Introduction: Digitizing Borders, Cities, and Landscapes
by Winifred R. Poster
p. 111-122
Abstract
This special issue asks what digital state-making means in border zones, cities, and landscapes. As a complement to discussions of such processes in cyberspace and virtual territory, we elaborate by exploring connections to physical territory. Authors provide firsthand accounts from a number of global locations where tech surveillance is especially apparent: the US-Mexico border; the city of Los Angeles; and the Uyghur borderlands of Northwest China. In these contexts, physical territory is important as a crucial linking point between massive databases in the cloud and technical systems on the land. It is where the state can surveil bodies and movements in order to identify them, codify them, and enter their features as data to be used later. This is happening at multiple levels of governance from national, regional, to city departments. And the differential impact on marginalized groups is evident throughout.
Winifred R. Poster is Director of Labor Tech Research Network and teaches at Washington University, St. Louis. Her interests are in digital globalization, labor, and tech activism. Her books are Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centers, edited with Kiran Mirchandani (University of Toronto Press, 2016); Invisible Labor, edited with Marion G. Crain and Miriam A. Cherry (University of California Press, 2016); and Multi-surveillance: Transnational Digital Agency in the Outsourced Services of Indian Call Centers (MIT Press, forthcoming).
Who Is Watched? Racialization of Surveillance Technologies and Practices in the US-Mexico Borderlands
by Josiah Heyman
p. 123-149
Abstract
The US-Mexico border-lands are disproportionately targeted by detection technologies, data tracing, and policing. Such technologies are applied to a population of millions who largely are racialized as Mexican in the United States. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have explored how technologies of classification and applications stemming from them embody important racial divides in their study of apartheid in South Africa. This article moves the examination of racialized technologies from the microscale to the macroscale by looking at the framing of a distinctive region and the people most characteristic of it as a surveillance and enforcement target.
Josiah Heyman is professor of anthropology, Endowed Professor of Border Trade Issues, and director of the University of Texas at El Paso's Center for Inter-American and Border Studies. He is the author of more than 140 scholarly articles, books, book chapters, and essays.
Race, Algorithms, and the Work of Border Enforcement
by Juan De Lara
p. 150-168
Abstract
This article uses border modernization programs, including the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time (AVATAR) and the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet), to examine how race and labor have been central to high-tech border enforcement strategies. While I discuss specific technologies and programs, I am less interested in the machines and much more concerned with the work they allow humans to do. By "work" I mean the epistemic and manual labor that is required to imagine, produce, and use border enforcement technologies. I integrate approaches from critical ethnic studies and geography to broaden how the mostly white fields of STS (science and technology studies) and military studies have treated border-making and enforcement technologies. Consequently, I argue that the machines, data networks, and human agents that constitute the modern border apparatus function as a sociotechnical articulation of the settler-colonial state.
Juan De Lara is associate professor in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity and director of the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies at the University of Southern California.
The Everyday of Future-Avoiding: Administering the Data-Driven Smart City
by Leah Horgan
p. 169-196
Abstract
Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study of data-driven governance in Los Angeles, this study shows that while much is made of using smart, data-driven approaches to make better, more sustainable, and more connected city futures, the everyday practices of data-driven governance are instead wrapped around efforts to prevent unwanted futures. Put another way, while the rhetoric of the smart city promises a utopia of transparency, efficiency, and well-being, the practical application of smart city tools is cast through their opposites: preventing waste, crime, disaster, and so on. Detailing two administrative projects that aim to prevent through prediction—crime prevention and homelessness prevention—this study asks, What does the coupling of prevention logics and predictive analytics do? I suggest that rendering preferable futures by avoiding unwanted ones expands the epistemic infrastructure of the smart city and, with it, reliance on surveillance.
Leah Horgan is a PhD candidate at UC Irvine researching data-driven governance in the smart city and the resultant consequences for civic labor, city living, and the aesthetic contours of the urban.
Producing "Enemy Intelligence": Information Infrastructure and the Smart City in Northwest China
by Darren Byler
p. 197-216
Abstract
Infrastructure power announces the priorities of a state: who and what is authorized to move and act, whose lives and what materials have significance. In the colonial context of the Uyghur region in Northwest China, surveillance systems—checkpoints, cameras, digital forensic tools, and nearly sixty thousand low-level "grid workers"—build forms of infrastructure power that make hidden or resistant populations appear legible, decoded, and editable as "enemy intelligence." Drawing on a recently obtained internal police database of thousands of Chinese-language digital files, ethnographic observations, and interviews with Muslims who recently fled from China to Kazakhstan, this article argues that in this location at the frontier of the neoliberal and illiberal East, a smart city functions in part as a neo-Taylorist assembly line that employs an army of grid workers to produce Muslim enemies and non-Muslim friends.
Darren Byler is an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2022) and In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021).
Author declaration: Parts of this research were supported by a research grant from the Social Science Research Council, as well as research funding from Columbia Global Reports.
The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel (review)
Kimberly Anastácio
p. 217-219
The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom
by Jessa Lingel
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2021, 168 PP.
HARDCOVER, $19.95; E-BOOK, $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-34490-7
Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson (review)
Leah Henrickson
p. 220-221
Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing
by John B. Thompson
POLITY PRESS, 2021, 450 PP.
HARDCOVER, $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-509-54678-7
Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age by Adam Crymble (review)
Katharina Hering
p. 222-224
Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age
by Adam Crymble
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, 2021, 258 PP.
PAPERBACK, $28.00; E-BOOK, $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-252-08569-7, 978-0-252-05260-6
Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work by Michelle Caswell (review)
Bethany Radcliff
p. 225-226
Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work
by Michelle Caswell
ROUTLEDGE, 2021, 142 PP.
HARDBACK, $160.00; E-BOOK, $44.05
ISBN: 978-0-367-42727-6
Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics by Jacob Gaboury (review)
Nabeel Siddiqui
p. 227-228
Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics
by Jacob Gaboury
MIT PRESS, 2021, 312 PP.
HARDCOVER, $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-262-04503-2
Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data ed. by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. (review)
Giulia Taurino
p. 229-230
Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data
edited by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D'Ignazio, and Kristin Veel
MIT PRESS, 2021, 640 PP.
PAPERBACK, $55.00
ISBN: 978-0-262-53988-3
Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era by Tom Roach (review)
Fredrika Thelandersson
p. 231-232
Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era
by Tom Roach
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2021, 222 PP.
HARDCOVER, $95.00; PAPERBACK, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-438-48207-1, 978-1-438-48208-8
The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope by Daniel Greene (review)
Christine T. Wolf
p. 233-234