Istanbul of networks: space, technology, and governance

This dissertation explores the promises and politics of networking in the globalizing city Istanbul, Turkey. It focuses on organizations of governance and struggle in relation to technological practices involving information communication technologies (ICTs) as well as discourses of networking inspired by ICTs. The question this dissertation seeks to answer is: how do discourses and practices of networking generate new models and mechanisms for urban governance and participation in the global city, yet simultaneously animate searches for, and enactments of, alternative trajectories of urban transformation? In more abstract terms, this dissertation inquires into the possibilities and limitations of participation and citizenship in the global city. To answer my question, I focus on two governance projects that underscore Istanbul's transformation into a global city: the information society project and the creative city project. Both these projects rely on networked formations of governance in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and self-organizing communities play key roles. Involved NGOs stimulate communities to acquire and produce new sets of skills and knowledge in preparation for what these NGOs take to be the necessities of the immanent future. In doing so, these NGOs integrate these communities with globalizing forms of labor, consumption, and citizenship. However, in the process, undermining a fixed division between more established civil society and forms of resistance, discourses and practices of networking also produce communities as entities endowed with a degree of political authority and with capabilities to not just adjust to but also appropriate and repurpose the technologies, discourses, and logics of the so-called information society and creative city. Against accounts of a homogenizing process of globalization, I show that the modalities of power that order the spaces of the global city and its technological modernity do not come strictly from above or from elsewhere. Rather, they are produced within complex contextual relations; they work through specific logics and are mediated by particular forms.Doctor of Philosoph

From Bitcoin to Farm Bank:An idiotic inquiry into blockchain speculation

Bitcoin’s uptake in Turkey has ranked among the highest in the world. Meanwhile, moral judgment about cryptocurrency has remained unsure about its comparison to other types of investment: what is a scam and what is a legitimate investment? Who is ‘daringly visionary’ and who is merely ‘gullible’ or ‘blinded’ by illusory promise? Displacing decidedly North American stories of Bitcoin’s origins and ‘Web3’ futures, this article considers the local appeal and sociotechnical potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-centric innovation. I analyze the open-endedness of such potential as well as its foreclosures. The case of Turkey shows that speculation regarding cryptocurrency not only implies wagering on price developments, but it also entails speculating about the possible, plausible or expectable futures of technological innovation. Blockchain-based innovation has elicited myths of the technological sublime and utopian sentiment, as it promises to usher in disruptive futures hardly imaginable from the vantage point of the present. Referencing Simondon’s philosophy of technology, my main question is: how do speculative technologies and discourses shape the present, along with the futures that emerge from it? Drawing on interviews with speculators in combination with a digital methods analysis of Turkish ‘crypto Twitter’, my answer highlights the asymmetries and inequalities of media ecologies as well as discursive contestations over the boundaries between the possible/impossible, realism/utopianism and common sense/idiocy. Moreover, engaging theories of utopia by Srnicek and Williams, Stengers, and Jameson, I ponder, what would a speculative engagement with seemingly ‘implausible’ or ‘impossible’ futures comprise that deserves not to be dismissed as simply gullible or as blinded by the technological sublime

Data Platforms and Cities

This section offers a series of joint reflections on (open) data platform from a variety of cases, from cycling, traffic and mapping to activism, environment and data brokering. Data platforms play a key role in contemporary urban governance. Linked to open data initiatives, such platforms are often proposed as both mechanisms for enhancing the accountability of administrations and performing as sites for 'bottom-up' digital invention. Such promises of smooth flows of data, however, rarely materialise unproblematically. The development of data platforms is always situated in legal and administrative cultures, databases are often built according to the standards of existing digital ecologies, access always involves processes of social negotiation, and interfaces (such as sensors) may become objects of public contestation. The following contributions explore the contested and mutable character of open data platforms as part of heterogeneous publics and trace the pathways of data through different knowledge, skills, public and private configurations. They also reflect on the value of STS approaches to highlight issues and tensions as well as to shape design and governance

The price of speculation:fintech risk regimes in Hong Kong

In what ways do fintech (financial technology) innovations mediate and articulate heterogenous facets of uncertainty in the context of finance capitalism? Arguing that uncertainty is a resource both produced and exploited, this article analyses how fintech trading applications configure market uncertainty as figures and scenarios of risk and opportunity. Moreover, foregrounding the experiences of novice retail traders, I analyse the weighing of financial risk against extra-financial forms of uncertainty, namely historical contingency, lived precarity, and infrastructural opacity. To map articulations between the various facets of uncertainty involved (i.e. risk, contingency, precarity, and opacity), I propose the concept of risk regimes: sociotechnical constellations or assemblages that interweave technologies of financial calculation and prediction; discourses of probability, possibility, risk, reward, et cetera; technologies of the self; and infrastructures of datafication key to fintech. This study is set in Hong Kong, a context that testifies to the instability of such assemblages. Whereas finance capitalism exploits uncertainty in multiple ways, contingency can also render the future of finance capitalism itself uncertain. Conceptually, I draw on recent media theories, theories of uncertainty and prediction as well as theories of value. Methodologically, I combine app analysis, in-depth user interviews, and digital-methods experimentation

Modeling Disruption:From Climate Models to Smart Farm

Climate change modeling in policy context assumes a planet and a world with a rather stable ontology, a system that is more or less fixed. Modeling here follows logics of if/then (Bucher 2018): “if this” (policy/behavior), “then that” (temperature increase/decrease). However, climate change is not simply the object of a straightforward process of measuring and modeling. Rather, looking at climate science, the notion of a changing climate is constituted by models that contain a host of proxies, speculations, and conjectures. The suggestion of an objective system abiding by logics of “if/then” dissipates in much more experimental and speculative dynamics in the gist of “what if”: what if conditions are as such and such, what if there is a relation, what if weights are such and such. The logic of “if/then” and the gist of “what if” are at tension. The question is: How does this tension unfold when modeling technologies and knowledge “travel” from the context of climate science to the context of policy and, further on, to situated contexts of practice? To start unpacking and addressing this huge question, this presentation will focus on three select models: General Circulation Models, Integrated Assessment Models, and the interfaces of apps deployed in smart farming

Aggregations of the opaque: Rethinking datafication and e-waste

This paper points to phenomena that are undeniably intrinsic to the datafied society, yet that themselves belie the dream/nightmare of total control through datafication: electronic waste (e-waste) and its recycling. In recycling industries and reverse logistics, invisibility, opacity, and uncertainty persist despite worldwide networks of surveillance, datafication, and algorithmic calculation. Mobilizing different technologies from RFID to big data, data assemblages enact particular regimes of visibility that cohere three “gazes”: security’s gaze, efficiency’s gaze, and speculation’s gaze. Yet along with these gazes come various forms of sightlessness, which I frame respectively as “blind eye,” “blind spot,” and “blindsight.” Looking at datafication through e-waste teaches us that critique should not start from the presumption of increasingly all-encompassing datafication, but instead analyze the (constitutive) limitations and (productive) excesses at stake in data assemblages

Ecological ethics and the smart circular economy

The corporate discourse on the circular economy holds that the growth of the electronics industry, driven by continuous innovation, does not imperil ecological sustainability. To achieve sustainable growth, its advocates propose optimizing recycling by means of artificial intelligence and sets of interrelated datacentric and algorithmic technologies. Drawing on critical data and algorithm studies, theories of waste, and empirical research, this paper investigates ecological ethics in the context of the datacentric and algorithmically mediated circular economy. It foregrounds the indeterminate and fickle material nature of waste as well as the uncertainties inherent in, and stemming from, datafication and computation. My question is: how do the rationalities, affordances, and dispositions of datacentric and algorithmic technologies perform and displace notions of corporate responsibility and transparency? In order to answer this question, I compare the smart circular economy to the informal recycling practices that it claims to replace, and I analyze relations between waste matter and data as well as distributions of agency. Specifically, I consider transitions and slippages between response-ability and responsibility. Conceptually, I bring process-relation or immanence-based philosophies such as Bergson's and Deleuze's into a debate about relations between waste matter and data and the ambition of algorithmic control over waste. My aim is not to demand heightened corporate responsibility enacted through control but to rethink responsibility in the smart circular economy along the lines of Amoore's cloud ethics to carve out a position of critique beyond either a deontological perspective that reinforces corporate agency or new-materialist denunciation of the concept

Transparency as Rupture: Open Data and the Datafied Society of Hong Kong

This paper deals with Open Data and the datafication of governance in Hong Kong. It addresses contestations over “transparency” as a techno-political construction that is embodied in, and performed by, the infrastructures and techniques of data-centric governance. Transparency is a site of negotiating distributions of cognition and perception in the context of transformations of citizenship and governance in the datafied society. I specifically inquire into the infrastructures, protocols, techniques, and practices of Open Data, which promises to simultaneously enhance government accountability and stimulate data-driven “smart” governance. Accordingly, I look at techno-political organizations of data and data infrastructures that support particular modes and distributions of cognition and perception (Halpern 2014; Hayles 2014; Kitchin 2014), which I distinguish as two data regimes respectively revolving around “representation” and “prediction.” I furthermore situate these issues in the larger institutional and political context of Hong Kong. The relevance of locating this case study in Hong Kong is that Hong Kong brands itself as an ICT Hub and ranks rather highly on smart city indexes. Yet at the same time the process of adapting Open Data is (structurally) incomplete, disruptive, and disrupted in the encounter with residual rationalities of statecraft. Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region of China helps us think about datafication and Open Data in relation to the transgressive processes of accommodating neoliberalism through an array of exceptions (Ong 2006). Yet the case of Hong Kong also provides a glimpse of the possibilities for intervention and Open Data activism

Modeling WEEE circularity:between glossy complexity and grimy potential

This paper explores technological imaginaries and rationalities that underpin the circular economy, specifically WEEE recycling. I consider the interplay between models as schematic simulations on the one hand and waste as indeterminate potentiality on the other. Key to my analysis are slippages between complexity and potentiality. Models are by nature different from their external referent, forming either models of or for (description versus prescription). As schematic simulations, they seek to approximate external realities, whereby the latest technologies promise to tackle degrees of complexity at the edge of what can be known. Waste as potentiality draws on a Deleuzian- Simondonian notion of the virtual. It offers a relational and processual framework that places waste matter in relation to various situational practices including neglect, dumping, reuse, refurbishment, and shredding. My aim is to work toward a critical theory of sustainability modeling and assessment of technology in the context of the waste crisis