Imperial Circuits of Recognition

• In Event: Elemental Postcards from Beyond Empire: Excavation / Dust

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of facial recognition-based landlord technologies deployed in US tenant housing, forcing many to subject their faces to predatory data grabbing and carceral infrastructures simply to access their homes. These systems nonconsensually imprint intimate biometric details of tenants’ faces into landlords’ databases, essentially merging the propertizing of personhood with that of housing. At the same time, landlord technologies reproduce racial and gendered biases baked into facial recognition systems, manifesting in the automation of racialized and gendered dispossession, as well as the reproduction of white and heteronormative property regimes. While there is much to critique and organize against regarding the racial capitalist nature of the propertizing of housing and personhood on stolen land, this paper also traces another imperial circuit tied up in the world of landlord technology: Some of the companies used by landlords in low-income housing in the US have been developed in Israel and by Israeli military officers. For instance, SafeRise, a facial recognition technology now deployed in East Harlem and the Lower East Side, was developed by a former Israeli military general responsible for killing hundreds of people and rendering thousands of homes in Palestine into rubble and dust. His technology claims to be able to recognize tenants’ faces and detect their emotional states and can alert law enforcement if danger is detected. Another facial recognition product used across hundreds of buildings in New York City to detect lease violations and automate evictions was developed by a tech entrepreneur celebrated for his role in Israel’s startup nation. In conversation with those who have traced the imperial circuits of biometric and scopic military technologies, as well as with those who highlight the racial logics undergirding laboratories of surveillance and capture, this paper weaves together interconnected histories of dispossession and property-making across two intimately tethered settler colonies. At the same time, it excavates sites in which anti-imperialist solidarity conjoins with housing justice organizing to carve out other spatial futures unrecognizable to imperial circuits of detection and dispossession.

Author

• Erin McElroy, University of Washington