A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #469 - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SOCIAL CONTROL, AND ALGORITHMIC WARFARE. - The Digital Panopticon (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In 1942, author Isaac Asimov, in his novels and short stories about 
robots, formulated the Three Laws of Robotics: a code of ethics designed 
to ensure that machines programmed by humans could never harm them. The 
first law was imperative: "A robot may not injure a human being, or, 
through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Decades later, 
Hollywood introduced teenage audiences to the perfect antithesis of this 
ideal with the Terminator: Skynet film series, a self-aware military 
artificial intelligence that decides to exterminate humanity. Today, the 
reality of digital warfare lies in a dangerous middle ground. We're no 
longer talking about red-eyed humanoid robots marching over destroyed 
cities, but rather about invisible algorithms, automated cyberattacks, 
and autonomous weapons systems. AI has entered the battlefield, both 
virtual and physical, completely shattering Asimov's romantic laws and 
bringing us ever closer to the cold calculation of Skynet, constantly at 
the service of the bureaucratic state structure that legitimizes and 
manages its use. The history of military technology is, ultimately, the 
history of the expansion of mechanisms of social and state control; 
therefore, contemporary algorithms do not represent a break with the 
past, but rather the most refined and dangerous phase of 
institutionalized bureaucracy.

This transition from conventional warfare to digital warfare is based on 
a dangerous dehumanization of violence, transforming the existence of a 
community or individual into a simple "pattern of suspicious behavior" 
detected by software and which the state can erase without the moral 
burden of assassination. Designed by the structures of domination of 
hegemonic states, Artificial Intelligence inherits and automates their 
prejudices and structural violence. In this sense, the current danger is 
not that machines will think for themselves, but that humans will accept 
submission to an opaque algorithmic logic in which responsibility fades 
behind the screen because, according to the new dogmas of power, the 
system makes no mistakes. It is precisely within this ecosystem of 
bureaucratic control that the emergence of corporations like Palantir 
Technologies makes sense. Founded in 2004 with initial capital from the 
CIA, Palantir was not created to create physical weapons, but to design 
a global digital surveillance system in the aftermath of the September 
11 attacks. The company's very name, drawn from the seer stones of 
Tolkien's mythology, the hero of our homegrown fascists, which allowed 
remote observation, reveals its true ambition: the absolute panopticon. 
By unifying databases of criminal records, financial records, telephone 
communications, and satellite imagery into a single interface, the 
company demonstrated to the state that the chaos of the social world 
could be ordered, labeled, and made predictable for the military and 
police apparatus.

This partnership between private capital and state power has reached 
full maturity with the development of projects like Maven, a system in 
which Palantir's software accumulates thousands of hours of drone 
recordings to automatically identify targets and even decide who to 
eliminate. By introducing platforms like its latest defense artificial 
intelligence system, the corporation transfers its algorithmic language 
models, capable of analyzing enormous amounts of data, directly into 
military headquarters, allowing commanders to query the system in 
natural language so that an algorithm can develop attack options. What 
began as an intelligence analysis tool in government offices has become 
the true engine of lethality in modern conflicts, from Ukraine to the 
Middle East. Palantir represents the privatization of state 
surveillance, an intermediary interested in profiting from institutional 
violence, producing software optimized for the efficiency of 
extermination, which it controls and also allows for decision-making, 
ultimately disempowering its own masters. Indeed, Palantir's inventors 
did not limit themselves to the role of "technicians," but also 
developed an ideological narrative that legitimizes its excesses and 
disguises them as inevitable historical destiny. This philosophical 
justification was clearly laid out by its CEO, Alex Karp, in the 
publication of his manifesto based on the book "The Technological 
Republic: How the Alliance with Silicon Valley Will Shape the Future of 
the West," published in Italy in 2025, sparking profound international 
alarm. Thus, Karp takes on a doctrinal role, articulating a Decalogue 
that critics have readily characterized as an exercise in shameless 
"technofascism." Its central thesis is as direct as it is disturbing: 
the survival of the West no longer depends on democratic consensus or 
diplomacy, but on "software-based hard power." The argument is the same 
one the State has historically used to justify its worst totalitarian 
excesses: automated violence as an inevitable measure of self-defense 
against "others": barbaric and savage enemies.

A libertarian reading suggests that this manifesto is nothing more than 
the post hoc rationalization of a corporation that draws its wealth and 
power directly from institutional violence, proclaiming that "some 
cultures are inferior to others" and that software must impose the 
civilizing order, thus digitally encoding its supremacist prejudices 
within lines of code that will then decide who is considered a 
legitimate target. Indeed, these are processes we've already seen and 
analyzed, considering that the State ends up being merely a container 
filled by factual powers. The new aspect, which seems little considered 
to me, is that the "instrument"  Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL:  Marx 
would call it the automaton  Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL:  is 
acquiring ever greater autonomy, and the time seems not far off when it 
will eventually decide on its own (Asimov had already predicted this).

Faced with the uncontrolled expansion of this US and Chinese 
military-technological complex, the institutional responses of other 
geopolitical blocs have shown alarming fragility, as in the case of the 
European Union, which in its regulatory framework has specifically 
excluded the military use of AI. Clearly, the ethical issue can no 
longer be resolved with cosmetic legislation or the hypocritical 
exceptions of European Union regulations. Current military technology 
has transformed into the state apparatus's definitive mechanism of 
social control: a panopticon in which the boundary between external 
security and internal repression has been completely erased. If we allow 
bureaucratic power and private capital to automatically decide who is a 
legitimate target, we will have definitively failed. Resistance against 
this war-like technocracy requires demystifying the supposed neutrality 
of science and understanding that the fight for freedom today is also 
fought by questioning the very digital infrastructure that claims to 
govern and classify us from the shadows.

Emanuele Amodio

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/maggio-2026_compressed.pdf
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