Experimentality, Surplus Data and the Politics of Debilitation in Borderzones

ABSTRACT

The use of digital devices and the collection of digital data have become pervasive in borderzones. Whether deployed by state or non-state actors, digital devices are rolled out despite intense criticism and controversy. In this article, I propose to approach these interventions through the prism of experimentality. Experimentality was initially formulated in the anthropological literature on the globalisation of clinical trials and, more recently, revisited in feminist science and technology studies. Drawing on this work, I argue that experimentality has become a rationality of governing in borderzones, which renders social relations continuously decomposable and recomposable by inserting mundane (digital) devices into the world. The introduction of various digital devices in Greece since 2015, starting with Skype for the pre-registration of asylum seekers, helps shed light on a particular form of governing through experiments without protocol. This form of experimentality has specific political effects for migrants’ lives. Firstly, experimentality builds upon and intensifies neoliberalism by rearranging rather than redressing precarity. In so doing, experimentality through digital devices produces debilitation rather than better connectivity or access to asylum. Secondly, migrants become not only subjects of surveillance, but subjects of extraction of ‘surplus data’ which entangles their lives into the circuits of digital platforms.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the special issue editors, Matthias Leese, Simon Noori and Stephan Scheel for the invitation to contribute to the special issue and their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to the editor, Nancy Hiemstra, for generous suggestions and pushing me to clarify conceptual distinctions and the analytical language of experimentality. Keina Espiñeira González, Alvina Hoffmann and Sarah Perret on the SECURITY FLOWS project have offered invaluable critiques and reading suggestions. I would like to acknowledge Sarah Perret’s coinage of ‘experiment without protocol’, which I have adopted in this final version.

Notes

1. Greece has different procedures of access to asylum depending on whether migrants reach the islands in the Aegean or the Greek mainland. Since the signature of the EU-Turkey agreement, migrants on the islands arriving via Turkey can only enter the normal asylum procedure if they are classified as ‘vulnerable’ (Greek Council for Refugees 2019a). Otherwise, they need to follow a fast-track border procedure. According to the fast-track border procedure, interviews are conducted by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in order to assess the vulnerability of applicants and make a decision on whether Turkey is a ‘safe third country’ for them (European Council 2016).

2. As Vicki Squire has argued, borderzones are sites of both control and struggle (Squire 2011).

3. On the distinction between ‘low-tech’ and ‘high-tech’ security, see (Bonelli and Ragazzi 2014).

4. There are many debates about the political uses of categories of ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’. To avoid the reification of categories and also to acknowledge their fluid status in practice, I use them interchangeably here.

5. Rhys Machold has criticised the ‘laboratory thesis’ in security studies for not being ‘groundbreaking and analytically robust’ (Machold 2018, 90). Rather than discarding the terminology of ‘laboratory’, he proposes to reinvigorate it through engagement with ANT/STS literature, as critical borders scholars have also started to do.

6. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframework.asylumapp646672&hl=en&showAllReviews=true.

7. http://asylo.gov.gr/en/?page_id=72.

8. Interestingly, Kouvelakis uses ‘laboratory’ metaphorically.

9. Turkish asylum seekers do not need to use the Skype procedure, but need to give their phone number to the Regional Asylum Office Attica. The No End in Sight report notes that interviews with Turkish asylum seekers are scheduled for 2025 (Lucas, Ramsay, and Keen 2019).

10. The Syria Fast Track procedure is a special procedure introduced since 2014 for Syrian nationals and stateless persons who entered Greece before the Turkey-EU agreement in 2016 or entered via the land borders (Greek Council for Refugees 2019b).

11. On borders as unpredictable regimes that create high degrees of uncertainty for migrants, see Stephan Scheel (2019 Chapter 4).

12. http://asylo.gov.gr/en/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Skype-programme-28-1-19_compressed.pdf.

13. https://www.inhereproject.eu/universities/harokopio-university-of-athens-el-study-in-greece-ngo.

14. The ‘walkthrough’ method involves engaging with the app, downloading it, working through the menu and tapping buttons as a user might do (Light, Burgess, and Duguay 2018).

15. ‘Surplus data’ also draws attention to the invisible labour that is needed to produce this data. While Greek authorities process the content of the Skype data, what is key here is the simultaneous production of data for exchange which produces surplus value (‘surplus data’).

16. These are some of the exceptions listed in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Article 23 ‘Restrictions’). In the UK, the Data Protection Act 2018 contains an ‘immigration exemption’, which was unsuccessfully challenged in court by campaigners.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SECURITY FLOWS, grant agreement No 819213).