The softened afternoon light shines on a beach scene of intergenerational play. Captured from the San Diego side of the US-Mexico border, the image titled Border—photographed by Peter van Agtmael—offers us a scene only in thin slats. The camera is positioned right up against the imaginary line where the US state of California becomes Mexico’s Baja California: a line that has been materialized with a wall of thick steel posts. Known for his depiction of scenes from post-9/11 US wars, van Agtmael’s Border captures the carceral aesthetic of the physical US-Mexico border wall as it extends from land to beach and into the water, the bars placed so closely together that few living things could pass between them.
Compare Border to another image: the butterfly logo, created by graphic artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, which defies the border policing regime by proclaiming “migration is beautiful.” Rodriguez’s imperative, which she screen prints onto posters and clothing, helps us see that the photograph Border captures the truth of both capacious life and of the artifice of militarism and policing of life at the border.
Together, these creative works remind us that art practice and speculative imaginaries can be sites of dissent and intervention. Van Agtmael’s Border and Rodriguez’s Migration is Beautiful remind us that, as Iván Chaar López puts it in his final chapter on artist interventions in his book The Cybernetic Border, “borders are structures of the sensible.” So how better to intervene than through the sensible?”
These images, like the artworks in the final chapter of The Cybernetic Border, “enact a technoaesthetics of dissent … contest[ing] the [border] through the same structures of the sensible that it instituted.” Art, and speculation more generally, can commandeer the structures of the sensible, even when these are being actively produced to sustain bordering and racialized repression.
Technoaesthetics of Dissent
The technoaesthetics of dissent is one of several important new analytics offered by the book The Cybernetic Border. These peel back the material reality of the technologies contributing to US-Mexico border politics and policing, showcasing the border itself as a technology.
These analytics engage with a broad variety of thinkers, many of them feminist. Chaar-López’s work on the importance of art practice and speculative imaginaries as sites of dissent and intervention is one of the three analytics that I found most productive in The Cybernetic Border. This comes out of my own research investments in communications and computing technologies through the lens of race, gender, and culture, as well as the role of art design and imagination as dissent. The other two analytics I will discuss are how borders work not only with technology but also as technology in themselves, and how bordering practices of technology rely on the command and control of space, a settler-colonial logic.
Technologies that Border/The Border as a Technology
My first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourcing (2015), was about data communication technologies that acted in place of borders: effectively funneling labor from India to the US and Europe, while filtering out the full lives of laborers. This was a part of what sociologist A. Aneesh called “virtual migration” in his 2006 book of the same title. Workers themselves became reduced to the information work they completed from afar, kept from participating in the societies for which they labored.
Now, nearly 20 years later, using Iván’s work, we can describe those same data communication technologies that were newly responsibly for creating business process outsourcing as “bordering technologies.” The Cybernetic Border explains that borders are technopolitical regimes. In other words, a border is not just a wall along an imaginary line between geopolitical nation-states. Borders are also logics or ways of acting and understanding that promote specific styles of technology development that support those understandings.
A wall of steel posts, as in the van Agtmael photograph, opposes the idea that the migration of anything that cannot pass through the bars is natural or allowable; a logic that is opposed by Rodriguez’s symbol of the butterfly. When Chaar López follows actors from the spaces of military technology design into state making, he reveals how racialization and xenophobia shape the technologies that enforce border logics.
Settler colonial formulations use the permanent residence of the colonizer itself as a technology, one for dispossessing the land from its people as well as gaining command of space.
Borders Employ (Remote) Command and Control of Space
The Cybernetic Border argues that the bordering practices of technology rely on the command and control of space, something that Atanasoski and I identify as a settler-colonial logic behind the technologies of drone warfare. Chaar López argues that “artefacts, like walls and fences, create relations to operations. Information technologies are operational because they play key roles in organizing on-the-ground efforts by actors,” and therefore “speak to the ‘datafication’ of border enforcement.” He explains that, in this way, the cybernetic border both makes relations, and is made by them: specifically, relations between information and racial formation. In fact, the book asserts that “information is fundamentally a boundary-making enterprise.” Without information, geopolitical borders could not exist.
In this way, data-centered entities produce the nation as a bounded, territorial space, policing bodies prescribed for exclusion. Communication and control continue to shape both the ongoing development of border enforcement, but also of what Chaar López calls “settler colonial structures of feeling,” informed by the US frontier and its racial politics. These structures of feeling become part of the assumptions built into technologies that border.
Settler colonial formulations use the permanent residence of the colonizer itself as a technology, one for dispossessing the land from its people as well as gaining command of space. One result is that protection of those residents becomes the grounds for punitive violence, which then, in turn, enables expansion of the physical and political settlement. Using this understanding of settler colonialism, The Cybernetic Border shows how technologies of surveillance used to protect settled land, but also other forms of property, can extend command and control of space in the form of information.
This was experienced in the United States in the spring of 2025, in the dramatic erasure of international student profiles in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). SEVIS is a US government database used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to track and maintain information on international students studying in the US with F-1, M-1, or J-1 visas. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began deleting student profiles, leaving them without documentation and subject to immediate deportation.
Here, then, is an example of a technology that is said to protect information that has been dispossessed from its owners, but effectively uses information systems to extend command and control of space. It does so by marking people as legitimately allowed across borders or not, resulting in the extension of border technologies across the entire North American continent, and even beyond. 