Borders kill. Projects that count border deaths, such as IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, expose how much border regimes turn landscapes into deadly weapons. The Mediterranean Sea, the West Balkans, or the deserts of North Africa and North America are notorious examples of landscapes turned mass graves: weaponized constellations of land, people, and technologies. These deadly amalgamations, in turn, nourish the fantasy of total border control and feed the violences of coast guards, police, fences, camps, and increasingly “smart” technologies to surveil and deter.
How can deserts, rivers, forests, or mountains become technologized to the teeth and be turned into borderlands capable of killing? How can seemingly random strips of land—say, a part of North America along the Tó Ba’áadi river (Rio Grande)—turn into hypersurveilled information systems, sites to enact racial hostility and settler colonialism?
One answer lies in history: an approach driving Iván Chaar López’s book The Cybernetic Border. Chaar López offers a history of the technologies at the US-Mexican border that not simply traces changes and continuities, but that exposes how the historical stories told about border technology linger as harmful mirages, (ab)used to justify the lethal hardware and software deployed at the border today.
Thus, the question Chaar López foregrounds is not which technologies are complicit, but rather when and how. When have border technologies become tied up with white settler colonialism? How could the tech story—that a “better” border is an ever “smarter” information system—gain traction?
Importantly, “the matter of ‘the border,’” Chaar López writes, “is as much a technological question as it is a cultural one. Stories give shape to the kinds of material arrangements through which borders are made, just as material arrangements … make possible the performance of distinct stories.” Such stories that engulf technological systems—through the language of “crisis,” “breakdown,” “solution,” or “restoring control”—are historical. As Chaar López shows, these are “scripts” of the border: inscribed as stories, narratives, and myths of imperial nation-building, as well as in the functional structures of technologies.
Thus, the script of borders as information systems that are “smart” or “intelligent” is not novel, disruptive, or innovative. In fact, borders are here revealed as a historical, deeply political and violent project with “unbearable endurance.”
How to understand the endurances of stories about technology, stories that are engendering the lethality of landscapes? In this essay, I demonstrate how important history is in grappling with such “unbearable endurance[s].”
To do so, I read Chaar López’s book alongside the writings of Walter Benjamin. Together, they provide urgent lessons to understand not only how the past shapes today’s deadly borders. More radically, these texts together reveal how history is paramount to counter the misleading stories of progress that allow new technologies to unleash harm, the tropes and narratives that nurture the “unbearable endurance” of border violence.
I trace three such stories (or, “scripts” in Chaar López’s vocabulary) about border technologies that history debunks: 1) that border technologies are neutral; 2) that technology equals progress; and 3) that technology offers solutions to crises.
Border Stones and Violence
The first misleading story is that border technologies are neutral, unpolitical, and enacting a naturally given order of the world. This myth is debunked by Walter Benjamin in his 1921 essay “The Critique of Violence.” He argues that to critique violence one needs to understand the history of its emergence. Getting caught up in the present hides systemic harms.
One deep historical violence he identifies in this essay is the drawing of borders itself. This he understands as an arbitrary, ungrounded claim to power, one that is undertaken to create the “law” as such, and then veil this law as pregiven and natural. This is achieved by making the markers of the border (the border stone and its technologies) into metaphysical symbols and enactors of said “law” and its reach. Importantly, as Michelle Ty unpacks in detail, this means that the technologies making borders embody the original act of violent exclusion itself. The stuff that makes the border is the very evidence of its own power—social and material at the same time.
The history, politics, and violence of the border—find Benjamin and Chaar López—can be located within the story of its technologies. The technologies of the border are not just neutral instruments enacting a separate politics; instead, they are historically made to embody the hierarchies and divisions of border regimes.
Specifically, Benjamin discusses the artifact of the border stone as the creator and evidence of the “guilt” of the border crosser. It turns the border crosser into a migrant who is, by default, guilty of breaching the law. The violence of borders lies in the power that imprints itself onto the bodies of those who “unwittingly” find themselves crossed by a line drawn by the stones.
The first markers of the US-Mexican border in 1848 were 276 obelisks, literal border stones. Following the trajectories of these stones—the first markers of the border crossers’ guilt—leads to today’s “smart” versions of border stones, provided by Google, Anduril, or Palantir. These systems are not simply neutral devices to enact a predetermined policy, but are complicit in twined political actions: the law-positing violences that turn the North American desert into a racist border zone, and the making of this violence seem natural and self-evident.
This history-driven insight can ultimately advance our critiques past reformist calls to regulate individual systems, such as through calls for privacy protection. Instead, we can more fundamentally question border tech by exposing the historical violent projects of hostility, within their function of dividing.
Border Histories of the Oppressed
Second, reading Chaar López alongside Benjamin debunks the story that technology equals progress. Both authors engage with the way in which history is made meaningful in the present. They are driven by a conviction that history needs to be mobilized against misleading assumptions of natural progress.
Much ink has been spilled on Benjamin’s Theses on the Concept of History (1940) or The Arcades Project (1927–1940), where he sketches out an imperative for historians to assemble images of the past that resonate with the present, so as to enable resistance against capitalism and fascism. Only in this interventionist way of historiography, he argues, can the past be attributed with meanings that break the flawed idea of progress and bring about real liberatory change. Such flawed ideas of progress regard forward movement as inevitable: a view present, for example, in left-wing ideas that class struggle would naturally lead to a future revolution, or in Enlightenment thinking of natural movement toward rationality.
As a remedy to this misguidance, Benjamin sees the “tradition of the oppressed” as the one that can break ideas of continuous progress toward an imagined goal. Writing history becomes about opposing “homogenous, empty time”: the time of the bourgeoisie, a jarring trap that neglects violences by only knowing movement forward.
Instead, history is about conjuring images from the past of the oppressed that can disrupt ideas of mindless progressivism and create a “real state of emergency,” once the ignored historical injustices finally become visible and understood. Once history is actually dealt with—and not ignored under the guise of progress—the cycle can be broken.
The Cybernetic Border is an exemplary project of disentangling border technologies from the language of progress and techno-solutionism. Instead, Chaar López reconnects contemporary technologies with images of the past that expose their violence. In his discussion of drones and surveillance systems, he peels off the narrative shells of technocratic neutrality that enwrap border technologies and confronts them with the “tradition of the oppressed”: stories of settler colonialism, racial enmity, imperialism, and necropolitics.
Aligning histories of border tech with the violent histories of US nation-building is not just a documentation of events. In fact, it is a political and affective project of showing how endurances are unbearable: where history harmfully remains in the present. To be sure, this does not mean that history merely repeats and copies itself; instead, it reinscribes itself, it reverberates in “strange continuit[ies],” in historian Ann Laura Stoler’s words.
Thus, we can see how the pasts of racialized US settler colonialism remain very much present within today’s digital, automated, AI-driven, “smart” borders. And we can also see, vice versa, how the digital present can be found across the history of North American deserts becoming a borderland of white supremacy.
Fake Crisis and Weaponization of Repair
Third, history can counter the misleading story that border tech offers “fixes” to “crises.” At the core of border fortification always lies a narrated crisis—usually, a sense of eternal crisis that creates enough panic to legitimize continuous interventions.
Border crises rely on being unprecedented, always worse than before: a process Stuart Hall described in Policing the Crisis as the weaponization of “novelty.” But additionally, as Chaar López demonstrates, border crises thrive on the story that the border is broken. He shows how the cybernetic border is an eternal prototype, always tested, never done, always in repair. This is not a flaw, but a feature of its design (following cybernetics’ logic of feedback loops and self-optimization, as well as technological progressivism). Border technologies live within loops of failure → crisis → fix → failure → crisis → fix, eternally to be tested. It will work, promise! Just wait for one more iteration.
Yet, while border systems surely need to be exposed for their failures, even this is a distraction. What is hiding behind the eternal promise of the breakdown-fix is a strong success: in justifying the migrant as the enemy, “in recording unauthorized border crossers as threats to the nation.” In the storyline of crisis, the border keeps failing because of the “migrant intruder.” It needs to be repaired because of the external threat that has broken it. When such promises of repair are weaponized, increasing lethality and hostility can sweep in.
Aligning histories of border tech with the violent histories of U.S. nation-building is not just a documentation of events. It is a political and affective project of showing how endurances are unbearable.
Ultimately, the fantasy of total border control is a “spectacle,” in the words of border scholar Nicholas De Genova. States perform mirages of restoring control in the face of imagined breakdown of control over territory and bodies.
It is, therefore, not coincidental that the recent “Immigration White Paper” presented by Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK is entitled “Restoring Control over the Immigration System” (May 2025). The word “control” features 55 times in the 80-page document, promising “an entirely new approach … required to repair the damage” (emphasis added). When such vocabulary lets governments weaponize repair in a self-victimizing manner—strategically conjuring up breakdown scenarios—further border fortification becomes justified.
Indeed, it is because of words like “control” and “repair” that Anduril’s AI surveillance towers are installed both in the US-Mexican deserts and on South England’s coastline overlooking the Channel. They do so not because they are a new technological fix to an unprecedented problem: instead, they do so in tune with the long histories of turning these landscapes into sites of “border crises” and assigning technologies the legitimate authority to “fix the damage” and address the “emergency.”
Grappling with the Debris of History
But what is the real emergency? Chaar López and Benjamin push us to grapple with the debris of historical violence: reading the pasts of bordered worlds from the “tradition of the oppressed,” resisting ideas of “threat” and “crisis” that legitimize “technological progress” as the historical norm and the only viable story. A story that, as information studies scholar Melissa Villa-Nicholas reminds us, fuels a high-investment tech industry in Silicon Valley, a backbone of the border-industrial complex.
But there is never only one viable story, only one single possible history. Other stories are always already told. For instance, in her book Survival and Witness at Europe’s Border, media anthropologist Karina Horsti shows how the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck that killed at least 368 refugees in the Mediterranean has created complex afterlives. Horsti shows how survival has become productive, in manifold creative practices of memorialization and representation of the event by survivors, families, activists, and communities, ranging from films and commemorations to counter-statistics. Through what she terms “survivor citizenship,” people take into their own hands the debris of lethal borderscapes and the histories told.
Such examples of reckoning with the border’s violences deserve attention because they reject narratives of history in which responsibility is outsourced to the future. “Future historians will judge”—a phrase omnipresent in commentaries of contemporary violence—is a phrase that Walter Benjamin would likely call a “narcotic of the century.”
But the idea of history—as just happening by itself, moving toward justice and liberation automatically—was not enough for Walter Benjamin. Neither is it for Iván Chaar López in The Cybernetic Border. And it is not enough for the many living with the “unbearable endurance” of lethal borderscapes. 