Sensing collectives. The politics of world-making in sensing counter-practices

Abstract

Sensors are ubiquitous. They are everywhere, and contemporary life is hard to imagine without them. And as such they are also elements of social order and social power. In response to Borbach and Kanderske (2025), who focus on sensor counter-practices, this contribution takes up the notion of the political, as discussed in their study, and contextualizes it in the political sociology of Latour. As such, this contribution is a beginning in an exploration of a possible political sociology of sensors that raises questions of world-making via sensing practices and the contribution of journalistic and academic inquiry in the stabilization of otherwise ephemeral political practices.

Sensors are ubiquitous. They are everywhere, and contemporary life is hard to imagine without them. Borbach and Kanderske (2025) give an extensive list of where “sensors determine our situation” (Scholz, 2021: 135). That list could easily be expanded with many more examples, leading eventually to the formulation that we live in a “Sensor Society” (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2015). The article builds on these notions, but at the same time the authors distance themselves from such macro perspectives on sensing on the one hand and, on the other hand, reference a specific question of the political momentum of (counter-)practices in such a sensing environment. I have lots of sympathy for such an approach. It enriches the discussion and can lead to a different understanding of the political implications of such a sensor society. By focusing on counter-practices and how these make sensing tangible and actionable the authors rightfully highlight that “counter-practices are intrinsically political” (Borbach and Kanderske, 2025: 21). But in what sense? Classical approaches would see this as a typical story of a struggle between power and freedom, transparency and control, and the question of how to balance them. A story that we know since the debate between political realism and liberalism. In their rather short excursion to de Certeau (1984/2011) the authors, however, hint at the possibility of a political theory or political sociology of sensing that is different. In the following, I want to take up this discussion and explicate two moments of “the political” of sensor counter-practices in reference to the political sociology of Bruno Latour (see Gertenbach et al. (2016), Harman (2014)): (a) the political ecology of associations and the making of collectives and (b) issue-politics and the reflexivity of the ephemeral.

The making of collectives

Borbach and Kanderske (2025) start with the observation that the theorizing of sensors often happens on a meso or macro level — and thus a praxeological study of sensors is mandated. I wholeheartedly agree. And yet, these perspectives are not at odds with each other. The question rather is, what do we understand as macro, meso, or micro? (see Dawe 1970; Giddens 1984). Practice theorists argue that the structure, i.e., the meso and macro, are always mediated by micro-sociological practices. Thus, the differentiation stops providing any analytical meaning but only highlights the perspective we choose to adopt. This was also one of the reasons why ANT no longer talked about society, which totalizes the unit of analysis, but about collectives. A collective is not given; it must be assembled. And the question of what is included and what is excluded becomes imperative. However, and contrary to classical social science, the construction of collectives is not only about the in/exclusion of people, but the question of what hybrids we include, and how we assemble artifacts, facts, and subjectivities together in a collective (Latour, 2010). Sensing technologies are an interesting case to think with such a political sociology.

As the authors point out in reference to Gabrys (2014) or Klimburg-Witjes et al. (2021) that sensors are now becoming our ecology. Or they are part of our collectives and power and subjectivities are distributed according to the processes of including us in these collectives. The process of sensing populations is similar to the process of creating scientific facts, as described by Latour (1999). In such a collective, we are addressed by references that travel over the digital infrastructure that holds the sensory networks together. Counter-practices to sensing can of course be seen as a form of resistance against the system, but we can also understand them as a move to change the processes of assembling the collective and the references that travel in such a system. The example of the synthetic traffic jam production (p. 16 f.) shows how new facts — the sensed traffic jam — are introduced to the collective and as a result, they change the process of assembling other actors. Cars are being rerouted to less “jammed” routes. The extent and the inclusivity of the sensory collective can be seen as an ongoing negotiation on how to build the collective and therefore how to build the common world. And this is highly political.

Issue-politics and the reflexivity of the ephemeral

Counter-practices as another means of assembling collectives is about world-making. However, the authors themselves see that these practices of resistance do not lead to any lasting change. These interventions might be fleeting and ephemeral (Borbach and Kanderske, 2025: 17). The sensory collective will catch up and repair the situation (in an ethnomethodological sense; Garfinkel, 1984), which might lead to other interventions and counter-practices. Or, in other cases, the intervention is not practical to implement in the structure of ordinary life, as discussed in the “Computer Vision [CV] Dazzle” (Borbach and Kanderske, 2025: 7). They are not a lasting change in the configuration of the collective. But what are they doing then? One possible answer would be that they create issues.

Issues have been discussed in STS for some time now, derived from the pragmatist thought of Dewey (Marres, 2007; Poechhacker et al., 2024). In their original conception issues are problems or frictions that occur in everyday life and that can create a public debate, given that enough people experience the same issues or find them important enough to tackle them. Counter-practices do not just stumble upon these problems, but they try to actively create problematizations by interacting with the sensory system in a way that makes it tangible. Instead of waiting for an infrastructural breakdown, the breakdown is induced (Borbach and Kanderske, 2025: 6). Yet, this tangible outcome is ephemeral, it does not last. And as such, it is hard for it to become an issue in public debate. What it needs is that someone creates a reference to the event, takes pictures, writes articles — just as the one by the authors — and thus instantiates a chain of references. This is the other part of media that is necessary to make a fleeting event of a person carrying a cart full of phones over a street into a shared issue that makes the otherwise invisible sensory control infrastructure a possible matter of public debate. Or as Latour (2004) would frame it, it becomes a matter of concern. The politics about the counter-practices presented in the article are not just the act of resistance per se, but the distribution of the references to these events. To be effective, it needs other allies and infrastructures, such as media outlets and academic publishing systems. The politics is in the hybrids we construct. And as such, it is hard to tell where the counter-practice starts and where it ends. Because it is embedded in a network that produces new hybrids with the potential to become an issue.

A political sociology of sensing?

The paper turns to de Certeau (1984/2011) to argue that practices of everyday life can be tactical and thus that the everyday is political. The tension between the notion that “sensors determine our situation” (Scholz, 2021: 135) and the potential for us to intervene in processes of world-making is an interesting anchor point for a political sociology of sensing that focuses on hybrids, collectives, and associations. Political sociology often concerns the question of how the formation of social order is a powerful device to organize societal relations in a way that keeps individuals addressable to political power (Clemens, 2024). Sensors are powerful tools for that as they allow to govern at a distance, as also mentioned by Borbach and Kanderske (2025). However, the distance is only relative, as a whole socio-technical and infrastructural regime needs to be in place to enable such as governance at a distance. A political sociology of sensors can uncover that regime by following the references through that regime, from sensors to data centers, from data centers to aggregated data spaces, and from aggregated data spaces to (automated) decision-makers. Each of these steps is (a) a practical achievement of doing sensing and (b) has its own mode of producing new hybrids, e.g., reports or inductive classifications. As such, understanding the relation between the (counter-)practices of the sensed in relation to all of these other actors — humans, technology, hybrids — can provide an insight how the political is realized in such a sensor regime and how a mode of world-making through sensing relies on the sensed to be addressable by sensors on the one hand, and how sensing them allows to make them addressable in such a sensor regime on the other.

Sensors are now everywhere, and as such they are part of our techno-political ecology. They are not just perceiving the world; they construct it and make it referenceable at a distance. Sensory counter-practices are therefore an intervention in the formation of these ecologies—or collectives—as an ongoing negotiation of our subjectivities, the included hybrids, and the world that we collectively create. To make these efforts durable, however, we need to invite other hybrids into the collective that reference the ephemeral events of resistance and can turn them into references that might turn into issues in the political discourse. As such, not only counter-practices are political, but the article of Borbach and Kanderske (2025) is as well.