AI centers born of blood
The union between the military and the economic does not merely carve territories; it shapes ways of thinking and personal futures. Near my hometown in Andalusia, the AI Lab Granada was born from the alliance of Indra, whose work extends across defense programs and border-surveillance systems, Google Cloud, whose infrastructures have been criticized for enabling mass surveillance and warfare, and the local University, which hosts the center and legitimizes it through public research and academic promise. And so, young minds will be shaped by an institution conceived and structured by global corporations whose histories are inseparable from vigilance, control, and the ruthless management of life and death.
Here, students learn data models, cloud architectures, machine-learning tools—yet the instruments themselves carry a lineage of far more predatory uses. The next generations will step into these environments without the protective lens of critique, internalizing the logics of extraction, prediction, and targeting as if they were neutral laws of nature. They move—perhaps unknowingly—closer to the machinery that has long hunted across borders, corridors, cities, and digital skies. Their training becomes a quiet apprenticeship in oblivion.
Even when their work remains fully civil—health, sustainability, civic services—they will have learned to operate within an exposed virtual terrain. Every gesture leaves a trace, every click is indexed, every movement mapped by the technology they are trained to refine. Thus, the University of Granada hosts a paradox: a sanctuary of free thought constructed atop foundations that render true safety impossible. Those who pass through the AI Lab will be skilled, ambitious, and ready for tomorrow—yet that future has been colonized in advance, a landscape where the watchers are never seen and the watched are never safe. A world in which you are both an unwitting member of the hunting party and a potential prey.
Illegal Cross-Border Butterflies
Butterflies do not respect borders; they traverse their own pathways. The Blue Polyommatus Damonides is known worldwide for two populations: one located in Nakhichevan (a western Azerbaijan enclave) and another in the Meghri area of Armenia. The Armenian population was thought to be extinct due to habitat destruction from open-pit mining, but remnants of this species have recently been rediscovered, necessitating strong protection.
Many use plant-derived toxins for defense, making themselves toxic or unpalatable, akin to chemical warfare. The spots on their wings signal this danger to potential enemies. To survive, they create accidental beauty for our eyes. Others mimic these rare color patterns to appear lethal or distasteful.
Another traditional combat tactic used by these insects is camouflage. Some have colors similar to leaves, branches, and other elements of the landscape. When resting, a butterfly often position its wings to cast minimal shadow. A few even distract predators with decoys, such as simulating a false head on their tail to mislead attackers into striking the wrong end. Those that lack these defenses often execute an unpredictable flight, to difficult the catching.
Insect collection, much like wars where AI is employed, involves creating target lists, gathering all possible information about their environment and behavior, and then pinning them. They can be captured passively with traps, some baited with sweet foods, or actively with nets. Ultraviolet light is used for nocturnal bugs. Aspirators capture the smallest ones. Aerial nets catch flying arthropods, while a sweep net is needed for those living among vegetation. Once collected, they are sacrificed for preservation using killing jars or ethanol and water solutions, depending on their type.
The dynamics of human hunting through new inventions often begin by dehumanizing their marks. The drone operators usually called their killings as ‘bug splats’ because that was what they resemble on their screens. In a practice widely used in the past, the enemy is treated as non-human. Each of the "eliminated" has a profile with their data, which first places them on a kill list and then leads to their death. It seems as if they are collecting insects. When people enter certain contested areas, they can easily become targets for states equipped with advanced surveillance tools.
A reality that doesn't get much attention in the news is the so-called trade routes. Historically, these have been linked to armed conflicts: wars, skirmishes, punitive actions, terrorism, etc. This is clearly evident in the case of the Zangezur corridor. In regions like this, coveted by several neighboring powers, small countries tend to appear and disappear; enclaves with strange names that almost no one remembers once they cease to exist (Republic of Mountainous Armenia). We could say that, like a mark on the skin warning of a disease, shifting borders and states controlled by large empires are symptoms of significant commercial interests at play in that part of the world.
Therefore, it is crucial to identify as soon as possible these zones that will become operational fields of technical brutality. Another sign is when, after sudden military incursions, or a full-blown war, there is silence surrounding them. In South Caucasus, many examples of violence have already occurred that barely merited space in the massive flow of information. Even certain instances of ethnic cleansing and destruction of cultural heritage, which in other cases have raised alarms when recorded elsewhere.
The colonization of the future, like any empire, feeds on a curated past—one that is preferred, elevated, even glorified.
So how could we break free? Basal art—work that rejects the eye and ear, leaning instead on smell, taste, touch. Experiences that can’t be archived or repackaged. No energy wasted, no data extracted. This refusal to record, to consume—might is the only way out. We have to get imaginative to respond to a new dawn of the human.