Glitch(ing)! A refusal and gateway to more caring techno-urban worlds?

Abstract

With code connecting to concrete in ‘smart’ cities, oppressive, patriarchal, and binary architectures of the urban have been translated into their algorithmic counterparts, too. This particularly excludes people who do not conform to these inscribed norms. In the public realm of streets and screens, their bodies now become misidentified as glitches by digitalized welfare services, techno-politics, and passersby. Primarily known as a visual or audible phenomenon of disruption in the technological environment, this paper advocates for conceptualizing the glitch as more than that: it understands the glitch as three-part: 1. a fleeting, but potentially violent error – either by mistake (technical) or by design (social); 2. a moment of refusal of prevailing systems; and 3. as a gateway for changing what it reveals as flawed.

Drawing on (auto-)ethnographic fieldwork from 2020 to 2022 on flâneuses* and hackfeminist collectives we will show how these grassroots urbanist actors turn the painful error of their bodies not being considered in techno-urban environments into practices of refusal and change. Creatively and collectively, they manage to turn glitches ‘by design’ into entry points to technologically and socially fight for spaces centering care instead. The portrayed bottom-up practices are important examples for breaking with social and technical binaries: Through strolling and scrolling, they dismantle tools of (digital) domination and provoke to think of who actually participates in ‘smartified’ spaces. Celebrating glitching as refusal, flâneuses* and hackfeminists alike open up questions about the authorship and implemented ideologies hardcoded into the fabric of the cities of today. Moreover, alone and together, their refusal mobilizes alternative, plural futures and makes glitch(ing) a gateway to more caring techno-urban worlds.