Techno-Social Entanglements and Contested Urban Futures: Producing Space, Subjectivities, and Economies in the Digital City

Abstract

With the rapid development of new digital technologies, cities are increasingly critical sites of techno-social experimentation and transformation. Through ‘smart city’ initiatives, city governments around the world are partnering with transnational technology firms to deeply integrate digital technologies—including extensive Internet of Things (IoT) sensing networks and increasingly complex infrastructures for data analytics—into everyday urban spaces. At the same time, emerging forms of digitally-mediated “platform capitalism,” represented by companies such as Airbnb and Uber, are dramatically disrupting existing economic, political and socio-spatial relations across urban contexts. In opposition to these trends, citizens’ initiatives in Barcelona, Spain are organizing around calls for “technological sovereignty,” radically rethinking existing models of urban development by claiming community control over emerging digital technologies. My ethnographic dissertation asks: Are emerging digital technologies inherently tools of technocratic governance, surveillance, and capital accumulation? Or how might they become loci for imagining and building alternative digital urban futures? I operationalize this question through three sub-questions focused on the production of alternative economies, urban space, and digital subjectivities, respectively, within the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. These three sub-questions are the basis of the three articles attached as appendices. The first paper (Appendix A) explores the concept of technological sovereignty employed by activists in Barcelona, describing its basis in experiments with alternative arrangements of work and property, an ethics of care, and an engagement with municipal institutions. Reviewing existing literature on the politics of digital development in geography, I argue for the need to think beyond critiques of techno-capitalist development—and beyond binaries of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. Analyses of ongoing processes of technological change in general, and smart cities in particular, too often present emerging digital technologies as silver-bullet solutions to a multitude of existing societal problems—making the world more connected, efficient, and sustainable, holding the promise to improve quality of life for millions of people. In contrast, more critical approaches highlight the ways such processes facilitate increased state and corporate surveillance, new forms of power and control, and new forms of exploitation and exclusion. Beyond such binaries, this paper argues for the need to imagine a multiplicity of possible social futures emergent in the entangled processes of urban and technological change. It explores the practices and discourses of the TS movement as a way to demonstrate how such alternatives might be brought about through grassroots organizing and collective experimentation. The second article (Appendix B) engages geographic literature on the automatic production of space—the way evolving assemblages of hardware, code, and data produce space with little to no direct human intervention—viewing it through the lens of philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s notion of proletarianization as the loss of knowledge. In contrast to this view of digital infrastructure, I describe the practices of Guifinet—neighborhood-based associations that build and maintain their own broadband internet infrastructure—focusing on the multiple forms of knowledge production and circulation on which the project is based. I present Guifinet as an example of amateur practices of de-proletarianization—as participants re-claim critical forms of knowledge about the processes (re)producing urban space. In doing so, I demonstrate the possibilities for digital infrastructures to create new spaces for democratic power based on alternative logics of techno-social organization. The third article (Appendix C) explores the question of digital subjectivity in the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. I approach digital subjectivity as the way people understand their relationship to digital technology and processes of technological change, structured by discursively produced hierarchies of technological expertise that are intimately entangled in the reproduction of gender, race, class, age, and other axes of difference. The paper employs the work of Stiegler (1998) and Barad (2007) to explore the co-constitution of humanity and technics, and recognize the way material practices involving an array of human and nonhuman actors iteratively reproduce hierarchies of difference. Against the hegemonic subject positions of techno-capitalism, I explore the practices of technological sovereignty activists that challenge the discursive privileging and separation of “technical” knowledge from its social entanglements and produce a diversity of subjects enacting a being-toward alternative techno-social futures.