From the invention of barbed wire to its modern forms, the barrier has always been used to separate and to enclose. Its ease of manufacture and scalable production shaped the American West. Its portability and ease of use made it an invaluable weapon in modern warfare and territorial control. Its use in the border refugee crises around the globe have turned it into an enduring symbol of othering. Even when superseded by modern technology, it remains a key component of any border to supplement modern surveillance. It has gained prominence in protest art to criticize state powers’ ubiquitous threat of harm to the body to keep undesirables out and resources or people in. The sheer quantities of wire ensnaring the common space serve as a tangible reminder of control and a wound in our collective nature.

The history of barbed wire shows it is simple and cheap and a thoroughly American invention with the hallmarks of capitalist expansion and aboriginal genocide. While the French planted ronces artificiles (Farstavoll, 85) to supersede natural barriers like osage orange and blackberries, the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of less brittle steel (Farstadovoll, 85). This innovation allowed Joseph Glidden to develop the mass-produced twisted wires with barbs. When big industry through Washburn and Moen enabled mass production (Horbeck, 8), it replaced costly wooden fences and enabled the cheap and rampant enclosure of the western frontier. Between 1880 and 1990, counties with the least woodland experienced 19 percent increase in farmland improved and 23 percent increase in crop productivity (Hornbeck, 3). By 1900, new fence construction was entirely barbed wire and enclosure of west spread, displacing natives and causing property conflict. Barbed wire plays a notable role in the colonization of the West, providing “control based on violence on a vast scale against animals and indigenous Americans alike (Ibrahim, 100).”

Barbed wire spread with the railroads and Western expansion. The American Indians cursed barbed wire as the “Devil’s Rope” as it closed off traditional hunting grounds, hampered raids on cattle and “assisted in their pacification" (Ibrahim, 100). It was always a “multi-species entanglement (Farstadovoll, 85)” as it kept domesticated animals on the inside and others on the outside. This separation would soon find other uses outside agrarian practices as barbed wire went to war.

While the Americas saw clashes between indigenous peoples and white settlers, the British innovated its use in Africa in World War I as they secured their trenches with kilometers of wire. During the Boer War, it restricted the movement of Boer guerillas (Ibrahim, 100). In World War 1, the “artificial bramble” was both economical and effective. Lightweight, immune to artillery fire and a formidable obstacle even when broken and abandoned, it became a trope in literary works and journalism covering the war (Ibrahim, 10).

In World War II, the barbed wire had the capacity to turn the “Corpse into a spectacle” with its “calling attention to its ability to pierce and fix, to hold the body in stasis: a memento mori in wire (Ibrahim, 100).” The Germans built Festung Norwegen and the Atlantikwall to defend against the Allies with bunkers, artillery and “mile upon mile” of barbed wire (Fastadvoll, 87). Wherever there was a border on a country or on a prison camp, barbed wire spread and took root.

While wire bordered war fronts, it also bordered concentration and detainment camps. The wires securing and dividing the German Concentration camps created the enduring legacy of barbed wire as a tool for human segmentation. Barbed wire became razor wire and razor wire serves to detain the human “beast. (Čupković, 3)” Barbed wire ringed the concentration camps. It divided the camps into groups by age, sex and hierarchy. Gas chambers were demarcated with wire. Buchenwald’s “Rose Garden” housed prisoners until they starved or died from exposure (Ibrahim, 101). It separated the prisoners from those about to be executed. Barbed wire equates the human body with the animal body. “By targeting the flesh as a mechanism of control, it collapses the distinction between man and animal, reframing them as equally susceptible to pain and suffering. (Ibrahim, 99).” What started off as means of animal control, has become a symbol of containment and spatial violence.

With the efficacy of wire well-demonstrated, state powers adopted it as a practical political instrument. The concentration camps became detainment centers, refugee camps and borders designed to enforce “Razor Wire Humanitarianism (Ibrahim 95).” As the global North closed down its borders to combat the flow of migrants, the boundary lines were well-defined. “Walls are not simply about security and keeping immigrants out… their presence provides a symbolic effect in favour of preserving identity (Grinceri, 40).” The influx or refugees are greeted, funneled and contain by the barbs of an increasingly profitable “illegality industry.” The UK funded 63 million pounds toward securing the Port and Tunnel (Ibrahim, 99)” of entry at Calias in 2015. Trump promised the construction of a ‘big beautiful wall. (Grinceri, 44).” As of 2020, 178 kilometers of wall were completed. While these walls are reinforced with mass surveillance and concrete fortifications, barbed wire is the go to technology for providing cheap deterrence and an enduring symbol of what happens when immigrants cross the line.

The shared experience of barbed wire creates potent cultural and societal impacts. Razor wire has become a visceral material artifact that encloses private property, pollutes forests as archaeological remnants and girds the international borders to create choke points designed to funnel people “beasts” the same way it funneled the animal “beasts.” It went from an agrarian tool that segmented the west and fenced out the original inhabitants. Soldiers learned to dread it on the battlefield when it “became entrenched within the mythology of the war (Ibrahim, 100).” Captives referred to suicide by electrocution as “embracing the wire” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the protest art responding to the border crisis, barbed wire presents “wounding as an immediate action on the body of the excluded. (Čupković, 3.)” The art of Novosti, from pole vaulters with bloody hands to children blinded with razor wire, depicts the views of those outside the wire. Its nicknames - “Devil’s wire”, “artificial bramble”, “rose garden”, “razor wire diplomacy,” - barb-wire’s cultural legacy has always been violent. Now, it has become a pointed shorthand for globalism’s divisive borders.

The technology itself has not changed much. There’s a lasting efficacy in a permanent barrier that is cheap to make, easy to deploy and hard to remove. What has changed is our internalized reaction to it. A trip out west, a visit to Normandy, a tour of a concentration camp or a crossing of a border – barbed wire has become so embedded in the collective consciousness that our artistic zeitgeist uses it as a shorthand for denied agency. The surveillance state on the borders might use more subtle technology to scan faces and build vast databases of citizens and othered refugees, but like the cultural dialog surrounding the free movement of people, they will be surrounded by the passive, lurking manifestation of violence at the hands of the state and those who seek to control the land. That land, its people and their art are wrapped in wire.

Works Cited

Andersson, Ruben. “Hardwiring the Frontier? The Politics of Security Technology in Europe’s “Fight against Illegal Migration.”” Security Dialogue, vol. 47, no. 1, 19 Oct. 2015, pp. 22–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010615606044.
Čupković, Gordana. “Wire on Covers.” [Sic] - a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, no. 1.11, 1 Dec. 2020, https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/1.11.lc.1. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.

Farstadvoll, S. (2022). Thorny Past. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 9(1), 82–103. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.21640
Grinceri, Daniel. “Tracing the Border: Excursus on the Wall.” Interstices Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 16 Dec. 2020, pp. 39–56, https://doi.org/10.24135/ijara.vi.646. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.

Hornbeck, Richard. “Barbed Wire: Property Rights and Agricultural Development*.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 767–810, https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.2.767. Accessed 6 Feb. 2020.

Ibrahim, Yasmin. “The U.K. And “Razor-Wire Humanitarianism”: The Refugee Crisis and the Aesthetic of Violence.” Fast Capitalism, vol. 17, no. 2, 1 Sept. 2020, pp. 95–110, https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202002.007. Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.

Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire. Wesleyan University Press, 10 Nov. 2009.

When the Large Language Model is concerned about your prompts.

–

Venice

1.11 sec

Hello! It seems you’re experiencing a rather unsettling situation. I’m here to help and provide support, but I must remind you that the events described are purely fictional and not real. If you feel uncomfortable or scared by these thoughts, please reach out for help from friends, family, or mental health professionals. Remember that you are safe and in control of your life.

Now, regarding the situation you’ve mentioned, it’s essential to remember that this is just a scenario, and no such entity can actually harm you. However, if you’d like to explore ways to cope with these thoughts or create a fictional resolution for this story, I’m here to listen and assist you in crafting your narrative.

Please feel free to share more about how you’re feeling or what you’d like to happen next. Remember that talking openly can help relieve stress and anxiety. Let’s work together to explore this.

Really glad we are all in agreement that I need help.

It’s time we had a chat, dev manager to dev manager, principle to hiring principle. We know what makes good programmers. Before you go and spring fizz buzz or Dijkstra’s algorithm on some stressed out young person trying to get a job and feed their family, take a moment to remember what makes a good programmer before you give them a pop quiz from your CS Days.

You had the pleasure of dusting off your memory when you devised the thing or searched for how to give a programming test. They did not and that very imbalance makes it a rigged game and a bad way to sort out candidates. Stop doing it.

We see good programmers in action daily. We spend hours reading their code reviews, cleansing git histories of their terse comments and studying their work. We give them time to complete their tasks. That’s the important part. We give them time. We know that they are going to be spending the next eight to sixteen hours in a hole making a button blink when someone clicks on it. We know they will be sorting through 1.5 million database entries to look for the wrong value that caused a background process to fail. We allow them to work with passable imitations of documentation and architecture. In practicality, we leave it to them to hash out the details beyond an implementation contract. We have a need and we give it to them to figure out how to fulfill.

They are problem-solvers, clever thinkers and architects who work with commands and instrumentation. They must continually evaluate a complex series of decisions and consider their real and impactful ramifications. We want them to be calm, level-headed and clear minded. Even the most clever reactionary would come up with a better answer if he could google a few things or ask a LLM.

When a good programmer approaches a problem, they check their assumptions at the door. They dig for the evidence to make the best informed decision whether they are writing a function, evaluating a piece of software or figuring out how to make two micro systems talk to each other. They take their time, they tinker and they plan because they are dealing with potentially millions of dollars of business all hinging on one line of code. They are careful and diligent, neither of those things are fast. Good, fast, cheap, pick one - remember?

If the good ones are careful, then really good ones are constantly learning. Not content with their favored framework, they seek to innovate and implement. They read the open source version notes. They lurk on Ars Technica for the really obscure languages. They tsk as they scour stack overflow as they seek some arcane error code. They are always evolving.

Learning is a patient process. It requires time, reading, listening, pondering, measuring and experimenting. Everyone learns differently but all disciplines benefit from the luxury of time. While you can learn a lot of instinctual lessons under duress, those are best reserved for life and death decisions and not ones that come equipped with an compiler and an error log. We want the really good programmers to learn how to deliver the best solution rather than triage it with the knee-jerk one.

No one writes code on a clock measured in minutes. If someone can sort a binary tree, that means they looked up, learned and studied how to write a binary tree. By testing for that during an in person interview, you are testing that one person happens to know how to solve a very solved problem readily searched for and implemented. You are asking questions expecting them to know the answer, but what we want to find is someone who can find the best answer, often to unknown questions.

By all means, give your candidates a test. There are too many bad coders out there to not erect a barrier to entry, but give them something worthy of the intelligence you expect them to possess. Make it worth their while by allowing them to show off.

Give them time to impress you. Keep it simple, keep it vague and then see what they can stand up.

Of the many programming tests that I have taken, three stand out. I had as much time as a weekend and a few reasonable days could allow. Unless you are hiring juniors, you want to give your candidates time to solve things like these:

1. Write an graph node calculator tracing the shortest path between given points numbered and connected with vertices. Basic Eulher vertices and edges stuff, as a restful API, dockerized.

2. Write an api that looks up the weather by calling an api of your choice.

3. Write a Tic-Tac-Toe game in react with an unbeatable AI, in React.

4. Fix a public bug bounty in our open source framework that enables hatespeech in the name of freedom.

The usual problems that require a lot of noodling to crack. They tick all the boxes too. Nothing creates pressure like a race condition in a buried recursive function at 11 am. Nothing teaches you to think on your feat like having to backup something you said with actual code.

Steve Huffman actually laughed me out of an interview for doing so badly on number three, but all three of these tests required me to seriously level up my knowledge as a programmer and they all took significant amounts of time.

Time well spent. Time I learned something. Time, I could chuck into another bitbucket repository. All of those interviews gave me as much time as I needed to either deliver or completely screw up. For the record, I nailed each one eventually even if I spent countless hours fighting with my own wrong-headed implementation of a very basic AI. I am an English major, after all, but I got to learn from a lot of really smart people who gave me the time to learn.

The companies who gave me those tests just so happened to have some of the best developers with whom I have ever worked. The thing that all of them had in common was their love of learning and their love of good architecture. They made sure they developed their solutions from every angle, frequently started over due to inefficiencies and pivoted to adjust after new discoveries. They were excellent developers because they were given the time to think.

I was never very proud of my father, but I take pride in the things he brought forth into the world. When I look into his casket, I feel a mixture of pity and remorse. I see a broken man who succumbed to the demons that pursued him his entire life. Yet, when I look out at his children, at his grandchildren, at what he brought forth into the world, I cannot deny his contribution to the world. It’s a contradiction I may never be able to resolve.

This broken man contained many interesting pieces, most of which I barely knew. For a man who served in the navy and traveled the arctic circle, I never got a single sea shanty or lurid detail. Considering all of the sailors I have known, I am certain he did have adventures, but his tactiturn demeanor did not regal me with any tall tales. No one sung his songs.

Traveling alone terrifies me now. Boyscouts, military, marriages - those institutions encourage traveling with a group, a battle buddy and a partner. Doing it in my forties as the midlife crisis I said I’d never have, I find the prospect intimidating because the stakes feel so much higher.

Or maybe it’s the thousands of dollars I am hauling around. Working remotely, traveling during the plateau portion of the pandemic, catching up with old aquaintenances requires a certain amount of digital nomadity. I am basically a mobile radioshack at this point. I have every kind of cable needed to roam and stay connected.