Gaza As A Continuity Of The Slaughterhouse

How Palestine is not the beginning nor the end.

Was Palestine a watershed moment? Or does it fit into the historical and continuous loss of empathy of the last two centuries? Capitalism accelerated the commodification of property and materials but really started a much longer term project: the mass commodification of life. To be fair, some elements of this existed prior, but there was no homogeneity in the economic system and much of it was highly dependent on culture. The exploitation of animals has played an important role as an exploited element of human history, and thereby is not new. But to be clear, there is something different in how animals are treated today in contrast to a few centuries ago: the waste, the concentration, the disease etc. all operate at an unprecedented scale.

Before discussing that continuity, I should define what I mean by commodification via some examples.

1. The mass purchase of data of customers by data brokers and the incorporation of that data into marketing or surveillance etc.

2. The seizure of ownership of any hardware from the consumer. Cars and other electronics are more easily turned off and destroyed remotely.

3. The creation of weapons which are always purposed for the destruction of human beings; and are replenished consistently.

4. The creation of systems of algorithms that work ensemble to track individuals or wage war in addition to the deployment of those weapons.

5. The tracking of individuals to create algorithms for various situations. Palantir on the one hand helped to target Palestinians but on the other profited from their own actions by creating algorithms that are intended to direct emergency response.

This mass commodification of life for now can be considered to be a loose network of a system that is akin to an ever-encroaching contour of a digitized and mechanized slaughterhouse.

Though we don’t have any idea of all the particularities of the MK-ULTRA project, we do have new information on its subjects having included Korea War POWs. The practice of mind-control or manipulative propaganda led the U.S. security state to extending and waging psychological warfare on all fronts, including on its own populace (which led up to the Church Committee in the 1970s).

This new apparatus of “security” and psychological warfare truly took off with the rise of Silicon Valley, and with a few key investments of C.I.A.-backed hedge fund In-Q-Tel, the U.S. recaptured the frontier edge of technology for that very purpose. Humans could now be encoded in 0’s and 1’s, including their interests, their address, where they work, who they know etc. I would call this procedure, wherein someone creates a log of a human, digital tagging. That information and its system of information is something that could be standardized and deployed for any purpose that the security state is interested in. This is why Palantir, C3.AI and other companies of their kind are so successful, for the creation and adaptation of data-bases of this information. DOGE wasn’t just about “efficiency” but also about the uniformization of the U.S. government wherein all data is integrated across all departments; something which sounds good until you develop a better and more nuanced understanding of how governments actually need to work.

But is this kind of process really all that new?

In the 1920s, industrial and mass animal agriculture began to spread and be standardized. Animals were consistently being bred to be bigger, fatter and more profitable to the detriment of their own lives. Their weight, breeding, insemination etc. were all recorded and tracked to increase profit. The animal meanwhile did the labor of existing and being forcibly submitted to this system. Labor, as I use the term, is not just the physical act of production, but also the mental act of submitting to that system of production and exploitation. And therefore, labor can be physically passive and yet still exist.

This was the labor that Gaza had to submit itself to: quiet existence. And when retaliation finally occurred, they were punished for no longer doing that labor. Animals, being voiceless or non-human, do that labor nearly de-facto, with the exception of physical resistance.

What Palestinians and Jews and others in different genocides have been through simply does not compare to the alienation, mass rape, mass abduction, mass torture, mass mutilation, mass slaughter and mass exploitation that animals have been through. Their existence is operated by the pre-determined value system that we have designed for them. “Yes you may be born into this world, but you lose me $6 to put on the shelf, $10 to be alive and $1 dead and disposed of”. Do these sound like sane thoughts that are appropriate for this world? Or do they sound cold and inhumane?

The same calculus is done in the world wherein weapons are made because of a similar market logic. The spread of the slaughterhouse ensues.

At times animals are born into the world and then taken out before a single human being or one of their own kin recognize their existence in the world. They are slaughtered on our behalf by mindless machines and algorithms, mechanized slaughterhouses, without even the acknowledgement of our own guilt.

This is where artificial intelligence and drone warfare has pushed us towards, mostly since the Obama administration’s acceleration of a long-standing U.S. drone program. We are attempting to create systems of exploitation and murder with near-total control that absolve us of our guilt.

Until human beings learn to recognize the consistent superstructure of quiet and secret exploitation in all settings, they will continue to fail to recognize those in their own societal sphere.

Gaza and the holocaust could never be mass implemented overtly. But a digital parallel to the world that is managed away from the public’s eyes could be used to finally mass standardize the most adaptable form of a digitized and mechanized slaughterhouse for humans to inhabit.

But we should not act scared or in fear, when the system we see evolving before our eyes grows and spreads, when instead we should all examine the structures that have been long institutionalized.