Beyond barcodes, RFIDs, geotags, hashtags, HTML metatags, at its most egregious, the tag's current legacy is carried by its role in aiding the surveillance apparatus' intrusive data collection and mining operations. However, it is the digitized, mediated, and networked applications of tags that probably perform the greatest violence. In the end, human life is reduced to body tags and body bags. The “targeted life” object of tagged data (one that ultimately meets an end tagged by missiles) becomes itself another kind of statistical tag populating the celebrated cartographies of victory. More alarming, when tags act as a scientific syntax used to interpret military intelligence and justify its targets, life becomes a mere object of controlled and delimited politics. The tag, interpreted more widely, can easily be seen in various guises servicing the carceral state and the surveillance vectors that go into the state's constant penetration of our lives. When applied to the human body, from a corporate fob card to a house arrest ankle monitor, a brand logo, body piercing, or micro-chipped passport, it is almost impossible to ignore the tag's significance as a bio-political technology that allows values and premiums on life to be reimagined, redefined, or reordered, usually to conform to capitalist modernity. From clothing labels associated with a “ghetto” class or others known to use sweatshops in manufacturing, to prison garb, soldier’s dog tags, “slave tags” and the slave origins that led to American policing and its badges, to the cryptic insignias on military unit patches (which represent a quizzical ethos about how the military establishment imagines itself), to the urban politics of graffiti, license plates, Canada's “Eskimo tags,” Holocaust tattoos, armbands, and ID badges, inmate and gang tattoos, and so on-the menacing qualities of “tagging” have persisted in brutal fashion. Its trajectory continues to trace a history of different systems of identification and models of control that are brutal and dehumanizing. Needless to say, the tag has come a long way from any origins as a banal object to the kinds of abstract meanings it connects with imaginary geographies today.
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