DJ Outvertigo, who created a playlist for the Take Back The Tech! Liveboard in 2024 around critical issues of surveillance, tech fascism and AI geopolitics joined us for a lively conversation centered around the curated resources in their playlist — here.
DJ Outvertigo is a Palestinian refugee researcher born and raised in Lebanon. She is researching surveillance in academia and anti-colonial knowledge production for my PHD. My work focuses on surveillance, tech fascism and AI geopolitics.
Her playlist offers a gathering of words, ideas, and images—fragments that have lit the way in moments of absolute apocalypse. When the world splits open, when it feels like there’s no ground left to stand on, these have been reminders that the only way is forward.
Palestine is a thread that pulls us together, no matter where we are, because it encompasses everything and summarizes our everyday struggle. Palestine means resistance, it means life refusing to be snuffed out. It means a determination to dream, to hold on, to fight for a better world for all.
This interview took place between Archismita (Take Back The Tech!) And DJ Outvertigo. All the links in the interview can be found collated in DJ Outvertigo’s playlist.
The interview will be published in three parts. This is Part 3 — (continued from Parts 2 and 1).
Archismita: Wow, this is really interesting and kind of scary and also expected at the same time — how universities have been complicit spaces since a long time, how, you know, AI has been developed not just as, “Oh, I'm so interested in how the mind works”, and if we can create something around it in technology. But also for warfare, and there was an active interest by arms companies and their interests to that end. And it's so true that a lot of people think that tech is so neutral. Like tech is the most neutral thing. Like tech is as neutral as it can get. It can never have the biases of a human being, like we have as humans. We have so many biases. We may make wrong decisions, but tech will never because it's not even human. That's really how a lot of people think. And you're so right that feminists’ tech work has really done a lot to challenge this idea of technology as neutral, because tech didn't just fall from the sky. We made it. And imbibed it with our biases. And now AI itself, as you pointed out, it’s such an interesting bit in the paper that it's actually traced the development of AI and the history of arms companies with it since 1947, that's really something that is scary and expected also at the same time.
DJ Outvertigo: Exactly.
Archismita: The video of the pro-Palestine activist confronting an Israeli weapons maker at a UAE arms expo was a digital flame of resistance and hope for many of us around the world who see more and more weapons being used against our communities by State and vested interests. What is one way, in your opinion, that we can start taking back the tech and reclaim our right to live in a world that doesn’t have technology and arms as linked as it is today?
And this is also taking into obviously taking into consideration the fact, as you've also mentioned, the history of technology and AI and warfare that goes so back and it can make a lot of people feel almost hopeless, like, oh my god, it's been going on since such a long time and I don't know what to do. Or can I even do anything?
In that context, what are some things that maybe you would like to talk about — some things that we can start doing to take back the tech, maybe start building or dreaming or thinking about a different world — which is echoed by that video also.
DJ Outvertigo: Yes, thank you. Thank you for everything. It's so beautifully put as well.
I think what I also really love about that video. I just want to comment that the video is indeed at an arms expo, but it's also happening in the UAE, which has also been complicit [in the exporting of warfare technologies and genocides]. There's so many other contexts. And their role has been, and is being, pointed out by activists and the people in Sudan, who have been saying there are so many layers to the complicity of the UAE. And at the same time for me as a Palestinian, and for other Arabs as well there is this question of the UAE's complicity in investing in arms companies that are Israeli. I think it was such an interesting moment to see that even in the worst, like highly surveilled places, people are still choosing to confront and fight. And I think that everyone knows the risks in confronting these powers. In some contexts, the cost may be your disappearance or your murder. It's just very scary — these consequences of confronting this reality that we're living in. So for me, it was also about this idea that sometimes, no matter the cost, even if you're just an individual, you have to do it — just to say that actually we will disrupt this, and we will disturb this.
I think that is such a powerful thing to keep reminding ourselves of — the importance of even trying to name the aggressor. That alone, sometimes, is great because it generates the connections that we need to make.
I think that taking back the tech or reclaiming our right to live in a world where technology is not just used to kill us, but to target and surveil us, as we use their services — I think that it is very difficult to imagine and it is very difficult to even envision how we can get there because it's been so embedded in the exclusionary logic of militarism and warfare for so long that it almost seems impossible. And, you know, I always say that now we have to operate from the position of paranoia.
I don't think that being paranoid is definitely a wrong thing. I think that it is something that holds so much in front of us as well, because then we start operating from the logic of fighting back, from the logic of survival. I think for so many people, when we speak about what technology can and cannot do, and how technology and arms are connected, it may be demobilising.
People may feel like — we’re only a small group of people. Or even if we are a large movement, there's so little that we can do. Especially now with Musk in the White House and everything that's been happening in the US as well, it has been affecting everyone across the globe. It also sometimes feels very demobilising to think about how to fight all of this.
I think for me, one key thing has been the reconnection of our contexts and understanding how our contexts are so similar despite their differences and despite their nuances. There is always a similarity of being targeted in similar ways. And I think the only way to fight back against this is to embed ourselves in our movements and each other's movements, embed ourselves in a sense of unity in other contexts — and not just be focused on our own.
In a similar way to how these forces of power operate — they also embed themselves in each other and they also fuel each other. We need to replicate that not just tactically, or even strategically. We need to have a combined strategy: If this is happening there, then it also directly affects me — and not just act in solidarity, but in joint struggle. And I think that, outside of values or principles, is how we can fight back.
The material way also revolves around having specific targets and having wins.
If we keep fighting the abstract, we're not going to have any tangible wins. We cannot continue. We cannot sustain ourselves either. The most important thing is to think of targets, whether they are companies, or investors, or banks that support certain tech and arms companies, or governments. Having tangible wins, having actionable items, and making it something that is achievable for us both long-term and short term — is a way in which we can definitely reclaim back the fight element. If we're not reclaiming the tech, then at least we're taking back the fight.
The recipients of such tech and AI violence are also actively fighting back, and we've seen this with the digitalised ecosystem, and beyond — we're seeing labor unions, we're seeing indigenous groups and communities, we're seeing so many people who are trying to say: Actually, this cannot go on. I think this is the importance of having tangible targets at a time, and not making it abstract — naming them, and having action items, and calls to action around these issues is the way forward, I would say.
Interviewer’s note: In the post by No Tech for Apartheid referred to above, it continued — echoing DJ Outvertigo’s thoughts — “It’s CRUCIAL that tech workers worldwide ensure that internationalist solidarity becomes a workplace conditions issue, and a basis for our organizing. We must build the necessary power not only to make small gains but to upend the power dynamic that allows our bosses to prioritize profiting from genocide and empire over worker voices.
We call on all tech workers of conscience to join the fight for reclaiming our labor against tech for empire, genocide, and apartheid.”
Archismita: Thank you so much, DJ Outvertigo. I also think it makes a lot of sense having something tangible to work towards, and also finding support and recognising the struggles that all of us go through in different forms — but essentially against the same forces. The forces that we are up against operate across borders, across groups, and different kinds of forces and hegemonies are interlinked within each other, and they're working with each other, working across different geopolitical areas, across different country borders, whereas for people — for us — the world as it is structured today just makes it so much harder for us to even connect across borders. There is so much money and so much effort being spent into just dehumanising other people on the other side of the border, on the other side of a very recent border.
Vested interests create propaganda that there can never be any connection between the two people on either side of a border. But it happens because they recognise the power that it can have and the revolutionary potential of our connection if we just stop thinking about borders and just connect across different spaces and across different peoples.
Part 1 of this interview can be found here.
Click here for Part 2.
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