Speculative Violence: The Visual Politics of AI-Powered Authoritarianism
About this ebook
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 war on Gaza 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.
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About the author
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. Della Ratta 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.
