Three stories this week share a single nervous system: the cost of hiding, and who gets to decide when hiding is legal. The New Yorker chronicles ICEBlock, the app built to warn people about immigration enforcement, which the Trump administration claims endangered agents and has moved to suppress. A memoir essay by the child of Weather Underground founders describes a childhood in hiding, born underground, running from the state. And in a different register, an artist's show in Mexico City was forced to close after targeted harassment. The mechanism is always the same: make the cost of visibility high enough and people self-censor, self-disappear.
The App as Underground Railroad
ICEBlock's legal precarity is particularly sharp given this week's discovery of a hidden Underground Railroad passage in New York, now threatened by development. The comparison is not hyperbolic. Both are infrastructure built to move people past enforcement that the state considers legitimate. The legal question ICEBlock raises, whether publishing the location of government agents constitutes obstruction or journalism, is the same question that surrounded abolitionist networks in the 1850s. A 2023 paper in Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review by Choudhury found that digital sanctuary technologies occupy a genuinely ambiguous legal space, neither clearly protected nor clearly prosecutable under current First Amendment doctrine.
Visibility, Capital, and Who Bears the Risk
The Weather Underground memoir adds a generational dimension. The children of radicals grew up inside the cost of resistance, literally inhabiting it. What the ICEBlock story and the memoir share is the question of who bears the physical risk of political visibility. Apps can be shut down. Galleries can be vandalized. Houses can be raided. Nadav Lapid's film about complicity in war asks the same question from the other direction: what does it cost to stay visible and say nothing? The hiding and the silence are both forms of the same calculation, just made by different people with different options.