For the official version of record, see here:
Synenko, J., & Epp, M. H. (2025). Violent Labour and Media. Media Theory, 9(1), 01–22. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1161
Violent Labour and Media
JOSHUA SYNENKO
Trent University, CANADA
MICHAEL H. EPP
Trent University, CANADA
Abstract
How are media implicated in the expansion of violent labour? Are media playing a larger, more structural role in violent labour than they have in the past? How can we intervene in this material transformation of culture, politics, and economics? The aim of this special issue of Media Theory is to explore the relationship between violent labour and media in theory and practice.
Keywords
Labour, Media, Violence
More than dominating the stories told in our culture industries, violent labour—work that involves violence—also dominates much of our daily lives. While the United States’ Department of Defense employs over four million people, our definition of violent labour should be extended to include everything from police to prison staff, to security companies, to weapons manufacturing and beyond. Today, teachers, health care providers, and general care workers are increasingly trained to respond to violence and to employ it if necessary. In the aftermath of school shootings, for instance, teachers, along with police and security professionals, are evaluated as violent labourers: Did they follow procedures? Did they close the door to protect the class, or risk leaving it open to invite in students trapped in hallways? Did they attack, hide, or run, and was it the right workplace decision?
Consistent with an expanded view of policing in contemporary society (Seigel, 2018), it has become clear that workers are increasingly implicated in violent labour beyond self-protection, as in the case of U.S. schoolteachers who are repeatedly encouraged to carry weapons in the classroom (Banerji and Mallon, 2024). Meanwhile, media, whether new or old, are becoming integral to labour practices, often applying directly to people’s work. These include content moderators from the Global South who are hired by Google to absorb violent online images, shaping moral standards about how violent media ought to be consumed (Gillespie, 2021; Risewieck and Block, 2018); it includes workers at distribution companies like Amazon who are being deskilled and de-unionized by automation (Crawford, 2022); and it includes ever-increasing digital divides around the world, which aggravate the capacity of workers to improve their lives, whether in disadvantaged countries or in remote areas of wealthier ones (Parks et al., 2023).
Media studies explore the intersections between labour, media and violence in different capacities: social media is reckoned for its ability to organize violent labour through fake news, hate speech, disinformation and political polarization (Pérez-Escolar and Noguera-Vivo, 2022); mobile safety alerts and health apps train users to become vigilant to potential threats (Ellcessor, 2022); while algorithmic tracking and surveillance corresponds to a rise in user addictions and depression (Lovink, 2019; Seymour, 2020). With these phenomena in mind, we argue that existing media practices tend to promote an insidious “militarization of thinking” (Weber, qtd. in Amoore, 2009: 61).
Not surprisingly, violent labour and media is most prominent in roles related to war maintenance, whether it be soldiers using data management tools to wage cyberwars (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko, 2019; Packer and Reeves, 2020); military strategists gaining ground in asymmetric conflicts using artificial intelligence (Jensen et al., 2022); workers tasked with waging drone wars in places like Ukraine and Palestine (Ganguly, 2024); or war reporters covering violent conflicts on the ground without the safeguards guaranteed by “embedded journalism” (Карпчук and Макар, 2023). Our special issue explores violent labour both in the context of military work and other fields, focusing particularly on the diversity of labour’s mediations—its representations and practices of mediation. Above all, this special issue examines how media influences the perception and manifestation of labour as violent.
Violence work / Violent labour
The emphasis in our thinking on the political, economic, and material dimension is captured in our use of the term “labour,” which might be contrasted to the other available term, “work.” Indeed, Micol Seigel’s term “violence work” (2018) is a twin concept in this equation. She writes (2018: 12), “‘Violence workers’ highlights the enormous range of activities such people do and the wide parameters of the ambits within which they do them” to constitute violence. This term originates from Seigel’s effort to challenge the founding myths of police in the U.S. after Ferguson, and specifically to probe the manifestation of violence as intrinsic to what police in general perform through their work:
“Violence workers” as a term therefore points to the paradox of the relationship between police and police work. Police both overflow and fail to fill their container. Police do things that do not need to be violence work—so much more—and violence work is done by more people than the uniformed public police—so very many more. How can this be, if police are expressing the essence of state power? How can people employed by private-sector entities, for example, be expressing the violence of the state? (Seigel, 2018: 12).
In ‘Anti-Violence Work,’ her contribution to this issue, Seigel extends her foundational thesis regarding violence workers in a commentary that examines how a particular media cluster of magazines and organizations takes up the work of anti-violence to contest the violent labours of family policing, a critical prison studies term for what some refer to as “child welfare.” Specifically, Seigel describes how online magazines like RISE sought to educate and inform people of colour who are suffering from the traditional U.S. colonial practice of family policing. Here, communities of activists deploy media to “produce structural analysis, foster collectivity and solidarity, and create possibilities for mutual aid against the violent work of family policing” (Seigel, this issue). More explicitly than most of our contributions, Seigel’s commentary demonstrates how violent labour works through media, especially print media, but also how it can be resisted.
Though not directly opposed, our emphasis on labour is derived from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s use of the term “emotional labour” in her influential book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), which uses the term “labour” for activity that “is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (1983: 7, emphasis original), whereas “work” in Hochschild’s formulation refers “to the same acts done in private context where they have use value” (7). The distinction here is not meant to delimit any thinking on the matter; rather, as noted above, the point is to emphasize how violent labour is part of a specific mode of production. This is important because, so often, violence is understood through abstractions and generalities, or as a spooky practice that “haunts liberal political thought,” as Vogler and Markell have suggested (2003: 1). The advantage of a materialist approach to violence can be illustrated this way: the axiom that the state has a monopoly on violence can read as if the state has a monopoly over an abstraction; but if we were to say that the state has a monopoly on violent labour we would understand more concretely how violence and labour are related to the state. Also, quite simply, the term violent labour helps us dodge one of capital’s more successful ideological maneuvers; as Jodi Dean writes, in commodity exchange, “the producer, labor, drops out of the picture” (2009: 27), and what we want to do is put labour back into the picture when we discuss violence and its productivity.
Generating protest, Situating violence
The abduction of Tufts University student Rümeysa Ozturk by plainclothes ICE officers in March 2025 represents a disturbing contemporary example of violent labour. It is widely believed that Ozturk was arrested for contributing to an op-ed in The Tufts Daily, which advocated for the university to adopt Senate resolutions acknowledging the Gaza genocide (“Try again, President Kumar,” 2024). Far from being an isolated case, the abduction is indicative of a broader effort to criminalize not only Ozturk and other vulnerable international students, but also U.S. citizens who have been outspoken on a range of issues—from the assault on Palestinians to the recent spate of ICE detentions, and more. Efforts to marginalize Democratic lawmakers and judges who have stood up to illegal ICE detentions appear to be the latest battleground of these aggressive policies. However, a notable aspect of the debate over the legality of the abductions specifically addressed ICE agents as violent labourers, questioning the specific mechanisms they employ in making arrests and their use of masks (“‘No Secret Police’: Lawmakers propose prohibiting masked agents,” 2025).
Figure 1: Abduction of Rümeysa Ozturk, 25/3/2025, video still, Twitter/X. Permission by Daniel Boguslaw.
Ozturk’s co-authored op-ed speaks as well to a need to address the influence of Israeli special interests in U.S. foreign policy. Building on a long history on the subject (see Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007), this influence extends beyond the United States government to include private industry, universities, and other facilities and institutions of higher ed. The abduction itself aligns with a calculated intimidation of progressive groups, and the targeting of universities where much of the anti-genocidal protest erupted in 2024. The fallout from these protests resulted in a full-scale crisis at places like Columbia and Harvard, making the latter in particular a staging ground for the direct confrontation between higher ed and the executive branch of the U.S. government. The executive branch, for its part, relishes the opportunity to link their aggressive immigration policy with their equally strong desire to restructure higher ed through an attack on its political function. The nature and use of violence is therefore not only central to the extrajudicial actions of the executive branch, but to those congregating on university campuses to expose and to resist the complicity of their institutions in war.
The escalating situation in U.S. universities reflects, in amplified form, the situation faced by Canadian organizations, including the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) and its partner, McGill University, during their anti-genocide encampment at Congress 2024. The decision by McGill and the Federation to suppress the encampment led to a chaotic situation that prompted several associations to hold their meetings off-site in nearby universities, while others, including the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)—one of the largest participating groups by membership—canceled their meeting altogether. In this example, once again, violence is obscured between the peregrinations of an institutional actor shrouded with legitimacy (the FHSS, in cooperation with McGill, together with a private campus security detail, and the police), and, on the other side, the protesters, who have chosen to engage in the violence of non-compliance and to protect their cause by holding ground. The coexistence of these groups opens several unresolved questions concerning the specific relationship that exists between working academics and how they are implicated in violence. How, for instance, does violence get wielded to direct, inform, interrupt, or prevent academic labouring practices? What is the quality of the violence that is exercised by different actors in this scene; and when is violence considered to be an extension of labour, whether as teachers, researchers, colleagues, or critical thinkers?
***
In her 1969 essay On Violence, building on previous books like The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt situates the category of “work,” which, in her formulation, refers to the fabrication of durable objects and the creation of worlds; and that of “labour,” which refers to the maintenance of existing. Arendt’s treatment of these terms is intriguing not just because of how it compares with that of Hoschchild’s or Seigel’s, but because of her subsequent and very direct identification of “violence” as an implementation of these competing terms.
Arendt’s definition of violence is shaped by the international student movement of the 1960s, a movement that had grown in response to the authoritarian regime in France and its antiquated policy on higher ed, in addition to the Vietnam conflict and the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States, and demands for free speech around the world. Arendt criticized the students, arguing that their congregation at places like university campuses was naïve, showing wanton “courage, astounding will to action, and no less astounding confidence in the possibility for change” (1969: 16). Arendt’s skepticism of the movement stemmed from her belief that many of the students involved appeared to glorify violence as a progressive force and to consider violence an end in itself. She situates this glorification in the work of Georges Sorel (1912) and Frantz Fanon (1963), and in a dialectical process premised on the reshaping of humanity through purposive actions—through myth or labour if not through thought or spirit. She argues that elevating a dialectic of purposive actions not only glorifies violence but also obfuscates its reality. When adopted by activist students, according to this rationale, violence provides an alibi to dispense with the more difficult and potentially rewarding task of building alternatives for social change.
This antipathy for concrete alternatives reveals a movement that was perhaps less politically motivated as it was counter-cultural in outlook, even anti-political—a phenomenon that Barbrook and Cameron (1995) held to be the foundation of a “Californian ideology” linking 1960s counterculture to neoliberalism. Arendt’s view on the subject is of course focused on a more limited retrospection: She argues that student activists in her day were unable to see how deeply violence had been woven into the pursuit of science, knowledge, and into the ideological practice of research; and how, at least since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a violence-centric morality was being wielded to manipulate higher ed as a tool of the state. She writes that the student rebellion was ignorant of “the simple fact that technological progress is leading in many instances straight into disaster” (Arendt, 1969: 16). And so, given the field of possibilities as she described it, the choice of using violence to counter violence—whether on the street or the university campus—will only result in a negative outcome: “‘there’s no damn thing you can do that can’t be turned into war’” (Arendt, 1969: 16). As she concludes, “violence, in the shape of war and revolution may appear to constitute the only possible interruption” of violence (Arendt, 1969: 30). And that is very different from a political alternative developed from the sphere of actions, and from building solidarity with working people.
While there is much in Arendt’s thesis to disagree with, the need to connect street-level protest with concrete plans and political alternatives is an important heuristic for present-day challenges. In recent months, comparisons have been made between the student movement of the 1960s and the coalition that formed in response to the Gaza genocide starting in 2024, noting that both resulted in the building of encampments at universities and in violent incriminations against students (‘How the college protests echo history,’ 2024). But we should be careful not to anachronize the present. While force was used by city and state police in both instances, Rümeysa Ozturk’s abduction is manifestly different from the intimidation of Black Power groups in the 1960s and 70s. Likewise, the Trump Administration’s use of economic violence against universities is manifestly different from Charles de Gaulle’s use of repressive force against students. Beyond these comparative points, the universities have witnessed considerable demographic changes among students and professors, which affect both the purpose and outcome of any emergent political movement, as does the shifting emphasis of the left toward equity and identity over justice. Above all, a comparative analysis fails to address phenomena that are unique to the present and thus unimaginable in the 1960s. Consider how the proliferation of AI-generated video, depicting protesters during the 2025 Los Angeles riots in the wake of illegal ICE raids, reveals an entirely new set of questions: who—or what—is performing the labour of violent protest, and to what end?
Figure 2: “Viral fakes on LA protests,” 16/6/2025, video still, YouTube.
Whatever may be said about comparisons, it is certain that Arendt’s work on violence remains valuable not despite but because of her unsympathetic reading of the 1960s student movement. While the movement did not result in a coalition with working people as she had hoped, what it did was reveal the urgency to narrowly situate “violence” as a unique term of political theory. After Arendt, “violence” can now be systematically weighted against adjacent terms like “strength,” “force,” and “authority,” and through this, it can be factored in the articulation of power and its limits (1969: 43). Arendt writes, if “power…stands in need of numbers…violence…relies on implements” (1969: 42). And so, adding to our special issue’s premise—that identifying violence highlights labour, and that identifying labour situates violence—we propose that violence itself be considered an implement or medium of these terms—whether it be considered as a tool, a technology, a structure, or an apparatus.
Violent representations
Our media, whether new or old, emerging, dominant, or residual, are structurally implicated in the presence of violent labour in our economy and in our lives. Popular critiques of media, especially new media, are usually framed in terms of the injuries media are supposed to threaten us with. However, insofar as such popular critiques are theoretical, they are often abstract, resting on a notion of violence disarticulated from concrete things like capitalism and imperialism (Epp, 2023). Theorizing the relationship between violence and media and a particular form of labour—violent labour—imposes a materializing discipline that has the chance to tell us things we didn’t know about our media, and things our theory may have missed. Some examples might be helpful here to illustrate this. In his book The Terrorist’s Dilemma, Jacob Shapiro (2013) describes the challenges of managing violent terror organizations through a reckoning of their need for media to operate. The dilemma in question is this: To maintain close management of their violent labourers, managers of such organizations leave digital and paper trails, including such things as basic communications, identity papers, and payments. What this means is that the more such managers manage, the bigger the noise, the larger the signature the organization leaves to be weakened by counterintelligence. The advantage of Shapiro’s approach is that it reduces violent labour to something mundane, which is very hard to do when it comes to violence; but in the managerial structure of such organizations, most of the work is mundane. As he writes, “the more we can see terrorist groups for what they are—ordinary organizations operating at a tremendous disadvantage—the easier it is to consign them to their proper place in the range of threats to society” (Shapiro, 2013: 271).
Many such examples are raised in our special issue; for instance, Maria Bose’s article ‘Work for Work’s Sake: U.S. Imperial Violence, Industrial Labor, and Post-9/11 Hollywood,’ traces the history of U.S. imperial violence in post-9/11 Hollywood films through a reckoning of how violent labour is represented in films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker. Here, explosive ordnance technical work, or bomb disposal, is represented as a kind of auto repair that invokes blue collar tropes even as the work is complicated by the prospect of being blown up and having a video of this workplace hazard posted to YouTube. The phrase “checking the oil,” used figuratively and literally by the technicians, comes to stand in for the productive confusion of the violent labour of soldiers on the ground, even as it calls forth the reason they might be in Iraq in the first place.
Dylan Calmes takes up film as well in ‘Violent Labour and the Labour of a Violent Genre: Hell or High Water (2016) and the Contemporary Western,’ though in his case the effort is to foreground just how key violent labour is to the Western genre, as well as to highlight the genre’s own violent labours. To this end, Calmes “symptomatically” reads Hell of High Water (2016) for its representation of what Stephanie LeMeneger calls “petromelancholia” (2014), and for its take on the durable presence of, and relations between, oil, family, capital and labour in Westerns. In the end, Calmes makes an argument on behalf of the genre for its affordances, specifically its capacity to help us see, dialectically, how oil, the family, and violent labour (among other things) continue to change in modernity.
Addressing another matter of specific urgency to modernity, Max Haiven takes on the current state of fascism in ‘Towards a Theory of the Playgrom: Deep and Dark Playbor and the Work of Fascism.’ In this speculative paper, Haiven proposes we think through the term “playgrom,” an amalgamation of the terms “pogrom” and “play,” to understand how a playful kind of labour, or “playbour,” informs the practices of the “playfully cruel fascistic violence” of our time. Drawing specifically on Gamergate, the vicious and scandalous 2014-15 anti-feminist swarming campaign that disrupted the video game industry, and the Christchurch white supremacist massacre of 2019, Haiven describes the gamification of violent labour in specific relation to the gamified capitalism that informs our contemporary world.
In ‘Visceral, Abstract: Labors of Looking,’ Mark Simpson addresses visuality and its relationship to violent labour. Here, Simpson takes up two maritime films, Leviathan (2012) and The Forgotten Space (2010), to consider the relationship between labouring violence and mediate violence in the context of commercial fishing and the global shipping industry. At stake are the films’ “materialistic commitments,” which are manifest in their “immersive aesthetics,” the one film immersing us in commercial fishing labour, the other dialectically dilating to offer another point of view (Simpson, this issue). In each case, the modulation of the visceral and the abstract bring the labours of looking into the material, and supposedly immaterial, processes of life in late capitalism.
Materializing media
In different ways, our contributors point to the fact that media studies already draw connections between violent labour and media, just sometimes without using the term. As we have seen from the examples above, the diversity of representations of violence, including especially those that highlight the play between representation and materiality, helps to expose these connections. But there are also attempts to bring together labour, violence, and media in ways that go beyond questions about representation or its limits: Data and lists are understood as instruments for managing armies and revolutions; social media are reckoned for their capacities to organize violent labour on battlefields and to harm through fake news; new and old technologies are critiqued for how they might be weaponized, literally and figuratively, by any number of actors and existing structures.
Figure 3: “Iranian state TV attacked while on air in latest wave of Israeli strikes on Tehran,” 19/6/2025, video still, YouTube.
The theoretical shift in media studies toward materiality, away from representation, helps to frame how violent actors and institutions become dependent on infrastructure and logistics to achieve their goals. In ‘Pulp to Plutonium: Conflict Media and Destructive Dependence,’ Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves note that media infrastructure will often become a target in military efforts to surveil and destroy opposing forces, which often result in interrupting lines of communication. For instance, in the West, audiences are fed considerable amounts of misinformation regarding atrocities like the Gaza genocide (‘Gaza and the Online Left,’ 2025). Meanwhile, IDF bombings, like the one that destroyed the Al-Jalaa building in Gaza City in 2021 and the offices of Ernst & Young, Associated Press, and Al Jazeera, created a precedent in the intervening years for the targeting and indiscriminate killing of journalists inside Gaza—not to mention those providing critical food and medical supplies (‘Destruction of the al-Jalaa building,’ 2021). The overt targeting of media organizations was magnified again with the bombing of Iranian state television on live broadcast during the Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025.
Importantly, in this case and in others, “military strategy is not simply about tactic—it is about infrastructures, about the ability to command flows of materials, bodies, and information” (Packer and Reeves, this issue). In other words, if media is prone to “destructive dependence,” military actors must consider this when developing, enhancing, and acquiring communication systems and materials. Building on Harold Innis’s (2022) examination of the dependency on staples to aid in North American colonial expansion, Packer and Reeves describe how media tools are not simply acquired to build capacity for violence, or to become spectacular targets in war, but that media are integral to “the processes through which war-making apparatuses [are] assembled and then put into action.” Whether through paper production during the American Civil War and the struggle over resources like cotton and pulp, or electro-magnetic communications during WWII, or digital warfare and the demand for rare earth elements in the Congo, Packer and Reeves show how media systems adapt and change to meet the criteria of violence, and indeed how “media systems are ‘in the last instance’ military systems.”
The use of commercial and open-source cloud computing platforms to develop predictive models for war is a case in point, having been open for public debate at least since details surfaced about the U.S.-based Project Maven back in 2018, now abandoned. Although this program, which was the result of a partnership between the U.S. government and Google, has been discontinued, militaries globally continue to adopt machine learning (ML) systems for combat scenarios, and to establish cooperative relationships with private enterprises. The resulting datafication of war through military platformization is explored and critiqued by Andrew Fitzgerald in his article, ‘Death by Data: Abstraction and the Political Economy of Computationally Driven State Violence.’ Fitzpatrick examines how data management has been normalized as a tool for governing populations since at least the early modern period to ensure both the efficiency and productivity of an operation. Normalizing data collection and management, by Fitzpatrick’s account, both gradually and directly informed how present-day violent actors engage in forms of “algorithmic targeting” (Fitzpatrick, this issue), which relies on the use of large datasets for the gathering of intelligence and decision-making about whether to engage in a preemptive attack. The resulting “platformization of the military” (Hoijtink and Planqué-van Hardeveld, 2022) helps to assess the quantity of risk in a particular example, and, increasingly, to identify the target for a distance operation. When the targeting exercises inevitably fail, they tend to be evaluated by the same problematic criteria regarding their ability to achieve results with pinpoint accuracy. Above all, these patterns of use show how data weaponization is maintained through myths of precision, preemptive logic, and a lack of accountability—all instances of abstraction by Fitzpatrick’s account.
Violent images and objects
Research on the violent labour of images offers a further perspective on these abstractions. While some researchers of images choose to highlight the inability of visual studies to critically evaluate such abstractions, others use its foundations as a guide. Serving both populations, Harun Farocki’s (2004) meditation on “operative images” also lies at the center of two concluding articles devoted to aesthetics. Famously, this term describes how images become a component in executing a computational task, which is a framing that departs from the conventional view of images as implicated in questions about meaning and representation.
In ‘How Heavy This Camera: Kinetic Aesthetics and the Mobile Camera,’ Owen Lyons develops a media-archaeological approach to efforts at motion stabilization for camera equipment, resulting in the development of the Steadicam in the 1970s. Popularized by canonical takes in Rocky (1975), Lyons describes how motion stabilizer capability emerged years before as a subject of military research, which led to the development of tracking systems for various ordnance and communication platforms, as well as drones. The coincidence of these developments with adjacent innovations in camera equipment designed for cinematic productions resulted in a “stabilized tracking camera system” (Lyons, this issue). This system has diverse applications, from worldbuilding for action movies to documenting large sporting events to establishing patterns for image generators—each more disconnected from the work of the camera operator than the last. By troubling a linear path from the Steadicam of the 1970s to the proliferation of a “stabilized and smooth virtual viewpoint”—which signals the dominance of operational images that are both deterministic and predictive by design—Lyons employs media archaeology to probe the relationship between operational images and their representations—both in wartime and its movies.
In ‘Commercial-off-the-shelf: The Re-aestheticization of Operational Drone Videos During Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on Social Media’, Francis Hunger continues this debate about how operational images gain the capacity to mediate violence in theatres both of war and entertainment. Specifically, Hunger examines the “residues” (Hunger, this issue) of discarded operational images in the Ukrainian drone offensive, using a comparative approach that is linked to his own artistic work. In pointing to cases where drone images are re-aestheticized for social media users, Hunger brings questions of representability back to what Lee-Morrison (2015: 202) calls “a construction of the site of engagement”—that is, of images that graphically identify anticipated targets, build a course to navigate through space and time, or use various other operational datapoints to produce a sense of intrigue and drama.
Through developing a taxonomy of images from drones in the Ukrainian theatre, Hunger situates himself at odds with Jussi Parrika’s (2023) recent work, which shows a competing tendency: one where images are fully enmeshed into logistical systems, like thermal sensors and other instruments that help to chart the flight path of a drone through automated assistance. As Hunger suggests, consistent with Parrika’s argument, these more embedded operational images translate reality “into discrete, digital units that can be processed by machines” (Hunger, this issue), resulting in images that are worked upon by invisual means, beyond the capacity of the human eye. Hunger’s point of view, like Lyons’s, calls for a different and perhaps differently embedded framing of operationality as it relates to the visual field. In their own way, both argue that neither category of image lives in isolation from the other.
Conclusion: Human or machine violent labour?
Labour, violence, and media materiality tend to pull conversations back to the antimony between human and machine. Above all, if we accept Arendt’s claim that violence is purely instrumental or requires implements, we need to ask how we can reconcile the very human and embodied category of labour with something like an operational image, or machine learning, or automation.
While this debate is longstanding between competing materialisms, we can consider it here from the vantage of an issue of mounting importance: the use of drones in warfare. We argue that the early scholarship on drones tended to feature and reinforce a human/machine binary. This is so particularly for work that was completed during the 2010-era U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Obama-led campaign—of questionable legality—inspired waves of criticism about how media technologies materialize spaces of extrajudicial killing—like the temporary “kill boxes” (Chamayou, 2013: 52-60) which resulted in the mass murder of innocents despite the precise nature of the technical instruments, as we had been told.
Part of the discussion back then centered on the working conditions of digital battlefields, and on the rise of post-traumatic stress disorder as experienced by remote workers. These conditions were explored in films like Sonia Kennebeck’s (2017) National Bird and Omar Fast’s (2011) 5000 Feet is the Best. On the other side of the equation, the unique difficulty of representing the violence of these campaigns, most notably from the point of view of those who experienced it on the ground, and the challenges of deciphering operational images from drone strike locations was further explored in artistic projects like James Bridle’s (2012) Dronestagram.
Despite the pertinence of these early discussions, it has now become clear that the cultural and political moment of the Obama-led drone war ultimately fueled the moral argument for a discontinuation of the practice: it humanized the problem, as it were. To be clear, while drone attacks are a very human matter involving significant injuries and injustices for all concerned, the exclusive framing of the attacks in human terms fails to make clear the specific relationships at play between violence, labour, and its media technologies. What are the boundaries that exist between labour and the human body in cases where the theatre of war is transposed onto a highly technical field—one that scales the planet with its digital systems and infrastructures? How is a ‘target’ constituted through them? Are the boundaries between human and machine even valid or needed in this example?
Not surprisingly, there is a growing scholarship that addresses these questions (Frantzman, 2021; Schnepf, 2023; Wilcox, 2016). For example, as Katherine Chandler (2020) writes, the main outcome of contemporary drone warfare is a sense of “unmanning” that has significant implications for how we think about humans and machines, and how they relate to each other in this specific matter:
Unmanning is, thus, structured as a denial, both negating and acknowledging what it is not. It emphasizes the political use of the term rather than its psychoanalytic specificity. “Man” is what is undone by the parts of the drone and is, as such, all the more insistently its backdrop. This is not to claim the primacy of human action of the “social,” claims long troubled by science and technology studies. Rather, it is to think about how human negation is made a counterpart of technoscience and what it means for human actions—and politics—to occur in this supposed absence (Chandler, 2020: 8).
By adopting Chandler’s oblique approach, we propose shifting the conversation toward a media-archaeological analysis that can help to situate the discursive alibi regarding ‘surgical strikes’ that animated much of the rhetoric coming out of the Obama Administration. As Derek Gregory (2020) observes in ‘Little Boys and Blue Skies: Drones through Post-Atomic Eyes,’ the desire to accelerate the development of pilotless drones was expressed in the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, when it became clear that the pilots of the Enola Gay had to be better protected from the danger posed by the kind of weapon they were tasked with dropping on the city. As drones developed over the next half century—partly in response to this logistical and existential challenge—the rhetoric of precision weaponry shifted to delivery systems with equal range as the Enola Gay, but with much smaller weapons. Meanwhile, through innovations in GUI, satellite communications, and other technical infrastructure, the pilot’s work became increasingly physically separated from the locations where violence is intended. To repeat Chandler: “‘Man’ is what is undone by the parts of the drone and is, as such, all the more insistently its backdrop” (2020: 8).
On the other side of this debate, the newer and more present-to-mind drone battles between Ukraine and Russia emphasizes a less precise, more indiscriminate form of violence than in the U.S.-led campaigns of the 2010s. Civilian lives and infrastructure aren’t simply collateral damage in this war but the primary target and objective; and the remote actors—those who scale the battlefields in the air with their handheld controllers—are just as closely involved with ground operations. The grit and sweat of the violence worker who populates the Ukrainian theatre is linked at every step with the labouring activity of precision war machines. And yet, while the bridge connecting the points at which the human ends and the machine begins clearly sets a bad precedent for critiquing what is happening—not only in Ukraine but elsewhere in other battle fields—the public debate tends to coalesce around the terrible circumstance of innocent (human) death.
Figure 4: Aerial reconnaissance servicemen of 108th Territorial Defence Brigade in Ukraine ã 2024 Dmytro Smolienko. Permission granted by Nurphoto.
In The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, Matteo Pasquinelli (2023) addresses the relationship between human and machine by opening the book with a description of truck drivers who must now be classified as working in a skilled and technical trade because of the integration of automated technologies. What we assume to be the most manual and mundane forms of labour today have become equally cognitive and immaterial.
The broader aim of Pasquinelli’s book is to advance a social history of artificial intelligence that frames the development of machine automation in the context of “collective knowledge and labour” (2023: 20). This view departs from the corporate view of AI as goal-oriented towards achieving superhuman intelligence with the assuring respite of new labour-saving services; and it departs as well from the theory of technical historians, who situate AI developments in relation to a history of cognition and technical advancement. Pasquinelli further distinguishes his approach from critical AI studies, which, by and large, examines how AI perpetuates discrimination and inequality. For Pasquinelli, this scholarship likewise reinforces a human/machine binary by characterizing the affected subjects as not only as being separated from the process with which AI is engaged, but also harmed by it.
Through proposing a “labour theory of automation” as an analytical term, Pasquinelli demonstrates how machine automation has been closely connected to social practices, labour relations, and the accruing of capital, from the earliest calculating machines designed by Charles Babbage (2023: 49-130) to the neural networks being developed in the most well-funded corporate labs (2023: 131-236). As a critical term, however, the labour theory of automation helps Pasquinelli articulate an alternative vision of artificial intelligence and how to grapple with its influence:
What is at the core of the labour theory of automation is, ultimately, a practice of social autonomy. Technologies can be judged, contested, reappropriated, and reinvented only by moving into the matrix of the social relations that originally constituted them. Alternative technologies should be situated in these social relations, in a way not dissimilar to what cooperative movements have done in the past centuries. But building alternative algorithms does not mean to make them more ethical. For instance, the proposal to hard-code ethical rules into AI and robots appears highly insufficient and incomplete because it does not directly address the broad political function of automation at their core. What is needed is neither techno-solutionism nor techno-pauperism, but instead a culture of invention, design and planning which cares for communities and the collective, and never entirely relinquishes agency and intelligence to automation (2023: 252).
Ending our introduction on Pasquinelli’s argument regarding how media technology rescales the division of human labour could be an excellent opener to this special issue. As he writes, “it is not difficult to see AI nowadays as a further centralization of digital society and the orchestration of the division of labour throughout society” (Pasquinelli, 2023: 6). Missing, however, is a sustained examination of its violence.
Contributors to this issue were encouraged to propose submissions that take an expansive approach to the productive intersections between labour, media, and violence, and to push the boundaries of how we understand their entangled past, present, and possible futures. We hope that our special issue will contribute to ongoing conversations in academia and beyond about how violent labour is implicated in the production and reproduction of some of our most pressing problems, and how thinking through violent labour specifically as labour might help us discover new ways to address these problems, even as media guarantee an ever-evolving context for such interventions.
References
Amoore, L. (2009) ‘Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror,’ Antipode 41(1): 49-69.
Arendt, H. (1969) On Violence. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barbrook, R., and A. Cameron (1995) ‘The Californian Ideology,’ Science as Culture 6(1): 44–72.
Chamayou, G. (2013) A Theory of the Drone. New York: The New Press.
Chandler, K. (2020) Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Dean, J. (2009) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
‘Destruction of the al-Jalaa building’ (2021) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_al-Jalaa_building
Ellcessor, E. (2022) In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality. New York: NYU Press.
Epp, M. (2023) Violent Labor. Victoria: LeanPub.
Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Fast, O., dir. (2011) 5000 Feet is the Best.
Farocki, H. (2004) ‘Phantom Images,’ Public (29): 12–22.
Frantzman, S.J. (2021) Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future. New York: Post Hill Press.
Ganguly, D. (2024) ‘Drone Form and Techno-Futurities,’ New Literary History 54(4): 1487-1514.
‘Gaza and the Online Left’ (2025) Emperor No Clothes, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H71IgsK_-0
Gillespie, T. (2021) Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions and Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gregory, D. (2020) ‘Little Boys and Blue Skies: Drones through Post-Atomic Eyes,’ in C. Lauzon and J. O’Brian (eds.) Through Post-Atomic Eyes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press.
Hochschild, A.R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Oakland: The University of California Press.
Hoijtink, M. and A. Planqué-van Hardeveld (2022) ‘Machine Learning and the Platformization of the Military: A Study of Google’s Machine Learning Platform TensorFlow,’ International Political Sociology 16(2): olab036.
‘How the college protests echo history’ (2024) NPR, April 29. Available at: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1198911364 (Accessed: June 27 2025).
Innis, H.A. (2022) Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jensen, B. M., C. Whyte and S. Cuomo (2022) Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Карпчук, H. and Ю Макар (2023) ‘Practice of “Embedded Journalism” in Ukraine,’ Медіафорум 12(1): 191-204.
Kennebeck, S., dir. (2016) National Bird.
Lee-Morrison, L. (2021) ‘Drone,’ in N.B. Thylstrup (ed.) Uncertain Archives—Critical Keywords for Big Data. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, chapter 17.
LeMenager, S. (2014) Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lovink, G. (2019) Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism. London: Pluto Press.
Mearsheimer, J. & S. Walt (2007) The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
‘“No Secret Police”: Lawmakers propose prohibiting masked agents’ (2025) USA Today, June 20. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/20/lawmakers-propose-banning-ice-from-wearing-masks/84283979007/ (Accessed: June 24, 2025).
Ozturk, R., F. Rhaman, G. Perez and N. Ambeliotis (2024) ‘Op-ed: Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions,’ The Tufts Daily, 4 March. Available at: https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Packer, J. and J. Reeves (2020) Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Parks, L., J. Velkova and S. de Ridder, eds. (2023) Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Pasquinelli, M. (2023) The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London: Verso.
Parikka, J. (2023) Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pérez-Escolar, M., and J.M. Noguera-Vivo, eds. (2022) Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society. New York: Routledge.
Risewieck, M. and H. Block, dirs. (2018) The Cleaners.
Schnepf, J.D. (2023) ‘Military Technologies and Human Labor,’ American Literature
(95)2: 351–363.
Seigel, M. (2018) Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shapiro, J (2013) The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sorel, G. (1912) Reflections on Violence. Paris: Marcel Rivière et Cie.
Vogler, C. and P. Markell (2003) ‘Introduction: Violence, Redemption, and the Liberal Imagination,’ Public Culture 15(1): 41-54.
Wilcox, L. (2016) ‘Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare,’ Security Dialogue 48(1): 11-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010616657947
Joshua Synenko is Associate Professor of Media and Culture in the Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University, where he also serves as Director of the Cultural Studies MA and PhD programs. He is Co-Editor of Media Theory, and Corresponding Editor of Canadian Review in Comparative Literature. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS). Synenko’s published work explores relationships between cities, mobility, memory, and media; cinema and geography; and exchanges between practice-based research and artistic research. He is currently under contract with Concordia University Press to write a monograph, Experimental Technologies: Reframing Locative Media’s Artistic Past.
Email: joshuasynenko@trentu.ca
Michael H. Epp is a Professor in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University. His research focuses on representations of violent labour in the United States and Ireland.
Email: michaelepp@trentu.ca
Conflicts of interest
None declared
Funding
None declared
Article history
Article submitted: 24/6/2025
Date of original decision: 24/6/2025
Revised article submitted: 29/6/2025
Article accepted: 30/6/2025
Leave a Reply