Being Human In Digital Cities

Being Human in Digital Cities is the title of Myria Georgiou‘s excellent new book, which is a must-read for anyone interested in digital technologies, cities and humans. Which would be most of us, you’d think, though the book’s starting point is that much academic writing on digital technologies pays too little attention to ‘the human’.

I’ve remarked on this lack of interest in the human in much of the work produced by geographers looking at things urban and digital before, in a paper published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (paywalled, sorry). In a lot of critical academic work, in fact, the tech – code, software, infrastructure – is given powerful causal agency to shape urban life, while the ‘human’ – if it remains at all as an analytical category – is positioned as its excessive and resistant other. Myria’s book is an extended counterpoint to that framing. She argues powerfully that critical scholarship needs to pay careful attention to the ‘human’, partly because it remains a powerful category and experience in and of the world, but also because giving it attention is what Big Tech is itself doing right now. The necessary question then becomes, what kind of human emerge in digitally-mediated cities, and with what effects?

Humans, Myria says, have critical and creative capabilities; the human is also a discursive category. From these two qualities, she proposes a threefold approach to analysing how the human is both conceptualised and acts in digital cities. (She also has lots of important and careful things to say about digital cities.) The first is what she calls popular humanism, which assumes a universal humanity (and is therefore implicitly racialised, classed and often gendered in specific ways); popular humanism is post-neoliberalising, and is mobilised by powerful institutions in the city to normalise the surveillance and management of everyday life with digital technologies by establishing hierarchies between different kinds of humans. The second is demotic humanism, a space of everyday, messy, unpredictable human agency and creativity, in which digital technologies are given affective and experiential meaning and in which popular humanism can be normalised but also reconfigured. And the third is critical humanism, which Myria defines as an analytical and normative framework from which popular humanism can be critiqued. The latter is necessary because the agents of popular humanism aim to establish a “seamless digital order” which “tie the human to deep and lasting transformations of social, economic and cultural life in the city” (page 27).

This is a powerful analytical framework. It avoids meta-theory from the Western canon in favour of extended engagements with critical race and postcolonial thinkers (though Foucault is given a nod, and I kind of felt the lingering presence of Lefebvre too, though maybe that’s just an echo of the power of triadic approaches to urban life). It draws generously on a wide range of scholarship on cities and digital technologies. I liked the focus on ordering as a form of power rather than, say, commodification or surveillance, very much – it feels more capacious and less paranoid than either of the latter. And I particularly liked the emphasis on the human as a discursive category.

The book also addresses directly something that I’ve noticed in my current research on how cities are visualised with and through digital software and screens: just how frequently humans are pictured. As Myria says, “the digital order is also a biopolitical order” (page 35). The popular scepticism about the big digital corporations seems to be resulting in a sustained effort by them to picture happy humans in order to address and appeal to them. It needs overtly to claim that it will deliver a better human future, and therefore also frequently pictures happy people in happy places as part of that claim. So I agree completely with Myria that popular humanism deserves critical attention.

Of course, I have other thoughts too, particularly on how the book’s disciplinary grounding in urban and cultural studies structure its account of power in various ways. Critical versions of those disciplines (like digital geography) are very keen to detect power, and resistance to power, everywhere. One trace of this enthusiasm is the book’s assumption that popular humanism is always bad (because post-neoliberal), and that demotic humanism is the source of some kind of challenge to it. I think there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that both are somewhat more complicated than that. Demotic humanism extends beyond the book’s fascinating and extensive case studies of groups engaging with digital tech for what critical scholars would broadly agree is for ‘good’. In my home city, for example, Facebook and the app NextDoor are used to mobilise a coalition of anti-fifteen minute city, anti-low traffic zones, anti-vaxxer libertarians, quite apart from all the toxic vileness hosted by social media more generally. The demotic is has a much wider range of register than the book acknowledges.

However, the book’s development of critical humanism as a concept works to displace the potential conflation of the critical with the demotic, of the radical with the popular. Critical humanism is “an epistemology for contesting the digital makings of a hierarchical humanity” (page 144). It prioritises care, inclusion and non-hierarchical forms of human identity. A few examples are discussed briefly in the book but Myria then elaborates what she calls nine ‘values’ which define critical humanism, drawing on rich range of critical thinkers. I guess political theorists might want a bit more detail on how to define those things, and indeed who defines them, but the point I take away is that this is a specific form of digitally-mediated humanism, diverse and emergent, and its specificity needs careful attention to distinguish it from demotic messiness. I very much look forward to reading the empirical scholarship which I am sure will be inspired to use these values as a methodological framework.

The second assumption in Myria’s book I’m currently thinking about in my own work is the claim that popular humanism is an effect of institutions, particularly corporations, the state and the media, developed in their headquarters, labs and factories. This is true. However, institutions are staffed by people. (Indeed, a lot of popular humanism relies precisely on creative individuals, designing the visuals and events that sell it). The workplace cultures of tech industries have been given considerable attention by feminist and other critical scholars, who have strongly indicated the alignment of certain forms of white masculinity with the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of what Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have called ‘the smartness mandate‘. (I’m thinking of the work of Mar Hicks, Judy Wajcman, Charlton McIlwaine and Nathan Ensmenger, among many others.) This suggests that the forms of human at work – literally – in making popular humanism also deserve attention.

My final reflection prompted by Myria’s book is about the forms of power that it focusses on. Addressing power and/as order enacted by institutions and platforms tends to neglect the massively popular digital mediations of urban life in more unruly things like computer games and blockbuster movies and tv shows. These experiences of digitally-mediated cities are hugely popular and widespread. I’m not suggesting that they are necessarily radical in any way, or that they don’t do their own kinds of order-making. But they do offer another register of power – spectacular, seductive, pleasurable, communal, emotional, embodied – that also deserves careful attention for its equally specific constitutions of the human and the urban. I think, anyway.

All this is really only to say, though, that I have a slightly different approach to thinking about the human and the digital in cities than Myria. Which is not going to stop her book – along with Sarah Barns’s on platform urbanism, another excellent account the human experiencing of urban technologies seriously – taking its place among my favourites on digitally-mediated urbanism. Oh, and did I mention that is beautifully written?

on Oppenheimer, again

From all the hype it seemed inevitable and indeed came to pass: Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer won various Best categories at the Oscars on Sunday night. I just want to reiterate why I think it’s a really bad movie (I blogged about it just after I saw it too). Specifically, I do not understand why Nolan gets a pass on the gender politics of Oppenheimer while inches and hours are spent dissecting Barbie.

I haven’t seen anything written about the masculinity that’s embedded in and celebrated by Oppenheimer. But the Oppenheimer character in the movie deserves some attention in those terms, I think, because he seems to me to be doing quite a lot of advocacy not just for Oppenheimer as a historical figure, but also on behalf of contemporary digital tech innovators. For all Cillian Murphy’s excellence as an actor, the character he is given is a cipher for the genius-inventor that seems very common right now in digital dude world: the scientific genius who invents something incredible (“moves fast and break things”), then gets to perform being really worried about that invention (“oops”), and then gets to decide to be the saviour who will prevent the rest of us from being harmed by his invention (“here is the oversight board I’ve convened”). It’s all about him. Genius, Tortured Genius, Genius-with-a-Conscience. This is exactly the position occupied by the contemporary techbro elite running corporations from Meta to OpenAI, who invent whatever and then want to work out how to manage its downsides themselves, while sacking the people (often women of colour) who have done the actual work of pointing out the problems with their creation.

This Genius-multiple position is one that only certain kinds of men can occupy. Indeed, Oppenheimer clearly demonstrates that being any variety of genius also makes you incredibly attractive to the ladies: the very few women in the film are all loyal to Oppenheimer regardless of what he does – abandon them, betray them – they even die for him! Yay!!! As for that ENTIRELY gratuitous scene of a lover writhing in Oppenheimer’s lap during a legal hearing while his wife looks on… unbelievable. It basically suggests that we live in a world in which a key scene in a major movie that shows a Genius being taken down a peg or two (mistakenly, of course) nevertheless has to reassure us that his masculinity is unscathed because he has not one but two women desperate for him, one of which actually is. In the room. No, sorry, in his fantasy. Except, since we can all see her, also in the room. Seriously???

Several reviewers have pointed out that Oppenheimer was a rather different character from the man in the film. And of course it’s a movie, not a historical document. But that makes its fictionality all the more important. Why is Oppenheimer the best movie now? What is it showing us, exactly? I think it’s so successful precisely because it’s a fantasy – a beautifully-made, visually striking fantasy – of a form of white masculinity that remains very powerful, and its enthusiastic endorsement at the Oscars speaks to that power.

Nolan has never been good at making the women in his films actual characters of course. But perhaps this new low actually speaks to something that Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins discuss in their recent book Believability. In that book, they argue that the current moment is definitely one in which a certain kind of hero masculinity is asserting itself, but in their analysis this is because it is also a moment in which, sometimes problematically, criticisms of straight white patriarchy are increasingly making themselves heard. So perhaps Oppenheimer should be seen as not only as a celebration of the tech bros, but also as a symptom of their anxiety that their control of the world might be slipping… perhaps. We can but hope.

The End We Start From and things not really ending

Another film reviewed in this post: The End We Start From, directed by Mahalia Belo and starring Jodie Comer, Joel Fry and fifteen babies, apparently, among other actors. It’s adapted from the book of the same name by Megan Hunter, which I haven’t read. I enjoyed the movie a lot, and I’ve thought a bit about not endings but survivings since.

There are lots of good things about The End We Start From (or at least, things I enjoyed). I liked the early extended attention to a pregnant body. A massive flood is very effectively filmed from within the water rather than from the aerial view that would be favoured by big budget VFX. There are some narrative gaps and jumps which I thought were quite powerful in suggesting Comer’s character’s traumatised memory. There are some beautiful bleak landscape scenes, and lots of rain. In general I felt the film was strongest in these more evocative moments, helped by Anna Meredith’s fab soundtrack. And all the performances are great.

But the film does suffer from what I’m really beginning to think is a fundamental issue with environmental disaster films (and novels, maybe): they are pulled towards the visual realism, emotional heft and narrative resolution which dominate mainstream filmmaking, but these are simply incompatible with picturing actual disaster. I’m no expert on actual hazards and disasters, but it always strikes me that apocalyptic kinds of films are pretty selective in the kinds of disasters they picture. Power failures, TV broadcasts surrendering to static (though only after they’ve conveyed the gravity of the unfolding situation to the characters and to us the audience), phone networks going down: all signal disaster apart from the disaster itself, whether that’s a flood as in The End or a meteor strike or alien invasion. But other things often keep going, oddly and illogically. In The End We Start From, cars are still on the roads and thus presumably petrol supplies remain; water continues to be safe to drink; our heroine and her baby survive long treks in good shape (do the filmmakers understand just how heavy a four month baby is?); there is nary a rat or a cockroach to be seen (though I did notice an ‘insect wrangler’ in the credits so maybe I missed one of the latter); and I am pretty sure that our heroine’s eyebrows would start to look a little more unkempt and her skin a little less dewy than Comer’s after months of privation. There is also the same character that appears in the novel The Survivors: Pandemic, by Alex Hern, which I blogged about: an older woman who against all the sceptical teasing has been hoarding food in case of just such an emergency. As in The Survivors, this is very handy in The End for a few scenes of marital and parental bliss before disaster recurs. And I won’t give away the ending but safe to say it’s not an actual ending.

Of course all disaster movies make these sorts of illogical moves – and that is my point. I seem to recall a tweet from a military historian (when Twitter was useful for this sort of fairly reliable random info) saying that in the face of the kind of disaster picture in The End, cholera and infected teeth would be the biggest and swiftest killers. But movies seem not to be able to envision such slow, messy and painful things. Even The Road, an environmental disaster movie that perhaps comes closest to a grimly real vision of an apocalypse, ends up with the dying father watching his son meet another mom-pop-and-dog family who take him in. I mean, a DOG survives in a situation in which people are turning cannibal?! And don’t get me started on the mother-son reunion at the end of the otherwise-excellent TV adaption of Station Eleven…

Using The End as a prompt, geographer Oli Mould wrote about films and the climate crisis for The Conversation earlier this year. He says films are good at communicating the consequences of climate change because they can visualise its consequences effectively, especially by embedding them into everyday scenarios and engaging audiences emotionally. Maybe. But if my hypothesis above is correct, maybe not. A movie can’t visualise the full awful consequences of environmental disaster effectively precisely because it has to do the emotional work too. As a movie, it has to give us characters to feel for and with, characters with some kind of agency, who survive, and they have to give us hope for happy endings too, apparently. So the end of this movie – like that of so many other films and novels – is precisely not the end of the world, it’s the start, the start of another human story, the nuclear family re-united and human life continuing.

In a world whose screens are currently showing so much terrible terrible actual violence and death, I guess some might feel that such fantasies are permissible. But right now, they do indeed feel like fantasies, the illogical fantasies of those who can afford to indulge in a frisson of risk which is survived and, at its end, generates a new start.

‘Beyond the page’ and beyond geometric perspective

I went to see the exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Today yesterday, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The show was fabulous – it ends on 28 January so go if you can.

At the core of the exhibition are the ‘miniatures’ (actually sometimes quite medium-sized) painted on book pages by artists working in South Asia from the seventeenth century onwards, and some of the diverse work that kind of painting has inspired, from artists exploring them in London museums in the twentieth century searching for forms of visual resistance to colonial rule, to later artists also intrigued by their formal qualities.

Unknown artist, A late Mughal Album of Calligraphy and Paintings, c.1720-1740

One of the exhibition’s many pleasures is its concern to emphasise that this tradition of painting was in dialogue with other forms of visual art practice from 1600. One miniature has a crowd of very European angels lurking in its clouds for example; there’s also a large canvas by a seventeenth-century Dutch painter bringing the Netherlandish ‘art of describing’ to Mughal carriages made of composite images. This is hybridity as weird and wonderful.

The exhibition also served to remind me how very specific Western techniques of geometric perspective are. I don’t think any of the images in the exhibition used any of those techniques to organise their space. Even a video had been edited so that four boats apparently filmed on a river together floated among patches of ripples in a larger blank space. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about geometric three-dimensional space and its organisation of the visual field recently, since so much digital imagery builds on that geometry; here is a visually compelling exhibition which for the most part (the Dutch canvas excepted, I think) works in very different spatial registers which seem to hold much greater potential for spatial and temporal multiplicity.

I’m going to try to be more active on this blog this year (I know I said that last year…) and reviews are one way to do that. I’ll try to give you more notice of excellent shows in the future though…