"In the month and a half I spent in DC this autumn, advertisements for defense contractors proved unavoidable. Everywhere I looked in the capital, there were promises to make America's globe-spanning killing machine more lethal. The city's Metro is so saturated with these ads, you might think no business had ever considered selling any consumer products. There's no respite to be found aboveground, either."
"Many more are distressingly direct. "Superhuman decisions win wars" reads the copy for the AI-powered workflow software company Onebrief. Some present a high-tech threat, which can act as a jump scare. In the Metro Center station, next to an ad thanking veterans, a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber hovers intimidatingly, its nose pointed directly at the passerby. It's selling Applied Intuition, a self-driving vehicle start-up, which, in small font, pledges to deliver "air combat autonomy-and a decisive advantage-to the warfighter at Silicon Valley speed.""
Washington, D.C., is saturated with defense-contractor advertising across Metro stations and public spaces, promising to make America's global military more lethal. Large campaigns appear everywhere, from a three-story Palantir poster at Gallery Place to oblique L3Harris graphics reading "Red Wolf™ Ready Now." Ads range from explicit claims like Onebrief's "Superhuman decisions win wars" to high-tech imagery such as a B-2 Spirit promoting Applied Intuition's "air combat autonomy." The ubiquity of these messages leads many residents to no longer consciously notice them, which likely numbs public perception of the rhetoric and the real violence of war, presenting militarism as a routine industry.
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]