Insurgent Citizenship and Technology

To frame our approach to technology, here we propose the concept of insurgent technology, which we derive from critical engagements with what is most often called modernity. Most directly, insurgent technology derives from insurgent citizenship, defined as the ongoing creative work that residents themselves do to make life livable in zones of abandonment (Holston, “Insurgent Citizenship”).

In the context of this chapter, insurgent citizenship is an important intervention against potentially excessive readings of concepts such as “human waste” (Bauman, Wasted Lives, 6), “necropolitics” (Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39), “bare life” (Agamben, Homo Sacer), “the damned of the earth” (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth), “pockets of abandonment” (Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 29), and “modernity/coloniality” (Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” 179; Mignolo, “Coloniality,” 39; Mignolo, “Delinking,” 449). All these concepts belong to a critical discourse that foregrounds the deprivation, inhumanity, and sovereign power that characterize racist spatialities. What risks being missed out in this emphasis, however, is the extent to which each of these critical terms exercises the critical gaze via an optic implicated within the genealogy of colonial praxis that generated such spatialities in the first place.

Holston (“Insurgent Citizenship”) has argued that notions such as “slum” frame the people living there as aberrant problems to be solved by interventions rooted in modern planning to introduce or grant access to the infrastructures. He suggests that interventions based on this belief can be blind to all the creative hard work people undertake to craft lives for themselves in these zones. One might add two further criticisms of this optic, that derive from a critique of decolonial computing: first, that such an approach would resemble colonialism in its expansionist attitude (Ali, “Brief Introduction,” 18); and second, that it would, ironically, be colonial in its devotion to the notion that Eurocentric principles of modern planning can be applied to solve the problems that flow from the application of those same principles (19).

What makes the above-mentioned critical lexicon central to our argument is that the cited authors all argue that waste and precarity are inevitable features of modernity. They are the dark side of the same coin whose more celebrated facet promises “progress,” “order,” “plenitude.” For Bauman, all order-forming gestures necessarily encounter realities that exceed the envisaged order. The catch-all category for such excess is materialized in the asylum, the prison, the refugee camp, the informal settlement. Mbembe (“Necropolitics”) has offered the most dramatic and cruel description of such zones, describing them as “death worlds” peopled by the walking dead. Agamben (Homo Sacer) subsumes such zones within the figure of “the camp,” a zone of abandonment where those who fall outside the envisaged modern order are contained and left to die by institutions such as market and state. Mignolo (“Coloniality”; “Delinking”), Escobar (“Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise”), and others have taken the argument a step beyond “abandonment” by assembling a historical account of how certain categories of humans have been actively rendered disposable in the service of a modern order, cultivated in the Global North and fed by resources and labor extracted from disposable landscapes and bodies from the Global South.

Modernity/coloniality begins from the recognition that modernity, as a rhetoric of salvation and a generalization of a local European history as the source of that salvation (Mignolo, “Delinking,” 463), rests upon coloniality, a matrix of power serving the production of body politics and geopolitics of knowledge and being. As such, programmatically modernity/coloniality seeks to proceed to what Escobar refers to as non-Eurocentric modes of thought, where eurocentrism is the “knowledge form that claims universality for itself, and that relies on a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” 184). It seeks to proceed in this direction by what participants in this intellectual stream term delinking.

Our question here is whether technology can be insurgent. Can it support the project of delinking, which presupposes moving toward a geopolitics and body politics of knowledge that, on the one hand, denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics) located in a specific part of the planet (geopolitics): that is, Europe, where capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. Delinking, then, shall be understood as a decolonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluriversality as a universal project (Mignolo, “Delinking,” 453).

Modernity/coloniality as an intellectual and political project is thus an attempt to repair delocalization, including the marginalization of place (the here and now of social action), in the definition of social life (Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” 182). As such, it meshes well with Holston’s critique of the disembodied bird’s-eye optic of modern planning, which can be read in terms of the above point as a mode of reproducing the faux universality of a European body politics and geopolitics, and the colonial consequences that follow from that pretend universality. Escobar goes on to argue that “the power of Eurocentered modernity—as a particular local history—lies in the fact that it has produced particular global designs in such a way that it has ‘subalternized’ other local histories and their corresponding designs” (Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” 183).

Forth extends this history of subalternization with an archive-based exploration of the colonial history of the concentration camp. Forth’s genealogy of zones of abandonment traces the global unfurling of the optic that Holston cautions against. He shows how civilian concentration camps, forerunners of refugee camps, death camps, transit camps, and safe zones (Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, 219), are rooted in “civilian concentration camps as a legitimate instrument of liberal empire,” and moreover, that the durability of the camp lay in those liberal origins (218). The optic Holston is critical of is precisely this liberal well-meaning disembodied quantitative gaze of the census or the political economy. These bird’s-eye perspectives effectively eliminate from view any creative work done by those within the zones of abandonment by rendering them deviant, inviting intervention. Instead, Holston proposes a ground-level optic where planners begin from the ground up, taking into account people’s insurgent citizenship that is crafted against the status quo of the modern logics that generated the abandonment to begin with (Holston, “Insurgent Citizenship”).

Holston’s optical distinction maps onto the distinction between a disembodied mind and a contextually situated embodiment. Mahendran draws from Fanon’s critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology to argue that abstract disembodiments imagined to be universal and neutral, such as that of the bird’s-eye view Holston ascribes to modern planning, are always racial—such that while race limits existence to the bodily, the power of digital computing decouples the bodily from existence. As Mahendran succinctly puts it, “It can be said that modern computation is the angelic ascent from one’s body, while race is the hellish descent into one’s body” (Mahendran, “Race and Computation,” 2).

Insurgent technology, as we are using the term here, thus has two related attributes. First, it refers to technologies, computational or other, that can facilitate insurgent citizenship, and that can be created and sustained within a zone of abandonment. Second, insurgent technologies must resist the decoupling of the bodily from existence, reproducing the racial embodiment of the bird’s-eye view, lest it be co-opted directly back into the mainstream. Insurgent technology also contributes to current developments relating to minimal computing in DH (see http://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/about/), as well as discussions around public digital humanities, by providing a practical example of how the rethinking of networking requirements for knowledge production can be applied in a nonacademic environment. Stommel defines public digital humanities as a “venn diagram at the point, always shifting . . . where public work, digital work, and humanities work intersect” (Stommel, “Public Digital Humanities”). Insurgent technology provides a conceptual basis for reflecting on how DH plays out in the public space in a way that centralizes the insurgency of the community, not the aims of the research project.

Defining Zones of Abandonment

South Africa, with its yawning inequality, racist history, and racialized political economy, stands as a microcosm for the spatial dynamics of disposability, abandonment, and necropolitical economy that characterize Mbembe’s “death-worlds” and Mignolo’s modernity/coloniality. Across the country, cities and towns exhibit a stark contrast between wealthy, leafy, resourced suburbs surrounded by dusty, largely impoverished “townships” and informal settlements. This is a contrast rooted in a centuries-old political economy of racist superexploitation (Bond, “Introduction”), described by Wolpe (“Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power”) and Magubane (Political Economy of Race and Class), that enduringly embodies Fanon’s distinction between the white settler town and the native town in The Wretched of the Earth (38). A practical example of this can be seen by viewing satellite images of different locations around Potchefstroom and adjacent Ikageng, South Africa. Stark differences exist in terms of socioeconomic status and available infrastructure.

The distinction captured so well by Fanon is far broader than a Potchefstroom or a South African phenomenon. Goodrich and Bombardella (“Street Name-Changes,” 28) have argued that German, British, and Portuguese colonial town planning were governed by the imperative of emphasizing and materializing social difference, primarily attached to race, such that the disembodied bird’s-eye optic served to cement in urban forms the damnation of the bodily that Mahendran articulates.

The Internet as a City

Since William Gibson introduced the term “cyberspace” and described the databanks contained therein as “city lights, receding,” the notion grew of the internet as a space comparable to a city (Technovelgy, “Cyberspace”). It was perhaps Yahoo! Geocities that most concretized the city analogy during the 1990s by hosting websites in virtual versions of real-world cities or neighborhoods according to content themes (Jordan, “In the Ruins of Geocities”; Geocities, “Visit These Neighborhoods”). While we understand that this analogy is limited and is one among many, it offers a useful transition to a mode of linking infrastructure and network design with the politics of exclusion, empowerment, and zones of abandonment. This is done in much the same way that social scientists ask how modern urban planning and design often unwittingly reproduce the inequalities that shape urban contexts and “slums,” that planners want to improve through progress and modern development.

As noted, scholars working within the modernity/coloniality program have argued that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin, and that each is entailed by the other (Mayblin, “Modernity/Coloniality”). In particular, they argue that modernity and progress, which can also be understood as technological and economic advancement, have depended on the provision of disposable populations. This has been happening for at least the last five hundred years, from slavery through to apartheid capitalism in South Africa. Within this paradigm, zones of abandonment or slums, where “modernity” has yet to arrive, are not departures from the norm to be given help and relief; rather, they are the inevitable conditions for and consequences of modernity (Holston, Insurgent Citizenship).

Providing such ground-up access remains a challenge. Access to site-specific insurgent technology may be a step toward producing such an archive of knowledge to share a community’s insurgent citizenship.

Our intervention thus begins by replacing the one assumption with two alternatives. The assumption that internet access has not yet arrived somewhere is replaced with assumptions informed by the work of Holston and the modernity/coloniality research program.

First, lack of access is best understood as a consequence of modernity/coloniality, not as a gap to be filled by the arrival of modernity.

Second, we must consider how to develop infrastructures and platforms that could, for example, generate archives for a polycentric body of knowledge, able to trouble the disembodied computational logic of modern planning, steeped as it is in the colonial praxis of racializing space and rendering bodies disposable within exploitative political economies. These archives may hold the seeds for a more equitable world by delinking networking from modernity/coloniality, and more broadly, by delinking the promise of modernity from the logic of coloniality, as Holston and scholars of modernity/coloniality argue.

Interventions to provide internet access should guard against being unwitting expansionist impulses that entrench the broader inequalities of modern society. Instead, the requisite infrastructure should enable insurgent citizenship to pass from one living space to the next. Moreover, it should adjudge the production of polycentric archives, with which to disrupt the production of European body political and geopolitical knowledge, as universal.

Insurgent Citizenship in Marikana

This chapter aims to share the story of Marikana, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Potchefstroom in South Africa’s North West Province. The settlement’s name was chosen as a gesture of defiance when they faced forced eviction in 2013. This was done in remembrance of the 2012 police massacre of striking mineworkers in South Africa’s platinum belt (de Villiers, “Marikana Massacre to Be Commemorated”).

In a practical exercise of insurgent citizenship, Marikana’s residents have embarked on a series of what they term “DIY formalization” projects, in order both to improve their lives and to protest against the precarious nature of their settlement. They have produced their own “household surveys,” surveyed the site, mapped and laid out their own standardized grid of roads and plots, and raised money to purchase water pipes and their own water infrastructure for fourteen communal taps, spread among the roughly 1,200 informal houses. They have introduced numerous services including a day-care center for small children and a vegetable garden that supplies the elderly and the infirm with regular nutrition. Hestia Victor, a postgraduate researcher working in the settlement, coined the term “buoyant life” to emphasize the creativity and endurance of Marikana’s residents, facing and improving life on the abandoned urban periphery (Bantam, “NWU Master’s Student Wins Award”).

Victor offers a helpful route through the seeming contradiction between “buoyant life” and the “bare life” expected in a zone of abandonment, without settling for the easy but dismissive suggestion that Marikana is somehow just exceptional. For Holston, the apparent contradiction is a matter of optics. Viewed from above, with the disembodied quantitative gaze of political economy and census data, places like Marikana appear as “slums” in need of intervention grounded in the assumption of “progress” and “order.” However, this view in isolation renders invisible the most significant resource available on the ground: the insurgent citizenship that the residents of Marikana currently display.

Strictly speaking, this chapter is not about providing access, if by that we mean granting access, as benevolent emissaries from the modern, to Fanon’s wretched of the earth, or if we mean the expansionist logic Ali criticizes. This project is primarily about access in the opposite direction. We bump up against our own problem of access when we consider the argument that a better world lies in insurgency from within the manufactured peripheries, and thus beyond the inevitable dynamic of modernity and waste. How does one access the lived space of this insurgency? Does an archive of insurgency exist? If not, how can it be created? How might they collaborate in their insurgency with other abandoned people, their fellows in far-flung geographies? How can insurgent technology provide a means of knowledge exchange?

Insurgent technology for the Marikana community must therefore adhere closely to context-specific needs. It would have to provide a networked platform where information on nutrition and farming could be accessed, as well as a platform to collaboratively record the community’s internal processes and decisions. If such a platform existed, it would, in turn, create a valuable resource for Marikana’s residents to share their insurgency with other people in similar settings and to send relevant information to municipal and political authorities in order to request and process context-specific service delivery. This may allow outsiders some form of access to the lived space of insurgency of the people living in Marikana. It may serve as the basis of an insurgency archive.

Given that Marikana currently lacks access to electricity, any networking platform delivering described content and services needs to be self-powered. It must also be physically small and light enough to carry around, as housing in the area is not formalized or permanent. Limited funds are available to acquire such a platform.

The PiBox as Prototype Insurgent Technology

As discussed, insurgent technology builds on the idea of insurgent citizenship, rather than just a modern out-of-the-box solution. It must be adaptable, as the nature of insurgency can differ from one community to the next. As a pilot for insurgent technology in the context of Marikana, we prototyped what we call a PiBox. As a start, we opted to use a Raspberry Model 3 B single board computer (SBC), since it is physically small and consumes very little electricity—an important requirement for the Marikana community. The operating system Rasbian Jessie was employed to ensure both server and desktop functionalities. This specific SBC also has an embedded Wi-Fi chip, which could be used to provide a Wi-Fi access point. This access point, in turn, enabled users to consume resources hosted on the PiBox via Wi-Fi-enabled devices at no cost—an important aspect. To create a platform to manage content, we installed WordPress as the content management system. WordPress was chosen since exposure to its structure could support the future integration of fully online versions of a community archive and knowledge resource. Finally, a solar-battery setup was also constructed to power the PiBox—another requirement in this community. The entire prototype was small, cheap, and free to power once it was operational—at a total cost of below $150, the most expensive component being $60. The whole setup could be crowdsourced and constructed without being reliant on external funding in the long run (Goodrich, Templehof, and Steyn, “Welcome to the PiBox Page”). The focus was solely on local network access in the first phase.

An overview of the entire project can be found on the PiBox Page (https://zjsteyn.github.io/pibox/).

Opportunities Arising and Future Considerations

Because the PiBox can provide digital networking infrastructure at no cost beyond initial setup, it can be utilized as a tool for individuals to gain access to contextually relevant resources, ranging from resources for day-to-day life to digital literature and audiovisual materials to aid insurgent citizenship. It also provides a platform for the people living in Marikana and similar settings to tell their stories, providing much-needed information to municipal structures to counter the logic of modern space planning that reproduces the dynamics of modernity/coloniality.

The PiBox can also be deployed and sustained by a group of individuals for their specific purposes. It satisfies the requirements of digital networking infrastructure in remote locales, and can function without the intervention of corporate social responsibility programs. It may also provide some groundwork to generate further discussion and development of other insurgency archives.

Future considerations can include how cost can be driven down further, through smaller and more efficient SBCs such as the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and models for adding a direct internet connection. One can further investigate how similar deployments might differ from place to place, and how outsiders might access the lived space of insurgent citizenry in order to foster mutually beneficial collaboration with individuals elsewhere, in similar zones of abandonment. This chapter aims to provide a space to reflect on the relationship between DH practice and community engagement. It seeks to foster discussions for moving the researcher-subject relationship in DH toward a more participatory, contributing model that ensures that all involved have equal agency and access to shape a “research project.”

Notes

1. See https://www.fin24.com/Tech/News/vodacom-starts-offering-free-facebook-access-20170117.

   Return to note reference.

2. Facebook Connectivity, https://info.Internet.org/en/story/where-weve-launched/; CellC, https://www.cellc.co.za/cellc/free-basics-by-facebook; Hempel, “What Happened to Facebook’s Grand Plan?”; Good Things Guy, https://www.goodthingsguy.com/business/mtn-free-access-wikipedia/.

   Return to note reference.

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