Date: 05.10.2025
Time: 14:00-18:00 CET
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3)
Participation: Attendance is free. If you would be interested to join this research group, please email info@varia.zone with 1-2 sentences introducing yourself and your interest in the topic before the 29th of September.

Continuing the Miscalculating Risk series (Policing Technologies in The Netherlands and Supermarket Surveillance) together with Sanne Stevens, in this session we will focus on the increasing militarisation of everyday practices through their dependence on the Big Tech industry.

Over the past few years the relationship between everyday technology and the industrial military complex has become more apparent, especially in the context of the Israeli army’s technological infrastructure deployment and maintenance.¹ In this session, we will consider the implication of everyday use of tech services provided by companies such as Microsoft, which assist military operations, and look into ways to divest from this continuum.

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s tech imperialism came to the forefront with the suspension of the Outlook email account of an International Criminal Court prosecutor in the Netherlands who was investigating Israel for war crimes.² This event has highlighted that, under the CLOUD Act, all activity can be halted and data can be analysed and monitored by the US government in workplaces and institutions across the EU, where Microsoft services are often in use.³

Furthermore, Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure is hosting audio files of millions of recorded calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.⁴ Through a joint venture with OpenAI, this infrastructure also allows access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, speech-to-text conversion tools, and automatic document analysis tools. The same Microsoft-owned tools and their operational logic are deployed in both civilian and military contexts, from workplaces and institutions to armies.

In this session, we will look more closely into the mechanisms of imperialism and colonisation inherent to Microsoft products and discuss ways to organise in our homes, our work lives, and in institutions, towards divestment from these complicit technologies.

Sanne Stevens (Justice, Equity and Technology Table) is a researcher, trained facilitator and advisor with many years of experience working with civil society organisations and media organisations in field of technology, digital safety and Internet freedom. Sanne is a Table Co-Director in the Justice, Equity and Technology Project.

This series falls under Varia’s Counter-Colonial research thread and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.