Group Reading Borders

Captives of the Cloud, Part III: All Tomorrow’s Clouds

I feel like my key takeaways from this one is that adding borders to a seemingly borderless space may actually make it safer for the average person on the internet. I never really thought about the internet as a borderless space, but with concepts like the “cloud” and even something as simple as WiFi, it does make sense to frame it that way. I found it interesting that this borderlessness is also precisely what makes the internet so vulnerable to exploitation. The idea that subdividing and localizing the physical servers that comprise the internet to protect individuals that reside in distinct jurisdictions is super interesting. I feel like the use cases cited of China and Russia show the potential downsides of government control and restricted internet access while the potential for governments to regulate how corporations gather and analyze data on the internet is more hopeful. It seems like an interesting double edged sword. I wonder if it will lead to digital demilitarized zones where countries need to allow for a grey area between local servers!

Borderlands/La Frontera

This piece was far more emotional for me, and I loved the way it touches on the invisible nature of borders themselves. While some border may appear physical like lines on a map or a fence, they are often hazy, blurred, and outright invisible. The changing nature of borders highlighted in the first chapter with the expansion of the US border and the diminishing of the Mexican border, shows how arbitrary many borders are. People might wake up one day to find that the place they call home is now something else entirely, and they are now labelled as the “other” when they had been living there for generations. It’s honestly heartbreaking. For the second chapter, the highlighting of the way we separate “others” using social and cultural borders was fascinating. Even the simple act of labeling someone or something as “other” creates a kind of border around that person/place/thing that not only bind the “others” to each other by giving them a sense of community and commonality but also ostracizes them from communities that seek to reject them. It’s a really interesting dynamic that shows the ways in which the concept of a “border” extends beyond the division between two physical places.