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Many patents in the field of “life sciences” contain fictitious examples, known as “prophetic”, of how the invention can be realised. Such imaginary examples enable applicants to increase the scope of their patents. This is a common practice that is now taking on significant proportions. At a time when multinationals are trying to obtain deregulation of their GMOs, an understanding of the broad outlines of this practice will give us a better grasp of the issues surrounding patents.

The latest news on patents covering “biotechnological inventions”, particularly GMOs/NTGs, reminds us that these legal tools are above all long and complex texts. Yet the content of these texts determines the scope of these patents. In addition to a general description of the invention, including its industrial applications, a patent must describe one or more examples of how the invention can be put into practice. However, at the time the patent application is filed, these examples may or may not have actually been realised. When they are not real, they are said to be “prophetic”, “phantom”, “hypothetical” or “fictional”… Anglo-Saxons also speak of “paper examples”. This practice, which is authorised in several jurisdictions, including the United States and Europe (EPO – European Patent Office), nevertheless raises legal issues, particularly in the field of “biotechnological inventions”.

RECOGNIZING TRUTH, AGREEING upon truth, and proclaiming truth are relevant to American national security in a multitude of ways. Agreement about objective facts and confidence in the institutions that produce them allow politicians to rely on Intelligence Community reports, provide a foundation for trust among military units, allow policymakers to agree on foreign policy crises even across the aisle, and enable great powers to maintain credibility in both their overtures of friendship and their threats to use force. In these ways and others, the trends that the RAND Corporation has labeled Truth Decay have implications for national security. This Perspectiive serves as a preliminary examination of the many roles and the complex intersection of Truth Decay and national security; in it, we examine how eroding confidence in facts and fact-finding institutions can affect U.S. national security. In addition to framing these intersections, we examine whether Truth Decay’s role in national security has changed over time and the impact of the changing definition of national security.

Truth Decay affects the United States on individual, institutional, societal, and normative levels. On an individual level, citizens are an increasingly recognized force in driving foreign policy and often build foreign policy positions from partisan cues rather than objective facts. The current media environment further enables individuals to affirm preexisting opinions. Truth Decay can drive elites and policymakers to more extreme positions, and the biases and opinions of policymakers can have great impact on foreign policy. At an institutional level, Truth Decay can harm the recruitment, retention, and morale of U.S. national security institutions— including the U.S. military and the Intelligence Community. More polarized and less informed discourse in U.S. legislative and executive institutions can impair quick policy action, especially in crisis. At a societal level, Truth Decay can diminish the United States’ ability to use national power, the availability of resources to focus on national security, and the U.S. resilience to homeland security threats. The United States and its allies are also more vulnerable to these trends than many of the United States’ adversaries, where post-truth politics are common. But, ultimately, there is much about the interplay of Truth Decay’s trends that we still do not understand. R 2

All of this points to a civic disease that I've been calling “Truth Decay,” and that has enfeebled our response to everything from climate change to domestic terrorism to a global pandemic. It's the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life, and it cuts much deeper than any political party or demographic. It's why nonpartisan think tanks like RAND are as important now as they have ever been.

I've always said that RAND is an idea as much as a research institute—a belief that the best way to solve the most complex and difficult problems is to begin with facts and objective analysis. In our early days, that meant figuring out how to put a satellite into orbit, or how to manage the threat of global nuclear war. Today, it means saving lives and livelihoods from COVID-19, building a more just and equitable society, and responding to the ever-changing threats of an ever-accelerating world. Our goal throughout has been to make communities safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous.

Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024, according to researchers, technologists and political scientists.

As the presidential election approaches, experts warn that a convergence of events at home and abroad, on traditional and social media — and amid an environment of rising authoritarianism, deep distrust, and political and social unrest — makes the dangers from propaganda, falsehoods and conspiracy theories more dire than ever.

Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm. Vaccine denial, climate denial, election denial and war-crime denial have joined the grotesque denial of the Holocaust in the ranks of dishonesties now regularly foisted on the public. We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age.

In January the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked the spread of misinformation among the greatest threats to humanity in its Global Risks Report. With more than four billion people voting in the upcoming 2024 elections (roughly half the world’s population), the report makes clear that now is the time to prepare the world against disinformation and those who peddle it.

Health misinformation took center stage during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to run rampant online. Falsehoods about evidence-based cancer treatments, birth control, and other forms of medical care have caused confusion, conflict, and premature death (Gisondi, M. A., et al., Journal of Medical Internet Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2022). Despite the growing threat to global health, social media companies have backtracked on promises to police misinformation on their platforms (Big Tech Backslide, Free Press, 2023). That has left users—especially young people, who frequently encounter antiscience views online—vulnerable to being deceived. When they try to verify information, they often land on more inaccuracies (Aslett, K., et al., Nature, Vol. 625, 2024). Turning to authority figures for clarity can also backfire: In February, Florida’s surgeon general shared advice that contradicted medical knowledge about measles. “Many laypeople are just not familiar with how knowledge is produced in science and medicine, so these concepts can feel very abstract,” which is why research-backed health communication is so important, said Kurt Sampsel, PhD, the senior program manager for disinformation and community engagement at PEN America, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting free expression. But as researchers work to address what some are calling an “infodemic” of health misinformation, they too face roadblocks—often politically motivated. Research groups such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, as well as advocacy organizations such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate, are fielding lawsuits, public-records requests, and accusations of collusion with social media platforms. Last August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suddenly halted its $154 million Advancing Health Communication Science and Practice initiative, which aimed to improve the accuracy of the medical information people receive and share. “The term ‘misinformation’ has become very politicized, and that is a problem,” said psychologist William Klein, PhD, associate director of behavioral research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), who was cochair of the now defunct NIH health communication initiative. Despite the barriers, psychologists and other scientists are forging ahead with efforts to learn more about the threat of health misinformation and to put what’s already known into practice. In November 2023, APA released a consensus statement titled Using Psychological Science to Understand and Fight Health Misinformation that provides evidence-based guidance on the issue. The statement, edited by University of Cambridge psychologist and misinformation researcher Sander van der Linden, PhD, was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). APA will further tackle the topic on the Main Stage at APA 2024 in Seattle on August 9. Ultimately, a cross-disciplinary push that advances psychological interventions (including strategies such as debunking and prebunking), as well as health care access and broader systems-level changes in how people engage with scientific information, is what’s needed to drive change.

“When people mistrust science and scientists, there will be more of a rumor mill,” where false information spreads rapidly, Klein said. “Trust in science has gone down, but it’s still not low. Reversing that trend could make a big difference.”

The theoretical case for prophetic examples rests on benefit to patentees. The Patent Act requires inventors to describe how to make and use their invention. Inventors often do this by writing experimental protocols and results in the patent. For example, a patent on a diabetes medication might include an experiment showing how to synthesize the molecule and another showing that the molecule can be given to humans to reduce the need for insulin injections. The broader the patent, the more experiments are required. A patent covering one molecule might only need to include one synthesis protocol, whereas a patent covering a family of one hundred molecules might need to include many more experiments. It is always faster and cheaper to make up data than to conduct real experiments, so if the experiments disclosed in the patent can be fictional, inventors will be able to file broader patents more easily. This should be particularly useful for small companies, who have small budgets and cannot afford extensive real experimentation. For companies of all sizes, broader patents provide a greater reward to the inventor, which might incentivize more innovation. I test this hypothesis empirically and find there is surprisingly little evidence that prophetic examples actually help patentees. Patents with more prophetic examples are narrower than patents with fewer prophetic examples – despite the prediction that prophetic examples help patentees get broader patents. Second, there is no evidence that patents with more prophetic examples are filed earlier than those with fewer prophetic examples – again, contrary to prediction. Finally, although small companies should benefit disproportionately from the ability to use prophetic examples, they do not. I find that small companies are significantly less likely to use prophetic examples as compared to their larger counterparts. In sum, the case for prophetic examples does not fit with the empirical evidence. Evidence for the benefits of prophetic examples is weak; but evidence for their harms is much stronger. Patents with prophetic examples are frequently abandoned, which suggests that the inventor is not commercializing their invention. The problem is that, because of the patent, neither is anybody else. While in force, the patent prevents others from working in that area. Even after the patent has been abandoned and no longer has legal force, a chilling effect remains. Because patents are granted only if an invention has not been previously disclosed, it is difficult for any subsequent inventor to get a patent in an area previously described by a prophetic example. This is true even if the prophetic example is incorrect and the subsequent inventor was the first to actually make a functioning prototype. Essentially, instead of incentivizing innovation, prophetic examples may create an innovation dead zone. Prophetic examples also lead to a second type of harm: they mislead scientists. In their patent, inventors must disclose a detailed description of their invention that can be used by other scientists to build further upon the technology. This disclosure function of patents has long been recognized as a crucial element of innovation – allowing downstream innovators to see further by metaphorically standing on the shoulders of giants. However, the disclosure function breaks down if scientists are misled by the disclosed information. I analyzed how prophetic examples were cited in scientific publications and found that ninety-nine percent of citations to prophetic examples incorrectly cited the example as if it represented work that had actually been done. This would not necessarily be a problem if the prophetic examples were good predictions, but, as I demonstrate in this Article, many prophetic examples are probably wrong. False information is infiltrating the scientific community by way of prophetic examples.

Many patents in the field of “life sciences” contain fictitious examples, known as “prophetic”, of how the invention can be realised. Such imaginary examples enable applicants to increase the scope of their patents. This is a common practice that is now taking on significant proportions. At a time when multinationals are trying to obtain deregulation of their GMOs, an understanding of the broad outlines of this practice will give us a better grasp of the issues surrounding patents. The latest news on patents covering “biotechnological inventions”, particularly GMOs/NTGs, reminds us that these legal tools are above all long and complex texts. Yet the content of these texts determines the scope of these patents. In addition to a general description of the invention, including its industrial applications, a patent must describe one or more examples of how the invention can be put into practice. However, at the time the patent application is filed, these examples may or may not have actually been realised. When they are not real, they are said to be “prophetic”, “phantom”, “hypothetical” or “fictional”… Anglo-Saxons also speak of “paper examples”. This practice, which is authorised in several jurisdictions, including the United States and Europe (), nevertheless raises legal issues, particularly in the field of “biotechnological inventions”. A practice permitted subject to conditions The broader the scope of a patent, the greater its potential economic value. But in order to claim broad scope, it is necessary, among other things, to demonstrate that the invention can be made in different ways. For example, a patent claiming genetic sequences with a minimum percentage – 80%, 90% or 95% – of identity with the sequence actually “invented” is very broad. It would therefore take many examples of embodiments of the invention to show that it can be implemented over the entire scope of the claims. The number of examples required may be such that it is sometimes necessary to create fictitious ones. Providing a plurality of examples therefore helps to fulfil a fundamental requirement of patent law: an invention must be sufficiently described for “a person skilled in the art” – a biotechnology engineer, for example – to be able to reproduce it to its full extent using his or her general knowledge. The “biotech” sector is no exception to this requirement of sufficient description. The rapid development and strong competitiveness of this sector encourages its players to file numerous patent applications as soon as possible. This is the case even if, when the patent application is filed, the invention is not sufficiently supported by real examples. This is why applicants resort to “prophetic” examples. In the United States, since the early 1980s, (the US Patent and Trademark Office) has accepted such examples under certain conditions, in particular that they are not misleading and that they have a reasonable scientific basis. The USPTO also requires that they be distinguished from actual examples in the text of the patent. The EPO also allows prophetic examples, provided they are reproducible. But a 2021 survey shows that 75% of European patent applicants do not distinguish prophetic examples from real ones in their patent applications. Examples in granted patents are by default presumed to be valid. While an examiner may, in the course of the examination procedure, request certain additional experimental data, it is not assumed that he or she is required or able to test the embodiments of the invention. A person challenging the validity of a patent on the grounds of inadmissible prophetic examples will have the burden of proof.

I test this hypothesis empirically and find there is surprisingly little evidence that prophetic examples actually help patentees. Patents with more prophetic examples are narrower than patents with fewer prophetic examples – despite the prediction that prophetic examples help patentees get broader patents.26 Second, there is no evidence that patents with more prophetic examples are filed earlier than those with fewer prophetic examples – again, contrary to prediction.27 Finally, although small companies should benefit disproportionately from the ability to use prophetic examples, they do not. I find that small companies are significantly less likely to use prophetic examples as compared to their larger counterparts.28 In sum, the case for prophetic examples does not fit with the empirical evidence. Evidence for the benefits of prophetic examples is weak; but evidence for their harms is much stronger. Patents with prophetic examples are frequently abandoned, which suggests that the inventor is not commercializing their invention. 29 The problem is that, because of the patent, neither is anybody else. While in force, the patent prevents others from working in that area.30 Even after the patent has been abandoned and no longer has legal force, a chilling effect remains. Because patents are granted only if an invention has not been previously disclosed, it is difficult for any subsequent inventor to get a patent in an area previously described by a prophetic example.31 This is true even if the prophetic example is incorrect and the subsequent inventor was the first to actually make a functioning prototype.32 Essentially, instead of incentivizing innovation, prophetic examples may create an innovation dead zone.

Prophetic examples also lead to a second type of harm: they mislead scientists. In their patent, inventors must disclose a detailed description of their invention that can be used by other scientists to build further upon the technology.33 This disclosure function of patents has long been recognized as a crucial element of innovation – allowing downstream innovators to see further by metaphorically standing on the shoulders of giants.34 However, the disclosure function breaks down if scientists are misled by the disclosed information. I analyzed how prophetic examples were cited in scientific publications and found that ninety-nine percent of citations to prophetic examples incorrectly cited the example as if it represented work that had actually been done.35 This would not necessarily be a problem if the prophetic examples were good predictions, but, as I demonstrate in this Article, many prophetic examples are probably wrong.36 False information is infiltrating the scientific community by way of prophetic examples. My empirical findings have implications for several core debates in patent theory, including the disclosure function of patents, theories about constructive reduction to practice, and the optimal timing of patent filing. For disclosure, the misinformation spread by prophetic examples adds strength to widespread accusations that disclosure functions poorly and furthers a line of the literature emphasizing the gap between scientific writing and “patentese.”37 For constructive reduction to practice – a doctrine that allows inventors to obtain a patent without having physically created the invention – scholars argue that it disincentivizes physical reduction to practice. 38 However, my evidence suggests that, surprisingly, there may be more advantages to physical invention than previously realized. 39 For the optimal timing of patent filing, I show that while proponents of early filing might be expected to favor mechanisms that contribute to earlier filing, some such mechanisms – such as prophetic examples – do not fit with the traditional justifications for early filing.

The theoretical case for prophetic examples rests on benefit to patentees. The Patent Act requires inventors to describe how to make and use their invention. Inventors often do this by writing experimental protocols and results in the patent. For example, a patent on a diabetes medication might include an experiment showing how to synthesize the molecule and another showing that the molecule can be given to humans to reduce the need for insulin injections. The broader the patent, the more experiments are required. A patent covering one molecule might only need to include one synthesis protocol, whereas a patent covering a family of one hundred molecules might need to include many more experiments. It is always faster and cheaper to make up data than to conduct real experiments, so if the experiments disclosed in the patent can be fictional, inventors will be able to file broader patents more easily. This should be particularly useful for small companies, who have small budgets and cannot afford extensive real experimentation. For companies of all sizes, broader patents provide a greater reward to the inventor, which might incentivize more innovation. I test this hypothesis empirically and find there is surprisingly little evidence that prophetic examples actually help patentees. Patents with more prophetic examples are narrower than patents with fewer prophetic examples – despite the prediction that prophetic examples help patentees get broader patents. Second, there is no evidence that patents with more prophetic examples are filed earlier than those with fewer prophetic examples – again, contrary to prediction. Finally, although small companies should benefit disproportionately from the ability to use prophetic examples, they do not. I find that small companies are significantly less likely to use prophetic examples as compared to their larger counterparts. In sum, the case for prophetic examples does not fit with the empirical evidence. Evidence for the benefits of prophetic examples is weak; but evidence for their harms is much stronger. Patents with prophetic examples are frequently abandoned, which suggests that the inventor is not commercializing their invention. The problem is that, because of the patent, neither is anybody else. While in force, the patent prevents others from working in that area. Even after the patent has been abandoned and no longer has legal force, a chilling effect remains. Because patents are granted only if an invention has not been previously disclosed, it is difficult for any subsequent inventor to get a patent in an area previously described by a prophetic example. This is true even if the prophetic example is incorrect and the subsequent inventor was the first to actually make a functioning prototype. Essentially, instead of incentivizing innovation, prophetic examples may create an innovation dead zone. Prophetic examples also lead to a second type of harm: they mislead scientists. In their patent, inventors must disclose a detailed description of their invention that can be used by other scientists to build further upon the technology. This disclosure function of patents has long been recognized as a crucial element of innovation – allowing downstream innovators to see further by metaphorically standing on the shoulders of giants. However, the disclosure function breaks down if scientists are misled by the disclosed information. I analyzed how prophetic examples were cited in scientific publications and found that ninety-nine percent of citations to prophetic examples incorrectly cited the example as if it represented work that had actually been done. This would not necessarily be a problem if the prophetic examples were good predictions, but, as I demonstrate in this Article, many prophetic examples are probably wrong. False information is infiltrating the scientific community by way of prophetic examples.

In most contexts, making up data is forbidden - considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments to be entirely fictional. These so-called “prophetic examples” are not only explicitly permitted by both the Patent Office and federal courts, but are considered equivalent to factual data in patent doctrine. Though prophetic examples are thought to be common, there are no in-depth studies of the practice, nor any explanation for why fictional data are allowed in patents.

Here, I provide the first historical, theoretical, and empirical analysis of prophetic examples. I collect and analyze a novel dataset of over 2 million U.S. patents and applications from the biology and chemistry industries. I find that at least 17% of experiments in this population are fictional. Through both empirical and theoretical analyses, I weigh the potential costs and benefits of prophetic examples and find that the costs prevail. Prophetic examples could be beneficial if they help patentees; but I find little evidence that they do so, even in the specific situations in which they should be the most useful. Instead, prophetic examples likely hinder innovation because they prevent others from conducting their own experiments – even after the patent has expired and even if the prophetic example is incorrect. Prophetic examples also hopelessly confuse scientists – a shocking 99% of scientific articles incorrectly cite prophetic examples as if they contained factual information – which means that made-up results from patents contaminate the scientific literature.

In most contexts, making up data is forbidden - considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments to be entirely fictional. These so-called “prophetic examples” are not only explicitly permitted by both the Patent Office and federal courts, but are considered equivalent to factual data in patent doctrine. Though prophetic examples are thought to be common, there are no in-depth studies of the practice, nor any explanation for why fictional data are allowed in patents.

Here, I provide the first historical, theoretical, and empirical analysis of prophetic examples. I collect and analyze a novel dataset of over 2 million U.S. patents and applications from the biology and chemistry industries. I find that at least 17% of experiments in this population are fictional. Through both empirical and theoretical analyses, I weigh the potential costs and benefits of prophetic examples and find that the costs prevail. Prophetic examples could be beneficial if they help patentees; but I find little evidence that they do so, even in the specific situations in which they should be the most useful. Instead, prophetic examples likely hinder innovation because they prevent others from conducting their own experiments – even after the patent has expired and even if the prophetic example is incorrect. Prophetic examples also hopelessly confuse scientists – a shocking 99% of scientific articles incorrectly cite prophetic examples as if they contained factual information – which means that made-up results from patents contaminate the scientific literature.

Misinformation has reached crisis proportions. It poses a risk to international peace (1), interferes with democratic decision making (2), endangers the well-being of the planet (3), and threatens public health (4, 5). Public support for policies to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is being undercut by misinformation, leading to the World Health Organization’s “infodemic” declaration (6). Ultimately, misinformation undermines collective sense making and collective action. We cannot solve problems of public health, social inequity, or climate change without also addressing the growing problem of misinformation. Most of the research efforts and interventions examine broad, public consumption of misinformation—modeling the spreading dynamics of falsehoods (7, 8), examining social network effects (9, 10), and evaluating crowd-sourced mediation (11), with a special focus on crisis events (12) and political elections (13). In this article, we turn the spotlight on science. We look at the ways that misinformation can travel within science due to misaligned incentives, out-of-date publishing norms, and sociotechnical systems that concentrate attention and credit on a small subset of the literature. Appealing as it may be to view science as occupying a privileged epistemic position, scientific communication has fallen victim to the ill effects of an attention economy. This is not to say that science is broken. Far from it. Science is the greatest of human inventions for understanding our world, and it functions remarkably well despite these challenges. Still, scientists compete for eyeballs just as journalists do. They face incentives to hype their work and to publish selectively those findings that are surprising and “clickable.” Like other information consumers and producers, researchers rely on search engines, recommendation systems, and social media to find relevant information. In turn, scientists can be susceptible to filter bubbles, predatory publishers, and undue deference to the authority of numbers, P values, and black box algorithms.

In most contexts, making up data is forbidden - considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments to be entirely fictional. These so-called “prophetic examples” are not only explicitly permitted by both the Patent Office and federal courts, but are considered equivalent to factual data in patent doctrine. Though prophetic examples are thought to be common, there are no in-depth studies of the practice, nor any explanation for why fictional data are allowed in patents. Here, I provide the first historical, theoretical, and empirical analysis of prophetic examples. I collect and analyze a novel dataset of over 2 million U.S. patents and applications from the biology and chemistry industries. I find that at least 17% of experiments in this population are fictional. Through both empirical and theoretical analyses, I weigh the potential costs and benefits of prophetic examples and find that the costs prevail. Prophetic examples could be beneficial if they help patentees; but I find little evidence that they do so, even in the specific situations in which they should be the most useful. Instead, prophetic examples likely hinder innovation because they prevent others from conducting their own experiments – even after the patent has expired and even if the prophetic example is incorrect. Prophetic examples also hopelessly confuse scientists – a shocking 99% of scientific articles incorrectly cite prophetic examples as if they contained factual information – which means that made-up results from patents contaminate the scientific literature.

To be justifiable, prophetic examples must help patentees, but it is not enough for them to merely help patentees. The underlying assumption in the case for prophetic examples is that they help patentees in a way that is not harmful to the patent system more broadly. This assumption has two main components, each of which is discussed below.

“The U.S.-Mexican border and border-states have been main battlegrounds where United States policies have fostered, encouraged, and even normalized the genocide and removal of Mexicans from the colonized land.” The United States was created out of settler colonialism, which is defined by permanent settlement in a territory by members of foreign group.[1] The first Anglo settlers came under British rule, creating sovereign colonial territories on lands that were taken from indigenous American communities. The creation of these colonies and later Western expansion reveals that settler colonialism is one of the structuring principles that birthed American society. Settler colonialism involves the displacement and removal of indigenous inhabitants instead of their assimilation or exploitation to the dominant culture; its main goal is to have control over land rather than human or natural resources.[2] As scholar Patrick Wolfe states, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event”[3]. It is a system with no end, as there is always constant tension between the remaining indigenous groups and the colonizers and their descendants. By examining U.S. and Mexican historical relations through the settler-colonialism paradigm, we can see that settler colonialism did not stop after the removal and genocide campaigns against Native Americans; rather, it continued as the U.S. searched for land in the Southwest, with Mexicans becoming the new victims. As stated before, settler colonialism is never ending, and the structure under which it functions is always transforming. I will argue that despite the long history of labor programs involving the recruitment of Mexicans, there have historically been many efforts to rid Mexicans from their captured land or to control those who are on it. I will also argue that the U.S.-Mexican border and border-states have been main battlegrounds where United States policies have fostered, encouraged, and even normalized the genocide and removal of Mexicans from the colonized land. These actions have been taken in order to maintain and increase power over the conquered peoples and country and as a means to continuously lay claim to their ownership of the land. As part of Westward expansion and the idea of a manifest destiny, many believed it was the duty of Anglo-Americans to have claim to all of the North American land. This sentiment was reinforced and strengthened by the success that the United States had experienced in taking land from the indigenous North Americans. Since the early 1800s, many Anglo-Americans had settled in many northwestern areas of Mexico. During this time Texas and Mexico were still Mexican lands; however, in 1836, colonists in Texas fought a war and gained independence from Mexico.[4] President James Polk saw this an opportunity to retrieve more land and in 1846 sent troops to territories below Texas. This led to the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48 in which the United States occupied Mexico City, and Mexico, which was unable to find the funds to continue the war, had to cede about 50 percent of its northern territory to the United States.[5] About 50,000 Mexicans died, in contrast to 13,000 Americans.[6] This mass killing and forced dispossession of land was the introduction to settler colonialist activities on this Southwestern territory. Though the U.S.-Mexican War ended with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave Mexicans living in the ceded territory the option of remaining and retaining their Mexican citizenship or becoming United States citizens, it did not mean that Mexicans would socially be accepted as welcome residents and citizens.[7] After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, the new border lines were not enforced and there were no border policies set in place, meaning that people could move freely between the two countries. This was an economic advantage to the United States, so it was allowed to happen.[8] Though there was migration, it was in relatively small numbers and the first mass migration into the new American territory did not occur until the 1880s, when there was a need for railroad workers, miners, and agricultural workers on that land. It must be clear that although Mexicans were being welcomed as workers, they were regarded as inferior within the social structure and were therefore rejected by the dominant order. Though some Mexicans gained citizenship through the terms of the 1848 treaty, under the Naturalization Act of 1790 (the first U.S. rules in granting citizenship), naturalization was only afforded to immigrants who were “free white people.” It was not until 1870 that the naturalization process was extended beyond white people and granted to “persons of African descent”; this revision was very limited though and continued to exclude other non-whites. [9] Mexicans were not considered “Americans” legally nor socially in the eyes of white-Americans. This pervading legal and social notion of associating whiteness with permanent residence and Mexican-ness with temporary labor was an institutionalized way of fostering an environment of displacement and racial othering that created the framework for future removal and discriminatory actions. Under the 1924 National Origins Act which placed great numerical limits on immigrants, Mexican immigrant workers were still allowed to come in without any limit, but they still had many other restraints and stresses placed on them. In Texas and California, Mexican students went to separate and unequal schools. Poll tax policies greatly inhibited Mexicans from voting, jobs outside of agriculture were hard to come by, and police violence was very common.[10] These actions can be classified as attrition through enforcement, a practice that intends to target immigrants through dimensions of everyday life in order to promote “self deportation.”[11] By using policies that encouraged discrimination, the government could create an unpleasant environment for Mexicans in order to encourage them to leave the United States, and to facilitate the exploitation of those Mexican-Americans who were citizens. However, nativists did not believe the prejudiced regulations were enough and they were very upset with the lack of limitations in the National Origins Act. This caused nativists to vow to control the Mexican peoples that were “causing a social problem,” a “problem [that] comes into our schools… comes into our cities, and… comes into our whole civilization in California,” as stated by a member of the California Farm Bureau stated during a 1926 hearing intended to put limits on Mexican migrants.[12] This type of narrative exemplifies how historical notions of the land had been reworked and recreated in a way that gave white-Americans more legitimacy over the land than people of Mexican origin. Tensions ran high as nativists on the border-states felt threatened by the increasing presence of Mexican inhabitants and workers. This stipulated a higher level of policing , leading to the 1925 Border Act. This Act “gave border patrol officers broad authority to interrogate, detain, and arrest any person they believe to be engaged in the act of illegal entry, a violation whose boundary extended from the moment unauthorized immigrants crossed the border until they reached their interior destination.[13]” Prior to this act, the Border Patrol had very little power. In fact, it had no more power than the ordinary citizen. However, the 1925 Act gave Border Patrol officers the power of arrest without warrant and defined a mass jurisdiction for their work, thus giving them governmental policing power and creating a new and powerful force to be used against Mexicans at the border and in the neighboring states.[14] This was the start of a new era of Border Patrol policies created to support the settler-colonialist system and to keep out and regulate those deemed unwanted by the nation. The anti-Mexican sentiment increased exponentially in 1929 after the stock market crash, when the economic depression resulted in an intensification of xenophobic behavior. Though the Border Patrol was using its new powers to round up and deport Mexicans that they identified as undocumented, this was not sufficient for anti-Mexican forces. Exclusionists rallied and organized public and private agencies at both the local and state levels agencies in order to institute repatriation programs that would expedite the removal of Mexican people from the United States. They sought to “return indigent nationals to their own country,” “to save welfare agencies money,” and to “create jobs for real Americans.”[15] This repatriation programs did not make a distinction between undocumented Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent; instead it aimed to remove all Mexicans. Unlike the Border Patrol, repatriation campaigns did not usually involve the government (with the exception of welfare offices), instead they involved the power of individuals. By using the power of physical violence, the people involved in these initiatives forced Mexicans to leave their jobs and homes throughout the country[16]. Copious amounts of people who had lived their whole lives in the United States and were obligated to abandon everything they had in order to move to a country they may have never been to before. According to the U.S. Labor Department, in only a fifteen-moth period over two million people were forcibly reallocated to Mexico, a large percentage of these people being United States citizens. During a five-month period in 1931 in Los Angeles 50,000 Mexicans were violently and unwillingly deported.[17] Under the conditions of settler colonialism, land owners and the government aimed to control Mexican life and labor; as an agribusiness man from Texas said in the 1920s: “if we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.[18]” When this perception of control was broken, Mexicans would no longer be accepted as workers or inhabitants of the United States. Mexicans and United States citizens of Mexican descent were subject to warrantless searches and arrests. They were victims of violent and invasive repatriation campaigns and were being exploited for their labor. The policies and laws in place encouraged these activities and served as the foundation and infrastructure for these exclusionary practices and xenophobic systems. Mexican people were systematically dehumanized and abused, a type of treatment that was well accepted by the majority of the American public and strengthened by government sanctions. This desire for control of the Mexican population in the United States is further noted by the initiation of the bracero program created in 1942. This program comprised a wartime agreement between the Mexican and American governments that provided for the use of Mexicans as temporary agricultural workers during a time where the U.S. was desperate for cheap labor.[19] This program aimed to bring in a limited number of expendable workers that would not become permanent residents and that would be under the authority and management of their supervisors at all times. This plan failed, however: smuggling of undocumented workers became commonplace from the beginning of the program and there was a great upsurge in undocumented workers coming into the states.[20] The program lasted until 1964 and employed about five million Mexican workers.[21] A dramatic increase of Mexican workers and inhabitants, both braceros and undocumented, created a national hysteria that led to the creation of Operation Wetback, another program that would lead to a numerous amount of Mexicans being forcibly removed, Operation Wetback was created in 1952 and was a paramilitary law enforcement campaign that used the threat of violence in order to detain and deport undocumented Mexican immigrants, although in reality it also induced the forced removal of thousands of documented Mexicans and Mexican Americans.[22] Officers searched Mexican American barrios throughout the border-states, and raided Mexican communities, migrant camps, ranches, farms, parks, and leisure spots.[23] The object of this intense militarization of border enforcement was to detain “illegal aliens,” but in practice the program focused on all “Mexican-looking” people in general. It was also not uncommon for American-born children to be deported along with their “illegal” parents. Many Mexicans were so fearful of the potential violence of this initiative that they went to Mexico in order to avoid the Border Patrol officials.[24] To have enough space for the detainees, officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities.[25] The United States forcibly removed over one million to Mexico during this short time period.[26] After Operation Wetback, the Border Patrol continued the militarization, racialization, and regionalization of the their practices.[27] In 1956, a new initiative to criminalize Mexican migrants and people soon surfaced. At this time, chief law enforcement officers instructed officers to delete wetback from their vocabulary and instead to use the words “criminal alien” or “deportable alien” in order to create a “psychological effect on the public and courts that [would] benefit the Service.”[28] Through these policies and initiatives the United States created a narrative that legitimized the white-American claim to the Southwest, while actively marginalizing and othering the Chicanos and Mexicans in the area. Mexicans were considered aliens on their own land. Part of the settler-colonialist paradigm is that the forced removal of indigenous people of the land becomes hegemonically accepted and adopted into everyday life. These hegemonic forces were incredibly successful at normalizing these exploitative and colonist measures. The impact of the U.S. government’s policies and initiatives even prompted Mexicans and Mexican descendants to become invested in the militarization and enhancement of the Border Patrol. A significant amount of support for the U.S. Border Patrol came from the Mexican-American middle class and Mexican-American political leaders. Many of them believed that migrants from Mexico, particularly those that came unauthorized, thwarted their assimilation.[29] The government also received support from much of the Mexican-American working class. As agricultural worker Drineo González explained in a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1952, “the legal residents can not live under the wetback wages and [compete] with them.”[30] The Border Patrol soon started working with the FBI on drug and crime related policies; this created a new association between Mexicans and drugs and violent crimes, and provided the BP with ample federal funding and backing. In 1956 the Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotics Program (CIN) was launched, which was a Southwestern Region program whose objective was to find United States immigrants that were excludable under the Immigration and Nationality Act policies regarding criminal records and drug possession. Through CIN the U.S. Border Patrol became a partner in law-enforcement institutions and initiatives and not only policed migration, but also policed criminals and drug related crimes.[31] This program targeted Mexican nationals already living in the United States, thus creating an association in the public conscience between Mexicans and criminals.[32] It also linked the underfunded efforts of U.S. Immigration control with the FBI, “the institutional heart of the U.S. federal law enforcement.”[33] As scholar Nicholas P. De Genova writes: “undocumented migrant labor has been criminalized as ‘illegal’ and subjected to excessive and extraordinary forms of policing.”[34] The legal powers the Border Patrol gained during the 1950s combined with the increase in racialized criminalization allowed for a political atmosphere that supported more force and militarization on the border than ever before. Although discriminatory and militant practices against Mexicans had already historically been used and implemented, these new measures allowed the government to employ them on a much larger scale and with the support of federal agencies. These new formal and democratic legal processes that were created under the country’s duty to “protect the state” legitimized extreme violence by the Border Patrol against Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican descent.[35] It must be recognized that Border Patrol policies also created conditions under which genocide could take place. When Border Patrol officials deported Mexican people and families, they were sending them into environments where they could possibly die. These deportees were sent back to a country they had fled from and had lost connections to. When returning to Mexico under these circumstances, they were often met with conditions of extreme poverty and economic persecution, which could lead to suffering and death. Not only this, but by gaining more armed guards for the border and creating fences, the Border Patrol forced those attempting to cross the border to cross miles and miles of desert and suffer from starvation, dehydration, sexual violence, and other human rights violations. They created a strategy in which they used the environment as a deterrent, thereby engendering the death of thousands of Mexican people over the course of history without directly being the cause of it.[36] The U.S. Border transformed into a militarized base where Mexican people suffered genocide and human rights violations. A study by the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston determined that “in the late 1980s, the number of foreign transient deaths usually exceeded 300, and peaked in 1988 at 355.”[37] Rodolfo Acuña a Professor Emeritus of Chicano Studies at California State University also stated that “Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported 117 cases of human rights abuses by US officials against migrants from 1988 to 1990, including fourteen deaths. During the 1980s, Border Patrol agents shot dozens of people, killing eleven and permanently disabling ten.”[38] These numbers do not account for the human rights violations and deaths of those that went unreported or for vigilante killing, so we can only assume the real numbers would be exponentially higher. The U.S.-Mexican Border served as a government-sponsored battleground where Mexican migrants had to fight for their right to live. There is no doubt that settler colonialism has been a structuring principle of American culture and society which has had great effects on U.S.-Mexican relations and the lived experience of the Mexicans and Chicanos that live in the United States. U.S. border and immigration policies have been highly influential in shaping the settler-colonial paradigm and have themselves been largely shaped by it. Settler colonialism is a system that is always transforming, and in order to change and shift these paradigms away from becoming more aggressive, controlling and deadly, we must first realize they exist. In the words of Cesar Chavez: “We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community – and this nation.”

On 15 August 2006, Elvira Arellano, along with her seven-year-old son, Saúl, took refuge at Adalberto United Methodist Church in the Humboldt Park neighbourhood of Chicago, Illinois. Arellano had been arrested by immigration agents in December 2002 while at work as a cleaner of airplanes at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for entering, working and residing in the United States without state sanction. She is, in other words, according to US authorities, an illegal alien. Despite the arrest, Arellano was able to win on humanitarian grounds three temporary stays of deportation, allowing her to remain in Chicago through mid-2006 to provide care for her US citizen son. During that time, she became a prominent spokesperson for Illinois’ unauthorised immigrant population and the president of La Familia Latina Unida (the United Latino Family), a Chicago-based organisation which works with families potentially split by deportation. But the stays of deportation ended. It was on the day that federal authorities ordered Arellano to appear at a local office of the Department of Homeland Security to be deported that she took up sanctuary at the church, challenging federal government to enter the church’s grounds and arrest her. Her son has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Arellano wants Saúl to stay in the country of his birth – which effectively requires her to remain in the United States as well – to ensure that he has access to medical treatment better than he would were he in Mexico. Arellano’s case has attracted a great deal of attention. She has won the support of many who see her as someone courageously standing up for the human rights of migrants, and earned the wrath of many others who perceive her as a law breaker for being in the United States without authorisation.1 Her defiance of US authorities has not yet led to her arrest – as least as of October 2006. Indeed, US officials have not entered the church and, according to one such official, have no intention of doing so. The Arellano case, he explained, carries “no more priority than any of the other 500,000 [non-US citizen] fugitives nationally”.2 That there are so many immigrant “fugitives” – along with many millions of “illegal aliens” – in the United States, especially at a time when immigration and boundary policing has reached unprecedented levels and the calls for ever-greater levels of enforcement resonate with large sectors of the US public, speaks to many of the contradictions that this special issue addresses. In short, this (according to many) neoliberalising era is one of falling barriers to capital and rising walls to migrants – at least those who are officially undesired by the relatively wealthy, secure and powerful countries of the world. Nonetheless, as Elvira Arellano’s presence in Chicago and the support she enjoys illustrate, the rejected outsider is also very much “in.” This is hardly unique to the United States as the large numbers of unauthorised migrants who live and work in Europe, Israel, South Africa and elsewhere demonstrate. These contradictions speak to the incredible persistence and resourcefulness of migrants and those who smuggle them – some unauthorised crossers of the US-Mexico boundary, for example, have resorted to using bicycles to cross the desert3 – as well as the power of resistance. This resistance is brought about in no small part by alternative ethical systems and related political-geographical imaginaries, as well as by the very humanity of migrants, whose neighbours in their country of destination often embrace them in ways that challenge the simple boundaries between “us” and “them”.4 In France, for example, large numbers of people have stepped forward publicly and vowed to hide migrant families with children who are under threat of deportation.5 These contradictions also speak to the difficulties – perhaps impossibilities – of disciplining and reducing people to policing agents of nationalism and its territorial expression. In the case of the US enforcement apparatus, many agents have succumbed to smugglers’ bribery (showing how susceptible they are to neoliberal logic), while some Border Patrol agents have been caught dating, loving and living with the very “illegals” they are charged with apprehending.6 Meanwhile, the neoliberalising forces of capital and their state allies continue to encourage migrants to cross the strengthening territorial boundaries. They do so, by among other means, disrupting socio-economic networks that undermine the ability of people to realise their livelihoods at “home,” and providing powerful employment magnets that attract migrants to go elsewhere.7 The viability of these “illegal” workers is greatly aided by, in the case of the United States, lax workplace enforcement by state authorities.8 This, combined with the very status of the migrants, helps to “produce” a worker of high “flexibility,” to employ a term much used by the champions of neoliberal policies. Such flexibility often reflects migrants’ significant and multifaceted vulnerability, one that frequently manifests itself in a lethal fashion within the increasingly policed border zones between the global North and South. To cite just one example, an estimated 1,700 migrants died in 2005 alone while trying to make the ocean voyage from the Western Sahara and Morocco to the Canary Islands of Spain,9 a tragic outcome which demonstrates the enduring and, in some ways, growing power of nationalism in a time also characterised by increasing globalisation. The papers in this special issue of Geopolitics address these growing “borderline contradictions” from several critical perspectives. First, the authors frame their discussions of unauthorised migration within the context of neoliberalism: a contradictory process which encourages economic flows across international borders (for instance, favouring the accumulation of capital; defence of private property rights, free market and free trade, as discussed by Carter and Merrill in this issue), while at the same time maintaining nationalistic political-geographic closure – at least to migrants deemed as undesirable – across those same borders via expanding boundary enforcement and militarisation. As the authors discuss, the ever-increasing movement of unauthorised migrants across national borders is an important manifestation of these contradictory processes of economic openness and territorial closure. This neoliberal contradiction is a manifestation of a continued adherence to a territorially trapped vision of the nation-state,10 which as Carter and Merrill, and Nevins discuss in this issue, simultaneously neglects the global economic and structural roots of international migration, and therefore places the responsibility for unauthorised migration and the blame for the increasingly deadly consequences of these migration attempts on the shoulders of individual migrants. The unauthorised migrant is perhaps, therefore, the embodied evidence of the Janus-faced nature of the neoliberal state. Contrary to neoliberal discourses which profess and at times, celebrate, the “withering of the nation-state,” unauthorised migration demonstrates the way in which state policies enable an increasingly open economic system, while simultaneously maintaining control of the national territory. This contradiction is typified in the simultaneous enactment, in 1994, of the seemingly paradoxical, yet fundamentally complementary North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Southwest Border Control Strategy (SWBCS). As the papers in this issue also demonstrate, the border is a crucial site in which these contradictions are materialised. While we often think of the border as simply the site at which unwanted people and flows are policed and excluded from the national territory, the neoliberal border also serves other important functions. First, intensifying border policing “performs” national closure for a concerned citizenry in the post-9/11 era, as a response to concerns about and, at times, hysteria over national security and the threat of terrorism, via the material and discursive production of closure at the border. And second, importantly, “the border” does not remain at the margins of the nation-state, but rather is woven throughout the territory of the nation by marking those who have crossed it without authorisation, and therefore delineating boundaries between insiders (citizens and others who have state authorisation to be in the national territory) and outsiders (those who do not belong). This internalisation of the border has the (un)intended effect of producing a marginalised and flexible working class, either through the production of illegality, as Varsanyi’s article discusses in the context of Mexican undocumented workers in the United States, or via the processing of returning overseas workers, as Silvey highlights in the context of Indonesia. The impact of the neoliberal border extends beyond the production of a marginalised working class. As both Scarpellino’s and Kim’s papers contend, albeit from different perspectives, the mortal dangers involved with crossing this border without authorisation can be understood not as aberrations, but rather as the deeply structural results of broader political economic changes. Scarpellino talks about the dangers of the neoliberal, or “hard” border, as she calls it, as manifestations of structural violence – not perhaps, as visible as more commonly understood forms of violence, but a long-term and life-threatening deprivation nonetheless. From a different viewpoint, Kim understands the increasing number of deaths along these neoliberal borders as a form of “slow-onset humanitarian disaster” (see also, Nevins, in this issue). And while the potential impacts of the neoliberal border are grave for those who attempt to cross without authorisation, the production of this border is also having serious impacts on the communities which live along it. As Madsen’s paper illustrates, nowhere, perhaps, is this impact felt more directly than in the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American nation which straddles the US-Mexico border, and whose lands have become a major migrant smuggling route since the implementation of Operations Gatekeeper and Hold-the-Line in the mid-1990s, which have had the effect of pushing migrant crossings into the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. In light of the disciplining, punishing, and potentially deadly impacts of this neoliberal border, what is to be done? A number of the papers in this special issue offer potential pathways across these borderline contradictions. If the commodities and capital flow with increasing ease across international boundaries, Kim’s paper proposes an unconventional solution to the dilemma of increasing migrant vulnerability which essentially fights fire with fire. He proposes, in essence, that the migrant smuggling business should treat migrants as commodities and that the concept of escrow – an arrangement whereby a third party holds payment pending safe delivery of the migrants – could be used to ensure safe delivery of these “goods”. Varsanyi’s paper engages not with the vulnerability of migrants as they cross the border, but with their stability once they are resident in the United States. She explores alternate forms of belonging and membership in the neoliberal context, through an examination of the increasing adoption of the matrículas consulares as an alternative form of identification for unauthorised Mexican migrants in cities and counties across the United States. Scarpellino’s paper engages with the ethical dimensions of this hardened, neoliberal border, and drawing on theories of justice, concludes that the neoliberal border is a violation of human rights. And finally, while neoliberalism has created a context in which international migration is seemingly the only way for many in the global South to survive, given the dangers of the neoliberal border as well as the production of a marginalised working class, Silvey questions the Indonesian state’s decision to promote overseas migration as a state-led development strategy in Indonesia.

Over the last decade, an embryonic movement examining the overlap between race, art, science and design has been stirring and growing beneath the surface. Afrofuturism is the current name for a body of systematic Black speculative thought originating in the 1990s as a response to postmodernity that has blossomed into a global movement the last five years. Although contemporary Black speculative thought has roots at the nexus of 19th century scientific racism, technology, and the struggle for African self-determination and creative expression, it has now matured into an emerging global phenomenon. Afrofuturism 2.0 is the beginning of both a move away and an answer to the Eurocentric perspective of the 20th century’s early formulation of Afrofuturism that wondered if the history of African peoples, especially in North America, had been deliberately erased. Or to put it more plainly, future-looking Black scholars, artists, and activists are not only reclaiming their right to tell their own stories, but also to critique the European/ American digerati class of their narratives about cultural others, past, present and future and, challenging their presumed authsority to be the sole interpreters of Black lives and Black futures. Kodwo Eshun asserts: “Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (288). One example of several approaches within this current wave of Afrofuturism is the strategic formulation reflecting Afrofuturism is a critical project with the mission of laying 230 • Reynaldo Anderson OBSIDIAN • 231 the groundwork for a humanity that is not bound up with the ideals of white Enlightenment universalism, critical theory, science or technology (Jones, 2015, Rabaka, 2010, Rollefson, 2008, p. 91). More recently, according to Anderson and Jones: [C]ontemporary expressions of Afrofuturism emerging in the areas of metaphysics, speculative philosophy, religion, visual studies, performance, art and philosophy of science or technology that are described as “2.0,” in response to the emergence of social media and other technological advances since the middle of the last decade. (ix) Additionally, the authors define Afrofuturism 2.0 as: [T]he early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere, with transdisciplinary applications and has grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural Pan African movement. (x) Therefore, propelled by new thoughts and creative energy, members of this Black speculative movement have been in creative dialogue with the boundary of space-time, the exterior of the macro-cosmos and the interior of the micro-cosmos. Yet, there is historical precedent for this movement around the concepts of the color line, the color curtain, and the digital divide. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois published his great work, The Souls of Black Folk, drawing on the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, autobiography, and history, and made his argument in the era of Jim Crow and imperialism noting: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (18). Furthermore, Du Bois suggested, due to their unique experience, African Americans had developed a metaphysical perspective or “Veil” that bestowed a certain insight upon them on life in the West. The Veil was a literary and philosophical translation of the inner life of people of African descent in the Americas (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk). Two years later, in 1905, Albert Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity that confirmed the relationship between space and time, postulating 232 • Reynaldo Anderson that the laws of physics are invariant in all inertial systems and the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers. Between 1908 and 1910, Du Bois drew upon ideas from natural science, humanities and social science to write a speculative short fiction story, “The Princess Steel.” Du Bois developed this story with a character that invented a Mega-scope that could see across space and time that would amplify his ideas to study the boundary of space-time creatively, “into a means for perceiving material history” (Du Bois, Brown & Rusert 820). The creative ideas of Du Bois and others during this period would be decisive in aesthetic and socio-political formulations of the non-white world of the twentieth century. Later in the twentieth century, Indonesian president Achmed Sukarno and other leaders organized the Bandung conference, a meeting for the Dark World that called for the de-occidentalization of the earth. Kwame Nkrumah, the foremost African leader to promote Pan-Africanism in the post-World War II era was an ardent supporter of this 1955 conference. Author Richard Wright, a conference attendee, reported on the ideas promoted, and discussed them at length in his work The Color Curtain (1956). This event would influence the imagination of activists like Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, Thomas Sankara, and others, in pursuit of the liberation of the Dark World. Over the course of a generation, many of these radical initiatives would be repressed or betrayed. However, the seeds for a Black speculative movement challenging white racist normativity and Black parochialism, would be sown by creative intellectuals, mystics, and artists like Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, George Clinton, Max Beauvoir, Octavia E. Butler, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Samuel R. Delany, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Michel Basquiat, and many others. At the end of the twentieth century, scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante, Audre Lorde, Chinua Achebe, Ngugiwa Thiong’o, Greg Tate, bell hooks, and Cornel West catalogued the increasing deterioration and anomie of Black cultural production and dislocation in relation to the transition to a neoliberal, multi-national, political-economic matrix. Furthermore, Anna Everett, Alondra Nelson, Paul D. Miller, Alex Weheliye, Kali Tal, and others, via an online forum during the early conceptual development of Afrofuturism, analyzed an emerging global digital divide that reflected technical, economic, and social inequality. This phenomenon was primarily OBSIDIAN • 233 responsible for the interruption of Africa, its Diaspora, and other countries of the global south in attaining optimal growth or enhancement in political, economic, social, or cultural capital. On the other side of the Atlantic, work by Kodwo Eshun as a member the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), and John Akomfrah, co-founder of the Black Audio Film collective, were crucial to the global theoretical genesis of Black cyber-culture. However, during this time and into the early 21st century, several disparate strands of a new creative Africanist matrix emerged, influenced by speculative design and world building, as well as a renewed radicalized socio-political stance, and the social physics of Blackness (the interface of African peoples, myth-forms, technology, behavioral science, ethics, and social world). Indispensable to this manifesto is the groundbreaking work done on the Black speculative phenomenon by Sheree Renée Thomas. In the late 90s, in a hostile environment toward Black speculative work, Thomas gathered obscure documents with the support of interviews from Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Charles Saunders, Samuel R. Delany, and Delany’s then-wife Marilyn Hacker (Thomas). Furthermore, these interviews and information gave Thomas the insight to revisit the term “speculative fiction” and create a project that led to the genesis of her anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora in 2000 and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones in 2004 (Thomas). This manifesto assembles and recognizes the ideas developed between 2005 and 2015 as the inspiration for the Black Speculative Art Movement (BSAM) and the event Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of The Black Imagination that established its existence. Black speculative art is a creative, aesthetic practice that integrates African diasporic or African metaphysics with science or technology and seeks to interpret, engage, design, or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and as a catalyst for the future. Moreover, this manifesto explores the question, “What is the responsibility of the Black artist in the 21st century?” Within the Afrofuturist 2.0 frame of inquiry, Tiffany Barber asserts: What is compelling about Afrofuturism is that it is historical in its gesture back to previous debates about social responsibility, radical politics, and black artistic production that surged during the 234 • Reynaldo Anderson Black Arts Movement or BAM of the 60s and 70s. But it rearticulates these debates and expands our understandings of blackness’s multi-dimensionality, the good and the bad, the respectable and the undesirable. Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Arts Movement are indebted to previous movements like BAM, Negritude, The Harlem Renaissance, and other continental and diasporic African speculative movements. Moreover, it is a continuation of the historical behavior within the Veil to engage the philosophies of thinkers such as Du Bois, Wright, Everett, and others in piercing the Color Line, the Color Curtain, and understanding the digital divide in the face of similarly relevant 21st-century challenges. For example, contemporary artists like Kapwani Kiwanga are revisiting the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah to envision an Afro-Galactic future. Moreover, the goals of the BSAM manifesto are structured as a pursuit or open-sourced path of inquiry to transform the anomie or collapse in ethics and dystopia in the Diaspora and African communities that were displaced by the collapse of space-time. Several events between 2005 and 2015 shaped the development of BSAM, including the explosion in social media platforms illustrated by Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter (Van Dijck, 2013), and three seminal publications: The Big Short (Lewis) documenting the global market collapse, Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, detailing re-segregation of people; and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Tributary events were the election of the United States’ first African American president, Barack Obama, racist reactions and subsequent collapse of the liberal post-racial project, the increased use of crowdfunding and other new technologies to design creative projects, escalating environmental stress, and the New Scramble for Africa (Kimeyi & Zenia). Furthermore, the resurgence of Pan Africanism and outreach to the African Diaspora (now incorporated as the 6th zone) by the African Union; the appearance of state sanctioned deaths of Black people through police brutality, such as the Marikana massacre; and the current global Black social protest response to localized forms of injustice all intensified the current social context. BSAM is not a unified school of thought. BSAM is a loose umbrella term which represents different positions or basis of inquiry: Afrofuturism 2.0 (and its several Africanist manifestations, e.g. OBSIDIAN • 235 Black Quantum Futurism, African Futurism, Afrofuturismo, and Afrofuturista), Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Afro-Pessimism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric. Although these positions may be incompatible in some instances, they overlap around the term speculative and design, and interact around the nexus of technology and ethics. Individuals or organizations whose work represents pillars of BSAM would include and are not limited to: Martin Delany, Paschal B. Randolph, Toni Morrison, Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka,Tananarive Due, Ben Okri, Nnedi Okorafor, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Afrofuturist Affair, Samuel R. Delany, Minister Faust, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jarita Holbrook, Milton Davis, Ishmael Reed, Wanuri Kahiu, Sheree Renée Thomas, Andrea Hairston, Janelle Monae, Sanford Biggers, John Jennings, Octavia E. Butler, Octavia’s Brood, Nalo Hopkinson, Cyrus Kabiru, D. Scott Miller, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Steven Barnes, N.K. Jemison, D. Denenge Akpem, Ytasha Womack, Kapwani Kiwanga, John Akomfrah, and Kodwo Eshun. In the occidental realm, the epistemic boundaries of speculative design is limited largely to objects, how they mediate the human experience and are primarily interpreted through ideas originating with the Frankfurt school of critical theory (a body of thought usually dismissive, in the case of Theodor Adorno, silent or Eurocentric in regards to Black cultural knowledge production and performance). Furthermore, this occidental approach limits the framework of the speculative to Western philosophy and science. For example, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby argue that, in relation to speculative design, only the present, probable, preferable, plausible, and possible should be zones of concern, noting: Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in. Fantasy exists in its own world, with few if any links to the world we live in…This is the world of fairy tales, goblins, superheroes, and space opera. (4) However, this approach eschews or avoids alternative speculative cultural worldviews and attempts to establish a system where Europe assumes the teacher position with all others as the recipients and consequently users of this limited perspective. For example, there is historical evidence that demonstrates, via the route of alchemy, that magic is a 236 • Reynaldo Anderson gateway into the study of science. In contrast to Dunn and Raby, Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization) previously noted: Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. It was in magic that the general conquest of the external environment was decisively instituted. For the magicians not only believed in marvels but audaciously sought to work them: by their straining after the exceptional, the natural philosophers who followed them were first given a clue to the regular. (36–37) An Africanist example of this phenomenon is the work of Max Beauvoir, a trained biochemist and Voudou priest who synthesized these approaches in medical treatments, as a healer and activist. Digital scientist Nettrice Gaskins, building on and moving beyond previous work done by Ron Eglash with African fractals, along with other contemporary scholars, demonstrates the possibilities of re-conceptualizing African Cosmograms as cultural tools to interact with digital technology, augmented space and augmented reality. Moreover, there are implications for culturally situated learning, STEAM, and holistic health. Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Akata Witch reveals the overlap or merger between magic and technology as a case for these implications. Therefore, in contrast to the occidental speculative design approach, BSAM freely embraces the Africanist approach to speculative design and incorporates earthly and unearthly intuitive aspects of Esoterica, Animism, and Magical Realism. This integration generates overlapping zones with other knowledge formations when formulating or conceptualizing theory and practice in relation to material reality.

De Genova (2007) observes that the production of the “enemy alien” serves the production of “heightened insecurity,” which may be the Homeland Security State’s “most politically valuable end” (p. 436). While border security measures seem to protect the nation from foreign threat, de Genova observes, such defense projects in fact generate ideological sites of “radical insecurity” (Kaplan, 2003, p. 90). Kaplan (2003) notes that homeland security blurs the inside and outside and reproduces itself through the repeated production of a nation that is insufficiently protected from – and cannot escape – internal and external threat. The production of border insecurity does not hinge simply on the delineation of deserving and undeserving, but rather a set of flexible technologies by which the (greatest) “threat” or “enemy” is constantly recreated. As de Genova writes, undocumented migrants and “terrorists” have been differently imagined by U.S security regimes; while the former is characterized by deportability, the latter is defined in relation to detainability. With the “War on Terror,” however, the “deportable alien” and the “enemy/terrorist” have converged. This merging was enacted, in part, through a strategy of targeted policing, which conceptualized “fugitive apprehension” as the precursor to the official “Endgame” of “remov[ing] all removable aliens” (USDHS-ICE, 2003, p. ii, quoted in de Genova, 2007). Although targeted enforcement – manifest in ICE raids and localized border militarization –cannot (and does not aspire to) achieve the putative goal of mass deportation, it does provide the rationale for an ever-growing Homeland Security apparatus (de Genova, 2007). Detention of those targeted for removal enhances the equation of detention with “illegality,” which enables the immigration regime’s even more targeted use of “preemptive” surveillance and detection for those produced as potential “terrorists.” Now employed by the Department of Homeland Security, border patrol officers are charged with the detection, containment, and detainment of immigrant, criminal, and terrorist threat. Thus, the border operates as a site of convergence for crime and immigration regulation, and overlapping carceral regimes (Bohrman & Murakawa, 2005; Hannabach, 2013). Razack (2010) conceptualizes the border as a “space of exception,” where neither domestic nor foreign law check the authority of the sovereign state and non-citizens are constituted as “extraterritorial” – neither inside nor outside the nation-state and therefore unprotected by human rights principles. Spaces of exception are structured through race, as the production of undeserving racialized subjects naturalizes the suspension of rights in the name of national security. Individuals may be detained indefinitely based on mere suspicion of membership in a “terrorist group,” as the “special” nature of national security provides a cloak of immunity in treating those who “threaten” the nation-state. Rhetorical appeal to colorblind logics of protection and “rule of law” – i.e., punishment of those who crossed the border without papers – naturalize violence and obscure the ways in which “citizen” and citizenship have been produced through colonization and racism (Garcia, 1995; Razack, 2010). When the racialized figure of the “illegal” migrant is created through the law and made into a spectacle at the “theater of the border” (Oliviero, 2011), the constitutive racialization of the law and “democracy” itself becomes invisible. Consequently, the “rule of law” and protection of national “sovereignty” become floating signifiers available to operate in service of immigration “reform” and “national security” (de Genova, 2004). The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the United States can also be understood through Agamben’s conceptualization of the state of exception, wherein biopolitical strategies cohere with and support sovereign violence in the (re)production of the nation-state. Rifkin (2009) argues that national sovereignty is not foundational to US law and policy, but rather the consequence of an exception “that rests on nothing more than the absoluteness with which it is articulated and enforced” (Rifkin 98). Reiteration of Indigenous peoples’ exceptionality legitimates their governance by seemingly limitless federal authority.

The "cult of domesticity," the ideology of "sepa- rate spheres," and the "culture of sentiment" have together provided a productive paradigm for understanding the work of white women writers in creating a middle-class American culture in the nineteenth century. Most studies of this paradigm have revealed the permeability of the border that separates the spheres, demonstrating that the private feminized space of the home both infused and bolstered the public male arena of the market, and that the sentimental values attached to maternal influence were used to sanction women's entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them. More recently, scholars have argued that the extension of female sympathy across social divides could violently reinforce the very racial and class hierarchies that sentimentality claims to dissolve.' This deconstruction of separate spheres, however, leaves another structural opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign. In this context domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home. The earliest meaning of foreign, according to the OED, is "out of doors" or "at a distance from home." Contemporary English speakers refer to national concerns as domestic in explicit or implicit contrast with the foreign. The notion of domestic policy makes sense only in opposition to foreign policy, and uncoupled from the foreign, national issues are never labeled domestic. The idea of foreign policy depends on the sense of the nation as a domestic space imbued with a sense of at-homeness, in contrast to an external world perceived as alien and threatening. Reciprocally, a sense of the foreign is necessary to erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as home. Reconceptualizing domesticity in this way might shift the cognitive geography of nineteenth-century separate spheres. When we contrast the domestic sphere with the market or political realm, men and women inhabit a divided social terrain, but when we oppose the do- mestic to the foreign, men and women become national allies against the alien, and the determining division is not gender but racial demarcations of otherness. Thus another part of the cultural work of domesticity might be to unite men and women in a national domain and to generate notions of the foreign against which the nation can be imagined as home. The border between the domestic and foreign, however, also deconstructs when we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as the process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery. Through the process of domestication, the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed; domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.2

This looks like the end of the beginning for PIPA/SOPA, as Harry Reid tweets that “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act.” I think we can learn a few lessons here, many of which illustrate the main conclusions of Baumgartner et. al.’s excellent book Lobbying and Policy Change: Why Wins, Who Loses, and Why.

1) Lobbying isn’t all about money: Hollywood badly outspent Silicon Valley on this issue and still lost. This is completely typical. There’s no evidence that better-funded groups systematically win policy fights.