Situating digitalisation in times of disruption
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot, PhD
The last week of May, I had the pleasure of joining colleagues from the Urban Futures at Risks team at Humboldt University in Berlin for a two-day workshop focused on urban future-making during times of disruption. Berlin, a city so visibly marked by some of the largest disruptions of the past centuries, where the different ideologies of the recent past are literally built next and on top of each other, seemed a fitting place to start thinking about how disruptions shape our agency for making the urban future. In an era of continuous crises, disruption carries with it a certain temporality and imagination for the future. Although disruptions often arise from long-term structural issues, they are acute and urgent impacts that can increase precarity and vulnerability for people, societies, and geographies. However, these disruptions can also create pathways for alternative outcomes. An abrupt interruption for relevant change.
It is from this latter definition that disruption has long been Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword to frame digital technological innovation and its potential impact on the economy, work, employment, and, in some cases, cities. Tech entrepreneurs often use the term to oversell the potential of technological innovation to create radically different worlds, usually emphasising a short-term perspective. This overlooks how transitions are situated in long waves of evolution that can either sharpen or dull their impact (Valenduc & Vendramin, 2017). While there are instances where the introduction of digital technologies has reformed industries, social relations, and economies, these are often overshadowed by numerous cases where digital technologies have merged with pre-existing institutions to entrench their power. In such instances, technology has not so much changed the rules of the game as it has been mobilised to reinforce them.
Perhaps more importantly, the ambition to disrupt continuity and path dependency is often used to justify the lack of regulatory oversight over big tech. This mindset is deeply rooted in capitalist and neoliberal approaches to governance, which prioritise continuous creation, growth, and replacement. Ultimately, bureaucratic and legislative control does not align well with the perceived need to accelerate change and shake up society.
This tension between the narrative of disruption and the institutionalised culture of bureaucracy appears frequently in our research. For example, digital platforms for land administration in Kenya mirror the inequalities present in Kenya’s urban and political landscape. Rather than achieving the disruptive goals of platformisation—such as increasing speed and transparency and eradicating corruption—the land information management platform simplifies complex relationships between people, land, and the state, neglecting citizens' efforts to envision more just and communal land markets (Hoefsloot & Gateri, 2024). Similarly, in conversations with intermediaries about the digitalisation of bureaucratic processes and urban planning, it becomes increasingly clear that despite the efforts to automate their work, the digitalising state heavily depends on the subaltern spaces of labor, such as cybercafes, and occupations such as brokers, typists, and consultants, to maintain information flow and organise civil and political life.
Despite the flawed and capitalist underpinning of the idea of disruption as used by Silicon Valley, the relationship between the digital and disruption deserves more critical engagement. Perhaps less in the sense of how digital technologies are the instigators of disruption, but more on how they are implemented in a context of disruption. As scholarship has repeatedly described, rather than floating in the clouds, digital technologies are produced, materialised, and imagined in concrete settings (Amoore, 2018). They are situated in specific spaces, institutions, cultures, and histories.
Hence, specifically in the current context of poly-crisis, when we see the tides of the climate, democratic, health, and humanitarian crisis crash together, it becomes important to explore how accelerated digitalisation piles onto this. In a moment where we are destabilised from many different directions at once, what does it mean to introduce new systems, technologies, or even strive for disruption? Technological optimists might present this potential disruption as a way out, creating new productive pathways for thinking about futures outside of the systems that have led to the poly-crisis. At the same time, with data centres consuming water and energy at astonishing rates, AI destabilising journalism and knowledge production through deep fakes and hallucinations, and the algorithmic capture of our attention and privacy, it becomes difficult to imagine how this contributes to progress rather than the further the extraction of the planet’s resources and the erosion of democratic society.
In our conversations during the workshop, we aimed to move towards a useful way for thinking about how to reclaim the conversation about disruption, unpack where it overlaps, is distinct, or complementary to other concepts such as crisis or risks, and try to understand how disruption contextualized to help improve our understanding in these moments of change. Thinking about productive disruptions would require us to rethink who is disrupting. Without blindly following the regurgitations coming from the tech sector – trying to sell us technical solutions to problems that didn’t exist – we can explore the smaller spaces of disruptions, experimentation, and interactions which explore just urban futures.
References:
Amoore, L. (2018). Cloud geographies: Computing, data, sovereignty. Progress in Human Geography, 42(1), 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516662147
Hoefsloot, F. I., & Gateri, C. (2024). Contestation, negotiation, and experimentation: The liminality of land administration platforms in Kenya. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 02637758241254943. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241254943
Valenduc, G., & Vendramin, P. (2017). Digitalisation, between disruption and evolution. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23(2), 121–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258917701379