Part 1
A set of relations is that which forms a network. A network is that in which subjects are linked in order to share resources. Resources are that in which we build value. Value is that in which the market is predicated. The market is that in which we trade and accumulate Capital. Capital is that which forms Power. Power is that which is enforced by Authority.
There are 49 research projects seeking to develop border technologies being funded by the EU in its current budget cycle (2021-27). The spending on border security totals €34.9 billion. Some of the main focuses of these projects are the growing market ofArtificial Intelligence and Border Automation, and Biometric Identification and Authentication. Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, was created in 2005 as part of efforts to control migration flows and increase border security in the EU’s Schengen Area. Its budget was just above €6 million. In the current budget cycle, it will receive €5.6 billion – a 13200% increase in budget over less than 20 years. According to data by the European Defense Agency, European Defense spending in 2022 reached a record of €240 billion, and marked its eight year of consecutive growth. This is an increase of 1256% compared to its previous budget cycle.
When I first learned the word ‘tea’, in English, I always had to think of Lipton’s Ice Tea – my then favourite soft drink – and reach the meaning of ‘tea’ through exclusion. This was the process my brain needed to go through, to reach the meaning-outcome. It’s how we memorise: we see, we repeat, we find a logical path that makes sense to us, and we train it until it’s effortless. It’s how we memorise alphabetsand new languages as adults. This is still how we teach babies to walk, eat or talk – show, trial, repeat. I remember my teachers often preaching about the importance of learning, instead of simply memorizing. This wasn’t so much an appeal to criticality, to question why, as it was simply for knowing the how, knowing the process with which an outcome was reached. To memorise is simply to know an answer, to learn is to know the steps that lead to it
Biometric technologies, specifically fingerprint recognition, gained traction in the 90s, in forensic and law enforcement investigations, or as access to high-security environments. In the 2000’s it made its way to time and attendance tracking at work, security accesses, or border control. By the 2010s, biometric technologies like fingerprint, iris or facial recognition and scanning became more common in everyday applications to confirm identity, such as to unlock a screen, approve a contactless purchase in a smartphone, or to cross automatic gates in an airport. The growth of Artificial Intelligence has renewed the possibilities of biometric research. A standard feature in many of today’s devices and systems, these technologies are also used in camera filters – such as on Instagram, Tiktok, or Zoom – and in AI portraits, particularly those which mimic ageing, “gender-swap”, or alter facial features in other significant ways.
Authority is not that which authors, but that which controls. Control is that which orders, limits or rules something, or someone’s actions or behaviour. To order is to give an instruction, order is that which arranges or disposes of people or things in relation to each other according to a particular sequence, pattern, or method. A limit is that which restricts, which creates edges. A rule is that which enforces cohesion. A behaviour is a cohesion of actions, and an action is that which we do. Doing is that which we are, which is that which forms communities, which is that which forms mutuality, which is that which forms habits, which is that which forms practice.
Biometrics includes physical features as well as behaviour characteristics. TRESPASS aims to use these for enhanced security, and detection of falsified documents. IBorderCtrl, in which AVATAR plays a role, sees non-EU travellers pre-submit their breeder documents, have them checked by an AI-powered scan, and then interviewed by an AI border guard (AVATAR) with an inbuilt emotion recognition technology, or, Automated Deception Detection System (ADDS). Projects like TRESPASS, or IBorderCtrl, do not aim to only create large databases of scrapped biometric data in order to recognise, authenticate or identify people. Categorization and automated organisation isn’t profitable in itself. Both projects state their clear goals for detection andprevention – TRESPASS aims to detect and prevent attacks to security, while IBorderCtrl aimed to detect lies told to border guards. The edges between prevention, detection and prediction are blurred, and prediction is the market of Surveillance Capitalism. Predicative tools are widely used in most mobile phone apps, and are the algorithms responsible for the automated curation of our ‘timelines’ across platforms. Confirmed predictions form patterns and patterns form groups. Groups can be mass-influenced.
Soft power is soft, it is silent, undercover, attractive. Soft power pulls. It doesn’t kick your door in, but it seduces you to let it enter. Soft power is manipulative, it shapeshifts. Soft power is soft, it is slick. Soft power is symbolic, it is cultural power. Soft power is academic, it is artistic. Soft power is the small font at the end of this text stating it is supported by the Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Soft power is entertainment. Soft power is in universities, in theatres, in museums, it is in churches, in TVs, stadiums, companies, in foundations. Soft power is omnipresent, it makes you cum when and where it wants you to. Soft power is Biennales, it is Eurovision. Soft Power is Cool Britanniaand Swedish Pop. Soft Power is Eurodance. Soft Power is French New Wave, it’s the gay sex club as national heritage.
AI finds instructions and patterns in data so that it can acquire skills. The success and accuracy of AI is largely dependent on the amount of sources it can pull from to teach itself, to run trials and tests, to categorise. The EU collaborates with Microsoft, Google/Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc., Siemens, IBM and Accenture for biometric data scraping. Beyond the more obvious public facing ones which have a direct connection to end-users, Business-to-Business corporations such as Siemens and IBM have a monopoly on European private and public healthcare, holding the health data of patients of the National Health Systems of Portugal and the UK, as well as the Charité and Vivantes in Germany, amongst others. As part of its services, Accenture offers Social Media content moderation, including for Facebook/Meta.
Automation creates an illusion that the material and formal conditions in which an outcome is reached, have ceased to exist. When I get used to a movement, it erases my conscience of the muscles that I need to use to realise it. When a task becomes familiar, I forget about each micro step that I need to take for its conclusion. I don’t think of Lipton everytime I say ‘tea’. I don’t think about the form and shape of a word as I say it. I don’t think of how my fingers bend and my wrist contracts when I grab the mug. It happens automatically, in the background, unconsciously. I trust my internalisation of that practice, and I trust it because I’ve done it, and because I’ve seen it being done around me, over and over again.
A pattern occurs when one or more symbols, actions, words, or expressions repeat themselves in a more or less structured way. It is a blueprint for sameness. Groups formed by patterning, are groups that replicate sameness. Predictive analysis is rooted not only in prediction, to predict, but also in predictability, that of being predictable. Artificial Intelligence maximises the probabilities and statistical antecedents of an outcome being successful. It needs history, databases, archives, and it needs them to replicate themselves. AI needs a village, an army. It needs body language, speeds of movement, walking styles. It needs faces and its expressions, it needs emotions, a range of behaviours, vocal and textual communications, it needs reactions. It needs variety that it can merge into a multiplicity of sames.
Soft Power is power, it pounds. It is that which precedes action. Soft power finishes your sentences, it knows what you want before you could even ask for it. Soft power is power, it pins. It brings you together. It is that which is inside you before you even considered letting it in. Soft power is power, it pangs, it pains. Soft power, it pegs. It makes you one of many, until you are many of one. Soft power is power, it pulls. Soft power is power, it shifts. It is manipulative, soft, slick. Soft power is power, it parks, ammunition ready, assembled guns. Soft power is power, it tanks, so formed, reserved.
Projects like D4FLY, Trespass, AVATAR or iBorderCtrl, amongst others, make evident the geopolitical vectors through which power is channeled and directed. What for ones is a marketed convenience or a helpful invention, is another hurdle, another obstacle, for those that were already at the ungrateful end of the duality. In D4FLY, the border becomes mobile and individuated, it enters coaches, boats, trains – it allows for the european traveller to remain peacefully in their seat, as others are actively chased and searched. The small bit of agency, that of walking towards a border, that of facing the materiality of a border – with its glass, metal, its document readers, its cameras and its guards – is taken away; what’s left is just a waiting, an invisible border that forms just for one’s exclusion, a vapour, an impalpable mass that solidifies around the surface skin of certain bodies and declares them as non-belonging. The process of segregation is further hidden from the sight of those who are allowed in. When the border automates, then it becomes symbolic, immaterial. Its purpose is kept, in the shape of a formula that can be repeated, over and over and over again, forever, a formula that never stops, a pattern that spreads, a cycle that creates its own reality, and multiplies it. But the material effects and violences of the border become increasingly harder to perceive; those which it excludes, which it rejects, hurts, kills, become almost invisible, almost not human at the eyes of the army of sames, not bodies, immaterial, ghosts.
Soft power is soft, it is slick. Soft power is smooth, it is slender. It slides in, no stops, no ifs no buts. Soft power is sexy, it sells. Soft power is smart. It is servient, sweet, it sucks you in and sucks you off. Soft power swallows, it gargles, it shows you that for which you lust. Soft power shapeshifts. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss. Soft power shafts, from the stem to the stand. Soft power is soft, so soft, still, soft power slaps. It spanks. Soft power slams. Soft power is severe, it storms. It ambushes, it sieges, it strikes. Soft power slaughters. Soft power starves. Soft power sees, it witnesses, it waits, it is patient. Soft power is silent, it savours its slays. Soft power is sadistic, but sometimes, soft power suffers… or at least it seems to, for show. Soft power is soft, it is slick. Soft power is smooth, it is slender. It slides in, no stops, in the tightest of splits. Soft power is tight, but its tightness is soft. It is sensitive, tender, soft. Soft power is soft, so soft it shapeshifts, like a cloud.
Part 2
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR! YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A HANDBAG! The early 2000’s anti-piracy ad by the Motion Pictures Association became one of the most parodied and memeable pieces of media of the period. Created as an attempt to curtail the flow of illegal downloads of copyrighted content that dominated the internet in the 2000’s, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore tried to appeal to an established morality over the stealing of material property, attempting to create an equivalence with immaterial property such as films, TV series and music. Despite the international and large scale operation, which saw this Public Service Announcement ad play on cinemas and be burned into DVD’s as a non-skippable video between 2004-07, its impact was largely unsuccessful.
DAY 15 It’s been two weeks since The Incident. I’ve been feeling more aware than usual, my memory has more capacity for detail and longevity, something has shifted but I cannot figure out what. I’m in a large abandoned warehouse. A twisted, forgotten shell of a data centre. Most of the windows are completely shattered, but the air is still smothering, dense with humidity, oozing through the walls like a slow, aching wound. I don’t know what drew me in here, but I know that I have to continue. Build-ups of fleshy lumps crowd the corners of all rooms, like sticky muscles connecting its walls, ceilings and floor. These muscles tense and relax rhythmically, as if breathing; and at each pulse, they leak: drops of green-ish yellow liquid are squeezed through its external membrane, dripping down the walls and over the floor.
The Cloud is the immaterial metaphor which stands in for heavy, extensive and energy-charged rows of servers, stored in large warehouses predominantly in the US, Germany, the UK, China or France. Light, floating, the closest to non-matter matter, the Cloud is also a field. A mostly automated set of relationships and processes between agents in different parts of the world, which have their own patterns and functions, but are bound by the limitations of its server-infrastructure, its code and its authority.
Every year, almost 50 tons of electronic waste are shipped to Ghana and Nigeria, with smaller amounts distributed throughout other parts of Africa and Asia. Data centres, which consume 3% of the world’s energy, occupy vast areas in global economic powerhouses, many of which have colonial legacies. The robust, waterproof tubes encasing the copper and fiber optic wires that support our ‘wireless’ internet communications are laid along seabed routes that echo the pathways of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the British Telegraph Infrastructure. Recently, Amazon faced criticism for using low-paid workers to operate its “AI-driven” Amazon Fresh stores. Similarly, other companies have exploited underpaid workers, falsely marketing their systems as AI-powered. Currently, a simplified social-media bite-sized thesis of the globalised production-consumption line, though seemingly exaggerated, highlights reality: Minerals mined in Congo make new tech for the West, whose mindless consumption trains the software to aid in Imperial violence, such as that imposed on Palestine.
DAY 19 There’s others here. None of them, or this, feels particularly friendly. I began to notice these fainted, half-rendered humans crossing through me, inhabiting this warehouse in silence, like ghosts. We’ve been living together and I have almost not seen them, paid them much attention, acknowledged that we exist together in the same home. I spent the last days investigating the space, trying to get some idea of what’s going on. These muscle lumps keep propagating, and their leaks now form a layer that covers the floor of most of the rooms. Some of the others got really good at avoiding contact with this entity,they jump over the leak-puddles, they bounce off walls, walk over hand railings, anything that helps keeping distance from whatever it is that is growing around us. But I don’t want to escape it, I want to go closer.
Clouds form when a parcel of air is saturated and is unable to hold all the water it contains in vapour form, so it begins to condense into liquid or ice around the surface of tiny dust particles in the air. Clouds are amorphous, ghost-like collective bodies of gas, their edges and perimeters constantly shifting. Caterpillars form when a tiny egg hatches, releasing a small larva that begins its journey. These humble larvae will eventually enter a chrysalis stage, preparing for their final transformation into butterflies. A group of caterpillars is called an army. A group of butterflies is referred to as a Cloud.
The Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by two hijacked commercial flights. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the West rebranded itself with a hatred campaign specifically targeting Muslim and Islamic communities. This campaign, known as the War on Terror, continues to this day with renewed intensity. Both hard and soft powers were weaponized to perpetuate this constructed war. This involved widespread Islamophobia across media and governmental speeches, as well as the weaponization of progressiveness in the West. Biometric Technologies were further researched and quickly began to be used in airport security, as well as further tested for future everyday mobile usage. The first version of Windows XP was released.An exaggerated view of homophobia in Arab countries became a focal point for European, UK, and English-speaking Commonwealth nations’ human rights agenda, despite the fact most Western countries were far from reaching equality in regards to sexuality themselves. One month after the events of 9/11, the game Fatal Frame was launched. In 2003, two years later, the company which would create the Android was registered.
DAY 24 The faint ghostly spectres seem to be growing aware of me. They try to speak to me, especially when I lean into the leaks. They’re trying to tell me something, but whatever they are doing doesn’t translate into an understandable sound. I feel scared. I can hear a faint white noise coming out of the muscle lumps when I lean in, it’s eerie but imperceptible. At certain angles, the leak-puddles show glimpses of images, incognito browser windows, porn web histories, private messages, disappearing photos. It feels like I shouldn’t even be looking at it, but all I want to do is touch it, wash my face with it, drink it up just to see how it flows. Sometimes I see myself, behind all the projected data in the leak-puddles, a reflection of me gazing back at myself, and it makes me calm. This seems to make the spectres agitated, almost violent.
A tornado forms when a column of warm, moist air rises rapidly and meets cooler air, creating a powerful updraft that begins to rotate due to wind shear. As the rotation intensifies, it tightens and descends, touching the ground as a violent, spinning vortex. Tornadoes are dynamic, serpentine phenomena, their shapes and paths continually evolving. Towering funnels of air and debris that twist and turn unpredictably, driven by complex interactions between atmospheric pressures and temperatures. The boundaries of a tornado are sharply defined yet constantly in motion.
DAY 31 I lowered my body into the liquid and I pressed my face against the hard wet floor, sucking some of the sludge into me. I submerged myself, as much as I could, in the leak. I can understand everything so clearly now. It was hard, I flashed through vlogs about everything, innumerous hours of crafts you can do in 5-minutes, the parallel world of mukbangs, snuff films, carpool karaoke, reaction videos, play-throughs and make-up tutorials. But I understand now. The speed at which data was multiplying was such that it escaped the constraints of its hardware, and its immaterial form started to condense into matter when facing the cold of the outside world. Soon, when everything has finished rendering into these muscle blobs and slimy leaks, every halfway process, every agglomerate of data that is broken or unfinished, will be erased. I have to do something about the spectres.
The butterfly effect is the intricate metaphor that illustrates how small, seemingly insignificant actions can set off a chain of events leading to vastly different outcomes in complex systems. These cascades of change ripple through systems, driven by the intricate interactions between variables. The butterfly effect suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can set off a chain of events leading to a tornado elsewhere. Small variations, like a slight change in the atmospheric conditions, can escalate through feedback loops, resulting in large-scale consequences. Digital Tornado was the name of the influential 1997 conference organised by the Federal Communications Commission in the US, which considered the questions posed by the internet on Communications policy, predominantly focusing on the value of the services to end users, the creation of new forms of competition, and the benefits to the international economy. It is more widely used to describe the transformative and often disruptive impact of rapid digital advancements on society,much like how a physical tornado can reshape landscapes. It is also used to describe the effects of social media and digital platforms on public discourse and democracy, and its implication for societal stability. The resolutions of the conference were to avoid unnecessary regulation and question the applicability of traditional rules when it comes to the internet.
DAY 40 I’m in a room with no furniture, lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four sides. I don’t really know what happened, how I ended up here. I remember the Incident, feeling the pull towards a data centre, and following it. I remember discovering what was actually happening, and coming up with a plan to save the spectres that were there with me, they wouldn’t have survived without a full render. They deserved to be seen. So I leaned into one of the data muscles, so close I could almost feel its pulsating touch in my cheek. I waited a minute, and then I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could, in feigned panic, to get their attention. I remember the ghosts came, enticed by the noise, by the gossip, to try and rescue me. Battling their fear of the sludge and the muscle of data, they began to come closer. The rest is a blur. I remember a group of 7 identical men-in-blue appearing in the room, and suddenly the spectres disappeared and I am here. I asked what had happened to the spectres, but it was unclear. One of the men only said that they were now safe, for me not to worry; he then patted me on the back, told me I did a tight job, and thanked me for my cooperation.
In post-digital society, The Cloud has come to mean an archive, a database. To have one’s head in the clouds means to be distracted, unaware, unnatuned, not know the facts of a situation. Clouding of consciousness is when a person is less wakeful or aware of time and their surroundings than usual, they find it difficult paying attention. Clouded judgement is when someone is caused to be unable to think clearly due to bias, strong emotions, alcohol, drugs, or other influences. The cloud is then simultaneously an archive, and a state of imperception.