[2022] The Prosecution Project: Data-driven anti-fascism in a post-truth, proto-fascist era (original) (raw)
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[2023] We Protect Us: Cyber Persistent Digital Antifascism and Dual Use Knowledge
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2023
Beginning in 2018, US cyber defense architects began promoting the doctrinal strategy of Persistent Engagement (PE), amending a 2015 cyber policy based on deterrence. The PE doctrine encourages cyber soldiers to be quick, nimble, and aggressive—not waiting for an attack to defend against, and instead, maintaining a posture of constant agitation, infiltration, presence, and persistence. Although unintentional (and highly contentious), this cyber approach mirrors the strategic logic of contemporary, digital, antifascists in their efforts to disrupt and deplatform far-right activists online. The proactive, ‘defend forward’ approach offered by PE shares notable similarities to antifascists’ efforts to ‘go where they go’, and to confront the enemy in all venues and on all platforms where they are present. Through interrogating digital antifascists’ online efforts through the lens of cyber persistence and a whole-of-nation-plus approach, the cooperative proximity between State prosecutors and anti-State leftists has fostered a palpable tension deserving of serious inquiry and consideration. The purpose of this intervention is to critically probe these parallel functions, and the interplay between the State and non-State. Although such a comparative analysis shines an unacknowledged and often undesirable light on activists’ efforts, the incorporation of their research in intelligence efforts and State prosecutions is undeniable, and begs the question: How can we critically interrogate the unintended role anti-carceral, abolitionist, antifascists’ dual use knowledge plays in intelligence gathering and law enforcement?
The Instrumentarian Power of Artificial Intelligence in Data-Driven Fascist Regimes
La Furia Umana, 2024
AI-powered technology can both promote accuracy and hide the standards of measurement and circulation of information. It can also produce models that are opaque and hard to access. As such, the new paradigm of AI asks to pounder about societal values and sets of priorities we want to promote, especially as these technologies are further deployed in times of warfare. The systemic tracking of people’s life and the opaqueness of the models designate a new paradigm in the formation of truth, as censorship is enabled on a new scale.
2019
This talk was given at the launch of the 'All Access AI' network at Goldsmiths, Unversity of London 1st April 2019.
Vox Pol Workshop: Ethics and Politics of Online Monitoring of Violent Extremism
2015
In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon (Perry & Olsson, 2009). One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online, whose strategy mainly consists in disguising their hidden political agenda and attempting to subvert civil rights by presenting their standpoints through an overturn of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, aimed to destroy civil rights themselves (Daniels, 2009). Undoubtedly, such kind of hidden racist expressions are intended to exploit “favorable” conditions as the financial crisis, the increase of social conflict and the rise of populist issues in politics. In Italy, as an example, UNAR, a governmental anti-discrimination body, documented that complaints for online racism weighed for 30.9% of the overall cases involving the media (UNAR, 2013). Similar situations have been also found in other Europea...
"The New Fascism Syllabus: Networked Knowledge in the Digital Public Sphere"
Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies, 2021
This article analyzes the New Fascism Syllabus private Facebook discussion group, which came into being in the months following the 2016 US presidential election. Through the use of several scraping, data mining, and visualization programs and Facebook's own platform analytics software, the article posits ways we might analyze Facebook fora as a mediated digital public sphere. It argues that digital spaces like these, however fraught, help users craft arguments and points of contention around how to oppose resurgent authoritarianism. Online discussion creates aff ective communities that help bond participants, who in turn shape the construction of popular memory around the history and legacy of fascism.
Fascism and Antifascism in Our Time - Critical Investigations
The spread of nationalist and authoritarian movements in Europe and around the world has prompted debates about a return of global fascism. At the same time, many countries are witnessing civil society activities opposing such movements. Politicians and activists from both camps endorse like-minded actors across borders. Do these developments suggest that we are living in a time comparable to the 1930s, when the decisive marker in national and international politics was the one between fascism and antifascism? The conference investigates the contemporary relevance of fascism and antifascism by bringing together scholarly experts on these historical movements and actors in civil society. It will discuss the interrelatedness of fascism and antifascism, illuminate their global networks and local trajectories, analyze central characteristics and ideas, and trace shifts in discourses and practices of remembrance. Other focuses are memory politics, phenomenology, and current adaptations as well as the aesthetic dimensions and artistic practices associated with fascism or antifascism. The overarching aim of the conference is to explore whether and how the histories of fascism and antifascism offer insights into the rise of authoritarian regimes today. What makes a fascist regime? What is the line separating authoritarianism from fascism? Can we identify "tipping points"? How should a civil society react to these challenges? Do antifascist movements of the 20th century offer a role model? How can insights into such historical connections benefit proponents of a democratic civil society?
2015
A critical framework for the analysis of political violence, terrorism and social movements must be based around a data-driven, empirical examination of primary source data. In an era of data overabundance, possible sources for analysis are all around us, from anonymous communiqués issued by social movements to slick propaganda videos issued by military-styled insurgent and guerrilla movements. The problem is no longer “Where do I find data?” but has now become “Through what metric can I measure reliability?” A critically situated analysis of violence must take into account the intentional manipulation of facts which is standard practice by both state and nonstate actors. If one can acknowledge that both governments and Foreign Terrorist Organizations attempt to shape public opinion through selective reporting and misrepresentation, the study of political violence through the venue of discourse is appropriate. Therefore, discourse is a fitting site for critical engagement, as it is based around subjective reality and its construction, and not the establishment of authorship and “truth.”
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence. Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms, 2019
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?