Provocatively, Browne calls this brutal branding “a biometric technology.” Today, biometric identification—the recruitment of a permanent part of the body to measure and track—evokes sleek machines with blue or green light scanning faces, irises, or finger pads. Browne makes the case that physical branding played the same function for enslavers, allowing them to track racialized bodies via a permanent, unchangeable marker: “Branding in the transatlantic slave trade … was a measure of slavery’s making, marking, and marketing of the black subject as commodity.” The permanence of the brand was its power—it was designed to follow the enslaved person for the rest of their life, insurance against the irrepressible will to be free.

XREF: Connects contemporary biometric surveillance technology to its historical roots in chattel slavery's tracking of bodies. FICTION: Could ground a narrative contrasting modern facial recognition with historical bodily branding as linked techniques of control.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 199