Abstract Gaza’s “live-streamed genocide” is more than the circulation of images about genocide, but an infrastructure whose foundation is bits. Bitification is introduced as the process of the material transformation of the conditions of existence into digital data whose value to Israel’s settler colonial project become operational, manipulable and discardable. Palestinians and Palestine are continuously disassembled, reassembled, and processed into digital data, whether for purposes of killing or media consumption, in all cases effacing and abstracting that Palestinians are human beings and that Palestine is a real territory. The connections between Israel’s algorithm-dependent warfare and surveillance regime, along with social media algorithms that both suppress and allow Palestinian content, are related through the shared logic and process of bitification.
Helga Tawil-Souri (2025) studied this question.