“How Might Current and Emerging Technologies Best Be Mobilized to Secure Perpetual Peace?”
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Carlyn Zwarenstein is a writer and science journalist based in Toronto, and the author of On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance (2021). She is the winner of the 2025 Hinternet Essay Prize Contest.
1. War machines for family fun
As I write this, typing at my desk in a downtown apartment in my city by the lake, every little while I hear, from outside, an immense noise. It begins more like the feeling of pressure in my ears before resolving into a terrific scream. The sky is then torn by the fighter jets eating the extremely clear blue sky above my building on their way, from one of two international airports, to our annual air show. The longest-running celebration of flying war machines of its kind in North America, for 76 years Toronto’s air show has closed out the summer in my city.
When I was twelve, I stood with my family near the water at the same event on a similarly clear day and watched a pilot plunge to his death in Lake Ontario.1
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, 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. According to Air Combat Command, “The Lightning II is a stealthy, multirole, all weather air-to-air and surface attack fighter. It is designed to enable direct attack against the most heavily defended ground targets.”
This fighter jet incorporates the latest technology, and was, of course, developed specifically to achieve military ends such as the destruction of hospitals, the burning alive of journalists, and the serial amputation of children. It is also, with the large variety of specific innovations it incorporates, intended to lead the US and its allies in their “migration to the net-centric war fighting force of the future”. It is utterly terrifying to imagine this thing tearing through the darkened sky at 1 am, setting residential apartment buildings ablaze. The F-35 is supplied (purchased for billions of dollars by Israel but actually funded by US military aid) by the United States to Israel, the only country in the region to boast such advanced technology. It has been
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