"The street finds its own uses for things": William Gibson, technology and the city

I've just been reading Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of non-fiction pieces by William Gibson that has been published recently by Putnam.

I do love me some William Gibson, and it was a real pleasure to come across this particular passage in a piece called "Rocket Radio" that was first published in 1989.

The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnitizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular telephone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity. The aerosol can gives birth to the graffiti matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexi-disks out of used chest X rays.

The line "The street finds its own uses for things" is one of Gibson's most quoted phrases, and had first appeared in his book Burning Chrome. The idea infuses most of his work, and certainly informs the plotlines of his most recent trilogy of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. In that series of books, Gibson's various characters make all sorts of different and unintended uses of a whole variety of techno-gizmos that are all commonly available today -- mobile phones, laptop computers, RFID chips, iPods, GPS devices, and the like.

Gibson is a strong believer in the role of technology in shaping society, but as the essays in this book make very clear, his fiction is not crafted or intended as an exercise in techo-determinist futurology. For me, it's Gibson's insistence on the potentials of new technologies to be modified, hacked, twisted and contorted that is one of the things that makes his writing so thrilling. Indeed, my current research on location-aware mobile media and the city has been heavily inspired by his recent set of novels. I especially love the interaction in those books between state agencies (both overt and covert), crime networks, subcultures, artists, corporations and advertising agencies, each paying close attention to the others as they try to adapt their practices to new circumstances. I also love the persistence, combination and mutation of 'old' technologies in his stories. And Gibson's urban imagination is also really interesting. Places like Tokyo and Moscow are every bit as crucial to his vision as London and New York, which is certainly an inversion of the dominant urban imaginary of English-speaking urban studies.

As Gibson is the first to emphasise, the near-futures imagined in his various books have certainly been overtaken by unexpected events. In the first book of his current trilogy, one of the key plot-lines concerns the circulation of mysterious snippets of video via internet bulletin boards. As he points out in an essay in Distrust That Particular Flavor, he might have written this kinda differently if he'd anticipated something like YouTube. Likewise, in his his first novel Neuromancer, "there's something like the Internet, but called 'cyberspace', and a complete absence of cell phones"!

But these novels don't stand or fall by their predictions. They're still compelling reading for the insights they offer into the times in which they were written. As he puts it in one essay:

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely ... more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

Please don't mistake this for one of those 'after us, the deluge' moments on my part. I've always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

The best science fiction has always known that, but is was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the Seventies, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984.

Indeed, the title of the this collection comes from a passage in an essay which riffs on the relationship between science fiction, history and the future. He expresses a distrust for that flavor of science fiction which is all about the capital-F future, and which in order to get there must literally destroy the present and all its messy possibilities.

Likewise, I'm very much hoping to avoid the utopian 'crystalline city on the hill' which characterises so much contemporary talk on the so-called 'smart city', as well steering clear of the dystopian 'wasteland' envisioned by critics of these new technologies who consider them only ever as agents of the military and/or capital. I'm more interested in what kind of stuff is happening. Of course, some of this stuff will no doubt be good or bad, and I certainly want to offer some judgements here. But I'm less interested in judging the technologies, and way more interested in critically exploring their uses as they become caught up in various habits and projects that are taking shape in cities.

Locational privacy: beyond privacy as property and secrecy?

In April last year, it was revealed that every time an iPhone user synchronises their device with a networked computer, Apple downloaded files which contain fairly detailed locational information about the movement of its user. 

Soon after that, it was revealed that TomTom GPS devices also send locational information about their user's movements back to the company which provides the navigational services.

Map of iPhone movements, produced by Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden with their iPhone Tracker application (discussed below)

Predictably, in both cases the corporations involved have denied any sinister intentions, and have tried to re-assure folks that the data from individuals is de-identified and used only to improve services for consumers of their products. Equally as predictably, such re-assurances have not satisfied critics, who argue that these corporations have breached the privacy of their customers by keeping locational information without their explicit consent.

This question is most often asked, and answered, through the concept of privacy. And if the extent of newspaper coverage and opinion on such episodes is anything to go by, the issue of locational privacy is beginning to generate some overdue scrutiny. While most readers of these articles are assumed to be aware that their activities in 'cyberspace' might leave behind digital shadows, the fact that their movements through the city are also leaving such shadows is presented as something new that has emerged as a result of the increasing diffusion of location-aware mobile media devices such as smartphones and navigation devices.

Media discussions of locational privacy are generally infused with a nagging sense that something is  kinda wrong with these privacy incursions ... but there's not a clear sense of what exactly that is.
For the most part, these emerging locational privacy issues are presented as a problem of 'informed consent'. The assumption seems to be that as long as users are aware that digital data about their movements is being collected and stored and have given their consent to this, then there is no problem.

From this perspective, the only problem with corporations like Apple and Tom Tom collecting and storing locational data about individuals is that those individuals were unlikely to be aware that it was happening, and so could not make an informed choice. By contrast, when people broadcast their location by 'checking-in' to places via locative media applications like Foursquare or Facebook Places, there is no problem because they are doing so knowingly -- they have made an informed choice.

[There are also concerns about the security of such data, even where there is informed consent. Last year's breach of security at Sony exemplifies this risk. And even where data is de-identified, there exists the potential for re-identification in many cases. But I'm gonna leave this important issue aside for now...]

The understanding of privacy that informs this presentation of the problems of location-awareness is interesting. Privacy is almost universally assumed in such stories to be something that is traded by individuals, in return for the benefits of owning and using devices such as smartphones and SatNavs. From this perspective, as long as choice is free and informed, what individuals choose to do with their privacy is entirely up to them. The argument goes something like this: no-one is being forced to buy an iPhone or a SatNav, or to sign up with Foursquare or Facebook Places etc. So, if they value their locational privacy, they should not use the gadget and/or service. Similarly, if they are worried about digital surveillance through CCTV cameras or credit cards and are not prepared to 'trade' a degree of locational privacy for a bit of security and/or convenience, they can choose not to go to places with surveillance or use credit facilities.

This way of articulating the privacy problem has an associated policy response -- to ensure that adequate consent and notification mechanisms are established for users of gadgets and applications and places that might track/store/broadcast their movements. Once such mechanisms are in place, the problem appears to be solved.

This classically liberal presentation of privacy as something to be valued and traded by an individual has at least two limitations. First, there's the important question of whether conventional consent mechanisms are actually adequate to their task in a complex digital world. At the Engaging Data Forum hosted by MIT's Senseable City Lab a couple of years ago, Solon Barocas and Helen Nissenbaum gave a great paper about some of the significant limitations of notice and consent mechanisms in the digital realm. While their paper is primarily concerned with Online Behavioural Advertising and the tracking and targeting of individuals as they roam the internet, I think many of the points they raise are pertinent to the emerging discussions of locational privacy in the city.

Second, there's the broader question about whether individual consent really is the key issue here. If I'm the kind of person who wants to maintain some locational privacy, it's easy enough for me to not buy an iPhone. I could probably even give up my beloved 7-year old Nokia mobile phone without too much inconvenience! But here in Sydney, and in many other cities, making the 'choice' not to have my movements digitally surveilled would also mean not using public transportation systems (hello CCTV). It would mean not driving my car on freeways (hello eTags and traffic cameras). It would mean not going into any shopping malls or most shopping streets (hello CCTV and EFTPOS). It would mean not going into my university library (hello again, CCTV).  In other words, the issue is not only whether my 'choice' is informed. Even if I'm informed, do I really have the option not to consent? When a 'choice' about locational privacy means that I can't access facilities and services that are actually a part of my everyday life and citizenship, then is it really a matter of individual 'choice'?

Our 'choices' about locational privacy, then, are also constrained by the wider context in which they are made. This raises important questions: what are the 'reasonable expectations of privacy' that pertain in different contexts, and how are such expectations established, upheld and modified? These questions draw attention to the public nature of privacy. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner put it, "There's nothing more public than privacy". Of course, they were talking about the ideological privacy of sex and sexuality, but hey, their point holds here too -- 'reasonable expectations of (locational) privacy' are normative, and inscribed in laws and other public institutions and arrangements.

Given this public dimension to locational privacy, the extent of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' ought to be open to public debate and deliberation. But our collective capacity to conduct such debates is hampered by at least two crucial factors. First, there's the question of whether enough of us understand the new technologies and practices which impinge on locational privacy. It might now be obvious to most people that their movements in (certain parts of) the city are surveilled by CCTV cameras. But how much do most people know about the kinds of locational data kept by retailers, banks, advertisers, mobile phone companies, public services, etc?

Second, attempts to initiate debates about threats to locational privacy are often shut down by the claim that "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". Here, the 'public interest' is equated with security in the face of terror and other forms of risk, and that public interest is said to outweigh most privacy concerns.

Daniel Solove (a Prof of Law at George Washington University in the US) has recently tackled this logic in a book called Nothing to Hide: The False Trade Off Between Privacy and Security (you can read a shortish article excerpted from the book here). The crux of Solove's criticism of the 'nothing to hide' logic is that it reduces the value of privacy to individual secrecy from the state. To paraphrase him, the disclosure of 'bad things' to the state is just one of a range of outcomes that may ensue from the collection, storage and/or broadcast of our location and movements. And we ought to be debating threats to locational privacy with some of these other outcomes in mind.

What are some of these other outcomes of the reduction of locational privacy that we might try to debate? Well, interestingly, one of the other outcomes frequently discussed is the risk that is generated, rather than prevented, by exposure -- this is the fear that 'good' people who make their location public might be at risk of stalking, or worse forms of criminal behaviour. (The good folks who designed the website Please Rob Me sought to draw attention to the fact that many people are basically broadcasting both their home address and the times they are not home via location-aware mobile media applications, in a manner which could be quite handy for, say, burglars.)

The potential aggregation of individually-identifiable information is another concern raised by Solove that is pertinent in discussions of locational privacy. His point here is that while we may not be too troubled by any one of the different digital shadows we leave behind in the course of a daily lives (a face on a CCTV camera here, a credit card transaction there, a Foursquare check-in here, a tag on a Facebook image there, etc etc), once those traces are aggregated, they build up a much more detailed picture of our movements and activities. As such, the question of who has the capability and authority to aggregate these different bits of data becomes an important question. Should some state agencies like the police have that authority? Under what circumstances and with what controls? Should insurance companies? Should employers?

There are some further outcomes of locational data collection and storage that also warrant debate. In  cases like the Apple and Tom Tom ones that I mentioned at the start of this piece, the collection and aggregation of data about our movements through the city is commodified through its use in the design new devices and applications, and through its sale to third parties like advertisers. Here, our movements through the city are generating a kind of surplus value that is being captured for profit by private economic interests rather than any 'common good'.

In seeking to raise these broader questions, the big question here is whether 'privacy' is an adequate concept to capture the variety of concerns that might emerge from the rapid diffusion of location-aware technologies. This has been a matter of debate for folks who have been thinking about surveillance for a while -- Colin Bennett recently published an article 'In Defense of Privacy' in the journal Surveillance and Society, and there have been a number of responses in the journal (gathered together here).

I haven't quite worked through my own position on this yet. Having thought quite a bit about publicness and the city, I'm certainly now pretty interested to think about the urban dimensions of privacy. I wonder if in urban studies, we've been so concerned with critiquing various forms of 'privatisation' that we might have missed the simultaneous threats to other forms of privacy that we might value?

I'm fairly certain that I'm not down with the 'privacy is dead and we should celebrate it' crowd. IT pundit Bill Thompson gave a really interesting talk advocating this position ("The Death of Privacy and Why We Should Welcome It") at the Lift conference in 2009, the video of which is sadly no longer available -- but there's at least an abstract here and a longer summary here. His talk was deliberately provocative -- but it seems to me that to posit the notion that 'we' have all traded in out-dated expectations of individual privacy for the benefits of smart phones and social media seems to rely on the very Enlightenment ideal of possessive individualism that it claims to supplant. I'm caricaturing his position, but he basically seems to be suggesting that the adoption of these new technological wonders has been an informed and unconstrained choice by individuals who constitute a technological vanguard that gets the benefits of it all, and need to teach the rest of us how to learn to stop worrying and love the iPhone.

In trying to wrap my head around it all, I'm especially interested to think more about the particular nature of locational privacy. The very notion of 'locational privacy' challenges simplistic assumptions about the public/private distinction which hold them to be separate spheres and places, because it implies that we might have a 'reasonable expectation' of a degree of privacy concerning our movements and activites 'in public'. This issue is addressed to some extent an in interesting piece on Locational Privacy from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Meanwhile, for those of you who have iPhones, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden -- the researchers who initially revealed the tracking of iPhone users -- have developed an open source application called iPhone Tracker, which lets you map the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements.

And using this application, James Bridle has just published what looks to be a beautiful book of maps of his (iPhone's) movements, called Where the F**k Was I?. I love the essay that he's put up on his website about the book, which is very evocative of the invisible infrastructure supporting location-aware media devices that saturates the city.

The Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly

A couple of posts back, I offered up some reflections on the Founding Assembly of the Sydney Alliance, a coalition of unions, community organisations and faith groups working together to "advance the common good and achieve a fair, just and sustainable Sydney". A short couple of months after that event, I was involved in launching the Sydney Alliance's campaign on transport at the Transport Assembly in Penrith, one of the outer-western suburbs of Sydney.

The Transport Assembly was the culmination of six months of action-research by the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team. In May of this year, when the Alliance decided that Transport would be one of the three key issues on which it would work, the Research Action Team was formed. It's a loose, diverse group, comprised of people from across the member organisations of the Alliance who were prepared to commit to working on transport. There's been quite a bit of learning-as-we-go here. One of the first issues to confront the group was that it was difficult to find a time and place to meet that would work for everyone across the city -- especially given some of the very transport issues that the group is trying to address! To get around this, we ended up with two groups, one that has been meeting in the Central Business District and the other that has been meeting in Penrith.

Since May, Transport Team participants have been busy talking to people across the member organisations of the Alliance about their transport issues, as well as reading up on the latest research on transport and meeting with a range of transport experts based in Sydney and beyond. Personally, I've found this really interesting. I've never conducted research on transport before, so compared to some of the other participants in the group, I've had a lot of catching up to do. Those involved in the team include transport workers and advocates in community organisations like the Western Sydney Community Forum and the Cancer Council, folks from various unions and community groups who've had a long involvement in transport campaigns dating back as far as the anti-freeway green bans in the 1970s (and sometimes further!), bus drivers and railway staff who have intimate knowledge of how public transport works and how it might run better, and people like me who are new to transport but fired up to make a change, among many others.

Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly, Q Theatre, Penrith, November 2011

The event started with small groups of people making their way to Penrith on public transport from various parts of the city. These groups conducted some research on the trip, surveying commuters about their experiences of public transport and telling them about the Sydney Alliance. They also chaperoned some members of NSW Parliament who were attending the Assembly. On arrival at Penrith Station, there were bagpipes playing (seriously!!!), and a march to the Q Theatre in Penrith. After the surveys were handed in and some food was consumed, the formalities began...

One of the main purposes of the night was to launch and explain the Sydney Alliance's formula for public transport in Sydney:

400:15:1 SCA².

This formula addresses the different dimensions of accessibility to public transport which have emerged as Alliance priorities through the initial phase of action research.

The 400 is for 400 metres -- meaning that everyone in Sydney should have some form of public transport within 400 metres of where they're at and where they want to go.

The 15 is for 15 minutes -- meaning that public transport services should come at least every fifteen minutes all day, across the entire network

The 1 is for 1 ticket -- meaning that if your trip requires you to change modes of transport, you should not need to buy separate tickets, as is currently the case. 1 ticket should buy you access to the network, not just a single line.

The S is for Safe. The C is for Clean. The first A is for Accessible. And the second A is for Affordable.

Adding all of this up, the formula addresses the different 'accessibility gaps' that characterise the existing public transport system (see Corinne Mulley and Rhonda Daniel's work on accessibility gaps in public transport). The Alliance formula also recognises that Sydney-siders' travel needs are complicated -- we don't simply travel from the suburbs to the city centre for work, although the system tends to be planned with that kind of trip in mind. Rather, in our day-to-day lives we travel to lots of places, for lots of different reasons, at all times of the day and night (only about 16% of trips in Sydney are commuting to work, which constitutes about 28% of the distance we travel -- a large chunk of our travel is much shorter trips for other purposes like shopping, recreation, and services like health and education. See the most recent stats on transport in Sydney here). As such, for public transport to facilitate universal access to a range of activities and services which are central to our lives, it has to provide a network which enables us to access the whole metropolitan area.

Here, our thinking broadly fits with some of the work done by folks like Gustav Nielsen, Jarrett Walker and Paul Mees on the so-called 'network effect' in public transport. As Paul Mees puts it, you want the public transport network to be similar to the road network. The road network is not planned to enable all possible car trips to be taken on a single road. Rather, the roads form a network which provides a kind of mesh that enable car drivers to get anywhere they want to go. The same should be true of the public transport network. But in Sydney, public transport tends to be planned and provided as a series of distinct routes feeding into the CBD rather than as an integrated network which enables trips across the entire city.

To illustrate the '400' and '15' parts of the formula, a group of us produced a series of maps of public transport accessibility and frequency in Sydney. First, we mapped every train station and bus routes across the Metropolitan Area, to come up with an approximate representation of which parts of the city had access to public transport within 400 metres. Then we calculated the average frequency of each bus and train route between 5am and midnight on an average weekday. (Lots of member organisations in the Alliance represent shift workers, so looking at frequencies across the whole day was vital to adequately address their transport needs.) The result was the maps below, which show the extent of public transport coverage at different average frequencies.

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 30 minutes during the day

In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 15 minutes during the day

As you can see, while Sydney is relatively well-covered by public transport routes, not many of those routes have adequate frequencies to provide decent public transport for people across the city.

There are no doubt those who would suggest that lower density residential suburbs in the north, south and west of the city can't sustain frequent, comprehensive public transport and that densification is the answer. But like Paul Mees, we're not convinced of this. As the Public Transport Users Association in Melbourne puts it

Any city with sufficient population density to cause traffic congestion has sufficient population to support a first-rate public transport alternative.

Of course, the point of the Alliance is not just to raise a series of issues and toss around ideas for solutions, it is to build power and take effective political action. To that end, at the conclusion of the Assembly participants were provided with maps of their region of Sydney, and reps from the Sydney Alliance regional groups were on hand outside the theatre to sign people up who were ready to start taking action to address the gaps in the network.

Reflecting back on the Assembly and the work of the Transport Research Action Team so far, I think we've got at least two big challenges as we continue to develop the campaign... (beyond public transport being, like, a big issue!!)

First, I've found it really interesting that the issues of safety and cleanliness have emerged as very significant issues both to members of the Alliance and to members of the public who we surveyed. When we first presented the idea of a formula for transport at the Founding Assembly in September, it was '400:15:1'. But when we went back to member organisations across the Alliance with this formula, many told us that it didn't effectively capture all of their major concerns. This shouldn't have surprised me, given it has also emerged from previous research on transport accessibility. But I do think it's going to be a real challenge for the Alliance to find ways to address issues like safety and cleanliness that don't resort to the typical punitive 'law-and-order' responses. This is going to be especially important given that one of the other issues on which the Alliance is working is social inclusion. Indeed, the harassment of young people by police and security guards in public spaces and on public transport has emerged as one of the key issues for the Social Inclusion Research Action Team. I'm really excited about the potential for the Alliance to come up with something progressive rather than exclusionary on this issue...

Second, finding ways to build power and take action on public transport presents a particular set of geographical challenges for the Alliance in Sydney. To build an effective campaign on public transport, it's essential that people can connect with the issue and take action 'locally', in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. And yet, we've got to ensure that local actions add up to more than the sum of their parts. After all, a big part of the problem with public transport in Sydney is the fact that local services are not effectively co-ordinated into a network that provides integrated and comprehensive access to the entire metropolitan area. Inevitably, confronting network-wide issues like route structures, ticketing and safety will push us all beyond our localities. For instance, a 'local' safety campaign to get train stations staffed at night would have budgetary implications, and change to local bus routes and timetables would mean changes to procurement contracts between the State Government and public and private bus operators. So, we absolutely need to go local and build genuine citizen participation in transport planning -- that's a crucial ingredient that's been missing from all the expert-driven plans for improving the system which are now sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, never to be implemented. And yet, we also have to make sure that local action is itself co-ordinated across the city -- you could say our organising challenge is to build a campaign that is as integrated and comprehensive as the transport network we want to create...

I'll be presenting a paper reflecting on the Sydney Alliance transport research-action process at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers later this month in New York, at a session on 'Placing Justice and Struggle in Transport Studies'. It's going to be crazy cold I'm sure ... but I'm not complaining!! I just hope that the transport heads go easy on me...

Meanwhile, if you're in Sydney and you'd like to know more or get involved, further details about the on-going activities of the Transport Research Action Team can be found here.


[Note: the ideas above are the product of collective research-action by lots of people involved in the Transport Research Action Team, but it's my write-up, so blame me for any mistakes or misinterpretations!] 

To upgrade or not to upgrade, or, can I research locative media without an iPhone?

I've recently been awarded an Australia Research Council award to do a project called The Politics of Location. (Yay!!) The project will be looking into the implications of new location-aware mobile media technologies for the governance of cities. I'm especially interested in how different applications of location-awareness across various fields (from art and advertising to protest and planning) are caught up in wider conflicts over the making of urban spaces. It seems to me that there's an emerging politics of location associated with these new technologies and their applications. As the project gets underway, there'll be lots more on this topic here into the future. But in the mean time, I have a decision to make...

Quite a few of my friends and workmates find it pretty funny that I've been entrusted with public money to research this particular topic. I don't have a Facebook account, I don't Tweet or check-in, and I'm still rocking a 2004-model mobile phone that is far from smart - no camera, no big screen, no music, and definitely no internet. It does have a torch light, though. (And hey, I do have a blog!)

My mobile phone...

Most of those same friends and workmates have gleefully assumed that to do this research I'll now have to 'give-in', buy a smart phone and load it up with a bevvy of apps in order to truly wrap my head around the possibilities of locative media and mobile internet.

I'm not sure. Do I?

Initially, I never made a principled decision not to sign up with MySpace (remember that??), Facebook, Twitter or other social media. I just wasn't particularly interested, and I already spend enough time on computers for work as it is. And as for my phone, the one I have sends texts and makes calls perfectly well, and it just kinda kept on working, so I had no need to replace it. I briefly considered replacing it last year when the battery finally gave up on me, but my Dad found me a replacement battery on eBay for $5.

As social media and new mobile phone/internet technologies have become more ubiquitous, my non-adoption of this stuff is increasingly interpreted as a deliberate and determined opposition to new technology. I'm frequently asked to justify why I haven't upgraded my old phone, or why I haven't got Facebook, etc. It seems to be assumed that if I haven't adopted all of these new technologies, I must have some kinda position against them.

If I'm faced with insistent questions along those lines, it's not too hard to offer a position to justify my (lack of) action. Sometimes I express concern about the intensification of work that seems to accompany mobile internet and email, or about the storage and/or profiling of digital data about me by corporations. Sometimes I wax lyrical about the importance of being lost every now and again. Sometimes I remind people that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter. Etc.

Now, I happen to think some of the above concerns are quite legitimate (at least to a point ... right now I'm blogging at the same time as looking after kids on a wi-fi enabled laptop through a Google-owned blog interface...). But if I'm honest, my non-adoption of these new media technologies is not actually informed by such concerns. My non-adoption of these technologies up to now has not been the product of a principled stance, just the result of inertia combined with a murky sense that I have other priorities for my time and money.

As it turns out, that inertia has actually given me scope to make an informed choice. Now that I've got this grant, it feels as though the time has come to think through some principles... or at least some reasons ... for going one way or the other.

If I let myself be guided by what's going to be best for the research project, at first look I can see a few pros and cons for upgrading to a location-aware mobile media device...

Pros:

• Maybe those who think I can't understand this stuff unless I have my own experience with it have a point! Getting to know the ins and outs of being 'on the grid' will surely be helpful in telling me something about both the possibilities of location-aware mobile media technologies, and the different ways they are woven into the fabric of everyday urban life for those who have access to them...
• Part of my motivation for doing this research in the first place is a sense of excitement about some of the possibilities of location-aware mobile media technologies for progressive urban planning and politics. If I want to get involved in application-design for this purpose, having had some experience using such devices will probably be helpful in this regard. Not to mention the fact that I'll have no credibility if I'm sitting in a team-meeting with some designers and pull out my current phone...! 

Cons

• I'm not actually trying to research the individual experience of urban life for users of location-aware mobile media devices. I'm trying to understand the ways in which various applications of these technologies are being put to work by different actors involved in urban governance and politics. The are related, but different. As such, I'm not sure how important it really is that I have personal experience with this stuff. It doesn't seem essential in order for me to be able to understand and analyse someone else's account of what they are trying to do with it...
• Even if I was trying to research the user experience, there's a risk that if I become a frequent user of these technologies, I'll universalise my own experience with location-aware mobile media in my research. I think this is a trap that some folks from the computer/design disciplines sometimes fall into when they write on this topic.
• As a non-adopter of some of these media technologies, they remain productively 'strange' to me (at least to some degree), and this is not a bad position to be researching from. Indeed, as a non-adopter, I quite like the kinds of conversations I get into with people who are designers and/or users of these technologies, which are often very demonstrative as they fire up their devices and take me through a particular application step-by-step. When some folks express surprise that I can live without one, it's a great pretext for a conversation about how they live with one.

So, none of the above is particularly deep or original ... in some ways this is just a variant on the old 'insider/outsider' dilemma for researchers. If anyone has any pros or cons to add to the list, let me know. Meanwhile, time for me to hit some methods books for guidance...

Contesting the war on graffiti: Zero Tolerance, Uprock and Outpost

OK, so this is my first post here for ages ... it's been a crazy few weeks! Hopefully I've now got some time to catch up on various things that have been going on around the place.

First up, graffiti stuff. Back in October and November, I ended up talking on graffiti and street art at three different events. These three events were really interesting examples of different approaches to trying to contest the escalating war on graffiti -- one was the launch of a book documenting a legal graffiti project trying to advocate on behalf of alternative policy approaches, one was a group small of graffiti writers at a hip hop summit trying to figure out collective strategies, and one was at a giant state-sponsored exhibition of graffiti and street art in Sydney which attracted over 50,000 visitors. So, here are some extended reflections on it all...

Zero Tolerance - The Blue Mountains Street Art Collaborative

The first event was the launch of Zero Tolerance, a book published by the Moutains Youth Service Team about the Blue Mountains Street Art Collaborative (BMSAC). BMSAC is a collective of Blue Mountains street artists that has sought to negotiate legal opportunities for large-scale graffiti and street art. The project was coordinated by Jarrod Wheatley, and it has had quite a bit of success. As the book shows, BMSAC has produced lots of terrific work, and in the process it has gained positive press in the local newspapers and won a Greater Western Sydney Community Services Award.

Occupying Wall Street: "Don't be afraid to say 'revolution'"

Posters at the Zuccotti/Liberty Park Occupation (source: demotix)

There's been lots of discussion in the media about the risk of 'debt contagion' over the past few months. It would seem that mass protest against austerity is contagious too...

For several weeks now, a protest camp has occupied Zuccotti Park, around the corner from Wall Street, in New York City. The occupation has inspired several other similar actions in other US cities. It has taken explicit inspiration from the occupations of squares and parks in Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Athens, London and elsewhere that have been underway over the past 12 months. 

Today, on the same day that thousands went on strike and marched in Athens against austerity measures, several unions joined the Wall St occupiers in a march through New York City, which Anjali Mullany of the New York Daily Post tweeted as a 'game changer': "The energy is thru the roof & the message is united." We'll see if it's a game changer, but it's certainly a good excuse to post some resources and reflections on what's going on...

The Occupy Wall Street website contains useful information about the occupation. It is self-described as the "unofficial de facto online resource for the ongoing protests happening on Wall Street", put together by an affinity group involved in the protests. On that website, Occupy Wall Street is described as a:

leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

We are the 99% is a website where all sorts of folks are uploading pictures of themselves holding up some words about why they are fed up with the status quo:

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

The thumbnails of all the pictures and messages posted so far are achived here, in what to me is a really powerful image which visualises the diversity of folks involved...

Screen Grab from We are the 99% website

The action on the ground is being 'organised' through 'NYC General Assemblies'. These Assemblies are facilitated through an on-line networking tool, which those involved describe as:

an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times.

As the actions spread, the Occupy Together website is collecting and disseminating information about occupations taking place in other parts of the United States.

And those who tweet could follow: #OccupyWallStreet

For some reporting on events, The Guardian in the UK has published a few articles reporting on what is going that are worth a look: check this one from September 21 for a bit of an introduction to what has been happening, and this page which collates all their reporst and articles on the protests.

Keeping up with all mass occupations and protests happening across the world over the past 12 months would be a full-time job in itself! But here's a few thoughts-in-progress ...

Coalition-Building in the City: the Sydney Alliance Founding Assembly

On the 15th of September, the Sydney Alliance had its Founding Assembly. Over 2000 people packed the Sydney Town Hall for the occasion, drawn from the ranks of the 45 member organisations made up of non-government organisations, trade unions and religious organisations.

The stated goal of the Alliance is to "bring together diverse community organisations, unions and religious organisations to advance the common good and achieve a fair, just and sustainable city." It's part of the wider international network of citizen coalitions affilliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, which includes coalitions such as the Seattle Sound Alliance and Citizens UK. It was seed-funded in 2007 by Unions NSW, the peak body for trade unions in NSW. With its strong trade union involvement, the Sydney Alliance also explicitly positions itself within an Australian tradition of community-union alliances such as the green ban movement of the 1970s.

The Founding Assembly was an exciting night for me, on lots of levels. The National Tertiary Education Union has joined the Alliance, and I was one of several NTEU members there on the night. I've also been actively involved in the Alliance's Research-Action Team on public transport for a few months now, and had a small speaking role in the Assembly on behalf of that Team. They are a fantastic bunch of people, and it was a real thrill to represent them on the night and watch the whole thing go down from up on the stage. (Yay Team Transport!!)

More broadly, I think it was also an exciting night for the city. The Assembly very publicly staged the Alliance in all its diversity and ambition. In this regard, two moments stood out for me. The first was the opening "roll-call" in which someone from each of the 45 member organisations stood up to deliver a brief message about their organisation and why it had joined the Alliance. As members of each organisation stood and spoke to cheers and applause from the crowd, I actually got chills ... it was a powerful display of unity and common purpose across difference, and a real highlight of the night.

The second moment was the speech given by Amanda Tattersall, the Alliance's Director. At one point, she noted that we the people had been "sliced and diced and categorised" in various ways by political parties and the media and corporate interests --- as 'Howard's Battlers', as 'working families', as 'consumers', etc. "But from tonight," she concluded, "we go by a new name. We are the Sydney Alliance!" I think this part of Amanda's speech spoke to one of most important aspects of what the Alliance is all about -- the creation of a new political subject in and of this city.

All of which brings me to the subject of coalition-building in the city more generally. This issue has re-emerged as a central concern of recent urban activism and theory concerned with rights to the city and/or spatial justice. So, in what follows I want to offer a few thoughts on the on-going work of the Sydney Alliance through a dialogue with two recent books by Ed Soja and Mark Purcell. Both of these books strive to move beyond critique of neoliberal urbanisms by thinking about the kinds of movements that might articulate (and hopefully even realise!) visions of a more just and democratic city.