Technology and Critique

Abstract This special section grows out of “Technologies of Power,” a virtual series convened between fall 2021 and spring 2022, where twenty-one scholars, artists, writers, and activists gathered to examine the entanglements of empire, technology, and violence across the longue durée of the global “war on terror.” We interrogate how technologies—from maps, censuses, and drones to smartphones, platform governance, biometrics, and AI—mediate governance, surveillance, and subjectivity, embedding themselves within infrastructures of domination while generating new forms of racialized, precarious, and disposable life. Contributors foreground the afterlives of colonial violence as they persist in digital enclosures, juridical regimes, and surveillance systems. Palestine, in particular, emerges as a critical field of refraction, revealing how military technologies tested there reverberate globally. Spanning geographies across South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this section contributes to a technology and data studies of war that deliberately recenters analysis away from the United States and Europe, reframing technologies of power through relationality, resistance, and the lived experiences of those targeted by digital war. These essays underscore how technologies are artifacts of fertile empires—repurposed, defied, and contested by the dispossessed—offering an urgent call to rethink technology, power, and critique amid persistent infrastructures of war and authoritarian resurgence.