Prompt: The Cyborg Manifesto was written within the context of the hard-right turn of the 1980s. But the hard-right turn was one thing; the hard-fascist turn of the late 2010s is another. It’s not the same as Reagan. The presidents of Colombia, Hungary, Brazil, Egypt, India, the United States — we are looking at a new fascist capitalism, which requires reworking the ideas of the early 1980s for them to make sense.

Response: So there are continuities between now and the map I made then, a lot of continuities. But there are also some pretty serious inflection points, particularly when it comes to developments in digital technologies that are playing into the new fascism. Could you say more about those developments? If the public-private dichotomy was old-fashioned in 1980, by 2019 I don’t even know what to call it. We have to try to rebuild some sense of a public. But how can you rebuild a public in the face of nearly total surveillance? And this surveillance doesn’t even have a single center. There is no eye in the sky.


Prompt: Then we have the ongoing enclosure of the commons. Capitalism produces new forms of value and then encloses those forms of value — the digital is an especially good example of that. This involves the monetization of practically everything we do. And it’s not like we are ignorant of this dynamic. We know what’s going on. We just don’t have a clue how to get a grip on it.  One attempt to update the ideas of the Cyborg Manifesto has come from the “xenofeminists” of the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. I believe some of them have described themselves as your “disobedient daughters.” Overstating things, that’s not my feminism.

Response: Why not? I’m not very interested in those discussions, frankly. It’s not what I’m doing. It’s not what makes me vital now. In a moment of ecological urgency, I’m more engaged in questions of multispecies environmental and reproductive justice. Those questions certainly involve issues of digital and robotic and machine cultures, but they aren’t at the center of my attention.


Prompt: What is at the center of my attention are land and water sovereignty struggles, such as those over the Dakota Access Pipeline, over coal mining on the Black Mesa plateau, over extractionism everywhere. My attention is centered on the extermination and extinction crises happening at a worldwide level, on human and nonhuman displacement and homelessness. That’s where my energies are. My feminism is in these other places and corridors.

Response: Do you still think the cyborg is still a useful figure? I think so. The cyborg has turned out to be rather deathless. Cyborgs keep reappearing in my life as well as other people’s lives.  The cyborg remains a wily trickster figure. And, you know, they’re also kind of old-fashioned. They’re hardly up-to-the‑minute. They’re rather klutzy, a bit like R2-D2 or a pacemaker. Maybe the embodied digitality of us now is not especially well captured by the cyborg. So I’m not sure. But, yeah, I think cyborgs are still in the litter. I just think we need a giant bumptious litter whelped by a whole lot of really badass bitches — some of whom are men! Mourning Without Despair You mentioned that your current work is more focused on environmental issues. How are you thinking about the role of technology in mitigating or adapting to climate change — or fighting extractivism and extermination? There is no homogeneous socialist position on this question. I’m very pro-technology, but I belong to a crowd that is quite skeptical of the projects of what we might call the “techno-fix,” in part because of their profound immersion in technocapitalism and their disengagement from communities of practice.  Those communities may need other kinds of technologies than those promised by the techno-fix: different kinds of mortgage instruments, say, or re-engineered water systems. I’m against the kind of techno-fixes that are abstracted from place and tied up with huge amounts of technocapital. This seems to include most geoengineering projects and imaginations.  So when I see massive solar fields and wind farms I feel conflicted, because on the one hand they may be better than fracking in Monterey County — but only maybe. Because I also know where the rare earth minerals required for renewable energy technologies come from and under what conditions. We still aren’t doing the whole supply-chain analysis of our technologies. So I think we have a long way to go in socialist understanding of these matters.


Prompt: One tendency within socialist thought believes that socialists can simply seize capitalist technology and put it to different purposes — that you take the forces of production, build new relations around them, and you’re done. This approach is also associated with a Promethean, even utopian approach to technology. Socialist techno-utopianism has been around forever, but it has its own adherents today, such as those who advocate for “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.” I wonder how you see that particular lineage of socialist thinking about technology.

Response: I think very few people are that simplistic, actually. In various moments we might make proclamations that come down that way. But for most people, our socialisms, and the approaches with which socialists can ally, are richer and more varied.  When you talk to the Indigenous activists of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, for example, they have a complex sense around solar arrays and coal plants and water engineering and art practices and community movements. They have very rich articulated alliances and separations around all of this.  Socialists aren’t the only ones who have been techno-utopian, of course. A far more prominent and more influential strand of techno-utopianism has come from the figures around the Bay Area counterculture associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, in particular Stewart Brand, who went on to play important intellectual and cultural roles in Silicon Valley.


Prompt: They are not friends. They are not allies. I’m avoiding calling them enemies because I’m leaving open the possibility of their being able to learn or change, though I’m not optimistic. I think they occupy the position of the “god trick.” [Eds.: The “god trick” is an idea introduced by Haraway that refers to the traditional view of objectivity as a transcendent “gaze from nowhere.”] I think they are blissed out by their own privileged positions and have no idea what their own positionality in the world really is. And I think they cause a lot of harm, both ideologically and technically.

Response: How so? They get a lot of publicity. They take up a lot of the air in the room.  It’s not that I think they’re horrible people. There should be space for people pushing new technologies. But I don’t see nearly enough attention given to what kinds of technological innovation are really needed to produce viable local and regional energy systems that don’t depend on species-destroying solar farms and wind farms that require giant land grabs in the desert.


Prompt: The kinds of conversations around technology that I think we need are those among folks who know how to write law and policy, folks who know how to do material science, folks who are interested in architecture and park design, and folks who are involved in land struggles and solidarity movements. I want to see us do much savvier scientific, technological, and political thinking with each other, and I want to see it get press. The Stewart Brand types are never going there.  Do you see clear limitations in their worldviews and their politics? They remain remarkably humanist in their orientation, in their cognitive apparatus, and in their vision of the world. They also have an almost Peter Pan quality. They never quite grew up. They say, “If it’s broken, fix it.”  This comes from an incapacity to mourn and an incapacity to be finite. I mean that psychoanalytically: an incapacity to understand that there is no status quo ante, to understand that death and loss are real. Only within that understanding is it possible to open up to a kind of vitality that isn’t double death, that isn’t extermination, and which doesn’t yearn for transcendence, yearn for the fix.

Response: There’s not much mourning with the Stewart Brand types. There’s not much felt loss of the already disappeared, the already dead — the disappeared of Argentina, the disappeared of the caravans, the disappeared of the species that will not come back. You can try to do as much resurrection biology as you want to. But any of the biologists who are actually involved in the work are very clear that there is no resurrection.  You have also been critical of the Anthropocene, as a proposed new geological epoch defined by human influence on the earth. Do you see the idea of the Anthropocene as having similar limitations? I think the Anthropocene framework has been a fertile container for quite a lot, actually. The Anthropocene has turned out to be a rather capacious territory for incorporating people in struggle. There are a lot of interesting collaborations with artists and scientists and activists going on.


Prompt: The main thing that’s too bad about the term is that it perpetuates the misunderstanding that what has happened is a human species act, as if human beings as a species necessarily exterminate every planet we dare to live on. As if we can’t stop our productive and reproductive excesses.  Extractivism and exterminationism are not human species acts. They come from a situated historical conjuncture of about five hundred years in duration that begins with the invention of the plantation and the subsequent modeling of industrial capitalism. It is a situated historical conjuncture that has had devastating effects even while it has created astonishing wealth.  To define this as a human species act affects the way a lot of scientists think about the Anthropocene. My scientist colleagues and friends really do continue to think of it as something human beings can’t stop doing, even while they understand my historical critique and agree with a lot of it.  It’s a little bit like the relativism versus objectivity problem. The old languages have a deep grip. The situated historical way of thinking is not instinctual for Western science, whose offspring are numerous.  Are there alternatives that you think could work better than the Anthropocene? There are plenty of other ways of thinking. Take climate change. Now, climate change is a necessary and essential category. But if you go to the circumpolar North as a Southern scientist wanting to collaborate with Indigenous people on climate change — on questions of changes in the sea ice, for example, or changes in the hunting and subsistence base — the limitations of that category will be profound. That’s because it fails to engage with the Indigenous categories that are actually active on the ground.  There is an Inuktitut word, “sila.” In an Anglophone lexicon, “sila” will be translated as “weather.” But in fact, it’s much more complicated. In the circumpolar North, climate change is a concept that collects a lot of stuff that the Southern scientist won’t understand. So the Southern scientist who wants to collaborate on climate change finds it almost impossible to build a contact zone.

Response: Anyway, there are plenty of other ways of thinking about shared contemporary problems. But they require building contact zones between cognitive apparatuses, out of which neither will leave the same as they were before. These are the kinds of encounters that need to be happening more. A final question. Have you been following the revival of socialism, and socialist feminism, over the past few years?  Yes.


Prompt: What do you make of it? I mean, socialist feminism is becoming so mainstream that even Harper’s Bazaar is running essays on “emotional labor.” I’m really pleased! The old lady is happy. I like the resurgence of socialism. For all the horror of Trump, it has released us. A whole lot of things are now being seriously considered, including mass nonviolent social resistance. So I am not in a state of cynicism or despair.

Response: Though you’re currently an artist and professor, you were originally trained as a water engineer. What does that mean? My first degree was in environmental engineering and I specialized in water, particularly stormwater. This is an area of engineering concerned with how cities, roads, and landscapes are designed to deal with runoff and water flows. It’s an area that overlaps with hydrology, which is the study of how water interacts with the environment — how we model and predict rainfall and what it’s going to do on the ground. It also overlaps with urban design, because obviously a road is not just a thing for cars to drive on, but also a mechanism to manage water flows in a storm.  Every gutter or drain or pipe is the materialization of a process of data collection, estimation, and modeling and is therefore a wager on environmental variability. How much water might fall? How often? And what is the biggest or smallest rain event the system must be able to deal with? I was involved in designing those sorts of systems.  Towards the end of my time working in that industry in Australia, I was in an area of environmental engineering called “water-sensitive urban design” where we were trying to design living systems to improve water quality. Specifically, we were working on improving the composition and quality of stormwater that flowed from housing developments to rivers or oceans downstream. Instead of designing a pollutant trap made out of concrete, we would try to imitate how a natural watershed would work and design a wetland so that stormwater would flow through it and hang out there for a few days before flowing into a creek. In this way, the water would both get filtered and support wildlife and plant growth along the way.


Prompt: How did you go from doing that engineering work to making art? There’s license in the arts to question very normative assumptions. The engineering approach of designing infrastructures as living systems does still give me hope for how we might rethink human systems more broadly. But I continue to feel quite frustrated with the way that engineering as a discipline tends to frame problems as technical challenges. You’re supposed to scope out the political and social forces that are causing an environmental problem, and just slap a technical fix on the end of it. Even the work I was doing — that really nice, innovative, environmental work — was facilitating terrible housing developments full of huge McMansions. It seemed like my job was to make these wildly unsustainable projects just a little bit less bad.  So I started to get more and more interested in different kinds of questions. Like, who and what do we value? What do we think we need in order to have a good life? These weren’t questions we asked as engineers, but they were questions I could ask as an artist.  For example, as an engineer, your goal is to minimize risk to humans living in the environment, and to do this, you have to adhere to regulations such as human health standards. But the cost may be the capacity of other, nonhuman species to live and flourish. At some point, you have to think about how you weigh that cost. We urgently need to expand the definition of human health to also include the fates of other life forms. There was very little room in the space I was working in to explore these assumptions and the cost of designing from a solely human-centric perspective.

Response: Unlearning Engineering “Coin-Operated Wetland” (2011). Image by Alex Davies. Decentering the human feels like a theme throughout your work. One of my earliest pieces was called “Coin-Operated Wetland.” It was an installation that recreated what I was doing as an engineer, but in a gallery space. I built a system where a washing machine was connected to a wetland. The whole installation was a closed system, where the water that was used to wash clothes ultimately ended up in the wetland and then circulated back to the washing machine. What if you show people that there is no downstream? What if you’re confronted with the life forms that are directly impacted by your actions? The night before that show opened, I was incredibly stressed because working with water is so hard! With software-based work, if you get a glitch, you edit the code and even use the mistake to inform the aesthetic of the work. But mistakes in a system involving water can result in, you know, flooding.  Also, in order for a living water treatment system to work, you can’t use disinfectants like chlorine because it will kill all the bacteria and plants. So from a human health perspective, that system didn’t actually comply with health standards and I kept thinking, “Oh my God, someone’s going to put their hand in it and put their hand in their mouth, and I’m going to get sued.” That was the engineer in me, thinking about risk minimization.


Prompt: In the end, the system was actually pretty successful; the plants were happy and, even though the laundry water wasn’t treated to drinking water standards, the T-shirts we put in the laundromat came out looking clean. Of course, it required more maintenance and labor than a washing machine you’d have in your house, and it was less efficient by some measures; we could only do one load per day because that’s the pace at which the plants could consume the water. But if we’re going to shift away from seeing ecosystems strictly as service providers and towards a more negotiated, reciprocal relationship with them, our systems are going to need a little more give. That project was about seeking a balance, and exploring how to build infrastructures that are not optimized for humans alone.

Response: I mean, you’d never be allowed to build something like that as an engineer. The client would sue you.  That balancing act reminds me of something engineer and professor Deb Chachra wrote in one of her newsletters. She wrote, “Sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.” That’s beautiful. Deb also writes about infrastructure as being care at scale, which I think is a nice way to think about it. Could there be a model where infrastructures don’t just care for humans, but also care for the ecosystems where they’re acting? I’m obsessed with water leaks for that reason. If you look at a water pipe at the point where it’s leaking, you usually have these little gardens popping up, all these little ecosystems that are taking advantage of the water supply. There’s been fascinating research published on how leaks from water distribution systems in cities actually recharge groundwater aquifers because most of these systems leak 10 to 30 percent of their water.  Of course, there’s also research going on at MIT and all these engineering schools on how to to develop little autonomous robots that go into the pipes and find the leaks and plug them up. From the perspective of design and engineering, the system is not supposed to be porous; leaks are a problem, an inefficiency. But it actually takes more than just humans to make the city. What about the street trees that depend on those leaks? So then the question becomes: is there a way we can share resources with other species rather than completely monopolizing them? “Unfit Bits” (2015). Image courtesy of Tega Brain.


Prompt: The shift from looking at unintended side effects, of leaks for example, to intentionally surfacing or creating side effects reminds me of your project “Unfit Bits.” You and your collaborator Surya Mattu demonstrate all these ways to “hack” a Fitbit by making it register steps when you’re not actually taking them, such as attaching the Fitbit to a dog’s collar or the wheel of a bicycle. That project is about deliberate subversion — side effects intended by the hacker, but not by the creator of the system being hacked.

Response: I haven’t really thought about leaks and “Unfit Bits” together, but that project is also about the manipulation of infrastructure and the deliberate glitching of a dataset for a different political end. Whether you look at leaks in a water system or leaks in an information system like the Panama Papers or the Snowden leaks, both are about a redistribution of power.  In the context of fitness trackers and employer-provided health and life insurance, the pitch is that tracker data provides an accurate picture of a person’s health. That’s a very political claim, especially in the US where access to insurance is commodified and not universal. As a result, employers are handing over employee fitness data to private insurance companies as part of workplace wellness programs, and some of them even penalize their employees for refusing to wear these trackers. Life insurance companies are using Fitbit data to help determine premiums. You’ve got this very fraught situation where a dataset is playing a critical role in how people get access to essential services.


Prompt: With “Unfit Bits," you author your own dataset and optimize it for what you want rather than being subject to what it says is the objective reality of your life. If you want to see how a system works, look at what the system deems inaccurate or inefficient. Pay attention to what’s called an error. In a water system, it’s a leak. With a Fitbit, it’s anything that doesn’t meet the narrow definition of a step. On the flip side, many gestures that aren’t steps get measured as steps. “Unfit Bits” exploits that.

Response: With both leaks and glitches, you’re poking holes in the idea that systems are perfectly closed and objective. Yes, and it’s also me trying to unlearn an engineering worldview. When you’re trained as an engineer, you’re taught that you’re going to make a system that solves a problem. Very rarely do you get to the point of asking: is the problem we’re solving for the same for everyone? Who gets to decide what qualifies as a problem and what are the tradeoffs in how it is defined? There are these universal ideas of what’s efficient. Well, efficient for whom?  Not looking at the world as an engineer is also about embracing inefficiencies or using them to to tease out what we call success in a system.  Simulation Machines “Asunder” (2019). Image courtesy of Tega Brain.


Prompt: Part of what makes “Unfit Bits” work is the absurdity of putting a Fitbit on a dog collar to convince the device that you ran five miles. Your project “Asunder” also uses absurdity, but to make a point about optimizing the environment. Tell me about that project. It’s basically a simulation machine. Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölén, and I built a computing system to generate fictional geoengineering proposals. The work cycles through publicly available satellite imagery of the world — tiles taken from the Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellites (6 got lost). From that dataset, we chose a series of sites that have gone through significant change over the last thirty to forty years and we show these places using the historic satellite tiles for that site.  From there, our computer generates preposterous scenarios for geoengineering that site, like rerouting a river or recombining the site with another site from across the world. It generates lots of scenarios using a GAN — a machine learning method that uses existing images to generate new images — to stitch the satellite tiles together. You end up with these surreal, dreamlike Landsat tiles that are made up of edited landscapes. Then the system chooses one possibility, analyzes the land use changes in it, and inputs that data into a climate model to estimate how the change would impact the environmental performance of the earth overall.

Response: One of our sites is Silicon Valley. The system generated a geoengineering scenario where it took a lithium mining region in Chile and transplanted it into Silicon Valley. In another scenario, a region in Antarctica is recombined with an area of industrial agriculture in the US Midwest. Using the climate model, the simulation then gradually tries to estimate what that would mean, climate-wise.  The project takes the solutionism that you hear in geoengineering spaces to the most ridiculous extreme possible. These solutions are totally not viable.  I know it’s generating ridiculous scenarios, but I can also imagine the EPA or NASA wanting to do exactly this.  Yeah, and if you look at climate forecasts a hundred years out, there’s a lot of extremely bizarre land use changes that are predicted unless we can drastically change our systems of production. An ice-free Arctic. Agricultural areas shifting to higher latitudes as frozen areas in Russia and Canada thaw. The complete desertification of agricultural areas that are viable today. And if that’s not bad enough, all of the southern wine-growing regions in Europe are predicted to become too dry to support wine production anymore.


Prompt: This is the information that’s coming from the scientific community today. So although the system we built with “Asunder” generates scenarios that feel preposterous, we live at a moment where scientists are predicting an even more catastrophic future.  We’re all trying to assimilate that view of our future. I think anybody who’s done even a little bit of reading on the subject must feel a deep sense of dislocation. The narratives we grew up with around modernity and technology and progress are really at odds with what the science is telling us.  How did you all decide on satellite imagery and machine learning as the mediums for this piece? They’re part of a long tradition. The history of weather prediction is entwined with the history of computation: the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was a military technology developed in the 1940s, and then put to civilian use. One of the use cases was weather prediction; in the 1950s John von Neumann developed the first weather prediction techniques on the ENIAC. So this is a long-running historic project that has produced the knowledge of how we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere and what that means. We wouldn’t be able to understand climate change if we didn’t have these technologies. They have given us a view of the world that would otherwise be impossible.  At the same time, these simulations of the world can make you forget that there are other ways to know. Computing is so seductive that way. It makes you forget that there’s always something the simulation can’t capture. And it turns out that all these decisions have to be made about how the simulation or the model is built, and those all impact the end result.

Response: “Asunder” is also connected with work I’ve been doing in the past year or so around machinic perspectives of environmental systems and what looking at the environment as a computer does. How does it make us see the biosphere, and how does it produce and foreclose certain possibilities? These questions are really important, because we have some urgent environmental challenges to deal with. And this is happening at the exact moment where we also have a surplus of computation. Everyone’s like, “What can we do with all this computation? I know! We can solve climate change and extinction and whatever!” You’ve been making work about the environment, nonhumans, and environmental timescales for a decade. My sense is that the language of “climate crisis” and “extinction events” has recently become mainstream in a way that it wasn’t before. What has it been like to watch that happen? Has it changed how your work is received? It’s a huge relief to see these issues become more widely discussed and to see organizing and activist work happening in the mainstream. We need more of that, and we need our collective action to be more extreme because the political class has decided to leverage denial for their economic gain. There’s no question that we need to be doing everything we can to take power away from those people. It’s horrifying that denial and doubt are being used very strategically by powerful people not only in the US, but also in Australia where I’m from.  I’d love to see much more experimentation around how to reconfigure relations and trouble the human-centeredness of technologies and infrastructures. I’m excited to see more work that takes up what it means to attempt to optimize an environment. So often, we think about data in service of prediction and control as the primary way to encounter an environment. And yet there are so many other ways to know a place.


Prompt: I wanted to start with your first day at camp at Standing Rock. In your book, you write about digging compost holes with an Ojibwe relative and building a kitchen shack with a Palestinian network admin. It seemed like an incredible logistical feat that brought together people from all over. Can you talk about the infrastructure you all built there and what made that convergence possible? My first day at camp was late August 2016, before the dog attacks. We arrived to bring supplies, and we set up camp for about a week. Some of us from our organization, The Red Nation, had to leave, but some of us stayed for a long time. One of our people stayed until the last day when camp was evicted in February 2017.  By and large, the infrastructure of the camp was organized around tribal nations. Our tribe, the Kul Wicasa, or Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, set up our own camp. Next to us was the Ihanktonwan, or Yankton, and next to them was the Oglalas. Then there was the Cheyenne River Sioux camp and then across the Cannonball River, there was the Rosebud Sioux camp. The camp structure took on an organic shape. Later on, other organizations and tribal nations filled in.  Because of the culture of Native people in general, our camping and outdoor life is really well organized. We have a depth of communal knowledge about those subjects. Even though we are colonized and confined to reservations and don’t live the life that we once lived, we still have a seasonal cycle of migration and gathering. Summers are very community-oriented and organized around a kind of camp life, whether it’s Powwows or fairs or Sun Dances or whatever. Then in the winter, we go back to our more settled homes. Camp life at Standing Rock reflected that.

Response: Everything was organized around need, so the first thing that went up were the porta potties. Then came the kitchens, followed by the donation tents where people could get camp supplies they didn’t have. It reflected the traditions of Indigenous people: if you didn’t have enough, you were still taken care of. Many people see Indigenous generosity as a weakness, but it’s one of our strengths.


Prompt: Over a longer period of time, people developed internal political processes, both formal and informal. Not everyone was Lakota or Indigenous, and with that many people sharing space, there had to be some kind of community agreements. There were community councils where non-Indigenous people had a say. The camp infrastructure wasn’t meant to be permanent, but it suited the purpose.

Response: Was there power or Wi-Fi?  No. Or maybe there was for a moment. There was a place called Facebook Hill, which was the only place where you could get good cell phone reception. You would see people up there checking the internet, broadcasting to Facebook or checking email.  I ask because the conventional narrative about other large mobilizations like Occupy or Arab Spring tends to emphasize the role of social media. How do you think about technology, whether within the context of the encampment at Standing Rock or more broadly?  Technology is interesting because its value is socially constructed. For Native nations, technological progress is usually top-down. It’s usually something that’s forced on us. More generally, capitalism as a social process has devastated our communities. It has ensured that we don’t have self-determining authority over the means of production that are located on our land. Take the Navajo Nation: there are all these fracking rigs going up there. The road systems are created as infrastructure for fracking rigs. They’re not infrastructure for the people who live on the land.  My friend, the poet Mark Tilsen, made a joke when we were discussing what the future would look like. I said, “Indigenous peoples aren’t protesting the construction of wind turbines and solar panels on their land.” And he replied, “Yet.” It’s true: regardless of what the technology is, who has the power to decide how it will be implemented and managed? Who will shoulder the burden of the transition away from fossil fuels? Take those electric cars that run on batteries made from rare earth elements — those elements have to come from somewhere. Those wind turbines have to be built on someone’s land.


Prompt: At the same time, I would say that Indigenous ontologies and ways of being are social systems that value different things than settler ontologies, so our technologies look different. Indigenous technology gets cast as primitive, like it may have been useful in the past but no longer has any relevance. But that’s not true. Assembling communal life is in itself a technology.  That dynamic, where technology by default means settler technology or capitalist technology as opposed to Indigenous technology, also operates with the law.

Response: Your book shows that US law is not “the” law but is “settler law,” one of many possible legal frameworks. And one subtext of the book is that settler law is a technology for dispossessing Native nations of their land and replacing Indigenous people with settlers and infrastructure to support settler life. There’s a Lakota concept for this that you describe: Woope Wasicu, or “law of the colonizer.” Can you talk more about that? These are ways that we’re racialized: we’re constructed as not developing socially valuable technologies and we’re constructed as lawless — not having forms of order, or having forms of order that are not legible to the settler state. Erasure is a social technology that makes the taking of our land much easier. It’s done not just at the level of the imagination, but enacted through the law itself.  In my book, I mention this 1823 Supreme Court decision that said that Indigenous people only had occupancy rights to our land — not full title — so settlers who “discovered” our land could legally take it. That ruling was based on the “doctrine of discovery.” The Chief Justice in that case, John Marshall, cited a fifteenth-century papal bull called the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that was used to legally justify Portugal’s claims to land in West Africa. The reasoning was that, just like non-Christians in West Africa were considered “savages” who couldn’t own their own land, we couldn’t have full title to our land because we’re not full humans who exist at the level of civilization — a doctrine decided and standardized, of course, by the colonizing nation.  So settler law comes in to impose itself on ours. And what’s interesting about US settler law is that even though the United States claims to be a democratic republic, it has a very covenant-based government, meaning that it derives its authority from a constitution that hasn’t changed much since it was written. The United States is different from other liberal capitalist democracies in that it came into existence as a capitalist democracy from the get-go. It didn’t evolve from feudalism like democracies did in Europe; it supplanted itself on top of what already existed, in order to destroy what already existed.


Prompt: Consequently, US settlers were one of the first nationalities to define themselves against the people whose labor and resources they depended on, whether it was African slaves or Indigenous land. There are core principles of American identity that revolve around white supremacy, land ownership, xenophobia, anti-Indigenousness, and anti-Blackness. Those principles are ingrained not just in the Constitution, but into the broader social fabric of the United States.  Those principles also helped compose a highly centralized national identity. In response, the multitude of disparate Native nations became centralized into fewer, more unified identities. Our Indianness as a universal identity that we share is always defined against what we are not, and what we are not is a colonizing nation.  Another thread that runs through your book is the extent to which feats of engineering and scientific “progress” literally come at the expense of Native life and land. You write about the Pick-Sloan Plan, which was sold to the non-Native public as an innovative hydroelectric power project. Can you talk more about that? In the name of providing cheap hydroelectricity to settlers and making the prairie bloom through irrigation, the Pick-Sloan Plan called for the construction of five dams along the Missouri River. So between 1946 and 1966, the US Army Corps of Engineers condemned and seized 550 square miles of Native land through eminent domain. The dams also flooded seven Lakota and Dakota reservations and forced thousands of people to relocate from land they had lived on for generations.

Response: Those dams were imposed on us by the US military. Hydroelectric dams have a lot in common with nuclear power plants in terms of how they’re centrally and hierarchically managed, how they produce power, and how they’re ingrained within the military-industrial complex. Hydroelectricity and nuclear energy also both get lumped in as “green” technologies, but I would contrast the impact and management of those particular forms of technology with solar grids and wind turbines, which are very decentralized.


Prompt: If you turn off the hydroelectric dam, the impact is catastrophic. The same goes for a nuclear power plant: if you’re not cooling your nuclear rods, there are disastrous downstream — literally, down the stream — consequences. You need hierarchical management built in, to keep people safe. But the existence of those threats is a manmade crisis that naturalizes and justifies that hierarchy once it’s been created.

Response: On the flip side, solar power and wind power are decentralized. You knock a couple wind turbines off the grid and it doesn’t have any effect. Those are some of the things I think about. And even the fossil fuel industry is thinking about this. They want to recentralize those decentralized green technologies. It’s like the internet: everybody thought it was going to democratize everything, and now it’s been totally privatized and commodified. That’s something we have to fight in this energy transition.


Prompt: Camp Tech It’s hard to talk about the internet without talking about centralization, and also without talking about surveillance. One of the metaphors we have for online surveillance is the panopticon. But the scholar Simone Browne makes the case in her book Dark Matters that the origins of surveillance also lie in the slave ship and the forms of racialized policing that emerged from the plantation. Would you add the reservation to this set of ways of thinking about surveillance? Yeah. I don’t think it’s a competing framework. I think it’s complementary. I’ve been thinking about camps as a technology of surveillance and control, and I would consider reservations to be a kind of camp. In the book, I talk about a few types of camps. There’s the resistance camp — the blockade — which has long been a tactic of Indigenous people. You saw it from the late 1960s through the early 1980s with the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and the Yellow Thunder camp in the Black Hills. You also saw it more recently with Standing Rock and the Unist’ot’en camp in British Columbia. Mauna Kea, where thousands of people are camping to protect a sacred Native site from a billion-dollar telescope, is becoming a resistance camp. We could go on and on.  But there’s also the concentration camp. The US concentration camp originated as a technology of control specifically for Indigenous people. Under Abraham Lincoln, thousands of Dakotas were put in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. In the Southwest in the same period, Navajos were subject to forced marches and imprisonment in camps. And, of course, reservations were and are concentration camps. Russell Means of the American Indian Movement once said, “Pine Ridge is concentration camp #334.” On our tribal IDs, we each have an assigned number that corresponds to our reservation. I’m from Lower Brule so mine is 343. The concentration camp evolved into the apartheid Bantustan system in South Africa. The architects of that system were looking at the reservation system in Canada because they shared an affiliation with the British Crown. So these technologies are co-constitutive.

Response: The last type of camp are what Indigenous activists have called “man camps.” These begin as transient settlements of extractive industry workers who set up in an area temporarily and then leave. They’re the shock troops of capitalism. But what starts as temporary extractive infrastructure eventually becomes permanent outposts.  Could you give an example? My hometown, Chamberlain, South Dakota, used to be called Fort Kiowa. And it was a trading fort, a militarized encampment of primarily men who were killing tons of animals to extract furs. Now, it’s a racist border town. Many people think of the US-Mexico border when they think of border towns, but here I’m talking about the white-dominated settlements bordering Indian reservations that were once man camps and have now become permanent fixtures.  The penetration of capitalism into non-capitalist economies is always accompanied by extreme violence, and it’s not just a process that starts and then ends — it’s ongoing. There was a time when US hunters and soldiers would go out and kill as many buffalo as they could. That was it; that was the whole goal. Miners did the same thing. And now you have man camps of oil workers who go into a region, run the oil extraction machinery, and then leave. These man camps obviously exist to extract resources — whether it’s animals or people or minerals — but they also perform a certain social function: they reorder societies toward the accumulation of capital.  You see this now in the West Bank. Israeli settlers occupy these outposts in order to reshape the landscape and disrupt the social world of the people who were already there. The state deploys the Israeli Defense Forces to protect the settlers and put down Palestinian resistance. Sometimes there are more soldiers than settlers: they’re just there to protect a small sliver of illegal settlement.


Prompt: So those are three technologies of surveillance that we can think about: an Indigenous countersurveillance program of creating resistance camps, the state-sanctioned concentration camp, and the public-private partnership that is the man camp. When I asked the surveillance question, I thought you were going to talk about racist policing around reservations. But it sounds like the policing of Native people also happens in a more informal way through these man camps that pop up around extractive industries on or near Native land. So is the police and prison abolition work you do with The Red Nation also about fighting those extractive industries? The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) issue is a perfect way to talk about carceral abolition work in that context. The activists who developed the MMIW framework were connecting it explicitly to the extractive industries. But there’s also a framing that says the problem is due to a lack of law enforcement as opposed to understanding police as part of the problem. If you read the reports on the MMIW epidemic, the perceptions and actions of law enforcement confirm that, as an institution, the police perpetuate the problem of violence against Indigenous women.

Response: New Mexico has the highest number of MMIW cases in the US. What conditions contribute to that? New Mexico is undergoing an oil boom. Where are these women disappearing? They’re disappearing in border towns. Gallup, New Mexico was once a coal-mining community. Santa Fe was once a place where they bought and sold Native slaves. The same with Albuquerque, which is where I live. These are now permanent border towns where there are high rates of violence against Native women, as well as against LGBTQ and Two-Spirit people [Eds.: This is a Native term for gender-nonconforming people, distinct from the non-Native concept of LGBTQ identity.] In regions where oil and gas is taking off, you see this increased violence. Unfortunately, instead of throwing out the extractive industries, the solution so far has been to go to the police.


Prompt: Let’s bring the surveillance conversation back to Standing Rock. In your book, you write about emails and other documents that came out after camp was evicted, where police and security contractors were discussing counterinsurgency tactics to use against Water Protectors. They were talking about “riot control agents,” aerial surveillance, and infiltrating camp. Did people at camp know this was happening? There’s a naive trust in Facebook, Twitter, our cell phones — all these things we’re socialized to use day-to-day and bring into our intimate lives. Even technologies that are supposed to be encrypted were hacked. We don’t know how they were hacked, but information was getting out.  I think that naive trust is partly because there’s a generational gap between movements today and those of the past that experienced the violence of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that targeted the Black freedom movement, the American Indian Movement, and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. We don’t believe we are under constant surveillance, even though there has never been a point in human history where we are under such constant surveillance.

Response: So those documents weren’t surprising. What we can take from them is how police officers and private security firms like TigerSwan were and are connecting different struggles. We’re often taught to silo our struggles, to say, “This is a Black issue; that’s a Native issue; that’s a Palestinian issue.” But they see it all as one, and we should too. North Dakota state police shared a federal “Field Force Operations” manual that references Ferguson. They are drawing connections among many different issues: violence against migrants crossing the border; the policing, criminalization, and surveillance of Water Protectors at Standing Rock; the dehumanization of Black people in Ferguson and Baltimore. Our adversaries see themselves as participating in a global counterinsurgency war, and we can’t underestimate the power of that alliance. It’s not a secret that Facebook works hand-in-hand with law enforcement.  Our group, The Red Nation, dealt with this when we were planning a protest against the Entrada, a celebration of Spanish reconquest after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that ultimately ended up being abolished by the city. We learned after the protest that the Sante Fe Police Department (SFPD) had issued a sealed warrant — so we never saw it at the time — and that Facebook had turned over all of our communications on Facebook Messenger. As a result, on the day of the action, the SFPD brought in twelve different law enforcement jurisdictions. There was a huge police presence with sniper nests and everything. Eight of our people got arrested. We didn’t find out until later that they had access to our Facebook messages. Most of what was on there was irreverent memes about the cops, but that was a wakeup call. We no longer write anything on our phones or social media that we’re not willing to share in public, no matter how private we think the conversation is.


Prompt: The Red Deal I want to change gears to talk about the Red Deal, The Red Nation’s proposal for climate justice and decolonization. What would you say are the main pillars? Our program is influenced by the divest/reinvest strategies of Standing Rock and the Movement for Black Lives. At Standing Rock, Water Protectors called for divesting from fossil fuel industries. The Movement for Black Lives platform calls for divesting from carceral institutions and reinvesting in the things that people need to live — instead of the things that put us in jail.  The Red Deal focuses on the state itself as opposed to industry because it’s the state that keeps the extractive industries intact. Who else was at the pipeline protests? The police. What allows the criminalization of Native people? The carceral legal apparatus. What prevents colonized nations from throwing off the yoke of US dominance so they can develop? The US military. So demilitarization and carceral abolition are two main pillars of this program. We estimate that divesting from those state institutions would free up about a trillion dollars to reinvest in things like hospitals and healthcare and land that has been destroyed here, as well as in other countries that have been damaged by the US military.

Response: We’re also using the idea of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal, which essentially argues in its legislative text that every social justice issue should become a climate justice issue. Indigenous people have long been the most confrontational arm of the environmental justice movement, but have received the least attention when it comes to actually making policy. The Red Deal says that if we’re going to imagine carbon-free economies and the end of fossil fuels, then we also have to talk about decolonization. How are we going to build wind turbines but not give the land back to Indigenous people? The Red Deal stands for a caretaking economy. If soldiers and the police are caretakers of violence, then we need to contrast those value systems with people who are caretakers of human and nonhuman life. That includes teachers, nurses, counselors, mental health experts. It also includes land defenders and Water Protectors.  We all need water and land and forests to live. But when you walk into a restaurant, who gets a discount? Military and police, who, by the way, tend to be men. That reflects a value system. Caretakers tend to be women, and caretakers of the land tend to be Indigenous. If we look at the anti-protest and anti-BDS laws [Eds.: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement is a Palestinian-led campaign “to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians”] that have gone through state governments, they criminalize caretakers. So that’s what we mean when we talk about investing in a caretaking economy that seeks to live in a correct relation with each other as human beings and nations, as well as a correct relation with the nonhuman world.


Prompt: On the topic of lip service, what do you think of land acknowledgements? I recently came across one on the website of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary that’s spending $900 million to build a “smart city” on the Toronto waterfront. Here’s what I think about land acknowledgements. I ride a bike to work. Imagine I wake up one day and my bike is gone. I’m late for work. Maybe I’m going to get fired and I won’t be able to feed my family, but I’m shit out of luck. And then some guy rolls by on my bike and is like, “Hey. I want to acknowledge that I’m riding your bike. I know it’s really bad that I stole it, but I hope we can work towards reconciliation.” And then he cruises away on my bike!  I guess it’s not that land acknowledgements shouldn’t happen, but they just make me think, “Uh, okay. Great.” But this kind of gesture isn’t limited to land acknowledgements. People often use the language of decolonization when they’re not actually talking about giving back our land. What they’re actually talking about is indigenization. That’s an inclusion framework: let’s include Indigenous people in their own dispossession. Let’s have more Indigenous clergy! Let’s have more Indigenous people in the police, in the military, in the forces that occupy our land! In the vein of concrete questions about Red Deal implementation, I want to ask you about tradeoffs that tribal governments have made over the years. In the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor, a microchip manufacturer that was one of the first major firms in Silicon Valley, built a factory on a Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico with the support of the Navajo Tribal Council.

Response: The one where the workers went on strike for better working conditions and then Fairchild shut it down? Yes. Presumably, the Navajo Tribal Council wanted to bring jobs to the reservation. You’ve written about the tradeoffs that tribal governments navigate in deciding whether to participate in coal production or chip production or even solar power production on Native land. Do you think it’s fair to talk about that within the context of a Red Deal, or do you think the question is more about why tribal governments even have to think about those tradeoffs? There are a lot of examples of this. There’s a Raytheon facility right outside of Farmington, New Mexico on Navajo land, where the workforce is 90 percent Navajo. That facility makes the microchips for the Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. The Alaska Native Corporation employs a lot of the private security forces who work at the child and family detention centers on the US-Mexico border. They also have contracts building what are essentially military bases in the Pacific. The Cherokee Nation has contracts to build State Department facilities in the Green Zone in Baghdad. There’s also a federal law that gives preference to Native businesses for lucrative defense contracts. These are the opportunities we get, and we have to take them because our subsistence economies have been annihilated.


Prompt: People say the Navajo Nation is dependent on coal and oil and gas, but I would actually say that the Southwest is dependent on the Navajo Nation producing coal and oil and gas because no one else wants to do it. No one else will have the generating station on their land because it’s one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country. So Navajo lands have been sacrificed — whether it’s been for coal, oil, and gas, or something like uranium. The same is true of Pueblo lands: the first atomic bomb was created on Pueblo land. And the nuclear waste that resulted was buried in Pueblo sacred sites because US government agencies knew Pueblo people would never tell anyone because they won’t say where their sacred sites are.  The reality is that Native nations have a longstanding intimacy with these kinds of economies, whether it’s nuclear economies or fossil fuel economies. Understanding the historical conditions that force Native nations to participate in these economies is important, but I don’t think it’s a conversation about tradeoffs. It’s about the fact that participating in these economies further entrenches us into the settler-colonial system — not just for our own dispossession, but also the dispossession of other people. The Red Deal presents an alternative: a shift away from the military-industrial complex and these extractive economies.

Response: Does that entail a break from the Green New Deal that wants to see investment in green technologies that are also extractive? For example, you mentioned earlier that rare earth elements have to come from somewhere. How do technologies like lithium ion batteries that power electric vehicles fit into the Red Deal, given that lithium is mined on Indigenous land in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile? This idea that we’re just going to continue the same level of consumption in a different economy is absurd because it requires the ongoing dispossession and subordination of not just Indigenous nations here, but also Third World countries. There are proponents of the Green New Deal that agree with this. We simply have to lower our levels of consumption. As Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs said in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, “The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things.” Many of the revolutions that erupted in the Third World increased consumption levels for the vast majority of those societies because they were under-consuming. To this day, there are many countries that are under-consuming. The United States is not one of those countries. Now, there are a lot of people in this country who are under-consuming, like Native people who live in dire poverty. But, by and large, the average North American middle-class and upper-middle-class person consumes way too much.  I don’t dwell too much on settlers and whether they will ever have an ethical relationship to land. Some of them will turn into fascists — many already have — and some of them will follow us. If we’re decentering whiteness, and we’re decentering settler ontologies, and we’re actually advocating for their abolition, what does that new world look like? What does ending the colonial relation look like?  Ultimately, we’re trying to center what good relations to the land means. Instead of talking about car batteries, I think the real conversation should be: why are we working more than twenty hours per week? Why are there jobs that require air travel? Why don’t we have a universal basic income across the globe so people don’t have to leave their hometowns to find work? How do we end border imperialism so capital doesn’t have an endless supply of cheap labor? Those are some of the things that I’m thinking about.


Prompt: 1/ As we close this issue, COVID-19 case numbers are surging across the European Union, and if they are not yet as high in North America, it seems to be mostly for a lack of tests. Oil prices are plunging, the Dow Jones is plunging, and Ted Cruz is in voluntary self-quarantine. New York State prisoners are making hand sanitizer for $0.65 per hour. Passengers are disembarking from the Diamond Princess into the Port of Oakland.

Response: For months, prominent figures in the tech industry have been warning that it will get worse before it gets better. In February, Recode reported that the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz was already on high alert, canceling employee travel to China and banning handshakes in the office. In early March, Sequoia Capital wrote a memo warning partners that coronavirus would be the “black swan” of 2020; they urged startups to prepare for leaner times.


Prompt: On Twitter, one “founder coach and angel investor” surmised that “people in Silicon Valley were taking #COVID19 more seriously than other parts of the US including NYC” because “SV understands the power of network effects and exponential growth.” "Congrats Silicon Valley you took a math class," a tech journalist turned venture capitalist swiped back.  Everyone was on edge.

Response: The exponential growth in tweets about exponential growth was easy to make fun of, combining, as it did, several stereotypes. The prepper engineer stocking Soylent. The billionaire in his New Zealand bunker. The thought leader inclined to consider himself an expert and therefore obliged to opine on everything, since everything is, or can be made into a source of, data. And yet. There was something to what the Founder Coach and Angel Investor said.  To tell a good horror story, it is not enough to imagine some freak occurrence. You have to find what is frightening about what is ordinary—or, more precisely, ordinarily desired. A large home with a pool, backyard, and picture windows. A movie star husband. A beach vacation. A hot shower after a long drive. The very thing you wanted must turn deadly. Otherwise, you could just walk away.  The pacing of the unfolding pandemic has more in common with a conspiracy theory than with a slasher flick. Its mode is twitchy simultaneity rather than the drumbeat of a killer closing in. Now our victim is in Wuhan. Now in Bergamo. Now New York. The villain is invisible and everywhere.  But as the coronavirus spread all over the world, the tech industry watched the properties that it usually thinks of as strengths turn into vulnerabilities. Disruption was rampant. The same transportation networks, and supply chains, that had turned second-tier cities into “furnaces” fueling global just-in-time production suddenly became vectors for infection. The same networks that could be used to track cases, and disseminate information, were promoting dangerous lies. What we are watching, at time of writing, from home, is hockey-stick growth, but for sickness and death.


Prompt: 2/ Viral, we call content that spreads quickly by means of preexisting bodies and behaviors. A virus takes our tendencies to make new cells, or touch one another, or share a laugh, and turns them to its own sole purpose: self-propagation. What makes something catch on is a subject of much speculation. What is clear is that some dangers cannot be confronted without considering the ways that the entire system they imperil works.  This issue will explore forms of security and insecurity that arise as digital technologies enter new realms of existence—and how stubbornly these two terms intertwine.

Response: In one sense, the dynamics that it explores are not new. The rise of capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided some insurance against the whims of, say, the weather. Labor markets promised to free workers from physical coercion: rather than toiling on the particular piece of land where you happened to have been born, or where some lord put a sword to your head and told you, Toil!, you could choose where to go work where you wanted, for a wage.  And yet, in order to get most people to work for wages at all, those in power had to produce widespread insecurity. By turning life’s necessities into commodities that had to be bought and sold on a market, they made it impossible for most people to survive any other way. Digital technologies have only intensified this dynamic. To access information—a matter of survival in a pandemic—we rely on the platforms. If you want to get information about what the pandemic means for your kid’s school, you will likely have to join Facebook.  The current crisis has brought us back to these founding facts of capitalism as a world system. The market mediates our every move, and binds us, through countless threads of interdependence, to everyone else. Nothing like shortages of toilet paper to highlight how few of us would be capable of single-handedly reproducing the conditions of our lives.


Prompt: At the same time, technologies designed to make some people and property more secure create new vulnerabilities. Machine learning algorithms used to plant, water, and harvest miles of crops at the optimal times can be hacked; a software bug or glitch can now cause a famine. Wireless technologies allow the lender that has loaned you the money to buy the car you need to drive to work to remotely disable that car if you should fall behind on monthly payments.  Securing one man’s loan can endanger another man’s livelihood or life—or both, should the remote disabling, for instance, happen while you drive to work on the freeway. And so, when we talk about security, we always have to ask: Secure from what? Secure for whom? 3/ You can use a baseball bat to play a game or break a window; you can set a table, or kill your hostess, in the parlor, with a candlestick.  Any tool can be abused, and if we have learned anything in the years since Gamergate and the 2016 presidential election, it is that some systems are most dangerous when they are being used as they were designed to be. The same features that make it possible for social networks to produce “cognitive surplus” and new social movements also produce misinformation and harassment.

Response: The authors in this issue explore how the very same products and design features that are supposed to make some secure make others less so. Code designed to let you prove that You are not a robot will not make you safer if you are vision impaired and need your phone to play the code aloud every time you log in. Privately owned surveillance cameras, whose footage is constantly scanned by proprietary facial recognition software, are unlikely to make all the residents of a city safer.  As one activist interviewed in these pages puts it: Feeling watched is not the same as feeling seen.  4/ It is taking too long to write this. We can hardly keep up with our push notifications.  As we close this issue, deaths in Italy surpassed deaths in China; the number of confirmed cases in the United States passed 30,000, still with a dearth of tests; California sheltered in place; at least hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs, applying en masse to a safety net that is not ready for the load, and at least two senators were found to have sold millions of dollars in stock after attending a closed door coronavirus briefing, and then lied to the public about the severity of the coming crisis. It is probably too much to hope that they do not sleep soundly. Their colleague Rand Paul became the first senator to test positive for coronavirus; he is not likely to be the last.Meanwhile, powerful tech firms are finding ways to play the situation to their advantage. The alerts continue: Amazon has announced that they will hire 100,000 more workers to meet skyrocketing demand for “contactless delivery,” as their competitor businesses stand empty or close down. Palantir and Clearview AI are making bids to sell software to surveil infected people and their networks to the state; Facebook and Google are offering to use the track-location function in their apps to do the same. In China, the pandemic has intensified, and legitimated, expansive government control. The tools that are making it possible for millions of Americans to learn and work remotely are also creating new opportunities for both public and private entities to do the same. School-issued computers come with spyware installed; Zoom video conferencing software allows the boss to track “attendee attention” or drop in at any time.


Prompt: 5/ What would it take to turn this emergency inside out?An emergency produces opportunities for solidarity as well as selfishness. A pandemic does this in particular. To the idiots buying five bottles of soap, one viral tweet admonished, it doesn’t matter how many times you wash your hands if your neighbors cannot wash theirs. Our present situation highlights, with particular starkness, that nobody can be secure alone.Ancient philosophers argued that care or worry, cura, was the defining feature of human life. The state of being sine cura—“without” or free from it—was, at best, fleeting. On the other hand, care or worry is also the origin of curiosity.  This issue proposes that the concept of security can still hold the same ambivalence and cautious hopefulness now as it did then. We must care for our neighbors not in spite of but because of our common vulnerabilities. (In Toledo, Ohio dozens of volunteers have begun sewing fabric masks for local doctors and nurses already running out of them.) As the social contagion of panic spreads, we hope this idea catches on, too: that the very same fears pushing millions of people into isolation can also draw us outward, binding us more firmly to the world and one another.

Response: Long before COVID-19 swept the globe, insecurity was already everywhere. Countless people faced housing, health, and food insecurity. Environmental insecurity was rising as changing weather patterns put communities at risk of fires and flooding. Prior to the advent of “social distancing,” we hid behind doors, locks, gates, and border walls, afraid of public space and one another. Online, we fretted over information security, devising passwords to access passwords, fearful we might be hacked or exposed. We were insecure at our jobs, in our homes, in our relationships, and on social media. We felt insecure about our very selves.


Prompt: Given the ubiquity of insecurity, it may seem surprising that, only a few centuries ago, the word didn’t even exist. A uniquely modern concept, insecurity first appeared in the seventeenth century. “Rather than being understood as an unalterable truth intrinsic to the human condition, ‘insecurity’ needs to be understood as the product of very specific historical circumstances,” the political theorist Mark Neocleous observes. Those particular historical circumstances were the rise of capitalism.

Response: Consider the response to the coronavirus. In the United States, the devastation unleashed by this novel and dangerous pathogen has as much to do with economics as epidemiology. When whole sectors of the economy shut down to comply with orders to shelter in place, unemployment soared. Instead of paying workers to stay home to slow down the disease—a sensible, life-saving policy pursued in various ways by some wealthy countries, including Denmark—American officials handed trillions of dollars of public money to the world’s biggest corporations. For the CEOs of these companies, the outbreak is less a crisis than an opportunity. Not only will they receive a staggering no-strings-attached government handout, they’ll also get a more pliable and profitable workforce. Experts estimate that unemployment rates could hit 30 percent, higher than during the Great Depression. When this pandemic passes, millions of people will be even more insecure and exploitable than they were at the outset, and that will not be an accident.


Prompt: Capitalism is an insecurity machine, though we rarely think of it as such. Alongside profits, commodities, and inequality, insecurity is a fundamental output of the system. Neither an incidental byproduct nor a secondary consequence of the concentration of wealth, it is one of capitalism’s essential and enabling creations. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, back when the most advanced machines were weaving cloth and harnessing steam. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” The beneficiaries of this arrangement dubbed it “creative destruction” before rebranding it as “disruption.”  Our economic apparatus, in other words, destabilizes by design: market forces capsize communities and disintegrate old ways of life. Too often, however, we emphasize dramatic shifts, underscoring “great transformations” and systemic crises over comparatively quotidian developments—a temptation we must resist as we face the dual calamity of a global pandemic and an economic downturn. Engineered in order to facilitate exploitation and undermine solidarity, the production of insecurity is a daily phenomenon, its operations so commonplace as to appear banal. It is both physical and psychological: people endure inadequate housing, wages, and healthcare while our culture encourages self-blame and shame for financial hardship, relentlessly exploiting our fears and vulnerabilities. (No advertisement will ever tell us we’re okay and that it is the world that needs changing.)  Of course, people have always lived precarious lives. Long before the industrial revolution, let alone the digital one, human existence was neither easy nor assured. (This partly explains why “security,” unlike “insecurity,” is an ancient concept and aspirational ideal: etymologically, security comes from the Latin securitas, meaning freedom from worry, sine cura, or without care.) In a similar fashion, commerce precedes capitalism; people have long engaged in the propensity to truck, barter, and trade. Capitalism emerges when the possibility of commerce becomes the necessity of competitive production. For that to happen—for market opportunities to become market imperatives—mass insecurity must be imposed and maintained.

Response: Digital technologies provide new channels through which this process can unfold. Social media elevates paid advertising and sensational content, spreading misinformation and confusion, increasing epistemological insecurity. Data brokers create intimate profiles so that we might be better targeted—segmenting us into categories that include “rural and barely making it,” “probably bipolar,” and “gullible elderly”—while companies invest millions into “affect recognition” so they can figure out when we are most persuadable, increasing psychological insecurity. Opaque systems of information collection and predictive analytics facilitate new forms of discrimination and redlining, marking certain populations as criminal threats or directing them into subprime financial services, predatory mortgages, and exploitative rental markets, increasing housing insecurity. Employers monitor and control employees remotely, refusing to offer decent wages and benefits or provide consistent scheduling, increasing job insecurity.


Prompt: Not everyone is made equally insecure by these tools, of course. That is precisely the point. The stability of ownership and investment for some necessarily depends on the destabilization and dispossession of others—and the struggle over housing and labor have always been the epicenters of this conflict. The spaces where we live and where we work are capitalism’s main battlegrounds, and the rise of networked digital technologies have given capital more powerful weapons with which to conquer them—weapons we can be assured will be put to use as we enter a phase of coronavirus-induced uncertainty and volatility.  Whose Streets?  In the summer of 2019, the residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a 718-unit apartment building in Brownsville, Brooklyn, got word that their landlord had plans to install a security system equipped with facial recognition. The devices would control entry to the twin high-rises and monitor all common areas.  The grounds were already covered in cameras. So who or what, exactly, would this new technology be making more secure, the tenants wondered. Contrary to the landlord’s insistence that the devices were a “cool upgrade” that would keep keys out of the hands of the “wrong people,” residents saw them as an unwelcome and unwanted intrusion—and one inextricably linked to a long and troubling history of racism, policing, and gentrification.  The mostly Black and female tenants were alarmed to learn of studies showing that facial recognition often perpetuates pre-existing bias, with software most accurately able to assess men with white skin. They also worried about the collection of sensitive biometric data. “I’m afraid of it being shared with third-party agencies. I’m afraid of it being shared with the police. I’m afraid of it being shared with anyone—advertising companies, just everyone. It’s just very sensitive information that I feel our landlord should not have,” a young woman named Tranae Moran told the Guardian. Another resident, who had called the complex home for fifty-one years, was more blunt: “We do not want to be tagged like animals. We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement.”

Response: One hundred thirty-four tenants filed a formal complaint. By banding together and partnering with lawyers, they thwarted the landlord’s plan and made national news. Their success, however, represents more than a victory for privacy rights or the growing backlash against a particularly problematic technology. (Thanks to the work of activists, the use of facial recognition software by government agencies has been banned in a handful of American cities.) On a deeper level, the tenants identified and resisted one of capitalism’s central dynamics: the fact that security for some is predicated on the insecurity of others.


Prompt: While the landlord never said it directly, the protection of an investment, not the community, drove the adoption of the new camera system. Increased “security” was part of a bid to attract new, more affluent tenants, whose arrival would cause rents and property values to rise, threatening long-time residents with displacement. “He doesn’t want Spanish. He doesn’t want Black. He wants white people to come into the neighborhood,” one tenant put it.  What happened in Brownsville is a variation of an old story, albeit with a high-tech twist. Property investments always involve what geographer Brett Story calls “the coercive scaffolding of enclosure and securitization”—a scaffolding that harkens back to capitalism’s murky origins in the English countryside. During the long and varied period called the enclosure movement, beginning in the twelfth century, wealthy landlords uprooted the peasantry in order to privatize once communal fields and forests, denying them their customary rights to the commons. A contemporary version of this dynamic now plays out in America’s fast-gentrifying cities, where crime is redefined as a threat to the real estate industry’s bottom line. Homeless people are the initial target, cleared off the streets by ordinances that outlaw panhandling or simply sitting on the sidewalk. Casting the poor not as residents deserving of rights but as miscreants on the wrong side of the law justifies their exclusion.

Response: Nowhere is this more apparent, Story argues, than modern-day Detroit, where a coalition of real estate investors, including the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, Dan Gilbert, are pushing forward a “revitalization” effort. As was almost the case in Brownsville, electronic monitoring plays a key role. In Detroit’s downtown Chase Tower, a command center contains dozens of computer screens connected to approximately 1,000 different outdoor cameras surrounding Gilbert’s properties in seven states, which include over 300 in metro Detroit alone. “The camera program is a collaborative effort that includes most of the big downtown property owners, including General Motors, Ilitch Holdings, and Compuware,” Story writes, one that also coordinates closely with local law enforcement agencies. Dangling the prospect of economic growth, real estate moguls are able to redirect public power to private ends: the security guards that Gilbert employs can use force on civilians but are under no legal obligation to read detainees their Miranda rights.  In 1843, a young Marx described security—what he called “the concept of police”—as the “supreme concept” of bourgeois society. Fearful of those they have dispossessed, ruling elites have long utilized state violence to safeguard private assets, criminalizing both poverty and protest in the process. In 2016, Detroit’s public-private surveillance system was used to track Black Lives Matter protesters. That same year, business owners formed a consortium called Project Green Light, which enables them to stream their surveillance footage directly to city police facilities. "Now we don't have just one billionaire (doing it), we have 500 businesses who pitch in and do their own areas," Detroit’s mayor Mike Duggan boasted last spring. Six months later, grassroots opposition successfully blocked the police department from using real-time facial recognition on Green Light’s feeds, though the police continue to use the controversial technology in other ways.


Prompt: Coding the Invisible Hand Ever since Thomas Hobbes portrayed civilized man trading obedience for protection to escape a perilous “state of nature,” security has been central to the liberal political tradition. Government, Adam Smith proclaimed, exists “for the security of property.” Similarly, John Locke insisted that the reason men put “themselves under Government is the Preservation of their Property.” Yet in Locke’s view, not all property deserved to be preserved: he defended the British seizure of Indigenous territory in the Americas. The question, then as now, is who and what is being secured—and at whose expense.

Response: Today, market logic so suffuses the concept of security that the term literally means property, like the security deposit you make before signing a lease or the “securities” owned by the affluent. It was these ironically-named securities that brought down the global economy in 2008. Traders, using algorithms that coded Black borrowers and homeowners as particularly exploitable, gambled with securitized mortgages boasting inflated ratings. At the same time, the multibillion-dollar “lead generation” industry, which uses digital tools to compile and sell lists of prospective online customers, enabled lenders to identify potential subprime borrowers. This process, experts say, “played a critical, but largely invisible, role” in the mortgage crisis. In the end, nine million families saw their homes foreclosed on, wiping out half the collective wealth of Black families nationwide, further devastating deindustrialized cities like Detroit. With a few strokes of a keyboard, modern bankers caused dispossession on a scale that put the landowners of the original enclosure movement to shame.


Prompt: The havoc wrought by the mortgage crisis in turn opened space for new algorithmically enabled land grabs. Invitation Homes, a private equity-backed firm, broke new ground by adopting machine learning systems to assess rental acquisitions, buying up huge swaths of property foreclosed during the subprime crisis on the wager that Americans would be willing to rent suburban houses they could no longer afford to own. Today, one-fourth of single-family rentals belong to institutional investors, which have developed streamlined, smartphone-driven systems to manage them. Digital technology mediates all interactions between tenants and the company, from viewings to lease signings to repairs, inaugurating what scholar Desiree Fields calls the age of the “automated landlord.” (In March 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tasked William Mulrow, a senior director at the private equity giant Blackstone Group, with spearheading the state’s coronavirus economic recovery; Blackstone held a major stake in Invitation Homes until November 2019, when it sold its last shares for a total of around $7 billion.) As Fields has documented, the digital dimensions of this high-tech landgrab go much deeper than a shiny interface. An assemblage of platforms and data analytics drive what the National Rental Home Council, a trade association, describes as “property management at scale.” First, Invitation Home’s proprietary underwriting algorithm determines what properties the company should purchase by considering factors including “neighborhood desirability, proximity to employment centers, transportation corridors, community amenities, construction type, and required ongoing capital needs.” Then networked technology allows investors to oversee large portfolios of far-flung units, with information quickly conveyed to capital markets so that additional money can be raised to expand the enterprise, while regular people who want to purchase a place to live are forced to compete with distant cash-rich investors working at digital speed. Hedge funds are happy to let buildings sit empty, waiting for them to appreciate, while locals pay the price.

Response: Meanwhile, old biases persist and compound even when the platform is cutting-edge. Invitation Homes, for example, targets people of color who lack other housing options while charging them sky-high rates to meet Wall Street’s outsized expectations. In other instances, opaque systems make discrimination difficult to prove. Automated decision-making enshrines socioeconomic disparities in an invisible, technical process, locking certain populations out or including them on predatory terms. One recent study from UC Berkeley found that, among online mortgage applicants, Black and Latinx borrowers paid over five basis points more in interest than white borrowers with similar financial backgrounds.  Racism is encoded in bad datasets and reinforced by the biases of disproportionately white, male, and privileged engineers—a process scholar Ruha Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code.” Recently, the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed new rules that would effectively permit automated discrimination in the housing market, allowing algorithms to exclude and segregate on a landlord or mortgage lender’s behalf, effectively exempting digital technology from civil rights regulations. “It’s going to drive people toward these algorithmic tools, and I think we’ll end up in a marketplace where everyone is taking advantage of this loophole,” Paul Goodman, a housing justice advocate, told Dissent. The powerful may soon be allowed to have computers mark certain populations as “risky” in order to dispossess them, and to do so without risking a lawsuit.


Prompt: All Watched Over by Machines at the Workplace New technologies aren’t just augmenting capitalism’s insecurity-generating tendencies in the spaces that we call home. They are also intensifying those tendencies in the other domain that defines most of our lives: the workplace.  The other night a friend regaled me with stories of working at a Brooklyn café. The place has a vintage and vaguely Parisian aesthetic—decidedly retro and low-tech. There are, of course, regulars, including a medievalist who likes to chat. A few months ago, on a slow day, another barista on duty was exchanging pleasantries with the medievalist when her phone rang: the owner was watching the security camera live-feed from his laptop, and told her to stop being so nice. When I asked my friend how many cameras are installed in the small space, she could identify at least eight, and said there might be more. The charming café is, in fact, a panopticon—the boss can tune in at any time from anywhere, and see from nearly every angle. The workers are always on edge, even when all they want to do is show a bit of kindness to a local eccentric.

Response: As the scholar George Rigakos reminds us in his book Security/Capital, employers have been deploying cameras toward similar ends for decades. In the early 1990s, Rigakos worked at a bakery where the staff regularly took home broken and unsaleable loaves. Management had always looked the other way. But weeks before the business was scheduled to be closed, the owners installed security cameras to catch workers in the act. Lifelong employees were summarily fired, losing their retirement benefits. “The security cameras must have saved the company thousands upon thousands in severance and pension dollars,” Rigakos recounts.  Today, employees no longer need to labor in the same physical space to be surveilled, nor is a human being required to do the surveilling. Instead, isolated and geographically dispersed, workers can be tracked and controlled remotely, whether they are driving for UPS or making deliveries for DoorDash or transcribing material for Rev. By harnessing digital technology, companies are able to offload more risk onto individuals, whom they categorize as independent contractors to bypass minimum wage laws and other protections. A dwindling number of people are entitled to severance or pension dollars in the first place.


Prompt: Work, we are often told, is becoming insecure. In reality, insecurity precedes work, or at least its waged variety. While some claim that insecurity is the inevitable consequence of innovation—the result of the fact that, as labor productivity rises, you need fewer workers to produce the same output—the fact is that people had to be made insecure, literally severed from their land and livelihoods, for capitalist working conditions to be foisted upon them.  Before the wage-earner could emerge as our society’s paradigmatic subject, the persona that we must all embody to survive, the condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wagelessness” had to be imposed via the process of enclosure, after which peasants could no longer provide for themselves. “Capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living,” Denning writes. Contrary to the myth of liberal laissez-faire, employment relations are anything but natural, spontaneous, or freely chosen.

Response: It wasn’t until during the New Deal era that employment became secure, at least for a subset of white men. During the Great Depression, an unlikely assortment of social reformers, radical workers, and “welfare populists” pushed to redefine “security” as a social good guaranteed by the government. "For a long time now people have been saying that perhaps the greatest evil of capitalist industrialism is not its unequal distribution of wealth but the insecurity it brings to the majority of the population,” The New Republic opined in 1935. If capitalism was the problem, the Roosevelt Administration’s solution was a robust welfare state. “Security” became FDR’s rallying cry.


Prompt: In response, business went on the offense, embracing the concept of security in order to redefine it. As historian Jennifer Klein demonstrates in her 2003 book For All These Rights, corporate elites devised a “firm-centered definition” of security “in order to cultivate workers’ loyalty to the company and check the further growth of the welfare state” A full-time job became more than just a paycheck—it was a lifeline to unemployment benefits, retirement funds, and medical care. Inadequate public programs left a gap that employers stepped in to fill; security was offered on an occupational as opposed to universal basis.  The advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s marked the end of this arrangement. Corporate leaders launched a concerted counterattack, breaking unions, reneging on pensions, freezing wages, dodging taxes, and outsourcing jobs. Determined to erode what remains of the New Deal compact, companies today strategically deploy digital technology to shirk their end of the historic bargain. The development of AI-enabled labor-management systems undermine worker rights and safety through a combination of surveillance and predictive analytics, impacting everything from hiring to firing. Bots scan resumes and assess vocal intonation during job interviews, dictating who gets their foot in the door.  On the job, algorithms are harsh taskmasters, ranking and rating workers and automatically setting performance targets. Pickers in Amazon warehouses and shoppers for Instacart scramble to meet the demands of their digital overlords, enduring mental stress, chronic injuries, and even death. Unpredictable algorithmic wage cuts undermine economic stability, but only come after a worker has been lured to a platform with promises of a living wage and “flexible” hours. Meanwhile, workers are kept in the dark, unable to understand or contest the decisions that set the terms of their lives and livelihoods.

Response: For years, wannabe prophets predicted that robots were “coming for our jobs.” That particular forecast, it turns out, has not come to pass. Instead, more and more people effectively have robots for bosses. Aggregating power in the hands of owners, managers, and developers, these digital systems secure profits by disregarding human beings’ need for predictable incomes, schedules, and benefits—for security, in other words. When your supervisor is an algorithm, expect no remorse.	 Shut Down the Machine The powerful have never wanted the masses to be secure, and the current crop of Silicon Valley overlords are hardly innovative in this respect. In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers denounced security as a sin and an insult to God. “Perverse security,” they called it. Today, tech billionaires are busy devising new sophisticated tools to spread insecurity so that they might become tomorrow’s trillionaires.


Prompt: Positioned to profit from mass precarity, they know that “disruption” is not a regrettable pitstop on the road to broadly shared prosperity, but a never-ending process that facilitates exploitation. Companies like Uber and Lyft benefit from the fact that millions of people can’t make ends meet with one job; from the fact that rising housing costs mean a growing number of drivers have no choice but to live in their cars (many rent their vehicles from Uber, essentially turning them into app-controlled sharecroppers); and from the fact that most drivers are ashamed of their predicament, which makes them less likely to stand up for themselves. It’s not a coincidence that homelessness tends to spike wherever the tech industry flourishes. The Bay Area’s tent cities are symbolic of a digital economy that thrives on new forms of enclosure and dispossession.   Looking at capitalism through the lens of insecurity, as opposed to focusing solely on inequality, reminds us that people need more than higher pay; we need peace of mind and an ability to plan ahead. Strong regulations and robust public services are essential in this regard. Newly popular proposals, including national rent control and a homes guarantee that makes affordable housing a universal right, would have a socially transformative effect. In terms of labor rights, AB5, a California law that would classify drivers as employees and not independent contractors, is an encouraging development. Clarifying the employment relationship would help stabilize people’s incomes and lives—which is why Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, and Instacart have committed $110 million to overturn it.  But even if AB5 became federal law, and “independent contractors” were finally recognized as what they are—workers—that wouldn’t be enough. The time has come to decouple security and employment, while also rethinking what security means in an age of ecological crisis and technological possibility. Indeed, the coronavirus outbreak has offered a distressing preview of the sort of upheaval climate change has in store. Overnight, millions of jobs evaporated and countless families were cut off from their medical coverage when they needed it most, laying bare the shortcomings of the New Deal settlement for all to see.

Response: In contrast to the New Deal’s individualistic and firm-centered conception of security, we need to devise a truly socialized security system, one predicated on universality and sustainability and geared toward redistributing not just wealth but risk. The frame of a Green New Deal moves us in this direction by centering collective solutions such as public housing, Medicare For All, and a federal job guarantee. (The multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package passed by Congress in the wake of the pandemic proves we have the money to pay for such policies, if only we can muster the political will.)    Digital technology can and must be redirected to assist the cause—smart machines could help pair patients with physicians and improve their treatment, for instance, not target desperate customers with discriminatory insurance rates. But digital technology must also recede when appropriate. Leftists these days often say we need to decommodify, democratize, and decarbonize various realms of social life; we need to de-digitize many of them as well.  While some technologies—think of the internet service providers we depend on for connectivity and the social media platforms we use to communicate, which have become even more essential to survival as people seek to physically isolate themselves—should be socialized and managed as public utilities, there are other technologies that shouldn’t exist, and plenty of data that shouldn’t be collected. As tech critic Ben Tarnoff has argued, technology employed primarily for social control or to enforce austerity must be abolished, not democratized or socialized. The Atlantic Towers tenants were right—invasive facial recognition systems have no place in our communities—and they proved that popular mobilization can push back on harmful technology. Many more mobilizations will be needed to dismantle insecurity-generating algorithms in all of their forms, from biometric tracking in the workplace to behavioral targeting by advertisers.


Prompt: Human beings will, of course, never be totally secure. The Stoic philosophers who first pondered the concept understood security as a psychological state, a kind of mental serenity that vulnerable, mortal, meaning-seeking creatures rarely feel. Two thousand years later, we live in a world where, though security on an existential level continues to elude us, economic security, or the fulfillment of everyone’s basic needs, is feasible. And yet we inhabit a paradox: a new digital arsenal is being developed to ensure we remain insecure despite the abundance in our midst. Denied the basic resources we need to live, we are forced to seek security through market means—investing in our brands, paying our insurance premiums, and praying that our retirement funds appreciate—while lining the pockets of those most responsible for making us insecure in the first place. Building a more secure world for everyone will be a challenge. But it’s a risk we can’t afford not to take.

Response: In August 2019, Alex Stamos took the stage at the USENIX Security Symposium to deliver the event’s keynote presentation. “I’m a little nervous today,” he began. “This is not my normal crowd.”  Indeed, as a Silicon Valley insider, the former chief security officer of Facebook was not the sort of academic computer security expert who typically delivers the event’s opening talk. After cracking a couple of self-deprecating jokes, Stamos offered what he saw as the reason he was invited to speak: technical security specialists have not kept up with the changing nature of threats stemming from the imbrication of information technology with every aspect of our lives. “It turns out the vast, vast majority of the human harm—of the people who are actually suffering in their lives because of tech—are suffering because of what we term in the industry ‘abuse,’” he said. “Abuse is the technically correct use of the products we build, to cause harm.”  Stamos illustrated his point with a simple diagram. It consisted of a triangle, with a small portion at the top labeled “InfoSec”—short for “information security”—and a large base at the bottom labeled “Abuse.” “The top of the triangle is basically everything that all of us in the room have dedicated our lives to,” he explained. But the bottom of the triangle—“abuse,” in Stamos’s terminology—is a far more prevalent form of technological exploitation. Stamos suggested that traditional security experts, himself included, are ill-prepared to deal with this class of threats. The computer security industry occupies itself with identifying and fixing technical flaws, the kind that hackers might use to gain unauthorized access to the backend of a system. Such work is important, but it leaves aside whole categories of more common dangers to people online.