Claire Wilmot is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
The road that leads to the city of Shire, the centre of Ethiopia’s gold rush, is pockmarked and warped. My driver told me the origins of each fissure: a drone strike here, an artillery shell there. He was stationed near Shire during the recent war, as a soldier with the Tigray Defence Forces, the popular army that rose up in 2020. All the seatbelts in his car had been cut off and...
Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather than a problem of desire (or the material conditions that shape desire). The deepfakes proliferating across far-right social media, some of which were printed off and displayed on banners on 13 September, are fascistic dream machines.
If the British government is to be believed, only one civilian has been killed by its armed forces during its air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As part of the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve, Britain has dropped more than 4300 bombs on Iraq and Syria since 2014, many of them in densely populated urban centres, and claims to have killed more than four thousand IS fighters. The US admits that the coalition has killed at least 1437 civilians, though the likely toll is far higher. Airwars, a British civilian casualty research organisation, puts the number between eight and thirteen thousand.
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