Border Technologies

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Notes

¹ Seabrook describes Southeast Asian cities, but this logic applies everywhere.

² This 55% included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

³ This included near-future border zone flash fiction read aloud to the pedestrians, postcards from the future, performances, a short-wave radio station transmitting for the cars stuck up on the border, processions, a swap meet, and a series of posters with “alternative” future demands. I had the pleasure of directing and producing the interventions.

⁴ From Schwarz’s “La pequeña guerra” (1984), a Hunger Games predecessor where girls have to fight to death in order to keep their work, and Lavin’s “Reaching the Shore” (1994), about a cyborg laborer in the Reynosa border, to Fernández and Sifuentes's “(e)” (1998), about employees in a neural system web addicted to an electronic drug in order to escape the mind-numbing work their brains do, science and technology are usually portrayed as the mechanisms through which neo-liberalism encroaches and embeds itself in the body in order to produce wealth, and not as liberating devices. Alex Rivera’s films Why Cybraceros? and Sleep Dealer continue this tradition, even if Rivera is Peruvian-American.

⁵ Candy has recently changed the term to “guerrilla futures” to enhance the strategic connection to tactical media, culture jamming, and activism, making it more political (2013).

⁶ A translated selection of the Micro(science)Fiction stories can be found in Alchemy: UCSD’s Journal of Translation, in the Summer 2014 and Winter 2015 issues.

⁷ The Yes Men's “identity correction” tactics, impersonating officers of institutions they dislike and making them say the “right” thing could well be “experiential fictions,” although this device’s main example would be the way parents trick their own kids into believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, using both oral and written components mixed with artifacts (presents).

⁸ The conversation was recorded on Banksy’s website, but has disappeared into electronic limbo. I found it reported on Nigel Parry’s Electronic Intifada site.

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Pepe Rojo

Pepe Rojo has published four books and more than 200 texts: short stories, essays, and articles dealing with fiction, media, and contemporary culture. He taught in the media studies program at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana for five years (2006–2011), where he published two collections of free, small-format booklets or minibúks (Mexican SF, 2009; Counter-versions, 2010), and a graphic Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana (2011). His writing can be found in Flurb! and Three Messages and a Warning.