From Infrastructural Breakdown to Data Vandalism: Repoliticizing the Smart City?

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From Infrastructural Breakdown to Data Vandalism: Repoliticizing the Smart City?

Rolien Hoyng1

AbstractThe smart city is often approached by its critics as a “system” that exploits optimal connectivity and efficiency for an urban society of control. Meanwhile, the actual operation of “smart city” assemblages in globalizing cities—characterized by development and breakdown, connectivity and disconnection—is seldom the basis of analysis. By focusing on the interplays between these dualities, this article aims to underscore the modalities of power and political possibilities of dissent in Istanbul, Turkey. Data-based smart city apparatuses are supposed to at once fix infrastructural breakdown and stabilize the socio-political order. However, during the Gezi protests of 2013, the integrated tactics of sabotage in urban space and data vandalism in the digital realm undermined both data control by the state and its political authority. Yet Gezi’s example also shows that hyperconnectivity, data motility, and virality by themselves do not necessarily lead to more meaningful participation in urban politics.

Keywordssmart city, data, social media, participation, protest, Istanbul

Introduction

During a symposium hosted by IBM in Istanbul in 2010, the General Manager of IBM Turkey, Michael Charouk, opened the day with the statement that cities around the world were in dire need of smart city solutions. But this was especially true for fast-growing

1Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

Corresponding Author:Rolien Hoyng, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Room 125, HSH Building, Castle Peak Road 8, Tuen Mun, New Territories, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected]

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ones such as Istanbul. Smart city solutions promise to improve the management of the city by integrating digital information technologies within urban environments and daily practices to generate data that support the production of actionable knowledge. According to Charouk, smart city solutions were necessary especially to deal with urban expansion hitherto unseen and to make life “more enjoyable, productive, civil, and connected.”1 Yet what kind of conditions was Charouk referring to, when arguing that rapidly developing, globalizing cities rather than established metropolises such as London or Paris would be the labs and test grounds for the smart city technologies of the future?

Rather than forming a fully functional grid, Istanbul as a smart city is often experi-enced through breakdown, disconnection, and suboptimal performance. Key to this article, broken infrastructure, urban planning disasters, congested traffic, and irregu-larities are concomitant with rapid urban redevelopment and continuous construction. Such infrastructural problems in urban space are related to information technologies too as their imagined solutions rely on “smart” techniques of data management. The marketing discourses of IBM and other companies promise transcendence of the cha-otic urbanism that characterizes developing cities and the realization of a smoothly functioning “world city.” The actuality however turns out otherwise, with implications for the modalities of power that govern the city as well as political possibilities of dissent.

My study explores the modalities of power and the possibility of dissent in the “broken” smart city. I concentrate on two instances of breakdown in the city and the kind of socio-technical and data-based responses they trigger: first, infrastructural breakdown concomitant with fast-paced urban development and, second, intentional breakdown, or sabotage, which forms part of the tactics of protest against urban devel-opment. This article explores how the interplay of development/breakdown extends in socio-technical and data-based power and politics by introducing a second and inter-related theme revolving around connectivity/disconnection. The two instances of breakdown in the city spur patterns of connectivity and informational exchange, belonging to smart city governance and viral protest, respectively. My analysis inves-tigates how the emerging socio-technical organization of governance and dissent, respectively, enables certain political performances yet disables others. For reasons detailed in the next section, this cannot be understood by analyzing the power impli-cated in connectivity only. Disconnection has to be factored in too.

Methodologically, this study is oriented on the particular workings of data logics (patterns of connectivity/disconnection; one-directional, “closed” communication/lat-eral, viral communication), technical codes that are realized in the workings of infor-mational systems,2 and epistemologies. I further focus on articulations of data-based forms of governance and protest to discourses of political authority. These foci allow me to construct the components of smart city assemblages and assemblages of viral protest. I gathered data through eleven interviews with practitioners of smart city gov-ernance, who were working in the public sector in Istanbul or in the private sector in partnership with the public sector. I also attended a symposium on the smart city held in Istanbul and collected recordings and proceedings for others. I further collected big



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data metrics and visualizations of the role of social media during the Gezi protests that took place in 2013. Through four sessions, I conducted interviews with seven urban activists belonging to collectives that participated in the Gezi protests.

Theorizing the Broken Smart City

It is remarkable that, parallel to smart city marketing discourses, the critical literature on smart cities tends to emphasize all-encompassing connectivity and efficiency. Little attention is paid to the particular socio-technical and socio-material conditions of actual cities, while an ideal type city is privileged instead. The actual operation of infrastructure and informational systems—characterized by functionality and malfunction, connectivity and disconnection, integrality and fragmentation or multi-plicity—often forms a footnote, caveat, or separate set of remarks.3

Critique often foregrounds a Deleuze-inspired thesis on the operation of networked, microphysical power in neoliberalized societies of control. This analysis incorporates some elements of Foucauldian theories of governmentality, according to which power is not exercised by the rule of the sovereign but through the proliferation and disper-sion of technical devices throughout an entire population (Barry 2001, 19). Hence in the smart city, what generates control are “the connections and processes of everyday urban inhabitations within computational modalities” (Gabrys 2014, 38). Software and detection instruments are integrated into urban space to anticipate behaviors, desires, processes and risks, so that intervention and manipulation become possible (Crang and Graham 2007).

Among critical authors, a sense of loss of politics, or at least of democratic politics “as we know it,” is commonplace. Reckoning with the expediency of smart city tech-nologies, if not the ideological force of technological determinism in urban politics, urban theorists often declare the smart city devoid of politics (Gibbs et al. 2013, 2151; Nissenbaum and Varnelis 2009; Vanolo 2013, 9). Arguing that the new mode of citi-zenship is not structured around rights and responsibilities, Gabrys (2014, 38) notes that citizen participation in the smart city consists in “monitoring and managing one’s relations to environments.” Rather than “citizens,” the city is populated with ambivid-uals: “ambient and malleable urban operators that are expressions of computer envi-ronments” (Gabrys, 2014, 42). Along similar lines, Crang and Graham (2007) warn that decision making becomes delegated to invisible and sentient systems, along with the ethics and politics of those decisions.

Others, who call for exploring new political possibilities that no longer rely on traditions of liberal democracy, seek to mobilize the very connectivity and micro-physical power that the society of control also exploits (Amin and Thrift 2013). This position reiterates the concept of the multitude as a thoroughly networked formation of resistance, given impetus by among others Hardt and Negri. Thrift (2014) argues that producing alternative human-technological sociality is possible by reorganizing responsiveness and the circulation of affect. He encourages experiments in producing “chaos out of order” by effectuating new forms of sentience that make use of the “loose ends and failures of control” in the smart city. Somewhat similarly, Coté (2014)




sees data flows as a site of struggle, whereby data motility—flow unchecked by cor-porations or the state —spawns the political possibility of generating new communica-tive and affective networks.

Although the endeavor to come to terms with emerging socio-technical logics is salient (Andrejevic and Burdon 2015), the risk is that existing critiques base them-selves on the imagination of a fully functional “system” by isolating such logics drasti-cally (yet this involves a value judgment). They may end up deferring the smart city to an imminent yet uninhabited future, where technology functions irrespective of con-text and practice. Even if the above perspectives are useful for my analysis, failure to attend to countervailing tendencies generated by breakdown and disconnection would lead to a misplaced critique.

Through the example of Istanbul, this article rethinks power and politics in so-called smart cities by focusing on the politics around development/breakdown, thereby defying the assumption of an efficient, “smooth,” and depoliticized urban society of control. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in Turkey in 2002 and in Istanbul in 2004. The party has promised development and betterment for all: access to modern urban lifestyles (increasingly configured as also Islamic-conservative), including high-rises, shopping malls, and more recently “smart” gover-nance and living.4 Meanwhile, the AKP-led state has played an active role in transforming Istanbul into a so-called world city [dünya kenti], a project that legiti-mizes the redesign of the city through infrastructural mega projects and gentrification. According to its critics, in the process, the state privatized public land and resources, forced communities relying on informal housing into formal market and rent relation-ships, enriched a nepotist clique of real estate magnates, and denied participation to independent expert bodies and citizens’ collectives alike. The project of transforming Istanbul into a world city brought the destruction of “the physical and social legacy of the past half-century” (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Lovering and Türkmen 2011, 75).

In the context of such fast-paced urban development, encounters with breakdown mark everyday life. Although they may generate embodied experiences of inconve-nience, danger and loss of life worlds, they can also render infrastructure and develop-ment political. In Disrupted Cities, Graham (2010) argues that occasions of breakdown and disrupted flow “help to reveal urban infrastructure systems to be much more than the technocratic engineer’s stuff configured in value-free ways to serve some notional public good often imagined.” Accordingly, in Istanbul’s case, infrastructure and urban design are enmeshed in struggles over political authority and entitlements. The Gezi protests of 2013 started off with the resistance against the destruction of the Gezi Park for the construction of a shopping mall. In the night of 28–29 of May 2013, a violent eviction by police of activists camping in tents to protect the Gezi Park caused a stir. As the news spread through social media, more and more people flocked to the park to resist the police. This was the beginning not only of an eighteen-day occupation that mobilized millions in the streets of Istanbul and across Turkey but also of new net-works of viral social media, rendering billions of postings.

The latter is relevant as this article studies the politics of development/breakdown in terms of its socio-technical manifestations and the data-based organization of urban



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governance and dissent. This brings me to the second theme of connectivity/discon-nection. Rather than considering Istanbul a full-fledged smart city, I approach Istanbul as a technopolis that is not fully connected or “networked,” yet where technology nonetheless plays an undeniable role: it yields material agency and, in addition, inspires discursive frameworks for formulating solutions to problems as well as politi-cal imaginaries (Barry 2001; Braun and Whatmore 2010).5 In Istanbul’s case, disrupt-ing fantasies of an all-encompassing network of control are technical shortcomings such as the lack of omniscient monitoring systems and of integration between different state and commercial digital platforms, only limited public Wi-Fi and a lingering digi-tal divide, as well as disobedient citizens who decline using smart city applications. But more so, disconnection in my study connotes the incompletion of any network: dominant data logics, technical code, and epistemologies produce “outsides” that are rendered invisible and unthinkable (Mejias 2013). Hence, though data-based “smart city” governance assemblages and assemblages of viral protest enable certain political performances, they disavow and incapacitate others. These outsides as instances of disconnection, rather than connectivity per se, help me rethink power and politics in the technopolis.

The following sections provide my analyses of, first, smart city assemblages lead-ing to a critique of the aforementioned assumptions of power-as-control and, subse-quently, of assemblages of viral protest, leading to an assessment of the visions of a new politics exploiting connectivity and the “loose ends” of control. Although this article provides a case study of Istanbul, the conclusion aims to contribute to an approach to technopoli in general that highlights understudied aspects. It serves as a reminder against projecting a universal teleology for smart city development, even if our aim is to provide a critique.

Assemblages of Smart City Governance

Istanbul’s municipalities collected requests, complaints, and opinions in digital data-bases, arriving through a wide array of channels including websites, mobile applica-tions, call centers, face-to-face service desks, and door-to-door visits. Yet different sets of political values pertained to different dimensions of Istanbul’s smart city appara-tuses. Hence, data logics, technical codes, and epistemologies in smart city assem-blages managed urban populations and spaces, while constructing political authority in complex and contradictory ways.

E-democracy applications such as online polls were associated with the political concept of voice as was the case with the online votes on the design of Istanbul’s fer-ries and taxis. The latter presumably gave citizens a say in urban design, even though the matter was relatively inconsequential. In other cases, participatory self-governance was at stake. The website The Citizen Mayor [Vatandaş Başkan] featured the slogan “The goal is direct participation in governance” and “Manage Your Municipality Yourself System.” During the World Intelligent City Summit in 2013, the mayor of Beyoğlu district hailed The Citizen Mayor project as a step toward the implementation of “direct democracy.”6 An engineer specialized in e-municipality systems explained




this project as an initiative that called on citizens to actively participate: “Contribute as if you are the mayor, provide value, comments, and contributions.”7 In doing so, citizens were supposed to not just be active but even pro-active.

Nonetheless, though citizens were stimulated to act as participatory contributors at the front-end, political authority was articulated in yet different ways to techniques of data management at the back-end. According to an Information Technology (IT) man-ager in Başakşehir district, where the “Living Lab” smart city project was realized, the municipality had “made the services for the citizens within the logic of technology.” He referred to the ways in which service provision was driven by responsiveness and feedback loops and measured in terms of satisfaction rates. Pointing to the quantity of data items, the manager concluded that “we are in a situation in which we actually have touched upon all citizens in one way or another [emphasis added].”8 An employee at the metropolitan municipality’s planning department argued that such techniques of tracking, sensing, and monitoring led to a type of governance that was less general and selective yet “faster, more actual [gerçekçi], more individual [bireysel].” Governance communication became “more critical, more actual, more responsive to urgencies, more human-focused, more service-focused.”9 At an IT service department of a dis-trict municipality, the manager told me, “The more data you collect, the better you can provide service. The more you know about a person, the better you can help and direct this person.”10 According to these governance actors, the state acted as the diagnosti-cian of needs and the deliverer of services addressing those needs. Responsiveness—the notion that smart city applications enabled feedback loops between the city and its governors—was articulated as a matter of responsibility of the state.

Turning the citizen subject into a recipient of service, the construction of political authority through “immediate” tracking, sensing, and monitoring substituted the dem-ocratic politics of voice or self-governance with “governance-as-service.” According to Gabrys (2014, 38), the citizen in the smart city functions as a data point, meaning both “a generator of data and a responsive node in a system of feedback.” However, citizens’ being monitored and generating data might not allow them to meaningfully participate in either producing or using data. For instance, though spokespersons of municipal departments at times mentioned values such as transparency and participa-tion, the kind of citizen involvement open data activists advocated was not a goal in itself. When Istanbul hosted a hackathon for CitySDK, a project sponsored by the European Union, the municipality made traffic data available for thirty-six hours, just to cut access again after the event.11 As the open data community complained, there was even a law, no. 4736, regarding public services, which made sharing data publi-cally with citizens impossible. In this context, “pro-active” citizens merely generated data that were fed into apparatuses of service by the state, which enjoyed exclusive data ownership and informational overview. As often citizens’ behavior was simply registered by sensors and cameras embedded in the urban landscape, conscious involvement and awareness of these processes were considered unneeded. As dis-cussed at the IBM Smart City Symposium, though citizens may not be consciously aware of sensors embedded in urban space or the functionalities and data logics at the back-end of smart city apparatuses, they would only notice the result of being served



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well.12 Data-based governance supposedly not just optimized the delivery of service but also identified an unquestionable common good. As one interviewee argued, “The most important thing here is the data. If you process this data with the right solutions, you will be able to make good analyses and decisions regarding both the present and the future.”13 From a critical perspective, however, due to the “closed” nature of the data logics and the fact that the state was the only one to process them, smart city assemblages gave way to dataveillance (Lyon 2001)—namely, the collection and cir-culation of data about citizens who have little insight into the nature of the data that are being collected about them and the purpose of their use. These assemblages also induced knowledge/power imbalances between governors and governed, enabling the former to construct notions of “common good” in urban governance.

Breakdown

The fact that smart city apparatuses were participatory without distributing agency to engage in urban politics in a meaningful and efficacious manner had specific implica-tions. These apparatuses exploited participatory citizenship to remediate breakdown. Breakdown formed the quintessential moment at which citizens were supposed to be “smart” [akıllı vatandaş] in the sense that they would interact in ways compatible with “smart city” governance apparatuses. Citizens were called on to act themselves as sen-sors of the broken—and also suboptimally performing—smart city: a city that suffered from infrastructural breakdown yet lacked an automatic, all-inclusive, “omniscient” monitoring system to fix or prevent problems. It was remarkable that during the IBM Smart City Symposium as well as in many other interviews I conducted, the examples of “pro-active” citizenship in the smart city came down to a rather restricted set of actions and behaviors, revolving around demanding services and reporting problems with regard to failing or inefficient infrastructures. Through Beyoğlu district’s website of The Citizen Mayor project, citizens could complain about experiences of break-down and opt for their information to be filed under categories such as infrastructure, cleaning, and traffic, next to construction and environmental issues. The mobile phone application Shoot & Send [Çek & İlet] facilitated online reporting of breakdown by citizens who while passing by were supposed to take photo shots of unremoved gar-bage, construction debris, or broken street lamps. Those who were illiterate or unequipped with a digital device and connection to the Internet were encouraged to phone or pay a visit to the municipality to report problems.

Although citizens were instructed to “participate,” they lacked the means to alter the basic parameters of their interaction through the interface. Instead, by communi-cating and providing data, pro-active citizens were doing the work of repair and con-tributed to Istanbul’s transformation into a well-functioning, smooth world city. Following Graham and Thrift’s (2007, 4) argument on the everyday work of repair, “it becomes increasingly difficult to define what the ‘thing’ is that is being maintained and repaired. Is it the thing itself, or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?” In Istanbul, such everyday acts of citizenship became aligned with the unquestioned project of urban redevelopment, led by the state. Citizen-reporting had




to advance the process of repair in the case of breakdown yet not fundamentally ques-tion the status quo. Dodge and Kitchin (2005) point to the performative character of digital-urban ontogenesis, whereby space is not fixed in nature yet attains a stable form through reiterative processes across physical-urban and digital platforms. In Istanbul’s case, smart city assemblages aimed to restore irregularity and ensure stabil-ity in urban-material and socio-political sense.

The aforementioned notion that data-based governance supported the common good also pertained to urban transformation, relinquishing critiques that a gentrified world city benefits certain, vested interests while harming others. A smart city advo-cate said that “in the face of [urban] transformations,” information technologies and data would help decision making and the development of new approaches that benefit the public.14 According to a spokesperson at the IT department of a district municipal-ity, digital data, integrated with Geographical Information System (GIS), facilitated rather open-ended knowledge production by allowing its users to test out various rela-tionalities among data sets and map them out geographically. The argument of the spokesperson resonated with Mackenzie and Vurdubakis’s (2011, 15) insight that to “sift through the massive amounts of transactional data generated by contemporary life, and to identify patterns of relations between seemingly unconnected data items, promises to transform what at first appears as little more than electronic noise into actionable knowledge.” Yet although municipalities’ GIS applications could help plan-ning playgrounds or hospitals, it should be noted too that the data collected included assessments of the condition of houses, type and presence/absence of land deeds, the ratio of renters versus owners in a particular area, and income levels—all of which were crucial for municipalities in planning urban transformation projects and finding the legal, financial, and cultural means to pressurize local populations into cooperation or force them to comply.

What the discourses regarding data-based urban transformation concealed was that in any practical context, data require construction and interpretation, rendering their use subject to social interests and purposes (cf. Dalton and Thatcher 2014; Faltesek 2013; Gitelman and Jackson 2013; Hayles 2012, 180–83). One company introduced the concept of “smart urban transformation” [akıllı kentsel dönüşüm] and assisted municipalities and real estate investors in their endeavor to build “brand cities.” This company did not just offer demographic data analysis, digital mapping, and computer-aided design, but advertised its multi-disciplinary team, which operated by combining data analysis with sociological, economic, and legal expertise. Hence, the services integrated new data solutions with a range of older discourses and concepts such as brand city, favored by the state and real estate magnates in the private sector yet mis-trusted by urban activists who associated these discourses with socially and environ-mentally harmful processes of urban transformation.

Disconnection

The question has been how data-based governance enabled certain performances in urban politics yet incapacitated others by facilitating particular distributions of



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agency of constructions of political authority. Materially, smart city and e-governance websites enabled only individualized and centralized communication from citizen to “solution center.” Although data flow was generally one directional and “closed,” the flow of representational discourse projecting how the city should be was again often one directional, yet running from center to citizen. Meanwhile, symbolically, by featuring pictures of local and national politicians prominently on interfaces, applications purported that communication was directly with these persons. As a consequence of this semiotic-material arrangement, the “state,” personified as the local or national authority, emerged as a representative institution knowing the “needs” of urban populations and having the political authority to redesign the city.

Yet even though governance actors praised Istanbul’s smart city apparatus as all-encompassing and inclusive, smart city assemblages also featured disconnections and constituted their own technical, epistemological, and ideological outsides. These dis-connections obstructed microphysical types of control that are predicated on connec-tivity and affective manipulation. The spokesman of the Informatics Association of Turkey complained about the lack of applications, produced by IBM and Oracle, that allow for tracking sentiments and moods—positive and negative ones of diverse groups—throughout the Internet including corporate social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.15 These disconnections left unsurveilled and “untouched” the many who for ideological reasons would ignore the interpellation as “pro-active” smart citizen and refuse to use smart city applications that carried the recognizable “face” of the state, or who did not even know about their existence. Social media were however the domain of urban activists, and they cultivated an alternative circulation of information regarding development and breakdown. For instance, sharing images through Twitter of bulldozers undoing cobblestone streets or uprooting trees, the activ-ist platform Taksim Solidarity, founded in March 2012, emphasized breakdown as the outcome of urban transformation and they portrayed the state and its partners as agents of destruction rather than development.

The Politics of Sabotage and Data Vandalism

Taksim Solidarity opposed the redesign of the inner city area Taksim, which was part of Beyoğlu district. In 2013, they coordinated actions by calling on their Twitter fol-lowers to help guard Gezi Park and stop the machines from being operationalized. As already narrated, their action was the beginning of the eighteen-day occupation of Istanbul’s center. Occupying the barricaded zone around the Gezi Park and Taksim Square formed a method of sabotage, or intentional breakdown that deregulated the urban order by undermining, for instance, the experience of orderliness and the smooth circulation of traffic. Then Prime Minister Erdoğan labeled the protesters çapulcu, which literally means “looter” but could be translated as “vandal.”16 Protesters were quick to appropriate the name and resignify their activities (including workshops, dis-cussion forums, and street cleaning) as creative, rather than destructive, and replete with love and care for the city as well as for one another.




The politics of sabotage did not form merely a singular and bounded act in urban physical space, but had an informational dimension too. Oft-cited research by a well-known Turkish information lawyer and an engineer claimed that during the initial days, the total number of messages carrying one of twenty selected Gezi-related hashtags climbed up rapidly from five to fifteen million between May 29 and June 5, peaking above twenty million by June 16 (Banko and Babaoğlan 2013). In accordance with the above rhetorical play around the dichotomy of development/breakdown, what was at stake can be called “data vandalism.” For the government, the problem was not just on-the-spot, physical-material damage and obstruction caused by the occupation of the Gezi Park in Beyoğlu district. The problem too was the circulation of controversial imagery and knowledge about the city. Images circu-lated through social media of working machines hijacked by protesters and painted the color pink, a seemingly Luddite performance that was however not simply directed against the machine. A spectacular series of videos retroactively identified as drone journalism emerged on Youtube, in which a camera hovered over the rav-aged city and zoomed in on occupiers’ barricades, tents, banners, signs, and numer-ous works of graffiti.17 Hashtags were used to share digital images of graffiti and blogs were opened to collect and archive them.18 Rendering the city in ravage visible challenged the sentiment, cultivated by the state, that development was inevitable and unstoppable.

More specifically, the problem for the government was reputational damage to Istanbul’s and Turkey’s brands. The Minister of Internal Affairs Muammar Güler stated that the Gezi events were harming “both our country’s brand value and our economy” (Bloomberg HT 2013). The spokesman of the Informatics Association of Turkey told me,

Within those three days 91 million tweets were generated. . . . This makes us sad. While we are building smart, brand cities, according to some statistics more than 500,000 photos and almost 100,000 videos were shared via Twitter in six days. How is all this content going to be removed from the internet? [Y]ou cannot erase or clean internet content. It really is a pity, the damage is huge.19

As brand value was key to the ability to attract foreign direct investment required for the further transformation of Istanbul into a world city, authorities accused protesters of impeding development.

Disrupting smart city apparatuses, Gezi’s data logics were performative. Communication about urban breakdown in the city enacted further disruption in the sense that the circulation itself undermined apparatuses of control. The “uncon-strained” circulation of data, or data motility (Coté 2014), subverted the circuits of channeled data flow and exclusive retention of data by smart city apparatuses. Following Coté (2014), there is “a deeper felicity in motility.” If data flows cannot be controlled and contained, they may deterritorialize existing socio-technical assem-blages that empower states and corporations, and they may open up the possibility of new communicative relations.



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The protests spun new networks of exchange that either undermined or exploited the smart city’s patterns of connectivity/disconnection. For instance, protesters exploited, or “hacked” if you will, the very infrastructure of the smart city in unfore-seen ways. The so-called tourist cameras streaming street views of touristic landmarks, which were arranged by the metropolitan municipal government to enhance city branding, were appropriated for the purpose of recording and broadcasting protest scenes and police violence. People captured the video stream of these tourist cameras or shared their URLs throughout the web. But also, public Wi-Fi was rather restricted in Istanbul and tended to be dysfunctional due to overusage during the protests. Creating new opportunities for connectivity, people opened up their private Wi-Fi con-nections by publicizing network names and passwords. They even sent this informa-tion to accounts with a larger following such as Taksim Solidarity’s for reposting. Stimulating unsurveilled patterns of connectivity beyond state control, the Alternative Informatics Association, the Turkish Pirate Party, the hackers group Red Hack as well as Anonymous taught people about the usage of VPN tunnels to masquerade IP addresses, “live CDs” to browse the Internet without leaving a trace on the hard disk, and encryption software like The Onion Router. There were instructions for establish-ing dial-up Internet connection for in case the Turkish authorities would order an Internet blackout and there were plans to initiate meshworks that would circumvent the Internet infrastructure owned by the former state company and monopoly Internet service provider TTNet.

As data motility and ungoverned networks of communication undermined the state’s control and political authority, viral protest exploited the “loose ends and fail-ures of control” in the smart city and produced “chaos out of order” (Thrift 2014). In response, Prime Minister Erdoğan declared social media and specifically Twitter a “menace” and told citizens to stay off of it. A special report by AKP’s Research and Development department framed Gezi’s use of social media in terms of disinformation and manipulation (CNN Türk 2015).

The Assemblages of Viral Protest

Gezi’s instance of breakdown was also an instance of socio-technical organization. Urban activists saw Gezi as a chance for self-organization, including bottom–up deci-sion making regarding the course of political action, rather than “mere” participa-tion.20 Articulating the political values of self-organization to user interaction in information-technological practice, one activist from Urban Movements said, “If somebody decides by him- or herself with what kind of slogan they will object [to wrong-doing], this person starts seeing him- or herself as part of the movement. They then find themselves in the midst of the struggle.”21 Similarly, another activist who had been involved with Taksim’s neighborhood organization commented, “There is now a search for how to make the energy last and construct a platform without destroying the pluralist participation.”22

Following authors such as Bennett and Segerberg (2011) and Shifman (2014), agency resided in protester-users’ ability to not just relay but adapt, recombine, and




modify content. One remarkable way in which protesters integrated their particular aspirations and concerns with the struggle was by adapting the hashtag meme #resist [#diren] to add new messages. These messages were, for instance, anti-government, anti-capitalist, against urban transformation projects elsewhere in Istanbul or Turkey, or in support of secular lifestyles or of sexual or ethnic minorities. Agency can also be considered in affective and less individualist terms. The imitative yet also adaptive logics of viral sharing among networked crowds constituted an atmosphere of affec-tive communication, where protesters were “susceptible to the contagions of others, harnessing their capacity to affect (and to be affected)” (Papacharissi and De Fatima Oliveira 2012; Postill 2014; Sampson 2012). Networked communication heightened responsiveness and sensibility to the diverse expressions of concerns and aspirations, enabling transformative processes of becoming. As multiple authors remarked, social media exchange shook up existing lines of separation between identities and political positions in Turkey (İnceoğlu 2014; Karaömerlioğlu 2013; Varnali and Görgülü 2015).

If smart city apparatuses requested active participation from citizens yet reinforced the state’s agency and political authority, what I describe as the assemblages of viral protest redistributed agency and political authority. However, like smart city assem-blages, assemblages of viral protest were complex and contradictory. Switching to a back-end perspective and considering data logics and epistemologies, they may not yet accommodate the kind of agency activists associated with self-organization. Rather, a different political imaginary emerged that was informed by the epistemology and aesthetics of virality.

Big Data and Protest-as-Avalanche

One consequence of Gezi’s instance of breakdown was the production of an over-whelming amount of interaction and data. Yet protesters lacked the ability to use data for the sake of producing actionable knowledge in somehow genuinely participatory and progressive ways, along the lines of Coté’s imagination of activists’ and artists’ appropriating data commons. There was an initiative for the development of special Park Communication Software [Parkların Haberleşme Yazılımı] that would integrate communication of park forums—namely, open speakers' platforms that emerged after police cleared the Gezi Park occupation—with decision making through voting. Yet the project went astray.

Perhaps the only available data-processing techniques during the protests concen-trated on Twitter data. Having seen an increase in registered accounts from under two million to close to ten million between May 29 and June 10, Twitter’s rise was not only responsible for viral data logics themselves but it also affected discourse re- conceptualizing the nature of politics. Big data visualizations and social media metrics were visualized as “trending topics” on Twitter’s own interface. During the Gezi pro-tests, similar visualizations appeared in reports about Gezi’s social media use by for-eign research labs as well as local Turkish marketing companies and researchers. These reports received considerable attention in Turkish news media and their visuals were enthusiastically circulated through social media by protesters, as a self-referential form



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of communication about communication (Andrejevic 2013; Dean 2010).23 To some extent, the computational epistemology and aesthetic of big data visualizations, trend-ing topics lists, and tag clouds yielded cultural authority to explain what the protests were about (cf. Faltesek 2013; Hayles 2012, 176): they promised to make sense of data deluge.

The most cited visualizations measured trends, intensities, volumes, and frequen-cies. They portrayed for instance the trending of the most prominent hashtags over time or the accumulative number of tweets posted carrying what were considered Gezi-related hashtags since the start of the uprising. Political imaginaries in news media guiding the visualizations invoked the spontaneous character of the uprising and its speed of the growth. For instance, one newspaper article commented, “Twitter is very fast. It is possible to convey information to tens of thousands of people within seconds. It provides the necessary coordination for an explosion of organization that grows like an avalanche” (Birbil et al. 2013).

However, spikes in aggregated big data visualization, corresponding to the fre-quency of hashtags or keywords, relayed the intensity of the protests yet not the het-erogeneity of meanings that may be underlying hashtag use: the multitude and particularity of meanings, sentiments, and commitments. Such visualizations obfus-cate the fact that hashtag reiteration does not necessarily imply a common cause or strong alliance between protesters who acknowledge and choose to be affiliated with each other (boyd and Crawford 2012; Rogers 2013). Hence, aggregated visualization rendered invisible that consolidating meaning and solidarity was only one effect of hashtag use and that, beyond this function, hashtag citation of key hashtags such as #direngeziparkɪ [#resistgezipark] and #occupygezi could, as said, add new causes; form a bid for solidarity when perceived weak (e.g., with oppressed Kurdish minori-ties) or for media attention (e.g., concerning police violence in less covered areas); or, alternatively, contest meanings and express antagonism (e.g., as did AKP supporters; Tüfekçi 2014). Similarly, visualizations consisting of multiple graph lines of frequen-cies in hashtag use, resembling an inundating set of waves, communicated a somehow common upsurge or concerted movement, without inquiring into the coherence/inco-herence of concerns and sentiments.

Aggregated visualizations furthermore rendered invisible whatever existed in less legible and non-quantifiable forms on or beyond Twitter. Left outside were not just those populations detached from social media but also those forms of expression that were rendered unthinkable and invisible by the epistemologies and aesthetics of aggre-gation. For instance, one rather peculiar visualization by the Turkish brand measure-ment company eBrandValue compared the number of people who had supposedly never made any comments of a political nature on Twitter before but now had started to comment on Gezi, with those who had commented on politics before.24 Although the suggestion was again that the protests had been driven by unorganized crowds and had emerged spontaneously beyond the scope of party politics, this quantitative approach overlooks the complexity of deciding what counts as “political.”

As per these critiques, assemblages of viral sharing tended to effectuate what Jodi Dean (2010, 89–90) describes as the “decline symbolic efficiency”: user interaction




and self-expression was turned into data that can be measured in terms of volumes, frequencies, or intensities. Yet underlying meanings, concerns, and aspirations—and more importantly, the possibilities for negotiation and transformative becoming—did no not matter. For instance, it was increasingly unclear what key hashtags such as #direngeziparkɪ [#resistgezipark] and #occupygezi stood for. When disseminating social media content that reversed “development” and “breakdown” symbolically, Taksim Solidarity initially operated with a specific set of meanings and actionable knowledge pertaining to a particular place, namely, Taksim. Soon after, breakdown lost its context-specific meaning and started to operate as a trope. The destruction of the Gezi Park and the tearing down of the trees became aligned with the violence police inflicted on protesters’ bodies (leading to more than 8,000 injured and a death toll of five by July 10 according to the Turkish Medical Association). Violence in Taksim became aligned with violence elsewhere and with repression of workers, women and sexual minorities, and political and ethnic minorities as well as secular lifestyles. On one hand, this rendering ambiguous of the meaning of breakdown can be considered the ramification of the growing scale of the protest and of the affective atmosphere that viral sharing brought about. On the other hand, it also signifies a milieu characterized by the weakening of political efficacy of self-expression and lack of opportunities to negotiate, and struggle over, meanings, concerns, aspirations, and relations of solidarity.

The epistemology and aesthetics of the metrics and visualizations discussed were simply indifferent to these dynamics of politics. Likewise, though immediacy is still key to protest-as-avalanche, this conception of mediated protest is oriented onto inten-sity and commonality yet not the political values that activists adhered to, such as self-expression and the possibility of negotiating heterogeneous commitments and their transformative becoming. As the conclusion will further argue, while protest assemblages undermined data control by smart city apparatuses and resulted in the recoding of development as breakdown, they did not give rise to the alternative approach to urban politics that activists imagined.

Conclusion

Rather than connectivity in the ideal type smart city, this article has explored the inter-plays of development/breakdown and connectivity/disconnection to contribute to the analysis of particular modalities of power and political possibilities of the “broken” smart city. My analysis shows that breakdown does not form only a threat to but also a chance for socio-technical, political-material organization. In Istanbul, the territori-alization of smart city assemblages involved the construction of the state as agent of development. Yet breakdown, if not sabotage, could also lead to deterritorialization by triggering new networks of viral communication and data motility. Especially for the study of technopoli that are undergoing expansion and redevelopment, the focus on breakdown promises to offer insight into the complex ways in which socio-tech-nical, political-material assemblages produce and challenge agency and political authority.



Hoyng 15

With regard to disconnection or the multiplicity of networks, this article has shown that Istanbul’s activists exploited the ungoverned “outsides” of the smart city assem-blages to mobilize against the state and its development plans. Through social media, new communicative circuits and social relationships emerged that were barred from smart city apparatuses. Yet the ensuing assemblages of viral protest constituted their own exclusions. Protest communication allowed for heterogeneous meanings, senti-ments, and commitments, yet epistemologies implicated in big data visualization and their articulation to a political discourse of spontaneous mass uprising also obfuscated such heterogeneity. The example of Istanbul suggests that disconnection in technopoli does not only consist in the lack of integration (between the state’s smart city appara-tuses and corporate social media platforms) or in digital divides that disadvantaged poorer urban populations. Outsides rendered invisible and unthinkable by the particu-lar configurations of dominant socio-technical networks can be constitutive of new social formations or they remain incapacitated.

My contentions regarding breakdown and disconnection provide a warning against overuse or easy application of concepts such as control and multitude, both of which are predicated on the assumption of connectivity. Smart city apparatuses in Istanbul operated not just through the microphysical power of control but also through what Jeremy Gilbert (2014) calls meta-individualist logics that undergirded the political authority of the sovereign state. In a meta-individualist arrangement, society consists in an aggregation of separate individuals who form a collective only by virtue of the relationship of each individual group member with the “leader” (a personage or an abstract idea such as “the nation”) that represents them. Society coheres only on the basis of the vertical relations between individuals and this central, representative insti-tution. Accordingly, though smart city apparatuses sought to instigate, appropriate, and control citizens’ data input, they also instituted the state as a distinct, sovereign, and supposedly representative agent of development. What was organized as citizens’ participation at the front-end was turned into data-supported service for a supposed common good at the back-end.

Protest assemblages enabled different kinds of political performances, redistribut-ing agency and political authority. Protesters’ participation in peer-to-peer sharing cre-ated new networks of communicative exchange that undermined control by smart city apparatuses. As a contrast to meta-individualism, Gilbert (2014) deploys the concept of the multitude to describe a form of sociality that is heterogeneous, multiple, and complex, while based in lateral communication. For the present analysis, the merit of the concept is that it highlights the creative aspect of politics, namely, the challenge to social stratifications by transformative becomings. Networked exchange gave rise to an increased sensibility, a shared atmosphere, extending the ability to affect and be affected.

However, it is not clear that viral protest assemblages facilitated what activists hoped for: the political efficacy of heterogeneous meanings, sentiments, commit-ments, and the pluralist possibility of their negotiation and transformation. The episte-mologies and aesthetics of big data rendered invisible the multiplicity of meanings of key hashtags and the uncertainty of relations of solidarity among those who used these




hashtags. The emerging discourse that conceptualized Gezi’s political nature empha-sized speed, intensity, and commonality instead.

Hence, Gezi’s instance of breakdown gave way to data motility, yet the increase of data produced was not met by the capacity to turn data into actionable knowledge (Kitchin 2014). If smart city apparatuses produced actionable knowledge with regard to urban governance and development that reinforced the authority of the sovereign state, the question is how protest assemblages could counter this distribution of knowl-edge/power in ways that met the political values hailed by activists, such as self-expression, bottom–up decision making, heterogeneity, and pluralism. If neither the modalities of power that govern the technopolis nor its political possibilities reside in hyperconnectivity and data mobility/motility only, how to imagine its struggle through alternative informational architectures, data-processing mechanisms, and political imaginaries?

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study has been supported by Lingnan University (grant DA13A4).

Notes

1. Michael Charouk, IBM Smart City Symposium, Istanbul, May 6, 2010. 2. Andrew Feenberg (1999) describes technical code as the set of ideologies, values, and

interests that affect the development of particular technology and are realized in it. 3. For instance, against the dispositions of the “system” approach, Mike Crang and Stephen

Graham (2007, 814) acknowledge that cities with information-processing capacity might function less like a “concept city” or a “global brain” and more through local aggrega-tions of suboptimally performing informational systems that produce a plethora of “little stories.” Furthermore, Stephen Graham’s collaboration with Nigel Thrift (2007) addresses breakdown in a separate article, along with repair and maintenance. In a recent article, Thrift (2014) calls for more attention to messiness, failure, and experimentation in “sen-tient” cities.

4. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 10, 2013. 5. My use of technopolis for cities in which technology informs ways of thinking about prob-

lems and solutions draws on Andrew Barry’s (2001) concept of technological societies. 6. Beyoğlu Muncipality, http://en.beyoglu.bel.tr/beyoglu_municipality/news_default.aspx?

SectionId=1659&ContentId=44064, last accessed on January 7, 2015. 7. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 19, 2013. 8. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 10, 2013. 9. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 11, 2013.10. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 28, 2010.11. Hackathonist, http://hackathonist.com/category/haberler/, last accessed on May 23, 2015.


http://en.beyoglu.bel.tr/beyoglu_municipality/news_default.aspx?SectionId=1659&ContentId=44064

http://en.beyoglu.bel.tr/beyoglu_municipality/news_default.aspx?SectionId=1659&ContentId=44064

http://hackathonist.com/category/haberler/


Hoyng 17

12. IBM Smart City Symposium, Istanbul, May 6, 2010.13. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 19, 2013.14. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 19, 2013.15. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 9, 2013.16. Looting as it happened, for instance, during the London Riots of 2011 was not a major

issue.17. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtoJW5PRyY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=mw7oHCDaSSA, last accessed on January 7, 2015.18. Duvardaki Sesler, http://duvardakisesler.com and #DuvardaGeziParki, http://duvard-

ageziparki.tumblr.com, last accessed on January 7, 2015.19. Personal interview, Istanbul, July 9, 2013.20. Personal interview, Istanbul, April 10, 2014.21. Personal interview, Istanbul, April 12, 2014.22. Personal interview, Istanbul, June 21, 2013.23. The following article gives an overview of various reports that came out earlier. See Çetin

(2013).24. eBrandValue, http://www.ebrandvalue.com/occupy-gezi-movement/, last accessed on

January 7, 2015.

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Author Biography

Rolien Hoyng received a PhD in communication studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, in 2012. She is currently a visiting assistant professor in cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.


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