A great review of the technology and politics of "killing at a distance"
Posted: 22nd October 2026
Hi all,
A great new video from Lewis Waller just dropped:
The Terrifying Risks of A.I. Drone Warfare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSHunwILLdo
Long, but worth it.
Those of you familiar with my work will have been dragged through this
in my previous presentations, but Lewis Waller does it far more slickly
& well-presented than I.
This is about drones, data, and mass surveillance, all working towards- in terms of that great tome, ‘The Technology of Political Control’ - a techno-politics of social control… except this system operates in
a way specifically prejudicial to human life and well-being rather than
just social policing/coercion.
The final section of the video, ‘Modernity’s Death Spiral’, is worth
watching on its own if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing.
For me, what this is really about (which the video misses) is
‘necropolitics’ - the idea, outlined two decades ago by Achille the
Mbembe, that global politics is increasingly based upon the
technological ability to kill, with impunity, a racialized or
politicized ‘other’. Especially as Western drone warfare has
historically related to the Middle East and North Africa, it is
essentially an extension of historic resource colonialism,
designed/justified to support the modern practices of neocolonial trade
and resource exploitation which underpin the economic power of The
West.
Necropolitics essentially classes certain groups or peoples as
expendable or undeserving of common human legal protections. For those
targeted in this way their lives are essentially forfeit to the greater
power and resource demands of technologically-developed states; and
even when not randomly killed, their lives are constantly subject to
external control and surveillance as a prelude to potential future
violent action at any time.
The other word I found missing from the video was ‘gamification’ -
reduction of military, and especially lethal military action to a form
of remote video gaming. Essentially, taking a generation raised upon
‘first person shooter’ video games and deploying them as the control
mechanism for lethal robots killing at a distance.
Of course, the areas most subject to constant technological
surveillance, backed up with the application of lethal force from a
distance (as mentioned in the video) are Gaza and the West Bank. If we
want a vision of what happens when necropolitics becomes not a system
for remote military action, but a routine and bureaucatized civilian
policing policy (see the new documentary ‘NAZA’ for the scope of this),
the status of the Palestinians people today is the perfect example of
the potential future that awaits us all - especially when the ‘tech including the UK
bros’ of Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, are creating
these tools right now for states to deploy at home (the tactics of ICE
in the USA being an example of how easily ‘security’ transforms from
social control into political repression).
Why is this significant?
The problem for the citizens of the states enmeshed in remote killing -- is that these technological system are abjectifying those who are not perceived as
increasingly being pointed at their own populations in the name of
preserving ‘security’; especially as those people on the receiving end
of the remote ‘kill chain’ strike back at those states engaged in these
operations.
Just as is happening in the US now (with the actions of ICE backed-up
by AI and automated surveillance technologies), or the ‘enemies within’
of the Thatcher years in the UK (which spawned the ‘spycops’ scandal
and its vile human abuses), as the domestic control agenda escalates it
only requires will from above for more extreme control tactics to be
applied at home -
supporters of the dominant economic or political narrative.
If you’re interested on the early analysis of this subject, from the
mid-1970s, I’d suggest you watch my review of the book, ‘The Technology
of Political Control’ (1977)—to see how closely the structures of
this situation were determinable from historic political realities of
bureaucratic state control, even when the technologies required to
implement these systems had not yet been invented:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQKrrVxRqFY
I also talk about that book, and how it specifically relates to
data/AI, in my 2018 presentation on ‘The Global Military Infrastructure
and You’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXMIwlG2lA
Taa,
P.