These walls are for now mostly invisible. The nature of wealthy urban space itself has often been the tool for keeping out the poor, with lower class people coming under suspicion from police if they enter a place where they're not meant to be. As class conflict escalates, the policing tools are getting more heavy-handed, and the wall is thus taking on a more openly hostile nature; highly militarized police, mass surveillance, and the erosion of civil liberties have made up the tools used to fortify bourgeois security in the last couple of decades.
The next step will be creating physical walls, which has already been accomplished in some places through gated communities. These structures of separation between the classes will take on a more warlike nature as the potential for violent conflict continues to increase.
The domestic army interventions, curfews, and Gestapo-style arrests that have appeared during the George Floyd protests are merely preparations for the war that the government plans to wage in the event that domestic revolts turn into armed insurrections. The priority of the capitalist state is to defend the existing class hierarchy, which in an unstable future could mean waging a civil war.
This means that for the poor, the technological advances that the system promises will largely mean a greater degree of techno-tyranny. The war college describes that censorship and surveillance will be necessary during the coming domestic conflicts, which are two things that the NSCAI's technological vision would provide a lot of help for. Only for the rich will this technological leap bring substantial improvements in living conditions. Those outside the smart cities will mainly experience the ways that technology can be used to harm people.
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