Glitch cities

Abstract

The generous responses to our intervention, Glitch epistemologies for computational cities, open onto knowing cities via glitches through an expanded attention to temporalities, subject/ivities, and power and politics in addition to our initial concern with urban spatialities. We respond to our interlocutors by engaging their responses as engendering more robust theorizations of what we here term glitch cities: pervasively digitally mediated and mediatized urban environments knowable not only through an attunement to configurations that appear out of place, but also those which present as being out of time, as counter-topographical against the violence of imposed legibility, and as more closely contending with subjects and subjectivities. We discuss how and why thinking more holistically about glitch cities while avoiding the tendency to reduce this epistemological claim to an archetype or conceptual singularity matters for digital urban geographies.

Introduction

In our original paper, we (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022) advanced the duality of glitches as nonanomalous anomalies and generative interruptions as a vector for knowing the pervasive digital mediations and mediatizations of urban environments via attunement to material spatialities that appear ‘out of place’ in 'computational cities' (Mattern, 2017, 2021). Our contribution is developed from North American examples of spatialities such as a seemingly abandoned shared e-bike positioned above a tent encampment, and a performatively ‘ugly’ house, through these dual valences of glitchiness in the registers of desire and architectural aesthetics.

The generous responses of our interlocutors open onto a more robust, multifaceted theorization of urban glitches by offering the additional entry points of temporalities, subjects and subjectivities, and power and politics for further grounding our epistemological intervention in cities. By thinking with and through glitch epistemologies, our interlocutors’ responses point to a more complex notion of what we here term glitch cities: pervasively digitally mediated (transduced) and mediatized (circulated) urban terrains comprised of configurations that not only appear out of place, but also present as being out of time, as counter-topographical to the violence of imposed legibility (computability), and as more closely contending with the subjects and subjectivities of urban computation. Building on these three additional valences of time, subject/ivities, and power and politics, we comment on the importance of knowing – and knowing from – glitch cities without asserting them as an urban ontological totality or conceptual singularity.

Temporalities

As Lynch (2022) brings forth in his response, glitch epistemologies ‘[call] attention’ not only to visually disorienting spatialities, but also to ‘moments of disorientation’ in cities, bringing into relief how recognitions of digital urban mediations as successes or failures is contingent on ‘differential encounters’ with such configurations in both space and time, which determine ‘perceptions of…systems’, such as the use of predictive policing algorithms, ‘as “intelligent”’ – that is, smart – ‘or not’. The temporal contingency of urban glitch/glitch is likewise picked up on by both Mahmoudi and Sabatino (2022) and Richardson (2022) in their responses.

For Mahmoudi and Sabatino (2022), our advancement of glitch/glitch presents as ahistorical, eliding longer genealogies of glitches – such as domestic technologies adding to women's domestic work (glitch as nonanomalous anomaly), and witches in the industrial revolution (glitch as interruption) – that predate the more contemporary intertwinement of capitalism and digitality at the heart of our epistemological intervention. Our intervention was not tendered in the spirit of dehistoricization, but rather as an alternative to ‘the hegemonies of critical theory's heuristics and political economy's dialectics’ (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022), which do not adequately contend with ‘how the logics of computational cities are also negotiated in [other] vital registers’, such as those of ‘desire and aesthetics’ (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022). We agree that tracing longer political economic throughlines, as Mahmoudi and Sabatino (2022) urge, does indeed point to important consistencies across place and time – such as structural and social rejection of people who refuse to make themselves legible to normative subjectivities of a particular capitalist regime. Our project, however, aims to show the possibilities of broadening our epistemological horizons beyond the historical materialist and political economic.

Indeed, as Richardson (2022) so astutely articulates, glitch epistemologies actively disrupt ‘the frequent tendency in technocapitalist narratives of the future to erase the multiple and intricate histories of everyday life in cities that remain complexly present in the face of apparent technological “disruption” and “transformation”’. Glitches do so by orienting us to how, where, and when urban formations express queer temporalities that ‘afford possibilities to weave alternative narratives of’ – and desire alternate futures for – ‘cities that are at odds with a standardized sense of time’ (Richardson, 2022). One example is urban imaginaries bound up with aspirations for digital degrowth (Marsh, 2018), in which the continued circulation and utilization of so-called ‘obsolescent’ digital devices mentioned by Richardson (2022) may ‘[point] to social experiences of time that … allow for more unfamiliar and unexpected sense of the temporal’ on glitches in computational citiesthose concomitant with Mahmoudi and Sabatino's (2022) linear narrative temporality. Richardson's framing of glitches as (also) temporalities that ‘do not compute’ in cities has powerful further implications, prompting us to destabilize disciplinary fixations on space and spatialities and to also attune to instances and potentialities of ‘queer time’.

Subjects and subjectivities

While we diverge from Mahmoudi and Sabatino's (2022) historical materialist project, we nevertheless appreciate the ways in which their intervention provokes a more nuanced consideration of subjects and subjectivities in glitch cities. Specifically, they remind us that any epistemological impetus toward identifying who ‘counts’ as a desiredand therefore agential subject of urban computation requires a genealogical engagement that allows us to situate glitch/glitch within a longer trajectory of who – and whose bodies – present as undesireable or ‘not computing’ with the translation of the logics of platformization, datafication, and algorithmic optimization to urban spatial fabrics. This historical contingency necessarily informs, as per Lynch, ‘whose perceptions’ of digitally mediated and mediatized materialities and systems – as well as what positionalities – ‘matter in dominant discourses’ of computational cities.

As Pallett (2022) sharply intervenes in her commentary, glitch epistemologies have the potential to foreground marginalized computational subjects, re-programming them as citizens. Building from Pallet's (2022) insight, glitch epistemologies open onto a broadened conception of a digital ‘right to the city’ in a present where digitalization constitutes urbanization (Datta, 2018). This moment calls not only for widening access to data and code facilitating increased ‘self-management of resources, surplus production, and the urban core’ and the simultaneous ‘withering away of the state’ (Shaw and Graham, 2017: 908), but also for a broadened conceptualization of who is seen as having rights to digitally mediated and mediatized materialities in cities, such as shared bikes and e-scooters. This is increasingly important as logics and imperatives of algorithmic optimization transform previously quotidian activities, such as riding a bicycle, into commodified services to be sold back to deserving – and desired – urban subjects, and to be consumed as rented assets with profits accrued in standardized increments of time (Leszczynski and Kong, 2022; Stehlin et al., 2020).

Power and politics

As Alvarez León (2022) asserts in his response, questions about subjects and subjectivities are, ultimately, questions about power and, therefore, about urban politics. Glitches refract dominant power relations encoded in computational cities, precisely because they present as illegible, even as the ‘attempted, often violent’ imposition and ‘enforcement of legibility’ (Alvarez León, 2022) is a central means of domination. In the case of computational cities, our original intervention and the commentators’ further thinking draw out ways in which domination increasingly is enacted through the rendering of spaces, times, and subjects as legible to the logics of platformization, datafication, and algorithmic optimization, with significant material implications. For unsheltered people, for instance, access to social assistance often rests upon reducing one's subjectivity and spatiality to these terms of knowability and optimizability – a forced consent to making oneself ‘compute’ through personal data disclosures required for accessing many shelter systems, apps that enforce compliance with behavioral requirements, and algorithmic selection for assistance based on calculative systems for assessing one's prior encounters with legal, medical, and social services, as well as one's history of trauma (Bishari, 2022). To present as non-performative against these and other scripts of computational cities is to invite being programmed out of existence (Russell, 2020) – quite literally, in the case of unsheltered people, via exposure to premature death.

In their further arguments about how this orientation might offer insights into substantive urban political pluralities, our interlocutors’ attention to power and politics draws out ways in which glitch epistemologies open a window onto understandings of power as more than only domination, and of politics as more than violent takings. Alvarez León's (2022) reflection on the kinds of politics that glitch epistemologies apprehend points to ‘…subaltern and surplus populations carv[ing out] spaces in the digitally mediated computational city while simultaneously making places (and lives) outside of, or in tension with, its ruling logics’. In spite of powerful mediating/mediatizing structures aligned to compel particular sociospatial and temporal legibilities, deeply vulnerable groups such as unsheltered residents mobilize political agency and self-determination – for instance by claiming e-bike/scooters for everyday survival-oriented urban mobility (rather the elite consumers/tourists coded as desired users), using them to support access to places such as tent encampments that ‘do not compute’ within the digital and esthetic regimes of platformization.

With respect to grounded struggles for power in computational cities, Pallett (2022) extends a glitch analysis in similarly vital ways, tracing struggles over a Black Lives Matter mural to show how automated systems for governing urban life are used to signify anti-racist politics as a glitch (reporting the mural as ‘graffiti’), cuing automatic removal by a third-party contractor. Pallett's example lays plain how the building blocks that assemble computational cities (e.g. data, algorithmic decision making, and automation) are often harnessed in service of longstanding technologies of domination and removal, such as race, cued to reproduce whiteness in and across cityscapes. Furthermore, Pallett (2022) uses glitch epistemologies to open onto a plurality of politics, tracing the stubborn iterative return of anti-racist activists, who repainted their mural again and again – a sort of algorithmic embodied politics AFK refusing the two-step of automated removal. This example unpacks significant ways in which glitch epistemologies offer a ‘portal opened towards… different ways of seeing and being in the cities of digital capitalism and, consequently, towards new forms of urban life that transcend the dominant logics of computational surveillance, monetization, and control’ (Alvarez León, 2022).

These further discussions of how glitch epistemologies orient toward significant yet often overlooked, subtly noticeable negotiations of power and politics in computational cities drill down on how a glitch orientation allows us to apprehend and articulate pervasive digital mediations and mediatizations in cities without reducing them to an archetype or conceptual singularity (‘the smart city’). Our intent, shared with our interlocutors in key ways, is to refract masculinist and colonialist epistemological reflexes to name and claim the ‘next frontier’ of digital urbanism. As Lynch (2022) problematizes at the start of his commentary, ‘name and claim’ moves fixate on questions of ontology that ultimately narrow what we can know and learn about digital urbanism. This is because the persistent move to ontologize has a relentless focus on ‘getting it right’ in regards to consolidating the boundaries of ‘the thing’ being named and claimed, and what defines its newness (or not). By contrast, reading for ‘glitch cities’, as we do in conversation with our interlocutors, is a way of seeing cities that opens onto pluralities of who can be seen as agential political subjects, and a way of grasping the significance of their everyday tactics and interventions in digitally mediated cities. For instance, as Pallett's (2022) analysis underscores, digitally mediated materialities are sites of struggle over rights to the city that get negotiated in ways that rub up against – yet also overspill the bounds of – data and code as means of constituting subjects, politics, and cities themselves.

Further reflections

Reading across the collection of responses to our intervention as well as our original paper opens up two related points of divergence within digital geographies scholarship, and indeed within critical human geography and social science writ large. First, there are divergences between the larger political projects we want our analyses to advance, and the modes of knowledge making we think are likely to do so. These differences play out in, for example, Mahmoudi and Sabatino's (2022) urging for representative cases that can offer ‘tool[s] for resisting the sociospatial structures of technocapitalism’, and Lynch's (2022) insistence that by focusing on ‘unique and contingent encounter in place’, geographers can develop nuanced insights about the risks and possibilities of spatialities and socialities that run counter to technodeterminist narratives. In a second register, we make a case for knowing glitch cities and their politics through a close reading of materialities, while Pallett (2022) underscores the importance of attending to embodiment and to self-representations of individual and collective intentions and experiences behind the presences we read as glitch politics. These lines of departure cue larger debates about the politics of abstraction, the ways in which knowledge and knowing are bound to collectively lived-in place and time, the purposes to which theory can/should be put, and viable onramps toward social transformation.

Wrestling with these sticky matters is well beyond the scope of this response piece. But we in digital geographies and elsewhere in the discipline must continue to do so, with the kind of engaged debate that our interlocutors have brought to this forum. We are deeply grateful for our colleagues’ thoughtful engagement with glitch epistemologies as an orientation to knowing and being in computational cities. Their further thinking with and relation to our arguments opens up additional registers for going deeper: subjects/subjectivities, temporalities, grounded politics. They’ve brought a generous creativity that invites further questions about power and politics in glitch cities via attuning to ‘convergence[s] of knowing and becoming’ that elude the logics of surveillance, monetization, and control on which analyses of digital urbanism so often center (Alvarez León, 2022). Yet as our interlocutors note, life in computational cities – and our epistemological orientations to it – must not be reduced to only these adverse relations. Glitch epistemologies open onto encounters, materialities, affects, and relationalities that are making ‘the city legible and liveable in new and potentially emancipatory ways’ (Alvarez León, 2022). This work is vital and urgent, and we are grateful to our colleagues for being in dialogue with us on avenues toward thinking and amplifying these glitchy cities in the making.