Like most contemporary wars, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is enabled by the algorithmic innovations of the day. In armored bases in southern Israel, intelligence soldiers cull through user-friendly interfaces displaying automatically generated recommendations of where and when the bombs should fall. Military heads, emulating Silicon Valley founders, brag innovations in AI have allowed them to build their killing capacities to scale. How did we get here?  This talk lays bare a vast algorithmic supply chain undergirding war today. 

Sophia Goodfriend, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, will thread together ethnographic research with Israeli intelligence veterans and Silicon Valley workers to provide an anthropological portrait of the pedestrian labor driving automated warfare: from Google technicians tinkering with facial recognition algorithms determining who is detained at makeshift checkpoints in Gaza City to reservists in Tel Aviv developing the speech to text software informing targeted strikes. In meditating on those bound up in warfare’s catastrophic effects, Goodfriend emphasizes how many more might play a role in demanding otherwise.

Goodfriend received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Duke University in June 2024. With years of experience reporting and writing from Israel/Palestine, Goodfriend’s academic research and journalistic writing have been published across a range of publications, including Foreign Policy, the London Review of Books, the Baffler, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Goodfriend is a regular contributor to 972 Magazine and is finishing two separate book projects on automated warfare in Israel and Palestine.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of Political Science. It is one of a series of "Digital War" speakers being organized by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program during the 2024–2025 academic year.