A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. In my fieldwork at a casino, a guard all in black sheepishly hands out blank visitor IDs that we wear only in a closed room. He collects them on our exit to the floor and accompanies us up to the lobby bar because of regulations. In the discussion, a man expresses his exasperation at an embassy’s request for an ambulance during a US National Special Security Event. I don’t understand why he makes an ambulance sound so ominous—he says he didn’t sleep for days—until someone later explains to me that he was worried the ambulance would be filled with explosives and allowed to slip through security lines. In The Filing Cabinet, Craig Robertson describes how information architecture via office furniture soothed clerks of “the particular anxiety produced by the knowledge that paper records create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials defer” (pp. 253). With two tools, the lanyard and the bollard, I consider how security work engenders and manages similar anxieties about the inherent instability of persons and property.
The lanyard is a sign composed of several modular parts, each of which can constitute a separate communication. Its base is the ID, a piece of paper or plastic displaying the name and institutional affiliation that an attendee proffers on registration, often with a visual border from the event’s primary organizational sponsor. The second primary component is the lanyard strap. The thin band of synthetic fabric often displays a logo. At a trade-show, the ID holder clipped to the strap might itself have markings, either of an event sponsor or by color to indicate, e.g., high-budget or prestige attendees. Because the events they are used for are temporary, they often accumulate uselessly.
In activist circles, “security culture” refers to semi-deliberate social practices that compartmentalize knowledge and risk for political activity. Odd behavior is socially marked out and isolated. In the US security industry, by contrast, a similar function is exported to technologies of access control and credentialing. One of the central artefacts that exercises elements of both is the lanyard. Unlike the laminated ID alone, the lanyard presents a constellation of belonging all at once and, unlike the uniform, its lightweight profile and compact size allow more individual expression through clothing.
For example, I go to a series of talks held by a professional association. I forgot to register beforehand, but the staff still let me into the industry event, because they already recognize me. But they can’t print a replacement ID I can wear right away, so I feel naked for the first half of the day. I know I will not be kicked out—I have permission from the staff—but I feel a shame, like I am an illegitimate conversation partner for other attendees. I don’t talk with almost anyone until I have a branded strap around my neck. Once I do, one of the vendor staff pointedly looks at my ID before launching into all the applications that his facial recognition software has for university security. Another recognizes my institution and offers to put me in touch with my own security operations center.
For her keynote at the symposium, the former police chief and current football security director tells us of the nightmare produced by instituting a perimeter. “Each becomes a temporary city,” she says of massive sport events, and so “you can’t draw a clean line.” As you build the protective layers for an event, each still introduces new technical and social difficulties—how do you get staff quickly past a perimeter? Identity verification pushes people into lines, which creates vulnerability for car ramming attacks. So, you place rows of successively strengthened bollards to lower that risk. Frustrated, she tells us of one event that had more than 40,000 staff and contractors. “People were wearing credentials as jewelry,” she says, lifting her hand to make a scooping crescent shape around her neck. Those credentials no longer served a “security function,” she says with distaste (cf. the personalization of lanyards in Willems and Warren 2020). But what are you supposed to do? There were thirty-five separate zones with different access and the “poor guard” couldn’t read them all off the issued IDs.
Earlier that year, I had attended an industry trade-show. One of the companies has decorated their room with a huge mural of a howling, rainbow wolf constructed in the center. The rainbow is meant to highlight the color reconstruction capabilities of their low-light security cameras. I am milling about in a hall partitioned out inside the casino convention center and, looking around, I see Raff. He is a middle-aged man who, like me, is surveying the stands against the wall in a way that is unlike customers or staff. What caught my eye is the enormous pile of wristbands he has fashioned to his grey fleece. A small blue ID for an exhibition services association is held in a clip, and from below it a festoon of thin paper-plastic bands, like those used for concert admission, reaches down to his waist—yellow smiley faces, red and orange flower and tortoise shell patterns, black text over a pink base. No one else I see at the event wears anything like it.
I walk over and ask him about his garland, what is it? He works in exhibition industry and, he explains, he uses it to get past security at events quicker. He has been doing this long enough at the convention center that building security recognizes him immediately—and then it is a conversation piece that gets people to talk to him, just like I have done. I think about the long trek I had to take just that morning into the bowels of the building to get my own lanyard and my own social isolation at these events. I admire how confident Raff seems in this strange space. Even as we talk, he is still examining the room and its booths—which he helped organize. Raff has gone to so many events and conferences and they all have these different ways of getting in, he just started collecting these bands. He says it is so effective that other exposition managers have started trying to duplicate it. I ask him about his work, and he starts to explain the complicated ecosystem he works within: “At any show, there are five entities.”
At this conference, a large camera vendor has paid to sponsor the lanyard straps—every ID comes with a strap in their corporate colors and their repeating logo. On the trade-show floor, I see that primary competitors have brought their own straps, and they move through the conference floor wearing matching outfits accented by their consistent color. Smaller vendors wear the branded lanyards of a larger corporate ecosystem, unprepared or uncaring that it contrasts with their own corporate heraldry. Meanwhile, the staff of the trade-show convenor wear little name badges, signaling their belonging with an entirely different mechanism. I catch sight of a man not wearing one of the standard-issue lanyards. His only identification is a corporate fleece branded by the logo of an exhibitor company that Raff mentioned to me earlier.
Later, a man wearing glasses and the conference lanyard boards the same bus as me as I head home; I had seen him earlier at a goofy mock-boxing debate about credentialing infrastructure. He is a programmer, working in security, and he says he is glad for the weird event—it gives people a chance to actually present their ideas outside the show floor. It is a strange show, this is only the second time he has been. People do not really understand the community. A couple of years ago, some people smuggled themselves into the conference without paying for registration by forging an ID and started bragging about it on social media, TikTok. But it is a trade-show that just sells tickets, he explains. It is not a secured event, and the vendors and hosting organization want people to see everything.
The man nervous about the unsecured ambulance had to spend days ensuring it had the exact, proper access and was not allowed unrestricted onto the streets of Washington, DC, during an security event. He wanted a quicker way to communicate the risk it posed, without his constant oversight. Wandering the trade-show, I notice over and over again demo videos of 18-wheelers, trucks, and SUVs speeding down a stretch of road only to seem to explode on collision, with a piece of upright, cylindrical metal. In contrast to the social subtleties of the lanyard, I present a simple tool for physical security: the bollard. These metal poles offer a catastrophic resolution for problems of permission to access a space. The social object of the car or truck—at industry-approved ratings—is almost instantly decomposed, even if its physical materials continue into the restricted space.
The industry dreams of just such control for people, even though the lanyard will not allow it. This brutal adjudication of belonging is made visible through these videos (like these), even as designers and architects struggle to camouflage them from view in urban landscapes (e.g., Ilum 2022). As security infrastructure, bollards can slip into the background—used as seats, tables, or nothing at all—until they are needed. Unlike the negotiations a security checkpoint requires, bollards promise that the gap between the security plan and its process will be instantaneously closed when tested.
The distinction between these two tools reflects an unresolved paranoia produced by the “fortress mentality” and its “spatial governmentality” (Low 2003) in the United States. Decades ago, William Bogard (1996) proposed that the distance between perception and intervention is a contradiction that surveillance can only address through an imagined simulation of its resolution. Whereas the bollard can act on its own to restrict a space, permeable perimeters of enough informality will always require distinct acts of recognition and partition. Members of the U.S. security industry practice this simulation both in their presentation of wares that could resolve security anxieties as they move through a social space that is much more permissive than it at first appears.
The main event for the DC Metropolitan Police Department’s “National Night Out,” August 2025. Photograph taken by author.
In DC, I make my way uptown to the flagship event of the Metropolitan Police Department’s “National Night Out.” The football field of a rec center has been converted into a summer festival—a bouncy castle, a rec-department portable bandshell, and a long line of community-organization tables. The air is filled with the sound of children screaming as they play and amplified music and vocals emanating from a uniformed band and its DJ. Gardeners on the hill overlooking the center nod to the rhythm as they weed. A chainlink fence painted black marks one physical boundary of the event. A loose perimeter of police cruisers, their lights on but sirens off, encircles the event one or two blocks out on every side.
A stack of black SUVs and military hardware is parked right near the event’s entrance on the far side of the rec center—just a gap in the fence leading onto the green turf. Attuned to tests of validity, I step through the gap hesitantly. I wait for a moment for someone to come up to me and ask for a registration. I look around for a table where I need to mark my presence or put on an ID. I feel anxious that I have made a mistake in my presence there, one that will be corrected or at least tested. No one comes. The anxiety abates slowly as I realize that I am free to move, anywhere within the confines of the fence. The relief is sweet.
References
Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315242002.
Ilum, Stine. 2022. “Concrete Blocks, Bollards, and Ha-Ha Walls: How Rationales of the Security Industry Shape Our Cities.” City & Society 34 (1): 88–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12424.
Low, Setha M. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. Routledge.
Robertson, Craig. 2021. Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. University of Minnesota Press.
Willems, Simon, and Samantha Warren. 2020. “Presenting Whilst Retreating in the Age of the Corporate Lanyard.” Organizational Aesthetics 9 (1): 1.
