The Unseen Architecture
On Control, Fear, and the Anarchist Response
The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti were identified in government records as Latinos from South Texas. Their ideology and participation in anti-immigration activity is a physical manifestation of a power relationship that has existed for a long time. It represents the unseen architecture of control that we all navigate.
It’s what the philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics: the power of the State to decide who lives and who dies. Those two masked agents are not only individuals from a marginalized ethnicity in this country but also metaphorical instruments of a governing body that reserves the right to render any one of us killable.
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This isn’t a new phenomenon. The historical arc of power in America, from the patrols sent to recover enslaved Africans to Predator drones, is a continuous pattern of control. The fear today is a reiteration of a past that has never passed. It’s the same fear that has been used to discipline and control Black and brown bodies for centuries.
But within this pattern of domination, a different pattern is emerging. The mass protests, the mutual aid networks providing alternative healthcare, the courageous individuals documenting the actions of federal agents aren’t centrally planned acts of rebellion. They’re what complexity theorists call complex responsive processes. They’re the spontaneous, emergent, and anarchic responses of a community refusing to be governed by fear. This is the practice of anarchy in its most fundamental form: people relating to each other, creating new patterns of solidarity in the face of an overwhelming and violent power.
This architecture of control isn’t just physical, it’s also digital. The Department of Homeland Security is rapidly building a vast AI-powered surveillance apparatus. With over 200 documented AI use cases, including tools from Palantir that map potential deportation targets and social media-scraping programs, the State is automating the process of social sorting. It’s creating a digital panopticon that aims to make every aspect of our lives transparent and subject to control.
This is justified in the cool, neutral language of “efficiency” and “security.” But let me be clear: this is the automation of necropolitics. It’s the creation of tools that can calculate, in an instant, who is a “threat” and who is disposable. When a federal judge finds that ICE has violated more court orders in a single month than some agencies have in their entire existence, it’s clear that government agents with this technology operate beyond the constraints of the law.
We see a similar dynamic in the economic sphere. The narrative that mass layoffs at companies like Amazon and Pinterest are the inevitable result of AI is a powerful act of misdirection. It attributes agency to an abstract technology, obscuring the very human, and very political, choices being made by corporate executives. The decision to prioritize shareholder value over the livelihoods of thousands of workers isn’t a technological inevitability, it’s an exercise of power. The language of “AI-driven efficiency” is a pattern of communication designed to make this power relationship seem natural and unchangeable.
What connects the streets of Minneapolis, the data centers of Palantir, and the boardrooms of Amazon is the logic of control. It’s the belief that human beings can and should be managed, sorted, and, if necessary, eliminated for the sake of order and profit. It’s a logic that seeks to create a predictable, legible, and ultimately lifeless world.
The anarchist response isn’t to propose a better plan or a more benevolent method of control. It’s to embrace the messy, unpredictable, and emergent nature of human interaction. It’s to find power not in top-down directives, but in the local, relational, and responsive acts of solidarity and resistance that we see in Minneapolis and other places. It’s to challenge the narratives that make power invisible and to build new patterns of relating to one another based on mutual aid and respect, not fear and control.
This is the slow, difficult work of social transformation. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer the only real alternative to the architecture of control we all navigate.
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