In this issue of e-flux journal, Trevor Paglen begins his three-part essay on how US military psychological warfare techniques were a historical predecessor to today’s AI-driven social media trained to identify emotions and exploit affects. Telling the story of Richard Doty, a counterintelligence officer who deliberately spread disinformation about extraterrestrials as cover for military operations, Paglen identifies a key tenet of the US Army Field Manual: it is easier to deceive someone by reinforcing their preexisting beliefs than to change those beliefs. Behind the outlandish but well-documented example of UFO sightings lies a chilling warning that the creation of an entirely new reality is accomplished not through coercion but through the tactical use of affirmative encouragement.
Also in this issue, Jonas Staal looks at Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean, some sixteen hundred kilometers off the west coast of Africa. Uninhabited when it was “discovered” by European seafarers, the island was considered a cursed land for exiling deviants of Empire. (It neighbors Saint Helena, where Napoleon was finally exiled after his escape from Elba.) As Staal recounts, declaring Ascension Island terra nullius invited agents of colonization to civilize it through technologies of geoengineering, warfare, surveillance, and eventually space colonization. But it also provides an opportunity to measure the pathologies of Empire in reverse, by asking: Who is the island?
If science and technology are offered as a promise of creating new worlds, today this same promise of expansion mixes with the limited and closed nature of any world. Indeed, science and technology not only inspire the imagination to study physical laws and limits in order to fly, sail, and build hospitals; they also weaponize those very same powers for air strikes, conquest, and bombing those same hospitals. Maria Iñigo Clavo’s essay analyzes the forms of ecocide necessary for colonial and postcolonial state-building. Considering the many threads of Indigenous dispossession through several textile-based artworks, Iñigo Clavo highlights a judicial case in which survivors of sexual violence shielded themselves from state-backed violence using an Indigenous textile known as the perraje. By unraveling the often separated discourses of anti-coloniality and ecology, she puts forward a feminist and Indigenous approach for thinking through state violence in Guatemala and beyond.
In the first of a two-part excerpt from Yuk Hui’s forthcoming book Post-Europe, Hui connects a longing for a sense of being at home to waves of displacement experienced due to modernization and colonialism. After European and then American planetarization, we are well aware of how the longing for lost wholeness and belonging can lead to reactionary and fascistic movements—most notably within Europe and the US themselves. Today, however, when wars and technological acceleration become increasingly threatening, we must draw finer distinctions between the existential need for home and the jingoist sense of belonging readily captured by nations or nationalist movements promising to restore lost homeworlds.
Hunter Bolin offers an extensive appraisal of the work of Günther Anders, a German thinker, antinuclear activist, and significant critic of the autonomization of technical forms, whose texts remain largely untranslated into English. Part of Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams’s Negative Anthropology series—which draws its name in part from Anders himself—this essay develops an account of Anders’s self-described negative anthropology and its refusal of any idea of a stable essence or historical constant for human behavior. Bolin offers extensive previously untranslated materials that show the depth of Anders’s thinking, focusing on the notion of “unworldliness” and placing Anders in dialogue with psychoanalysis.
In the third part of his ongoing series, Evan Calder Williams enters further into how the trope of paralysis establishes a frame that opens beyond “normal” cycles of production and circulation. What would it mean to understand accelerated production through its inclusion of stoppage, sabotage, inefficiency, loss, delay, and waste rather than their exclusion at the expense of human bodies? If debilitation and the intentional lowering of the quality of factory output are consequences of exploitative labor, but also techniques of resistance against that very same work, Williams argues that we need new tools to understand an intimate relation between limited movement and expressive power.
Finally, Luis Camnitzer looks at the overemphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education as signaling a crisis in moral and ethical development—precisely the kind of development cultivated in the humanities. Do attempts to feed workers into industrial fields such as AI erode our understanding of how creativity may enhance otherwise totalizing technological worlds defined by stability and control? Camnitzer turns to AI itself to find out.