Description
The proliferation of border technologies, particularly data extraction and algorithmic processing of data, has raised public and scholarly concern about discrimination, rights violations, and the amplification of violence for people on the move. Marketed as deterministic and ubiquitous improvements to the status quo, these innovations have been criticised for their technosolutionist approach to security ‘problems’. This paper proposes to illuminate the political dynamics of ‘techno-solutionism’ and develop a more specific intervention about security problems and technical fixes by exploring how corporate actors formulate problems and solutions in their patent applications and granted patents. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of problematisation, we analyse patents owned by nine companies holding contracts for existing and new EU border control and migration management databases. Focusing on biometrics and other AI technologies, we show how patents articulate trivial, insignificant, and small problems that nonetheless necessitate major, significant, and massive technological solutions. Therefore, we argue that it is crucial to shift from a general critique of techno-solutionism to a more precise interrogation of the specificities of problematisations by various actors, including the contradictions between the corporate identification of problems and the justification of solutions.
