Focusing on the paradoxes revealed in the multibillion dollar mistake of the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) and the expansive ambit of a leaked National Security Agency briefing on its approach to “identity intelligence,” this article analyzes security glitches arising from the state’s application of mechanized logics to security and visibility. Presuming that a digital-looking pattern would be more deceptive than designs inspired by natural forms, in 2004, the US Army adopted a pixelated “digital” camouflage pattern, a print that rendered soldiers more, rather than less, visible in the field; it acknowledged this error in 2012. Two years later, “Identity Intelligence: Image Is Everything” visualized the episteme of National Security Agency surveillance with an illustration detailing hundreds of different types of data—biometric, biographic, and contextual—that the agency believes it could exploit to identify and monitor “targets of interest.” These glitches originate in technofetishistic convictions about the nature of digital images and information, limited ways of imagining bodies and lives, and reductive understandings of complex relationships between power and perception. Together, they expose the paradoxes that arise as the state tries to extend its power over the body and the contingency of that power on the smallest of things.

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This pandemic is a season of nevertheless; we are exhausted from all kinds of labour, but keep labouring nevertheless. This labouring, I suggest, takes three forms: doing (the productive and reproductive labour required to sustain life through a pandemic), undoing (the tedious processes of postponing and cancelling plans, or abandoning the process of planning altogether), and notdoing (passing the time left over between doing and undoing). Of course, the particularities of our doing, undoing, and not-doing will vary by our circumstances even as we operate within these general patterns of behaviour. I want to think through these neverthelesses as a way of mapping orientations toward the future fractured by the pandemic, and our collective persistence despite those fractures. Under normal circumstances, doing is an expression of optimism about the future, but the pandemic has quickened the tempo and increased the frequency of disappointment and continually forecloses possibility. Undoing is tiresome and painful, the necessary labour that amounts to less than nothing, begetting a collection of losses that often remain private and invisible. Not-doing is an intensified experience of boredom, with no obvious end or relief. Against the calls, which abound in the public culture of the pandemic, to treat COVID-19 as an opportunity to cultivate resilience, I posit endurance as an alternative framework. Resilience implies a better future if only we would learn how to suffer more productively. By contrast, endurance makes no such promises but fully acknowledges all the ways we might hurt, even as it functions as the nameless capacity that carries us through our doing, undoing, and not-doingnevertheless.

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