Capital’s constant transformation has culminated into an ultra-efficient Genocide Machine that locates itself as a site of perpetual conquest and constant resource extraction---that inflicts unending colonial violence and collapses into ecological catastrophe and extinction.

The “Genocide Machine” theory has rattled and revived genocide studies. When PatrickWolfe24writes: “invasion is a structure not an event,” the Genocide Machine is the 1973theoretical assertion supporting this claim. Undoubtedly inspired by anti-colonialism25 and Sartre’s (1968) indictment of the Vietnam War as Genocide,26the theory of the Geno-cide Machines remains a notable contribution to the understanding of colonialism, neoco-lonialism and systematic patterns of degradation and extermination.27“In the aftermath of the Second World War,”Davis and Zannis contend,28“colonialism has absorbed a geno-cide through detached technological means.” They continue to define The Genocide Machine as: An extension of traditional colonialist genocide with new modes of operation. It is character-ized by a pervasive, repressed fear that corrodes the values and sanity of subject peoples and colonial powers alike. This fear acts to advance a super colonialism based entirely on economic considerations which respect no territorial boundaries and victimizes the people of even the great colonial powers.29While we can see shortcomings and strengths to this statement in different times and con-texts, Davis and Zannis recognize the limitations of identity boundaries by including “the people of even the great colonial powers.” The genocide machines recognizes the total character of techno-capitalist development and how genocidal processes are increasingly implicated within industrial and computational technologies. “[C]olonialism has absorbed a genocide through detached technological means,” writes Davis and Zannis, further con-tending that: “Automated technology does the work of maintaining colonial power.”30Think-ing of the study of material cultures, “genocidal values”31have been embedded into technological systems. Achille Mbembe contends that ideas of natural selection are coded into computational technologies, such as algorithms, but specifically applications of genetic and evolutionary algorithms.32Jaques Ellul’s (1954) notion of technique might also approximate these genocidal values. Sharing a psychoanalytical element with Davis and Zannis, Ellul defines technique as “man’s concern to master things by means of reason to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it.”Said differently: “technique is nothing more than means and the ensemble of means.”33Ellul’s exposition of technique resonates with early observations of the Nazi state appar-atus,34but also more recent conversations around automotive warfare and drones that manufacture the “[i]ndustrial production of compartmentalized psyches, immunized against any possibility of reflecting upon their own violence.”35Echoing Ellul, Davis and Zannis’ assertion that “[s]pecialization and bureaucratization …allow the control and administration of a genocidally-oriented system”and remains controlled by “a handful of leaders.”36The level of control exercised by a “handful of leaders” today remains ques-tionable, as highlighted by the World eater hypothesis that views the colonial process as viral and out of control.37Undeniable, however, are the exploitative capabilities created by technology; the dependence, deskilling and reskilling of humans; as well as widespread technophilia that contribute to serious collective psychosocial changes and disorders,38which do not account for the rates of natural resource extraction necessary to create them.39In sum, the concentration of wealth and the spread of industrial, cybernetic and computational technologies40reinforce a structure of conquest organized around a politi-cal economy that, despite its undeniable allure, convenience and (contested) develop-mental benefits, underpins and reinforces ecological catastrophe and climate change. The Genocide Machine recognizes a shift in modality –the economization of extreme coercive power –and locates capitalism or, more acutely, the global techno-capitalist system, as a structure of perpetual conquest. Recognizing the “political economy of gen-ocide”41and genocide-ecocide nexus dynamic within The Genocide Machine, Davis and Zannis advocate for the term “environmental genocide” to be distinguished from “insipid elements of the ecology movement.”42Linking human and environmental factors was the first step towards restoring Lemkin’s vision after post-War international legal negotiations and the “colonial clause” that exempted colonial territories from the Genocide Convention’s protections.43The perpetrators are “mainly a corporate interna-tionalism which must do everything in its power to discourage ‘unstable’ national move-ments that disrupt markets and endanger profits.”44Developing and sustaining structures of capital accumulation and, by extension, natural resources remain essential to the techno-capitalist Genocide Machine that absorbs resources, vitality and now “murder[s] only when they are forced to by resistance.”45Following Hanna Arendt, we might say that the Genocide Machine’s central commonality with the Nazi Holocaust is further institutionalizing and normalizing the “banality of evil,” becoming strategic, as opposed to indiscriminate in its violence. This evil is organized around the fetishization of efficiency, technological development, rule of law, capital accumulation and power. It is organized by leaders and carried out by people that are “neither perverted nor sadistic, [but]were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”46Terrifyingly normal people who in all likelihood are trying to gain social status and material comfort within industrial society.