Slow Violence and the Habitual Unfairness of the World

Habitually, when we think of “violence,” it brings to mind acts that have the features of observability, intentionality, and perceptibility. But in the Age of AI, there is an alternate framing of “violence” – it is slow. “Slow violence” is attritional. It is progressive, unhurried, out of sight, and spreads across time and space. What is worse is that attritional violence is not viewed as violence at all.

On the 11 th September, 1922, ignoring the incandescence of Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate for Palestine. On 11 th September, 1973, General Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in a coup d’état.  In 2001, thousands of innocent civilians lost their lives in a lethal terrorist attack on 11 th September, in New York and Washington. What unites this cortege of Septembers is the death of dreaming, the death of feeling, and the habitual unfairness of the world.

We are formed by people with whom we identify. The erosion of individuality is best described by Oscar Wilde’s statement – “Most people are other people.” In the Age of AI, e-instigation can foster a sense of identity, with individuals becoming weaponized to harm others, as they suppress all other affiliations that make their individual identities plural. The result is unpretentious elemental violence or globally artful terrorism, lacking empathy and natural kindness. The idea that all of us can, and do have, many different identities related to various groups to which we simultaneously belong, is ordinary.

Digital pseudonymity is a new layer of fuzziness. This is not anonymity because it conceals a person’s true identity, while still allowing for a steady and identifiable online presence, where there is no known identifier. Pseudonymity involves the use of screen names to facilitate online expression and interaction while safeguarding personal identity. This strategy offers benefits such as shielding privacy, averting context collapse, upholding freedom of speech, and safeguarding against violence.

The datafication of life is not inherently problematic. However, a dark cloud has been created by an overemphasis on AI bias. This cloud has the potential to hide the more profound challenges that AI poses to the individual as the subject of protection and empowerment within the human rights framework. Harms from AI systems, when applied across shifting sociotechnical environments and cultural hierarchies, can appear less perceivable, less understandable, and therefore less foreseeable.

Algorithms now nudge and filter tailored content to targeted individuals. This may mean that one is increasingly unable to discern whether they are being manipulated, or how slowly they become Wilde’s “other people”. All regulatory frameworks deserve interrogation on how they will impact the AI development trajectory of LAC. This can help policymakers in the LAC region contribute to an indigenous theoretical and legislative discourse on regulating technology, thereby avoiding erasure and ensuring epistemological justice and algorithmic fairness.

Erasure is the act of minimizing the other. “In the Castle of My Skin”, Lamming portrays the plantation as a mental space. Power always requires social negotiation. And because power is unequally distributed in society, some parties to the process are more present than others. This is where erasure is loosely coupled to identity in the history and politics of colonisation and decolonisation.

In his “On the Origin of Species”, Charles Darwin struggles to understand why people may be willing to risk themselves for others. It was not until Darwin published “The Descent of Man” that he realized that when faced with existential conflicts against others, which may lead to cultural extinction, moral commitments to collective loyalty, sacrifice, and rituals of resistance, like the Hosay Procession of 1884, on Cipero Street, become most consequential.

Ukraine’s ethnic self-consciousness has been reshaped by invasion. Ukrainian identity becomes an outcome of violence and war, not its cause. Identities are subject to the specific categories of use in a given historical and cultural epoch. Identity becomes a palimpsest of triumphs and tribulations. The Cuban painter, Wifredo Lam, highlighted that Africa has not only been emptied of its many peoples but also of its historical consciousness. The art of Lam was to relocate Black cultural objects to their original locations. Painting was an act of decolonising the mind. He cultivated a visual language dripping with Afro-Cuban spirituality. A body of work that Le Roy Clarke reinterpreted by recasting Lam-like images inside the French folk imagination. The work of Clarke and Lam still sits on a high altar before an uncomprehending public and piety.

Ours is a world of appalling deprivation and spectacular opulence. We must never become used to the “slow violence” and vulgar disparity of life all around us. We must watch, and try our best to understand it, and never turn away. Massive inequalities in the opportunities available to different people encourage scepticism about the ability of globalisation to reverse intergenerational inequality.  Economic growth alone is insufficient to equalize opportunity.