The Weight of Shadows by José Orduña

security. In 2008 the Los Angeles Police Department began monitoring individuals’ everyday activities. They came up with a list of sixty-five behaviors, including using binoculars, attempting to take measurements, taking pictures or video footage “withno apparent aesthetic value,” drawing diagrams, abandoning a vehicle, taking notes, and espousing extremist views, which “could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.” They were able to do this because the Department of Justice did away with federal regulations that governed criminal intelligence databases and expanded what kinds of information can be collected by local law enforcement and with whom it can be shared. This Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) program has since gone nationwide, which means that in addition to the mass information-gathering and surveillance that happens online, information about noncriminal activity is also being gathered offline in cities and towns all over the United States. A robust and steady stream of this information constantly flows into federal intelligence databases. The mission is to record, upload, and be able to extract exploitable meaning from everything; to fully capitalize on our cultural tendency and technological ability to force everything that will ever be thought through a recordable medium; to fill every crevice with a camera’s gaze, an accessible microphone; to comprehensively map human relations in real time; to make predictions that allow more comprehensive, broader management over life; and to make all of this available to a chosen operator from a single searchable database accessible from any laptop or mobile device.
    I look down and notice I haven’t filled out the form sitting in my lap. It asks for my alien number so I retrieve my green card. The letter “A” followed by nine digits. Tolstoy wrote in his private diaries that there are proper names, real names, names of things, animals and people, which evoke the way of life better than a description of the thing itself. The alien number constitutes one of my names in the system, lets the analyst know what my restrictions in movement and labor are, what my ports of entry and exit have been, and may be connected to what kind of trouble I’ve been getting into, if any. In the system, I am a collection oflinked information filed under the category of Alien. When these points of data become aggregated and disseminated among systems that determine humans’ lives, they allow for the expulsion and management of populations along lines of demarcation forged and maintained through violence. They allow for laws that inscribe themselves preemptively on the bodies and souls of people, laws that can act upon them from a great distance always exerting pressures that never let up. They allow for the displacement and expulsion of millions of individuals who are all members of families and communities. In many paradigms of social justice, people fight to be seen, named, and recognized, but in light of these systems of mass surveillance it seems we need to reclaim anonymity, unrecognizability, the right to be left alone.
    I have no idea where
I
am in this relation between the signifier and the signified.
    It feels like I’m betraying myself when I write the number on the line. I do it in bad faith.
    This is my official identification, composed of narrow points of data that are reassembled in permutations to serve others’ purposes. These identities refer to me, a reference that others own. These official permutations become my virtual selves, selves that have so little to do with me and yet contain information essential to my lived experience, selves that become unrecognizable to me—versions alleged to be me trapped to endlessly drag themselves along a razor’s edge of perpetually self-replicating virtual borders. They signal
what
I am because these systems can’t collect
who
I