“Borrowed Palantirs,” my May 2015 essay about virtual border walls, diminishing sovereigns, and social media counter-surveillance, is now available free online thanks to the generosity of publisher Routledge—along with the other piece from Mark Dery and Naief Yeyha’s amazing issue of Review 90 on the theme of Latin America and the Technological Imaginary. Can you build virtual holes in real border walls? A teaser:
Nineteen miles past Donald Judd's permanent sculptural installations in the old west Texas border base of Fort D. A. Russell, just before the conceptual roadside attraction of Prada Marfa, a white blimp shimmers over the bleached-out plains, pointed at Mexico. It is not part of the art.
The blimp does not move. You can see it from miles away, like a trick of the light, a transtemporal UFO. It floats on twin Tedlar® gasbags of helium and air, a 420,000-cubic-foot avionics platform tethered to the ground by a 10,000-foot nylon-and-polyethylene cable.
The Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) is loaded with electronic eyes that sweep the landscape and low-altitude airspace with wide-area surveillance, looking for invaders from the south. “Persistent Border Security,” the Lockheed Martin brochure calls it. The altitude allows electronic penetration of rough topography that ground radar cannot surveil, while being low enough to detect aircraft at levels most military and civilian air monitoring systems miss. The data is displayed on big screens in the windowless control shelter that houses the ground crews and fed to the other commands supported by TARS, including Homeland Security, USSOUTHCOM, and NORAD.
Marfa Sector's tethered aerostat is part of a network that covers the territory from the Florida Keys to southwest Arizona—a component in the virtual border wall Homeland Security is building from repurposed post-9/11 surveillance and battlefield awareness technologies. What started as the Clinton administration's Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS) morphed under Bush into America's Shield and then the Secure Border Initiative, and continues through the Obama administration. The stated objective is “full situational awareness”—border security through omniscience rather than impenetrability, by means of a largely invisible net of surveillance, tracking, and repulsion systems.
In March 2014, Homeland Security announced the installation of fifty futuristic watchtowers along the Arizona border packed with cameras, sensors, and radars that network with existing ground sensors, implementing technology developed and proven as a component of Israeli border controls. Four months earlier, the Border Patrol deployed new tethered dirigibles in the Rio Grande valley, more mobile models developed for the battle-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan that use Lockheed Martin's Persistent Threat Detection System—
an aerostat-based sensor integration architecture designed to support the automated interoperability between tactical/theater surveillance assets and the dissemination of threat data to operational forces to aid interdiction of hostile fires and unconventional threats . . . [that] leverages a wide-area, secure communications backbone for the integration of threat reporting from multiple available sensor assets.
Lockheed's conflation of techno-muscular Pentagon doublespeak with the science-fictional neologisms of Silicon Valley gizmo marketers signals that we are in the territory mapped out by political scientist Wendy Brown, who argues the real purpose of the global boom in border fortifications is to restore the idea of the sovereign in a world where the nation-state is of diminishing coherency and relevance. Noting how ineffective walls are at keeping out transnational criminal networks and other non-state actors, Brown makes a compelling case that the increasing fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border serves primarily to reinforce in the minds of American citizens the idea that the border, and the nation drawn by its politico-legal fictions, really exists.
Borrowed Palantirs, by Christopher Brown
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
Volume 48, Issue 1, 2015
Special Issue: Latin America and the Technological Imaginary in the Digital Age
