By Catherine Imani
This morning as I scrolled through my newsfeed, I noticed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made a post about their Digital RF Battlespace Emulator (DBRE), and were accepting proposals for this $1.5 billion project until April 1. DARPA conducts the strategic relationship between the military, the state department, universities, leaders of industry, and media companies. They are the bleeding edge of technological advancement, and drive the creation of things like the Internet, bioelectric interfaces for innovation in healthcare, and they even had a hand in the creation of Facebook and Google through their now cancelled all-seeing government surveillance project LifeLog.
Most of the technology we interact with daily comes from or was initially funded by a government entity, the same government that exists to oppress Black people, which is why it is important that we stay aware of how these projects affect our ability to organize and fight for our liberation.
Most Black people interested in social justice understand COINTELPRO and that the government targets activists, but not the specific technologies that are being weaponized. This ignorance around how technology is used against us has been a huge barrier to our continued liberation efforts, and will continue to affect our liberation efforts until we fully understand our enemy and the tools they use to stop our work wherever possible. The Battlefield Simulator, which will essentially be a super computer that processes data and runs simulations to help the military make decisions about their operations in battle, is a continuation of this trend.
The way the U.S. military defines their battlefield, or “area of operations,†differs greatly from how the average person thinks of the stages of war. I have studied the government’s relationship to Black liberation efforts in the United States for several years now, and their area of operations is as much AFRICOM, Venezuela, or Haiti as it was Ferguson. AFRICOM is the cumulative relationship our military has with a majority of the countries in Africa, where they support strategic allies through armed conflict and strategic humanitarian aid in exchange for control over assets within the United States’ interest. In Venezuela, the U.S. is attempting to enact regime change, while in Haiti they are attempting to ensure the regime is not changed amidst intense protest.
The goal in each of these situations is to meet the mission criteria outlined by our government and their senior officials. As it relates to Black liberation efforts in the United States, the goals of the State will always be to ensure the future of the U.S. Empire.
Throughout the entire history of the United States, there has been a particular violence and brutality that has been reserved for African Americans, Black Americans in general, and Native Americans, which has selectively been extended to people outside of these groups under very specific circumstances. The entire foundation of American society is built on our shared oppression, and if that oppression were to stop, so would American society.
Since before the Trail of Tears and the technical end of chattel slavery, African Americans, Black Americans more broadly, and Native Americans have been fighting to end our genocide, with the most radical of us recognizing that we cannot be free without a complete restructuring of modern society. As time went on, the State recognized this as well, and made a strategic effort to counter our efforts.
Although the State technically cannot enact targeted action against U.S. citizens, they have historically strategically circumvented these prohibitions to ensure our continued oppression, which allows them to retain a non-authoritarian image to the larger U.S. population and global allies while being an authoritarian figure.
Her-cu-les, Her-cu-les!
You don’t want to be on the receiving end of this gunship, aka the Angel of Death. pic.twitter.com/r5sN6c7g4I— U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) February 28, 2018
They need to suppress Black, Native, and African American liberation efforts while continuing to be perceived as a “melting pot†and post-racial society where anyone can access the American Dream if they work hard and assimilate. As technology progresses, so too will the tools they use to stop and disrupt any effort to end our genocide, and continue ensuring U.S. empire.
That’s where DARPA’s highly advanced battlefield simulator and similar tools come into play. It will take in our data and look for patterns that can be capitalized on in their attempt to suppress our liberation work. With data starting from at least the 1960s, they can accurately make decisions about how to guide public perception and, to an extent, activists and public intellectuals towards a specific action or thought process that would best benefit the State.
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Looking back at all the Uprisings in the U.S. in the last 6 years (Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Baton Rouge, etc.), they all have in common mobilization in response to the death of a Black person. These constant deaths and our reaction to them became a global talking point, effecting social organizing and, to a particular extent, political organizing globally.
It got to the point where us talking about things outside of our deaths, such as lynchings or hate crimes or blackface (all which still fall under the umbrella of genocide) affected global conversation and even global markets. In fact, one year the Black Friday boycott caused an 11% drop in total sales, which is a huge deal. But due to a bunch of complicated factors, those kinds of organizing tactics and methods have started to fall out of favor, even as the conditions that inspired those actions have ramped up and further expanded to non-Black groups.
If the State’s goal is to ensure that potential situations that could re-inspire that kind of action, or even more radical and direct action, no longer happen, a tool like the battlefield stimulator would be incredibly useful.
It could be used to not only map how folk’s thoughts lead to actions, but could potentially also use folk’s emotional reactions based on data received from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It could also use an assortment of other data points from a person’s entire offline and online history, or what Google calls their ledger, as predictors. They could create models using this data, and then use Machine Learning to create projections on what they would need to do in order to minimize the chance of a genocidal event becoming a flashpoint that lights the fuse of our oppression into a cultural moment like Ferguson.
Within the last 6 months, we’ve seen 3 nationally recognized cases that could have grown to become flash-points for organizing, but ultimately did not. Even though at first glance the cases of actor Jussie Smollett‘s alleged hate crime, army veteran EJ Bradford being killed in a mall after being “mistaken” as a shooter, and rapper 21 Savage being detained by ICE are not very similar, the way the police and media turned to misinformation, discrediting, and intra-communal discord were in sync. It’s not far-fetched to assume Machine Learning is beyond this coordinated response.
Taking hordes of data on our communities and looking for common denominators and weak points that could be taken advantage of has been the model to stop potentially revolutionary sparks from growing to the size they grew during the Obama years.
When issues could be moved from “this is a textbook example of genocide†to a more intra-communal finger pointing, what would have been a legitimate riot where the military and militarized police would get called instead becomes a situation where people debate endlessly and make memes.
And that is not to say that intra-communal issues don’t matter, they do, especially since isms like homophobia, sexism and ableism are all functions of white supremacy and will be rooted out as we deal with anti-Blackness and our genocide. But Black people should be aware of how our intra-communal issues (which are manifestations of white supremacy) are weaponized against us, and how this is a strategic effort on the part of the State.
As technology develops the tools used against us, the complexity of those tools will develop as well, and we need to be able to clock it as soon as it is happening. This is especially important if we continue to refuse to invest in the tools necessary to anticipate how these attacks will manifest. I can only imagine how much more advanced the tactics will get, and how much more subtle the choices they make will be to disrupt organizing once they have a multi-billion dollar sandbox to run simulations through, based on our data.
I feel like when I talk about things like this folks check out because it sounds like science fiction, or almost too fantastical to accept as within the range of possibility, but it already is. Cases like when Facebook collaborated with the police to shut down and delete Korryn Gaines’ live stream of her murder, or when the police illegally used a drone to extrajudicially murder Micah Johnson, or even the way courts use AI to imprison people show that this trend is only getting worse. In spite of how powerful social media is, and in spite of how aware activists are of the constant that is state suppression, technology is advancing to a place where the disadvantaged position we are in will be almost insurmountable.
I find patterns because I am trained to find patterns, to draw conclusions based on those patterns, and to prioritize action steps based on all the data available to me at any given moment, but I am only one person. With a tool like the DBRE, the government and technology companies will be able to process more data, build projections based on that data, test those projections and draw next steps faster than I can even blink.
We need to start thinking more critically about how we define liberation work, and expand it so that we are no longer just copying the steps of the people who came before us. Instead, we must use every tool available to us to build something new to face the new weapons forged against us. At the very least, we need to better understand those weapons.
Suggested Readings:
OxfordSparks, “What is Machine Learning?“, YouTube, 2017
Nick Foster, “The Selfish Ledger“, YouTube, 2016
Jeff Nesbit, “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance”, Quartz, 2017
Catherine Imani is a futurist and lifelong student of philosophy, black liberation and technology. I want to share my passions for complicated things in ways that are easy to understand. I’m very gay, and very disabled, so if you like my work please consider supporting me on Patreon, Paypal, or Cashapp.
