The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence x Petra Molnar (DRC)

304 pages.

First published May 21, 2024 (The New Press).

Non-fiction.

There are books that radicalise you and/or revolutionise your thinking; Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes has done both for me. I have been thinking in abstract ways about borders (and map-making) for a long time; anyone from the “Global South” who has ever crossed a border or applied for a visa knows the violence of borders. Molnar’s book turns the abstract into real stories about people on the move, about how they’re brutalised by the powerful—particularly, in today’s world, through the use of dystopian technology.

It’s difficult, incredibly painful, to read about how the most vulnerable among us—people fleeing war, or instability, or economic conditions created or exacerbated by the very same powerful nations mentioned above, those of the “Global North”—encounter high walls, barbed wire, robodogs, biometric registration and scanning, and cameras on surveillance towers; people smugglers—coyotes, or whatever name they may use regionally; rubber bullets, teargas, the Greek coast guard that flips their boats over or tows them back into international waters; camps and detention centres that are open prisons, where one only gets food if one consents to have one’s iris scanned; the Turkish border patrol that strips, searches and beats migrants, terrorising them with dogs; EU-funded or facilitated death camps in Libya; death, humiliation, trauma, and injury; and for these vulnerable people to very rarely find the asylum and sanctuary they seek. It is the most horrendous thing, and it is going on right under all of our noses, every day. We really only hear about the worst cases of abuse or death. It is horrendous, and it is real. All of us understand the very human desire to seek safety, refuge, a better life for ourselves and loved ones; half the world faces terrible barriers when they do.

Molnar has done a stellar job in shining a light on all of this, and on the huge and powerful complex of states and private actors behind it. Truthfully, I found myself in an abyss of despair towards the end of the book; it feels hopeless, the mountain insurmountable, the whole problem insuperable, rooted as it is in old imperial structures and colonial power differentials—which, as we know, continue to be as active today as they ever were. But Molar ends the book on a note of hope in resistance: there are small and large ways to resist, and it is happening. Molnar herself is doing the work, and many others are. So is this book; and in opening the eyes of readers, it serves as a call to arms.

A sobering and incredibly necessary read. Many thanks to The New Press and to NetGalley for early access.

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