To say that ours are darkening times is to acknowledge, that the present moment – the year is 2025 – is increasingly characterised by familiar modes of authoritarian oppression, of right-wing political cruelty and of inevitably rising geopolitical tensions in the context of which nuclear Armageddon and the necessity for autonomous weapon systems are frequently conjured up,  often in the same breath.

As my title suggests, the focus of this essay is not drones per se, but rather the wider turn to algorithmic warfare that they enable and of which they remain a key part, from surveillance operations to targeted assassination.

Somewhere in Germany there is a securitized data server that holds one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of propaganda videos produced by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), an extremist jihadist militant group that gained international notoriety in the mid-2010s for its sensationalist use of media violence to spread its ideology.

Introduction Human Computers is a media archaeology research that aims to unravel the intricate entanglement between computing and capitalism through the prism of labor.

“Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets… We are forced to act…

Neither natural nor intelligent ‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) is such a large, dynamic, and vaguely defined field that much of what can be said about it is both true and false, or no longer true or possibly not yet true.