2019-02-14T09:22:05+01:00
Feb 14, 2019
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1 min read
Hettie O’Brien writes in an article on The New Statesman on the fantasies of tech solutionism for Irish border:
The logic here is peak Silicon Valley: technology vacates policies of their political intent, offering practical solutions that we can converge on regardless of political differences.
Yet this politics-free vision of the Irish border amounts to magical thinking. It’s not because the necessary technologies don’t exist; many already do. It’s that the proposed solutions, whether visible or not, would effectively monitor everyone and everything that passed across the Irish border, making it one of the most closely observed and therefore political crossings in the world.
Authors
Wouter Van Rossem is a researcher on the intersection between social science and computer science. He previously worked on the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, Processing Citizenship, where he investigated how data infrastructures for population processing co-produce citizens, Europe, and territory. He completed his PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and is still working on publications stemming from these impactful projects. In addition to his academic pursuits as a PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he brings a diverse background as a software engineer, having worked in various companies and at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy. His diverse background, spanning both theoretical and hands-on knowledge, reflects his keen interest in exploring the intricate interconnections between technology and society.