Hello and welcome to the latest edition of my newsletter, Poiesis. This newsletter is where I share my research and practice relating to society and technology — AI, misinformation, surveillance, ethics, and more. It’s my way to help you understand and change the rapidly changing world of social technology.

These past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about power — from the standpoint of social movements, our individuals lives, and the technologies that govern and shape them. In particular, I’ve been spending time reflecting on AI’s influence on power. So, for this edition, we’ll discuss AI and power, how it’s being used to reshape the information landscape, conduct mass surveillance, and enact widespread targeted repression.

Op-Ed: The Robots Are Not Here, But AI is Still Supercharging US Militarism

I recently wrote and published part of the talk I gave for the United Universalists for a Just Economic Community on AI, militarism, and the climate crisis. This op-ed focuses just on the AI and militarism aspect.

For decades, Big Tech and the U.S. military has been hyping up the future role of AI in warfare, imagining autonomous weapons, hyperspeed information warfare, drone swarms, and more. These types of weapons are lodged in the popular imagination, fueled by Hollywood films like Terminator, or otherwise imagine a hostile AI takeover like in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the newest Mission Impossible film. Since 2018, the U.S. military has been strategically building partnerships with Big Tech companies to develop militarized AI, citing Russia and China as near-peer AI competitors whose AI developments threaten national security (and, notably, U.S. market dominance).

Big Tech companies have been making billions of dollars from these military contracts with the U.S. government, as well as raking in even more from foreign partnerships like those with the Israeli military — Google and Amazon through Project Nimbus, and Microsoft through their Azure cloud architecture.

Yet one of the interesting things I uncovered when I was conducting research for this project was that military insiders are skeptical, if not downright frustrated, with the autonomous weapon AI vision for military pushed on their institution. In a piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, two figures from U.S. military colleges strongly rebuked Big Tech, arguing they do not understand warfare and are driving military AI visions based on profit not realism. This contextualizes and makes sense of older military documents on AI, which contain only small pieces of planning for AI use for weaponry, and are dominated by discussion of using AI to make operations more efficient, saving money.

Despite the absence of killer robots, AI is still supercharging U.S. militarism. I like Jessica Katzenstein’s definition of militarism used in her work with Brown University’s Costs of War project: “the use of military language, counterinsurgency tactics, the spread of police paramilitary units, and military-derived ideologies about legitimate and moral uses of violence.”

Using this definition, AI is definitely increasing militarism. Through surveillance systems and targeted repression of dissent, it increases counterinsurgency power. Mass deportations, fueled by searching social media, are warping justifications of the use of violence. ICE is the new paramilitary unit of the day, supercharged by their access to AI-driven targeting.

Another thread I’ve been pursuing lately is thinking about power-building for our social justice movements. Recently, I was honored to be featured as a panelist on a webinar organized by the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security alongside Ann Wright from CODEPINK and Cole Harrison from MA Peace Action.

In this webinar, Ann discussed the amazing actions of the Sumud Flotilla as they approached Gaza and were apprehended by the Israeli military. She has had a hand in organizing anti-war flotilla for quite a while. Cole gave a phenomenal overview of the state of the movements, accounting for several overlapping dimensions of social and political power which could only be untangled by such a seasoned and intelligent organizer. I highly recommend listening to both their segments of the webinar.

For my piece, I focused on giving a critical analysis to our movements. The framing I chose was that despite much incredible courage and action, we have not been winning. It’s a bit of a depressing opening, but I tried to follow it up and build some hope. As I’ve been writing about in other work, I’ve come to understand having hope as not just blind faith that things will work out. To me, there is a separate kind of hope that comes from realistically assessing a situation, making a plan, and collectively executing a plan. I tried to do my part in realistically assessing a situation and giving some directions forward.

The crux of my analysis is that our movements, despite their best intentions and a tremendous amount of spent energy, do not have enough power — and not in the sense of vague “people power”; we do not have enough structural power. What I mean by structural power is twofold: (1) carriers of power through resources and (2) avenues of power through connections, policy, and democratic organization.

Our movements have been continually stymied by both corporations and the Democrat and Republican political machines. They have enormous amounts of money to spend on lobbying and buying politicians. Corporations dominate labor power as union prevalence is incredibly low in the U.S., but growing. Corporate-political party partnerships control the media ecosystem, notably with Big Tech constantly exerting power over our information lives, and serve people propaganda and lies. And we are deprived of basic resources like housing, food, health, and community, which keep us precarious, anxious, working, and disconnected.

While we have been focusing on issues like Palestine, racial justice, and the climate crisis — all issues that should be focused on, I should say, and ones that I have personally dedicated a ton of time to — social movements have not mobilized masses of people around these issues of power. All the while, the dominating political parties and corporations have consolidated power and passed legislation like Citizens United that allow for unchecked influence of money in politics.

I proposed that our movements all seriously consider incorporating seizing these aspects of power into all our campaigns. It doesn’t mean getting rid of our fights for social justice, climate justice, or peace, but having in our analysis that we cannot achieve them without being able to fight effectively, which means having more power. Ironically, I also mentioned that these issues are some of those which have been weaponized by the far-right to grow their influence, citing people’s deprivation of power and resources, but offering totally false solutions. We need to be framing our issues along these lines: War, policing, and ICE take away from public spending on things we need; the companies driving the climate crisis are unaccountable, lying to the public, controlling media, and making us unhealthy; those who divide us on racial lines and repress people of color are strategically using and justifying racism as a way to distract us while they run away with society.

I also put forward that our social justice organizations strongly consider new sites of contestation, particularly in areas that can be consider “pillars of power.” This is an idea from Lakey & Helvey’s On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, which argues that top-down power cannot be effected if certain social institutions and organizations don’t follow along. Trump’s administration cannot destroy society if they do not have the participation of labor, military, media, schools, business, and more. This presents us with opportunities: organize to seize power within the organizations that make up these institutional pillars — schools, companies, media organizations, faith groups, business groups, maybe even police and military.

It may sound unthinkable to work within some of these groups. Many left-leaning organizers I know entirely write off these groups because they are too much “the enemy.” Yet at the end of the day, these are the organizations that the far-right has mobilized and taken control over. We may simply have to take the more difficult path and learn how to work with those who have been captured by fascism and turn them to our side. After all, as stated above, some of the major issues that they have been mobilized on (inequality, political corruption, misinformation, corporate domination) are issues that also we should be focusing on.

I ended my portion of the webinar teasing that I am working on setting up infrastructure to build out programs to train us to build and seize power so we can win our fights — trainings, materials to read or watch, organizations with plans. Stay tuned as I keep working on these and share out what I arrive at.

Finally, I want to share out some work that I did uplifting practices of media literacy given a new development in the informational ecosystem: GenAI-driven social media platforms.

OpenAI recently released their Sora 2 social media platform, and Meta released their similar platform named Vibes. These are both GenAI-only social media platforms, featuring AI-generated short videos on a TikTok-like feed. They give users unprecedented power to make hyper-realistic video content of whatever they can generate a prompt for. I specifically focused in the reel above on the potential for misinformation and how to counter it. I gave three tips that might be useful to you as well.

1️⃣ Only trust verified sources

It may go without saying, but don't trust just anything you see. When looking for news, try to go to verified ✅ sources like journalistic organizations, non-profits, or academics. If you see political videos, make sure to check the source's biases and background.

2️⃣ Understand the intent behind what's being shared

Even if you trust the source, try to understand why they shared that certain content. Is it to inform you or make you upset? Is the outrage legitimate? Fear 😱 and outrage 😡 are prime disinformation tactics that outlets use to spread their false or misleading information.

3️⃣ Build a critical political education

Having a sharp mind with critical analysis skills is perhaps the best defense. Instead of scrolling online, read some thoughtful books! In fact, read some that have nuanced and critical views of the world so you can think logically and carefully. Reading helps you develop brain power 🧠 ⚡️

I hope to share more media literacy strategies and insights from my deep studies into misinformation, so look out for those in the future.

This newsletter provides you with critical information about technology, democracy, militarism, climate and more — vetted by someone who’s been trained both as a scholar and community organizer.

Use this information to contribute to your own building of democracy and fighting against technological domination! And share it with those who would be interested.

Until next time 📣