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As anthropologists of the state have shown, states produce powerful effects, but they are always made up, in the end, by public and private institutions and ultimately individuals who are motivated by a range of discursive and economic interests. While the capitalist system I discuss is certainly supported by state capital and mandated by central state authorities such as Xi Jinping and Chen Quanguo, the forms of terror it produces are largely carried out by private technology companies, coupled with privately contracted policing technicians, Aid Xinjiang “volunteers,” and other Han settlers. These institutionalized agents act on behalf of the state and their own economic interests in dispossessing Uyghurs and building and maintaining the security systems that restrict Uyghur freedom to move and live. Many of the security and intelligence workers in this space are employees of state-owned enterprises or private technology or security companies and are motivated in large part by economic incentives, not directly by state power. … these state proxies are often primarily interested in creating a better life for themselves and their families rather than strictly political motivations.

— Terror Capitalism by Darren Byler

Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles clearly reveal that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death.

— We are many by Margaret Killjoy, Kate Khatib, Mike McGuire

In general, the Scandinavian countries did not have the necessary military power and administrative capacity to establish and operate their own colonies. They had to ride the wave of the great colonial powers in order to enjoy the benefits offered by imperialism.

There was no difference, however, between the Scandinavian countries and the great colonial powers regarding their attitude towards colonialism. European colonialism can be seen as a unifieed whole in which large and small countries played different roles. Some managed territories and opened up markets, others provided capital, built infrastructure, or transported goods to and from the colonies. The Scandinavian countries earned large sums by navigating in the wake of the major colonial powers. The Frederiksstaden district of Copenhagen is full of mansions built with the profits made from the trade in slaves and colonial goods.

— Riding the Wave by Torkil Lauesen

As a result of the history of colonialism and the structures of imperialist exploitation, an “imperial mode of living” developed in the parasite states. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have explained, people in the Global North are born and socialized into this way of life. Their actions and choices are not just made under conditions of their own choosing but also under conditions inherited from the past. The imperial mode of living is normalized in daily acts of production and consumption, so that its violent character and consequences are kept at a distance from those who benefit from it. It is not only the consumption of cheap consumer goods and food; the infrastructure underlying everyday life, in areas such as transport, electricity, heating, and telecommunications, relies heavily on material flows from abroad. People in the Global North draw on these flows, not just because they consider them to be essential to a good life, but because they are dependent on them.

— Riding the Wave by Torkil Lauesen

We might say that the u.s. empire is less like a great military power in the old sense and more like a superbly-armed private mafia for a gated suburb. Its power is very dangerous on a tactical level—like a SWAT team blowing down your front door will really put some concern on your mind—but strategically it is more and more dysfunctional and immobilized.

— The Shape of Things to Come by J. Sakai

in the end, Signal’s encryption didn’t really matter, not when the CIA and NSA owned the underlying operating system and could grab whatever they wanted before encryption or obfuscation algorithms were applied. This flaw went beyond Signal and applied to every type of encryption technology on every type of consumer computer system. Sure, encryption apps might work against low-level opponents when used by a trained army intelligence analyst like Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who had used Tor while stationed in Iraq to monitor forums used by Sunni insurgents without giving away [her] identity. They also might work for someone with a high degree of technical savvy—say, a wily hacker like Julian Assange or a spy like Edward Snowden—who can use Signal and Tor combined with other techniques to effectively cover their tracks from the NSA. But, for the average user, these tools provided a false sense of security and offered the opposite of privacy.

— Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine

in relation to the 1920s (Stalinism in the 1930s was a different matter), it is not obvious that Soviet society was more violent than its tsarist predecessor. Historians often fail to convey how ingrained violence was in late-imperial Russia, evinced in colonial conquest, police repression, counter-insurgency, terrorism by left and right, and anti-Jewish pogroms, extending, too, into more everyday forms of violence, such as practices of samosud (‘self-judgement’), meted out by peasant communities on those who transgressed their norms, to the flogging of prisoners, to beatings in the workplace, child abuse, and wife-beating. At least some of these violent practices diminished under the Soviet regime. Any judgement on this matter, however, depends on how violence—a notoriously slippery and easily expandable concept—is defined. ... The Bolshevik Revolution certainly did not remove poverty and exploitation: indeed it would be decades before the material conditions of life in general surpassed those of the tsarist regime. But we should pause before accepting the view that the Russian Revolution initiated a cycle of escalating violence that inevitably culminated in the gulag.

— Russia in revolution by S. A. Smith

I talked to a guy who used to work for one of these companies. ... And one of their shticks was, “Oh, we’re going to use social media data to figure out if you’re a great credit risk or not.” And people are like, “Oh, are they going to look at my Facebook posts to see whether I’ve been drinking out late on a Saturday night? Is that going to affect my credit score?”

And I can tell you exactly what happened, and why they actually killed that. It’s because with your social media profile, they know your name, they know the names of your friends, and they can tell if you’re black or not. They can tell how wealthy you are, they can tell if you’re a credit risk. That’s the shtick.

And my consistent point of view is that any of these companies should be presumed to be incredibly racist unless presenting you with mountains of evidence otherwise. Anybody that says, “We’re an AI company that’s making smarter loans”: racist. Absolutely, 100 percent.

— Voices from the Valley by Moira Weigel, Ben Tarnoff

One of the gross linguistic anomalies of postcolonial Africa, in fact, is that whole classes of countries are named after the imperial languages they have adopted as their official languages.

This nomenclature essentially reflects the extent of Africa’s political dependence on the ex- colonial languages. Business in government offices, in legislatures and judiciaries in much of the continent is conducted primarily in European languages. Not only is the fundamental law still based on European principles in many African countries, but the laws are expressed primarily in European languages. And in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Senegal, and Gabon, all speeches addressed to the nation are given in the relevant European language. This is quite apart from the educational systems of many African nations that are predicated on the supremacy of European languages as media of instruction, and some of which completely ignore indigenous languages as worthy topics of educational study.

It is in this sense that terms like ‘anglophone’, ‘francophone’, and ‘lusophone’ may be considered appropriate – not because they describe how many people in those regions speak those languages, but because they describe the degree and perhaps nature of the lingo- cultural dependence in the societies concerned. We must remember that Asia too was colonized by Europe; and yet nobody refers to ‘Anglophone Asia’ or ‘Francophone Asia’. The difference between Africa and Asia may lie in the scale of political dependence on the imperial languages, linking them much more firmly to many of the African countries, and their very identities, than to former Asian colonies of European powers.

— The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics by H. Ekkehard Wolff