Speculative Violence
Description
A theoretically innovative account of the role of generative AI in transforming the political, visual, and imaginative landscape of our contemporary world
The authoritarian Right is using generative AI to blur the boundary between fiction and forecast, anticipating and normalizing acts of colonial destruction. Speculative Violence traces generative AI's ability to shape actions and beliefs in the present by seizing and rendering our imagination of the future through seamless aesthetics. With its signature photorealistic style, AI helps normalize possible worlds rooted in erasure and domination, presenting them as legitimate beneath their glossy synthetic surface.
Media studies scholar Donatella Della Ratta calls this phenomenon speculative violence: a form of harm that doesn't rely on overtly visible brutality but works through polished AI-generated images that make the removal of entire communities seem normal.
The "Gaza Riviera" visuals popularized by President Trump in early 2025 are a stark example: shimmering beaches and luxury resorts presented with no trace of the genocidal erasure such a future would require. Yet these visuals do more than simply imagine a future; they make that world thinkable, acceptable, even desirable, transforming vision itself into a tool of politics.
Drawing on examples from the post-October 7 Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the far right in the US and Europe, Speculative Violence elucidates the function of generative AI in a tech industry where resurgent faith-based narratives intersect with abiding military ambition, showing how AI has become a key tool for fueling authoritarian visions and normalizing exclusionary fantasies.
More details
Person
Donatella Della Ratta is a writer, performer, and curator specializing in networked technologies and generative AI, with a focus on the Arabic speaking world. Currently Associate Professor of Communication at John Cabot University, Rome, she is a former Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Donatella is the author of Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria , and a co-editor of The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self: Exploring Networked Identities . From 2007 to 2013 she served as the Arab world community manager for the international organization Creative Commons. She has curated several international art and film programs, including Syria Off Frame in collaboration with the Luciano Benetton Foundation, Venice, 2015. She is co-founder and board member of SyriaUntold, recipient of the Digital Communities Award at Ars Electronica 2014, and a member of the advisory board of the Cinema Futures initiative at Locarno International Film Festival.
Content
Introduction: A New Politics of Vision
Lays out the book's central argument and introduces generative AI as well as key theoretical terms and tools.
- Gaza Riviera: From Orientalist Fantasy to Synthetic "Ideoshock"
Traces a continuity-both political and visual-between the Zionist and settler-colonial imagination of occupying land and building over it, and contemporary projects like "Gaza Riviera," which present real estate development as peace, prosperity, and stability.
- "Rendering" the Apocalypse: Prophecy and Program, Faith and Frames
Shows how synthetic images operate as preparations for violence, making its outcomes imaginable in advance, paying special attention to the ways generative AI is deployed at the intersection of the tech industry, Christian eschatological beliefs, and military ambition.
- The Future Archive: Is it Really About the Future?
Places AI within a longer history of visual technologies of surveillance and control, tracing continuities with earlier media such as photography while highlighting key breaks introduced by generative systems-especially prompting-which transform archives from records of the past into engines for producing new visual futures.
- Speculative Violence Beyond Israel-Palestine
Frames speculative violence as a global dynamic that extends well beyond Israel-Palestine or traditional conflict zones. It identifies multiple instances in which generative AI is used by far-right movements in Europe and the United States to produce racist, exclusionary, and supremacist visions of the future, including within the MAGA movement and by President Trump himself.
Conclusion: Seeing the Future Before it Sees Us
Warns against dismissing synthetic visuals as mere memes, satire, or "AI slop," argues for the urgent need to develop critical literacy around the visual politics of generative AI-which increasingly functions as a prophetic apparatus for today's techno-authoritarian political projects-and situates the book's argument in relation to the politics of futurity more broadly.