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Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.

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Borders and bodies are increasingly regulated by data-capturing mechanisms spread across the world through information and communication technologies. This article traces the features and implications of such a border-body datalogical entanglement through the figure of the drug mule. It analyzes government documents and recorded case studies to argue that this figure emerges from an assemblage of cultural narratives, legal structures, human labor, technical practices, and biological processes. The datalogical drug mule is already implicated in a struggle over what, and how, data is meaningful and actionable. Investigating this figure allows us to begin disentangling the data-driven mechanisms that constitute modern borders and bodies while at the same time accounting for analog continuities in contemporary practices of border security.