Digital Migration Control Infrastructure as Worldmaking

Abstract

This article identifies and analyzes a typology of technologies at the intersection of tech-based worldmaking, on one hand, and contests over monopolizing control of global human mobility, on the other. The technologies we examine in three empirical case studies share an acute leveraging of scaling effects innate to their design and the economic system in which they emerge – the capability to reshape, overnight, the reality and orientation of asylum systems; or to oversee seamless, boundary-free sorting of friends and enemies. In each case, we investigate which properties make a tool ripe for use in worldmaking. By “worldmaking” we mean the construction, organization, and shaping of social reality with the ambition of planetary scale. Our guiding hypothesis is that technological progress in the realm of controlling human mobility follows a logic that has yet to be fully conceptualized, requiring a new empirical approach to understand the means and ends of power in a complex system. We also hypothesize that, in the backdrop of our study, there is an undeclared scramble to monopolize the future global migration infrastructure, with an undeclared common understanding among all contenders (state, supranational, corporate) that this future will run on omnipresent, deterritorialized digital surveillance technologies. We close with the idea that worldmaking and conceptualizing new logics of migration control also opens up new foundations for kinship and solidarity. With this brief survey of three case studies bearing the hallmarks of brutalist worldmaking in migration control infrastructure, we offer a scaffolding for further thought about additional typologies or features in a still-emerging system logic. We also advance a call for more field research to inform, correct or amend the framework provided here.

Keywords: Digital infrastructure, migration control, socio-technical systems, worldmaking, expulsion, surveillance, repression, social credit