Counter-Technologies @ the Edgelands

Separated by the most militarized border in the world, the cities of Tijuana and San Diego are witnessing the rapid integration and recombination of new technologies of policing and surveillance with increasingly draconian forms of labor and migration control—from location tracking, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered facial recognition, and human presence detection systems to drones and “smart walls.” The ethical questions raised by these technologies can only be understood as situated in practical action and political processes.

In this conference, we bring together activists, organizers, academics and artists to interrogate how border communities are particularly affected by new technologies of militarism, police, and border enforcement in San Diego/Tijuana and globally. At the same time, we are committed to conversations around counter-technologies—those that resist, exceed, or escape these forms of violent control and offer new ways of imagining geography, community, safety, and innovation. The conference’s key themes focus on labor and technology; policing and surveillance; afterlives of militarism and making life; global militarism and borderscapes; and art and aesthetics as counter-technologies.

The conference will launch on February 20th at U.C. San Diego, with a livestreamed community panel and a keynote on AI, ethics, and politics by Kate Crawford, co-director and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University. On February 28th and 29th, we will reconvene with panels and workshops in City Heights and Tijuana to build relationships and knowledge about technologies and counter-technologies that shape life in the region. On February 29th, conference participants – those who can given current border restrictions – will physically cross the US-Mexico border together. This crossing offers a way of reflecting on how new technologies interact with older infrastructures in regulating the flows of people, mediated by nationality, race, gender, and class. We cross to challenge the separations that borders and their regimes attempt to impose and to initiate new relationships, interdependencies, and interventions.

We, the conference organizers and participants, acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the traditional and unceded territory of the Kumeyaay Nation. We pay respect to the citizens of the Kumeyaay Nation, both past and present, and their continuing relationships to their ancestral lands.