Drone futures

Abstract

The US–Mexico border is the subject of an expanding market of cultural productions that frame this imagined and real location as the future and ultimate site of national security. It is also a site anchored in a past, where mobile subjects are sorted and processed in ways that correspond to racialized typologies of the Old West. The culture and politics of border security are saturated with this racial history even as drone technologies promise a future of neutral “target recognition,” so objective it can be automated. Even as this region is steeped in the future of surveillance technologies displayed in border security reality TV shows and Border Security Expos, the public demands pretechnological remedies for control of mobility of people and goods in terrestrial forms through ground agents, walls, and barriers.