Complicit Chips

Complicit Chips

5-6 October 2024, Brussels

Through our time together, we initiated a proposal for collaboration in a divestment campaign, extension of preexisting mapping of genocidal infrastructures, hands on work to understand how these chips operate and some analysis of the aesthetisation of military technology. We hope that, beyond the context of this worksession, the circulation of this reader can support fellow comrades sharing the desire to pursue divestment from an industry which provides the material means to both our most mundane activities and human rights violations all at once and fully intertwined.

Complicit Chips is a two day session of radical transdisciplinary research, bringing together different types of expertise around the complex conflations of software, hardware, global finance, digital aesthetics, securitisation and militarisation. Collectively, we will dive into the nebulous world of software-operated hardware, starting from the high density chips produced by NVIDIA, a company that in recent years has transformed from a mid-size producer of hard- and software for accelerated computer graphics into the 'Taylor Swift for investors'. NVIDIA's chips for computing AI, are a resource intensive offering that alongside game graphics, forest monitoring and medical devices include technologies used by the military and for policing. Deployed in the cloud through urban combat drones, mobile computing, edge-to-cloud and 5G telecommunication, NVIDIA has a near-monopoly on the GPU market. In Complicit Chips we ask: how can we approach the involvement of the computer industry in organised violence at borders and in occupied territories? And in what ways can we resist the violence of cloudified chips that have become central to computational processing, from weather apps to autonomous robots, from the smartphones in our pockets to occupied territories?

As an enterprise, NVIDIA is currently worth $2 trillion, and its hard- and software products for high-performance computing are in increasing demand due to the hyped global desire for everything-AI. Promoting applications for gaming, telecom, scientific research, aviation and logistics, its numerous military contracts with agencies such as DARPA and arms companies such as Lockheed Martin are widely known. In November 2023 the company completed the first stage of the worlds largest supercomputer aptly named Israel-1 ahead of schedule, providing plenty of exaflops to a country that is known for using AI in automated assassination and killing. As became public knowledge in the last few months, so-called AI tools such as Lavender, Find Daddy and The Gospel are used by the Israeli army to draw up kill lists, target individuals at home and aim at critical infrastructures. Their NVIDIA Jetson TX2 CPU is used in the widely reported LANIUS elbit urban combat assassination drones thought to be used in Gaza and sold globally to border agencies. It is difficult to prove whether NVIDIA technology powers a genocide in Palestine, but hard to defend they are not contributing to and profiting from the surge in so-called intelligent warfare. With thousands of workers located in Israel and the Westbank, of which a few hundreds work in the Israeli army and some were victim of the Hamas attacks, the company has been surprisingly successful in keeping its public profile neutral, and uphold that "no politics or hierarchy stands in the way of inventing the future." In recent months, NVIDIA has shown no signs of deinvestment in plants and labs co-constructing the Israeli start-up nation.

Knowing that Palestine is a testing ground for technologies that then are sold back to the rest of the world to weaponize immigration control, the case of NVIDIA seems worth trying to get our heads around. What does it mean when over 80% of gaming chips are sold by the same company that also runs the NVIDIA Isaac Lab for training "Spot", the entertaining high-tech robotdog deployed already in Gaza and to attack protestors in the US and UK, soon aiding borderpatrol and deadly push backs? What are the relentless ways these chips are complicit in expanding racial capitalism? How to intervene in the amalgamate of techniques such as scanning and 3d mapping, instant rendering, biometric verification, automated deception detection, document authentication, and risk assessment that border agencies deploy to survey migrating people without constraint? What is the role of cloudified chips in the further logistification and depletion of life? How to not feel overwhelmed and keep our anger while finding ways to make actual incisions in the industrial continuum of carefully constructed unavoidability?

From 5-6 October a group of 25 infra-artists, anti-racist poets, game hackers, computer scientists, hardware activists, political economists and others will come together in Brussels to articulate how those chips that power so-called AI are accelerating the decoupling of solidarity and life on multiple levels. We'll try to articulate interdependencies between global financing, AI, hardware development, and computer graphics and how these industries are complicit in extreme violence, inflicted on occupied territories, migrating bodies, on sites of extraction and ultimately on all of us. Most importantly, we'll use all means necessary to figure out ways to contest, resist and undo some or all of these systems.

Complicit Chips is a collective research session hosted by TITiPI, supported by the INFRA-RESISTANCE network of networks, De Vlaamse Overheid and SoLIXG. The session is in person. We will prepare a reader and there will be inputs from activists, artists and scholars, but most of the weekend we will work together in smaller groups.

Location: Jetsesteenweg 388, Brussels https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/HQ
Saturday 5 October: 11:00-18:00, Sunday 6 October: 10:00-17:00 with public sharing at 18:00