Biometric Re-bordering: Environmental Control During Pandemic Times

Abstract

The multiplication and reconfiguration of borders enabled by digital technology in response to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a template for increasingly granular form of control and governance. This chapter considers the ways in which the first global pandemic of the smartphone era resulted in strategies for securing mobility by allowing for the real-time tailoring of individual rights to movement through space. These rights could be curtailed in response to inferred bodily states captured by distributed sensors and other verification systems. The result is that the border is collapsed into the body. This collapse results in the use of biometric monitoring and surveillance to customize the environment in real time to canalize and govern circulation: doors are locked or unlocked, turnstiles reconfigured, and elevators redirected. When our bodies can be verified, monitored, and tracked by automated systems, governance can operate on them directly through the environment. However, this form of governance relies on the construction of modulatable, customizable, and fully sensorized spaces: hence on the development of augmented reality, whose informated overlay offers to make physical space as customizable as its online counterparts. The multiplication of borders and enclosures simultaneously blurs the line between online and offline forms of control.