After the conference SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control, Disruption Network Lab commissioned two texts to inform debates and influence civic society: a primary source insight by writer and activist Barrett Brown, “Pox Americana: Seeking Asylum from a Deteriorating Democracy”, and an empirical research analysis by researcher Jacopo Anderlini on tracking and monitoring at European borders, “The European Digital Border. Narratives on technology and practices of control in the governing of migrant mobilities”.

Jacopo Anderlini  – The European Digital Border. Narratives on technology and practices of control in the governing of migrant mobilitie

This article focuses on the relationship between the narratives around technology and its use in governing mobility and migration, and the materiality of border practices. Particularly, we see a dominating narrative, identifying smart borders as a way to seamlessly regulate different types of circulations, classifying and filtering them through the gathering and processing of data, which builds on the idea of radical transparency intended as the will to know and to be known, through the aid of digital technologies, as the main way to govern and control complex phenomena. In their precipitating in the border space, this narrative tends to obscure mechanisms of structural violence and various forms of discrimination that find new legitimation in the presumed objectivity and neutrality of digital technologies. This analysis is grounded on the ethnographic fieldwork Jacopo Anderlini conducted in the Sicilian borderzone, and in particular within the hotspot facilities of Pozzallo and Lampedusa, in different stays since 2016.

Jacopo Anderlini is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Parma, he is part of the Visual Sociology Laboratory of the University of Genoa, as well as systems / operations engineer at Tactical Tech. His main research interests revolve around border studies, refugee studies, migration, critical theory on technologies, social and political philosophy. His work mixes qualitative methods and ethnography.