20/09/2025
TECHNOVIOLENCE: Confronting Systematic Injustice
An exploration of how evidence of systemic violence - across war, borders, extractive industries, surveillance, and urban oppression is produced, challenged, and exposed. Through art, activism, and investigation, the conference empowers communities to resist and confront invisible crimes demanding public attention.
Full infos & programme:
https://www.disruptionlab.org/technoviolence
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LIVESTREAM #1: 16:30 - 18:00
KEYNOTE: Breaking the Code of Silence: From Whistleblowing to Systemic Change in Tech
Opening:
Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, Director, Disruption Network Institute, IT/DE).
Keynote:
Breaking the Code of Silence: From Whistleblowing to Systemic Change in Tech
Ifeoma Ozoma (Director of Technology Policy, Kapor Center Advocacy, US). Moderated by Tammarrian Rogers (Tech Expert, Founder, Sarell, US/UK).
Ifeoma Ozoma’s keynote will examine how nondisclosure agreements and corporate secrecy mechanisms function as instruments of technoviolence, systematically silencing workers who witness and experience discrimination, harassment, and human rights abuses within technology companies. Drawing from her whistleblowing work after Pinterest and her subsequent advocacy for legislative reform, Ozoma will explore how tech companies weaponize legal frameworks to perpetuate injustice and protect corporate interests over vulnerable communities.
The conversation will trace Ozoma’s journey from experiencing gender and race discrimination at Pinterest to breaking her nondisclosure agreement and speaking about systemic inequalities. This act of resistance led to her cosponsorship of California’s Silenced No More Act, landmark legislation that prohibits employers from using NDAs to suppress workers’ voices on discrimination, harassment, and other illegal conduct.
Ozoma will discuss her pragmatic approach to systemic change, rejecting academic theorizing in favor of tangible action that produces immediate material improvements for workers. Through Earthseed, the Tech Worker Handbook, and shareholder activism, she has created playbooks for forcing corporate accountability by leveraging financial risk rather than appealing to corporate conscience. Her strategy demonstrates how understanding power structures, from legislative processes to corporate hierarchies, enables more effective resistance.
The keynote will examine the intersection of individual courage and collective action, highlighting how marginalized individuals within tech face disproportionate retaliation while being essential to exposing systemic violence. Ozoma will address broader themes of technoviolence, including how surveillance technologies, algorithmic discrimination, and platform policies harm vulnerable communities globally. She will emphasize the urgency of current action, arguing against the American myth of individual mobility that prevents tech workers from recognizing their shared position as exploited labor regardless of salary levels.
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September 19th
LIVE STREAM #2: 18:00 - 20:45
On Platform Brutality + Dismantling the Algorithmic Gaze
BOOK PRESENTATION: Geert Lovink (Founding Director, Institute of Network Cultures, NL).
PANEL: Jennifer Kamau (Co-founder International Women* Space, Co-lead at the Migrant Justice Community of Practice, KE/DE), Heba Y. Amin (Artist and Professor of Art, ABK-Stuttgart, PS/DE), Anni Garza Lau (Artist, Technologist, Co-founder Ghost Agency, MX), Gro Sarauw (Artist, Co-founder Ghost Agency, DK). Moderated by Geert Lovink (Founding Director, Institute of Network Cultures, NL).
PRESENTATION: On Platform Brutality
Geert Lovink will present a new essay that is part of his new book, Platform Brutality, coming out late September (Valiz, 2025). It is third part of a triptych after the books Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). After decade of docile facilitation and sneaky extractivism Silicon Valley is now showing its ugly face. This is not only initiated by Trump II but also coincides with the overall stagnation and regression in terms of social media usage. Platform Brutality is a scathing diagnosis of our digital condition in the aftermath of Covid, grappling with a world overwhelmed by platform decay, social media addiction, and a psychic toll.
PANEL: Dismantling the Algorithmic Gaze
This panel analyses how forms of algorithmic and technological control are emerging at borders, in militarised contexts and in urban environments, spanning examples from Germany to Mexico and North Africa. It also discusses how we can imagine forms of resistance and empowerment based on social justice, using opacity as a means of resistance, as well as technological tools and collective action to counter epidemic violence.
As a migrant woman and activist in Germany at International Women* Space, and the Migrant Justice Community of Practice, Jennifer Kamau examines how border technologies such as Frontex, EURODAC, and the European asylum regime, surveil and control Black and Brown people. These systems shape daily realities of exclusion and criminalisation, exemplified by tools like the Bezahlkarte and recent border standoffs with neighbouring countries. She also explores the intersection of technological and environmental violence, highlighting how climate-induced displacement exacerbates the vulnerability of marginalised communities. Furthermore, she discusses the risks posed by AI, facial recognition, and cyber-surveillance in facilitating state and corporate oppression in migration.
The talk is followed by Heba Y. Amin’s presentation “Opacity as Resistance: Reversing the Image Politics of Empire”. In an effort to maintain colonial control in North Africa, the British military founded the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate near Cairo in 1941. British artists were recruited to engineer large-scale illusions designed to mislead enemy surveillance. Camouflage, in this case, was not merely a tactical device but part of a broader scopic regime of empire. Its operations relied on a colonial gaze that reframed the desert as an empty landscape for optical manipulation, erasing its inhabitants in a theatre of deception. Drawing from this history, this presentation asks how we can subvert and reclaim camouflage as a counter-methodology: not a technique of domination, but a practice of opacity, refusal, and disruption aimed at dismantling the militarised, algorithmic gaze and imagining resistant forms of visibility.
Anni Garza Lau and Gro Sarauw introduce the work of Ghost Agency. Ghost Agency operates at the intersection of research, artistic practice, digital technology and humanitarian inquiry. Working trans-locally between Mexico, the United States and Europe–yet rooted in Mexico’s specific context–the group investigates how gender violence and tehcno-impunity converge in systemic patterns of abuse, producing injustices in the digital age, especially for women and the environment. As a search for antidotes to epidemic violence under capitalism’s technological and institutional dismemberment of human lives, their practice is both a catalyst for novel literacies and technological designs and a response to neglected humanitarian aspects of digital technologies, which, Ghost agency claims, lead to forms of repression such as those faced by many women in Mexico.
Moderated by Geert Lovink, the following conversation explores how digital infrastructures enable systemic violence and reimagine what comes next.
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September 20st
LIVE STREAM #3: 16:00 - 18:15
PANEL: Exploited, Extracted, Erased: The Global Logic of Big Tech
Rima Sghaier (Digital Rights Advocate, Researcher, TN/IT), Sarah Ciston (Critical AI Researcher, Critical–Creative Coder, US/DE), Lya Cuéllar (Journalist and Political Scientist, SV/DE), Safa Ghnaim (Critical Tech Researcher, Educator, PS/US/DE). Moderated by Nil Uzun (Research Associate, Technology and Diversity, Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen, TR/DE).
This panel traces the systemic and extractive logic of Big Tech, examining how today’s digital infrastructures are weaponised against vulnerable communities. Topics include AI systems accelerating warfare, targeting campaigns on social media, erasing Palestinian voices, building techno-colonialist utopias in Central America and exploiting workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Speakers unpack the intersections between digital repression, xenophobia, and platform complicity, while offering critical tools for understanding and resisting technoviolence in its many forms.
In the presentation “Targeted by Design: Technoviolence, Xenophobia, and Algorithmic Injustice in SWANA“ Rima Sghaier explores how Big Tech and social media advertising enable and reinforce information disorder, fuelling xenophobic campaigns targeting vulnerable communities, while erasing the narratives of others, namely Palestinian voices. By unpacking platform design choices, extractive data economies, digital militarism, and feminist critiques of power in tech, the talk traces how communities are profiled, policed, and profitably excluded. What does it mean when violence is not incidental, but systematically designed into our digital infrastructures?
When the same chatbots and automated agents many people use daily are being scaled up to wage wars, we must better understand these AI systems and hold them to account. Sarah Ciston presents her artistic project AI War Cloud Database with her talk “Mapping the Techno-Imperial Boomerang”. AI War Cloud Database catalogues the AI decision-making systems used in warfare, which have been shown to accelerate and amplify death and destruction. The project details 50+ systems based on the type of machine learning tasks they use; who develops, deploys, and funds them; and their military and commercial purposes – in order to show how global technoviolence traces directly back to our mobile phones and social platforms. With the spotlight now on systems like Palantir’s Foundry and Israel’s Lavender, the stakes for AI tools are becoming increasingly urgent and personal.
In an era of global democratic backsliding, Central America is being used as a laboratory for new autocratic strategies. Tech entrepreneurs and libertarian ideologues see our nations as testing grounds for their ideas outside of the rule of law. Shifting the focus from digital infrastructure to the real world, Lya Cuéllar will trace this scenario. From private cities in the Caribbean, through a failed experiment with crypto as legal tender, to the transnationalisation of the carceral state, these actors in the US and Europe work with local elites to turn the region into a blueprint for their plans at home. Communities are being displaced and criminalised in the name of techno-colonialist utopias while the parallel erosion of democratic institutions leaves them with few options to fight back. And yet, everyday people are showing creative possibilities for resistance in a new global dystopia.
In the talk “Digitized Divides: Revealing the trade-offs of a tech-dependent world”, Safa Ghnaim shares stories of the exploitation and extractivism of technologies: from the mining to manufacturing and applications, painting a picture of the devastation left in its tracks by the owners and operators of these tools. In particular, focusing on technoviolence in the DR Congo and in Palestine gives an insight into how business models, power structures, and systems of oppression make our global struggles interconnected. None of these stories are new, but they are lesser known, hidden on the feeds of social media and painted over by Big Tech marketing campaigns. Listen to just a few critical cases and you’ll find out what’s really beneath the shiny surface of technology.
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LIVE STREAM #4: 18:45 - 20:30
KEYNOTE: Secrecy, Surveillance & Grassroots Resistance: Terry Albury & Lynzy Billing
Terry Albury (Former FBI Agent, Whistleblower, US), Lynzy Billing (Investigative Journalist and Photographer, UK/AF/PK). Moderated by Caitlin L Chandler (Writer, Journalist, US/DE).
This keynote maps the intersection of secrecy, state violence, and grassroots work, showing how insider courage and deeply personal reporting can disrupt entrenched systems of digital and real-world oppression. It brings together in a conversation Terry Albury, a former FBI counterterrorism agent whose leaks revealed systemic profiling and surveillance tactics deployed on journalists, vulnerable and marginalised communities (e.g. LGBTQ+, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, as well as women and migrants), and Lynzy Billing, a British investigative journalist and photographer of Afghan-Pakistani origins whose reporting exposed the human toll of the anti-terrorism strategies that US has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Exposing national security secrets requires courage and involves confronting the mainstream media's silence on the issue. This work involves truth-tellers, whistleblowers and investigative journalists, who risk a great deal to denounce misconduct and wrongdoing. However, at a time when marginalised people are being targeted, monitored, detained, incarcerated, and eventually killed, it is also important to focus on the work of local community members who are often the first to reveal abuses. Grassroots activism, providing a platform for first-hand accounts and documentation, can expose the systematic violence and oppression experienced by marginalised communities.
The keynote will discuss concrete examples of digital and real-world systems of oppression, highlighting the necessity of reporting from the ground and also providing safe systems for whistleblowers at local and national levels. Almost twenty-five years after the “war on terror”, how is “national security” being weaponised domestically and abroad? Is the media investigating the structural abuses of institutions, or failing to hold states accountable? As the world experiences a trend towards authoritarianism and re-militarisation, and as technology evolves to allow for widespread surveillance of dissidents and journalists, what possibilities remain for resistance? This discussion will provide an opportunity to share stories connecting the experiences of the speakers with those of the Disruption Network Lab's community of activists, human rights defenders, tech experts, investigative journalists, artists, dissidents, and more.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.
