ALL SALES OF THIS ALBUM ARE DONATED TO THE ALGORITHMIC JUSTICE LEAGUE and this is why:

The tracks on this tape were recorded as a way to process my feelings about not just the war in total but also about the drone program in particular. Most of us are aware of the civilian casualties that included children, the elderly, and attendees of weddings and funerals, and we understand that these deaths were ( and are ) driving radicalization by murdering the loved ones of people who are then incentivized to seek redress at an equal level of callousness. In addition at least one US citizen was assassinated ( executed without trial or any due process ) setting an extremely worrying precedent. These are not the only ways that the drone program threatens the lives of Americans.
The underlying strategy of the program is to eliminate “high-value targets” within the organizations that are designated as threats to national security. This strategy is not new nor does it seem to be effective. It echos a similar strategy that the US military attempted to utilize against the Nazis that many analysts now actually view as counterproductive. This analysis is based on the observation that successful assassination targets were often immediately replaced by other personnel, often ones who’s even more radical and aggressive natures may have been being held in check by the leader who had just been killed. This dynamic appears to be in effect in the present target organizations as well.
In this war the first challenge in implementing this weak strategy is locating the “high-value” individual in a situation characterized by an extreme lack of reliable human intelligence. Most people know that the missiles aboard a Predator drone are called Hellfire missiles but what is less known is that the weaponry is not the most common or the most valuable hardware in play. A drone is basically an empty platform to attach various instrumentation to in order to achieve a goal. Because the mission is to locate an individual most drones are crammed to capacity with an array of cutting edge sensors designed to locate specific people. In this way the longest war in US history has also been a laboratory in which to refine the very technologies that are now being applied to us through an exponentially expanding surveillance system.
In addition many, if not most, of these sensors originate in the private sector. This puts the military in a “black box” situation where they have access to the data generated by these devices but not to the software inside which remained the proprietary intellectual property of the vendor. An example of how this type of “black box” scenario is creeping into our lives is the common experience of a social media platform suddenly changing its behavior in a noticeable way. When we experience this we are usually experiencing the effects of a change in the algorithm that organizes our personalized feed. Often the rationalization for letting unexaminable computer programs make unilateral changes to one of our major avenues of communication is that they provide a service by connecting us with advertising that is tailored to our exclusive needs. I would argue that advertising is worse than useless, as well as being a threat by using emotionally manipulative tactics to divert our individual resources in ways that are not geared towards our survival or well-being.
There are more directly lethal and potentially lethal effects that are the direct result of algorithmic behavior. Consider the role of the unproven and highly questionable ShotSpotter surveillance system in the police shooting death of 13-year-old Chicago resident Adam Toledo in 2021. Or the death of bicyclist Elaine Herzberg in 2018 when, walking her bike across the street, she became the first pedestrian victim of self-driving cars ( which also qualify as drones ).
Of course Customs and Border Patrol also flew a Predator Drone over Minneapolis while its citizens were using the only historically effective form of communication readily available to them. After 20+ years of highly funded development we have to guess that the capacity for gathering and storing information could be at a point where mass identification of whole crowds is possible or at least imminent.
Joy Buolamwini and her organization The Algorithmic Justice League looks to me to be the best place to direct funds in order to get the best informed and most capable and driven talent the support they need. Learn more at: www.ajl.org