In a landscape saturated with techno-optimism, Carlyn Zwarenstein's 2025 Hinternet Prize-winning essay offers a jarring counter-narrative: the very machines sold as the pinnacle of human progress are the primary engines of modern atrocity. This piece is notable not for its policy prescriptions, but for its unflinching refusal to separate the gleaming promise of the F-35 stealth fighter from the charred reality of its use in Gaza. It forces the reader to confront a disturbing question that most mainstream analysis avoids: is our technological advancement merely a more efficient way to manage our capacity for mass murder?
The Spectacle of War
Zwarenstein opens by grounding the abstract concept of military might in the visceral experience of a civilian living in Toronto. She describes the "terrific scream" of F-35 jets performing at an air show, an event she notes is the "longest-running celebration of flying war machines of its kind in North America." The author's framing is deliberate and devastating; she juxtaposes the family-friendly atmosphere of the event with the lethal reality of the aircraft. "The particularly nasty-looking planes that cause today's screaming and travel at such infernal speeds are Lockheed Martin's F-35A stealth fighter jets," she writes, noting they are piloted by a US demonstration team "so we can see and hear what it's like to be attacked by the latest technology, although in a family-friendly, accessible setting inclusive to all."
This irony is not lost on the author. She points out that while the jet is marketed as a marvel of engineering, its design purpose is explicitly destructive. Citing Air Combat Command, she notes the aircraft is "designed to enable direct attack against the most heavily defended ground targets." Yet, Zwarenstein pushes beyond the official specifications to describe the human cost of these capabilities. She writes that the fighter jet was "developed specifically to achieve military ends such as the destruction of hospitals, the burning alive of journalists, and the serial amputation of children." This stark enumeration of civilian suffering serves as a necessary corrective to the sanitized language of "precision strikes" often used in official briefings.
The article further complicates the narrative by exposing the global supply chain of this violence. It is not just a US product; it is a collaborative effort where "nine countries, including my own, have contributed both research and development and materials to the production of the F-35." Zwarenstein highlights how specific components from Western nations are repurposed for destruction: "The lasers that are used to target Hezbollah rockets, Iranian nuclear facilities, or the tents of starving, multiply-displaced families... are produced by the company Leonardo in Edinburgh." The cables that release bombs are made in Brighton. This global entanglement suggests that the moral rot of these conflicts is not confined to a single battlefield but is woven into the industrial fabric of the West.
The technologies of war have long been tested and perfected abroad... But what is used to massacre malnourished fetuses in their starving mothers' wombs on the way to hospital or in schools-turned-shelters in Gaza won't stay in Gaza.
The Myth of Rational Progress
Zwarenstein then pivots to a critique of the intellectual class that champions technological determinism as a path to peace. She targets a specific cohort of thinkers—Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and various Silicon Valley billionaires—who argue that the Enlightenment and technology have ushered in an era of declining violence. The author dismisses this as a "smug knowledge" that ignores the brutal reality of contemporary geopolitics. "Some of us have been glued to social media for 21 months, observing there in Gaza and the occupied West Bank a collapse of pretences of Western claims to rationalism and science," she observes.
The essay argues that this techno-optimism is not just incorrect but dangerous because it obscures the true nature of the international legal regime. Zwarenstein suggests that the current order is not a shield against chaos but a mechanism of control. "That is, the monstrous barbarism we have been led to believe we can expect specifically from immigration... has been coherently, though selectively and racistly, expressed by Pinker-associates like Dawkins," she writes. She draws a parallel to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, noting how the state of nature is often invoked to justify aggressive foreign policy and xenophobia. The author argues that the "legal regime... constitutes, or constituted, an extremely successful technology linking laws and economies into one increasingly enmeshed system," one that has been cynically broken to facilitate the ongoing violence in Gaza.
Critics might argue that Zwarenstein's dismissal of the Enlightenment's achievements is too sweeping, potentially ignoring genuine gains in human rights and life expectancy in other parts of the world. However, her point is not that progress is impossible, but that the narrative of inevitable progress is a convenient cover for imperial overreach. She notes that for those who missed the historical lessons of Vietnam or COINTELPRO, the current events in Gaza serve as a "sickening awakening" to the continuity of state violence.
The False Dichotomy of War and Innovation
The core of Zwarenstein's argument challenges the assumption that war is a necessary catalyst for technological breakthrough. She dismantles the idea that humanity is either naturally savage or that we require constant conflict to innovate. "It may seem... that technological progress and mass murder are inevitably intertwined, making the idea of perpetual peace through technology appear highly unlikely," she writes, before systematically rejecting this fatalism. She cites the work of historians David Graeber and David Wengrow, who argue that "human societies have taken many forms" and that the view of progress as a linear march from primitive freedom to hierarchical oppression is false.
Zwarenstein emphasizes that innovation often springs from non-military motivations. "In fact they already do, as inventions and innovations and new technologies arise in response to dreams, annoyances, curiosity, grief, solidarity and simple desire to do good, among other motivations." She points out that the concentration of resources in military research is a political choice, not an economic inevitability. "The reason flying cars and other marvels of technology have not materialized is that the ruling class under capitalism is actively withholding resources from investment where it might do some good and shifting it towards warlike and oppressive ends," she argues, echoing Graeber's 2012 lecture.
This section is particularly potent because it reframes the debate from "can we stop war?" to "why do we choose war as our primary R&D engine?" The author suggests that the current trajectory is not a natural law but a result of elite interests. "We should note one attraction of AI for the élites I've described here: by automating decision processes that lead to manifestly unjust decisions, the world's tech bros and the governments letting them get away with it gain plausible deniability," she writes. This insight into the psychological and political utility of automation adds a layer of depth often missing from discussions about artificial intelligence and warfare.
Bottom Line
Zwarenstein's essay is a powerful indictment of the moral complacency that allows advanced technology to be marketed as a force for good while being deployed for mass destruction. Its greatest strength lies in its refusal to accept the separation between the "family fun" of air shows and the "beast mode" of modern warfare. The argument's vulnerability is its reliance on a broad critique of Western rationalism, which may alienate readers who believe in the potential for reform within existing institutions. However, the piece succeeds in forcing a necessary confrontation: until we stop viewing war as the primary engine of innovation, the dream of perpetual peace will remain a fantasy funded by the very machines that threaten to extinguish it.