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Technopolitics and genocide

Declaration of solidarity with Palestine

We are a translocal group of collectives and individuals, activists, artists, researchers and designers, committed to resist the regime imposed by Big Tech, Big Oil and the computational financial industry, because their basis is complicit with and actively participates in the zionist state of Israel and a world order that defines and maintains it.

It has been 4 months since the zionist aggression against the population in Gaza. The reported numbers of deaths reflect the magnitude of the atrocities that we have been witnessing.

We condemn the genocide, ecocide and epistemicide that Israel is carrying out against Palestine unequivocally, implementing, among other methods, the use of extractive and colonial technologies that use computational logic to execute an ethnic cleansing.

The complicity of Big Tech -- Amazon, Meta and Google among others -- pre-engineers and provides infrastructures and services that facilitate such operations. The direct streaming of evidence of the genocide by the victims themselves happens under conditions of dependence on capitalist platforms for content production. The erasure and censorship of Palestinian voices on social media entails only the most tangible and immediate layer that accentuates the presence of the dominant imperialist, racist and Islamophobic world order.

Nonetheless, we write this statement in solidarity with all the people and collectives that opt for the tactical use of these platforms as spaces of convening, communication and action; and at the same time we express our refusal to the way in which this fragility is being used by the military-commercial killer complex of Israel and its allies.

The implementation of artificial intelligence in military operations to target objectives (infrastructures, civilians, ...) in Gaza, raises not only a political urgency but also provokes a series of ethical and moral questions about the moment in which an algorithm determines targets to bomb with no human supervision. The dangerous drift to dehumanize the conflict is becoming evident and increases the death toll of civilians exponentially. In addition, the deployment of AI for this genocide establishes a highly violent epistemic system that turns the mass murder of civilians into a "rational" option.

In parallel, the intensive use of surveillance technologies -- including facial recognition -- to sustains a system of apartheid and control over the Palestinians is unacceptable. These practices violate fundamental rights such as privacy or freedom of movement and harm human dignity.

As digital practitioners and activists, we understand technology as a key part of politics and categorically reject its instrumentalisation for increasing oppression and violence. In this vein, we also call for a reorganisation of technopolitical forces and imaginations on other terms. We condemn the dehumanization of the Palestinian people, and we commit to defend their right to freedom and their self-determination as people, their right to contribute to resisting the infrastructural regime of Zionist apartheid and to continue inventing spaces to contribute to the complexification and defunding of the techniques, infrastructures, technologies and protocols involved or complicit in this deadly scenario.

We call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and we call all technopolitical and social justice and digital rights communities to the struggle. We cannot remain indifferent to the crimes against humanity we are witnessing as we work for a more just and ethical future for technology. In solidarity with Palestine and against technological oppression in all its forms, because no one will be free until we are all free.

Boycott Israel!
Boycott Big Tech!