presidents of the modern era, believed he could affect it through decisions, diplomacy, and, obviously, actions both legal and illegal, but he also recognized that despite its trapping the presidency was not as powerful as some would believed.

In this piece we’ll discuss Vietnam and the so-called War on Terror, but it’s important, before diving in, to see how two American presidents - Nixon and later Barack Obama - shared that same sense of powerlessness. Because American politics are often simply a front for something else that is sometimes almost impossible to explain.

That undercurrent is the confluence of state power and capitalism, and what it has wrought, through the events we are about to discuss, is a moment in which state power has been completely co-opted in favor of capitalist “progress.” That doesn’t mean it has to remain that way, or even that it will. I personally believe what we are discussing is changeable and will be changed. But it takes an understanding and it will certainly take struggle.

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The Vietnam War presented unique problems. As it was a civil war, and as members of the Viet Cong lived, moved, and operated among civilians, it was a unique problem requiring unique solutions. To this end, the United States put its “best and brightest” minds to the task. Included was Robert McNamara, an organization genius who cut his teeth in the corporate world before entering the political arena.

McNamara represented a new technocratic means of governance. The principles that had been relegated to business were brought to the forefront of state power, creating new and arguably bloodless means of approaching novel problems. McNamara wasn’t alone. He and other “whiz kids” were used to modernize American defense and bring the Military-Industrial Complex into a new age.

To address the unique problems in Vietnam, America embraced technology and cold rationalism. In addition to bombing and attack strategies, one of the answers was what has come to be known as the Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program used state-of-the-art technology, including computers and computing technology, to begin answering those problems, creating a database of targets in Vietnam that, if dealt with, might turn the tide of the war. From 1967 to 1972, over 81,000 targets were “neutralized” via assassinations, assaults, kidnapping, and torture. Many, many innocent people were swept up in these war crimes as the technology directed actions and created a distance between those creating the solutions and those suffering the consequences.

Despite the Phoenix Program not resulting in a victory in Vietnam, the die was cast. Many, as the following excerpt from a RAND report (the RAND Corporation was founded as a think-tank that served as a crucial connection between the Military and Industrial wings of the Military-Industrial Complex) details, saw it as the beginning of something novel and necessary.

In this case, the Viet Cong, as impediments to what the U.S. and the capitalist system desired, were determined to be “insurgents,” and the “counterinsurgency” required whatever means necessary to deal with them. This black and white thinking is essential to the carrying out of tactics that are obviously cruel and barbaric. The backdrop of the Cold War presented an easy rationalization of these actions and a simple sorting mechanism of “Good” and “Evil” for those wanting to ignore the capitalist rationale under-girding the behaviors.

To this same point, the U.S. embraced ruthless actions around the world, all of it support of the capitalist project it represented and hidden behind the ideology of “Good” versus “Evil.” This led to multiple overthrown governments aided by white supremacy and support for dictators eager to aid the U.S.’s interests. One example is the support of the Chilean Coup in 1973 and the ascent of the murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was a valuable asset for the U.S. as he violently subdued any Leftist elements and, simultaneously, aided capitalism in crushing labor unions and introducing cruel austerity. As we’ve discussed, this was the laboratory that birthed neoliberalism, the authoritarian project that has brought us to our present crisis.

Pinochet and the assorted authoritarian leaders we partnered with needed more though. In order to maintain their iron-fisted control, they needed American assistance to root out any possible threats. To this end, we organized what came to be known as Operation Condor, a joint operation that cobbled together Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru under American guidance. Intelligence and resources were shared, all to address what Pinochet described as “a leadership structure” of Leftists and “Communists” that was “intercontinental, continental, regional and subregional.” In other words, “evil” forces were everywhere and to defeat them meant unrestrained violence aided by technology.

Operation Condor was one of the largest and most powerful terrorist organizations in world history, all it organized under the ideological banner of fighting “evil,” or, in modern parlance, “terrorists” and “insurgents” that threatened the status quo. That status quo, if you’ve been paying attention, is obviously the pursuit of capitalist progress.

Upwards of 80,000 people were killed around the globe with hundreds of thousands imprisoned.

In other words, a wild, out-of-control animal.

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The modern equivalent is obviously the War on Terror. Across the globe, American-led and allied operations carried out unthinkable and unknowable atrocities, all in the name of destroying “Evil.” Conservative estimates say over a million people lost their lives. Others say four and a half million. Tens of millions displaced. And the consequences are so large as to boggle the mind and trouble the soul.

Following September 11th, the U.S. leveraged the entirety of the Military-Industrial Complex in carrying out a worldwide crusade to further the interests of global capitalism by opening markets and securing resources, all of it under the ideological auspices of “making the world safe for freedom.”

That war lasted officially for two decades and still continues to this day. The momentum we have described persists, and in the operation of those wars and its ceaseless spread, which spanned four presidencies (two Republicans and two Democrats), we can catch a glimpse at how it functions. Barack Obama, who promised Change in his transformative campaign, found himself, when in power, subject to forces he felt beyond his control. In that presidency, which was won in part with a promise to wind down George W. Bush’s war, Obama oversaw a wild expansion, including the usage of drone strikes that grew by nearly ten times under his watch.

The usage of drones, and the growing list of targets Obama habitually signed off on, represented that momentum we have been discussing. Drones replaced troops, creating an operation we could actively ignore as Americans as long as our sons and daughters were kept out of harm’s way, laying a framework for a hegemonic oppression we would experience, if we experienced it at all, from a grand distance. The list and resulting killings was eventually reduced to bloody maintenance. Bruce Riedel, an analyst for the CIA and a counter-terrorism adviser to Obama, likened the operations to lawn maintenance, telling The Washington Post, “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”

Our War On Terror coincided with the final collapse of our social safety net. Hurricane Katrina and the Financial Collapse made it obvious that our government had no interest in meeting the needs of the people and had been reprogrammed to solely serve the needs of the wealthy. In the past this co-option had been hidden, marginally at least, behind economic growth and supposed progress, but the truth of neoliberalism was coming to bear. That which had been done to nations around the world in the name of American control had been done on behalf of neoliberal capitalism masquerading as the U.S. We had been promised never-ending progress, luxuries, and dominance. But, as it always does, the oppression boomeranged around and met its originator. It became obvious that American Empire had always been a front for something else.

Even as we struggle to maintain hegemonic control, we have basically merged all functions of our military and defense with the industrial side, knocking down every barrier and welcoming the Tech industry as an essential partner in the operation and automation of that maintenance. This is how oligarchs like Elon Musk have gotten so indispensable: the privatization of our functions, including the maintenance of empire, is directly tied to modern day industrialists. Therefore, the confluence of interests only grows more intertwined with every passing day. And, unless we change course, it will only get worse.

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So far this has focused on international operations. The oppression of foreign peoples by America. If there was more room, more time, we would talk about how the same tactics, the same technologies, the same energies, and the same players, have also changed law enforcement within the United States into an occupying force armed with offensively bloated budgets and cutting-edge weapons and support. This modern effort began with what we discussed in Vietnam and the armaments of the War on Terror now appear on our city streets.

Reading this and considering the usage of A.I. in murdering individuals considered “terrorists” or “insurgents” should absolutely make you consider what happens when those very malleable and subjective terms get turned against U.S. citizens. We’ve seen it happen time and time again in the past, with the assault on Leftists, Civil Rights leaders, anti-war protesters, and even with citizens during the War on Terror. Once you start rationalizing anything through that lens, anything is possible.

The tragic thing about Lavender, about the Phoenix Program, Operation Condor, and the War on Terror is that it is a harnessing of technology for updating the oppressions of the past. Certainly humans have been killing humans as long as there have been humans to kill. A.I. and computing, however, have supercharged the process, creating a distance between the killer and the victim and streamlining the process. And, it allows the people who should do something about it to shrug and relent, “I wish I could do something about it…”

Now is the time to do something about it.

Now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not next month. Not next year.

The momentum we’ve been talking about is building, and if we do not fully outlaw A.I. in matters of life and death, it is absolute certain it will continue to be used in favor of multiplying state power in the interest of capitalist progression. We have more than enough evidence of this to understand what is happening and where this is going.

Turning this ship around and getting past this crisis depends on a massive sea-change of philosophy, governance, and culture. Reining in Tech, taxing its benefactors, and reasserting government oversight of industry and decision-making processes is absolutely vital. The momentum has kept that from happening and brought us here. A.I. is simply a vehicle is accelerating to the next stage in this ugly evolution.

As configured, there is no way that the state or any states will choose not to harness these technologies to these ends. It is too tempting. Too built into the system as it presently works. The nation state, even as it recognizes the co-option by neoliberal capitalism, has no choice but to trudge forward. It’s like an insect or an animal consumed by a parasitic disease. Still walking. Still trampling. Still serving.

And the time is now also because, as previously mentioned, these things will be leveraged against us and against dissent. When that happens, the words “terrorist” and “insurgent” will be more than enough cover for whatever an algorithm needs to protect itself and the process it serves. Because opposing the momentum of the zombie state pits you directly on the other side of the gun. Of the drone. Of the robot dog.

The killings in this article happened around the world. In darkened rooms far, far from the public eye. I don’t know the names of those killed. You likely don’t either. And those killings, and those actions, have been largely scrubbed from the history books and hidden from sight, even as the atrocities have mounted and worsened.

Because that’s what the wild animal does. What it always does.

And it will not stop itself. It has to be stopped.