Ways of Saying Not at All Instead of No
“Smart, Green city? I would prefer not to.”
Political platforms, position papers, and activist demands are often criticized for focusing on negation rather than affirmation. We often vote in ways that deny a candidate the chance to be president, rather than voting to affirm our support.
We share an enthusiastic rejection of the idea of “smart1” and “green” cities. We feel like trapped subjects. We are offered choices about how to consume and how to connect, but the option to say “no” in a meaningful way is missing for the majority of people.
The negation of an object produces a new object. The city which is not smart, nor green, nor a city.
“Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do” (Slavoj Žižek, Violence, 2007).
To imagine a better world, we must negate the apparent logic of the present one. Instead of choosing to resist it, we must decode the logic within the choice we are given and choose neither to accept it nor to oppose it, but to negate the logic altogether. From this space of total negativity we can create a new world, one that doesn’t forget the cruel logic it has denied.
CCTV and security
The collection of data from CCTV cameras – whether private or public – enables the surveillance of subjects. Even by watching and recording, subjects are always already potentially guilty. Resisting surveillance and denouncing abuses within policing is already happening. However, this struggle keeps us within the logic of surveillance.
In choosing to negate the gaze, instead of resisting it, we may be able to build our city on the lack of surveillance.
A real-world case study: Corsight is an Israeli company headquartered in Jerusalem. Their business is to develop facial recognition software and tools. In the beginning, their main targets as customers were law enforcement agencies and militaries around the world. Now these tools are also used by retailers.
According to The New York Times, cameras and facial recognition tools are used by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza. It was already the case before the war in Occupied Palestinians Territories, explains a report from Amnesty International.
“The facial recognition program in Gaza grew as Israel expanded its military offensive there. Israeli soldiers entering Gaza were given cameras equipped with the technology. Soldiers also set up checkpoints along major roads that Palestinians were using to flee areas of heavy fighting, with cameras that scanned faces”, explained The New York Times.
IDF use services from Israeli companies, especially Corsight, but also “Google Photos, the free photo sharing and storage service from Google”, because “Google’s ability to match faces and identify people even with only a small portion of their face visible was superior to other technology.”
Because they do not even know who they are killing. And they need to practice facial recognition on dead people.
Containers, smart ports, Tesla charging stations and extractivism
Shipping containers and charging stations are both channels for fueling and extracting resources for the benefit of the few. When discussing these objects, the idea of “necessity” constrains our imagination. However, the containment and transportation of subjects and objects simply follows the logic of production beyond necessity.
In choosing to negate extractivism, we may be able to build our city on the lack of perpetual growth.
Sensors, smartphones and encoded knowledge
The core principle of automation is that we can achieve a desired state by using machines that automatically determine the difference between where we are and where we want to be, and correct it – protecting our well-being. In reality, each step of this process encodes a specific, situated knowledge and excludes all that it doesn’t encode.
The violence that automation obscures is the erasure of consent, of the autonomy to act or not to act. A map on your smartphone takes you to your destination, eliminating the possibility of arriving somewhere else, or not arriving at all. The sensors that measure pollution erase the knowledge that pollution is a symptom of the decision to sacrifice certain subjects. It becomes a question of
“how polluted” instead of “why polluted”.
In choosing to negate the means of capturing, recording and distributing data as the sole practice we follow for guarding our well-being, we may be able to build a city on the lack of exclusion of knowledge.
Air taxis and libidinal investment
The art of doublespeak allows us to lift self-driving drones into the sky, power them with obscene amounts of energy, and celebrate them as the democratization of “green” public transportation. What becomes“green” here is the absence of overt signs of pollution, waste, and resource depletion.
However, the subtle buzz of the motor reveals to us the truth that has always been built into this technology: that we are not allowed to refuse it, merely to shape it.
Gardens, land and the individuation of care
Gardens – communal gardens, private gardens, balcony gardens – are a symbol of our attachment to the rites of care. We practice humility and patience in the closed circle that includes us, the plants, and all the creatures that gravitate to this oasis.
However, the critique of ideology teaches us to pay attention to the content hidden in the form. And so, the garden may reveal to us another border: one that distributes care to some, but not to all.
In his“Candide” (1759), Voltaire writes “One must cultivate one’s own garden”. This is an invitation towards self-cultivation, which furthers the logic of individuation of care. Taken further, “one’s own garden” leads to the logic of “land ownership“. Rights can only exist in the presence of a logic of demarcation and property.
By choosing to negate the border, instead of expanding it, we may be able to build our city on the lack of categorizing. We may resist answering the question “who is the care for?” choosing, instead, to practice care in the space opened up by our refusal.
Preferring not to is the act of the subject that subtracts its libidinal investment from the system, as a whole.
Terms like “smart” and “green” have become a warning that something is hidden from view. Resisting these terms keeps us firmly confined inside the structure that brought them to life. If we merely point out“this is not green”, we trap ourselves in the unspoken, next question: “then, what is green?”.
Resistance“masks the absence of a profound reality” (Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981).
Choosing to negate
The difficulty we experience in imagining the new also stems from the lack of lack. By resisting the current order instead of negating it, we uphold its structure. We chose to only allow ourselves to imagine within its confines. The truly smart thing to do is create open space, a chasm between object and not-object, and situate ourselves within this gap. Where, finally, there is space to dream the unimaginable together.
Workshop participants (in alphabetic order)
Alex Ștefănescu: Hacker, activist, focused on digital rights. The things that keep me up at night revolve around security, confidentiality, censorship evasion, the free flow of information.
Alistair Alexander: I explore the ecological and social impact of technology through research, art, writing, workshops and other formats. Recent projects include “Ecologies of Technology” MA seminar at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, an online disinformation course for LGBT activists, using the Doughnut Economic Model for digital sustainability, and researching“restorative and regenerative” futures for AI and digital infrastructures with Bath Spa University. My art displays on digital connection and disconnection was displayed at Invisible Networks exhibition in Berlin, in June this year Current i also speak and write technology, AI and climate.
Aslı Dinç: I am a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. My artistic narrative is deeply influenced by sci-fi culture, RPGs, cybernetics, and interconnected networks of power. These influences, along with gamer theory, hacker culture, and the deep-sea milieu, shape my practice. Inspired by cyberfeminism and tech-capitalism, I craft playgrounds using speculative and dystopian narratives as tools for resistance. My approach involves simulating and shape-shifting to explore and question existing structures and systems.
Géraldine Delacroix: I’m a journalist currently working for the French investigative news website Mediapart as an editor / copy editor.
Inha Lindarenka: I’m an organiser and curator of media, arts and human rights projects with focus on Belarusian context.
Jaron Rowan: Writer, teacher, and researcher. I am the Director of Research at BAU, University Center for Arts and Design in Barcelona. I have written the books Emprendizajes en cultura (Traficantes de Sueños, 2010), Memes: Stupid Intelligence, Weird Politics, and Digital Folklore (Capitan Swing, 2015), State-Free Culture (Traficantes de Sueños, 2016) and Manual para quemar el Liceo (Traficantes de Sueños 2024). I have also contributed chapters to books such as Cultura libre digital (Icaria, 2012) and The Tragedy of Copyright (Virus, 2013). I have collaborated on other works, such as Innovación en Cultura (Traficantes de Sueños, 2009), written with YProductions, Investigación en diseño (BAU Ediciones, 2021), co-written with Marta Camps, and more recently, I have participated in the collective work Steps Towards an Ecological Perspective of Arts and Design (BAU Ediciones, 2023).
Juan Francisco Donoso: I am a coalition builder and network weaver based in Berlin who specialize in the intersection of social movements and film productions, focusing on land defenders and issues related to water and energy. Part of the work that I do are impact campaigns, public relations, and community outreach for projects that envision post-capitalist realities.
Monisha Martins: I’m a freelance journalist, currently based in Canada, who mostly works for Germany’s international broadcater Deutsche Welle.
Niloufar Vadiati: scholar of Urbanism and Digital Geography. Working on opening a research network (Abadi) for MENA region. I have a podcast on Grassroots Digital Urbanism.
Shintaro Miyazaki: scholar of media history and commoning with focus on “new media”. I am interested in solidarity-oriented, anti-capitalist alternatives. Recently also in molecular biology and bio chemistry, endosymbiosis etc.
Sibylle Hofter is a Berlin based visual artist exploring film (essay, documentary, object animation on 35mm and 16mm, video installation), text, site-specific sculpture, installation in public space, 15 years. primarily photography – participatory and individual. Her working process often includes extensive research on extra-cultural fields. 2019-22 emancipatory projects with workers in Bangladesh. Recently relocating to countryside.
Facilitators
Dzina Zhuk is an artist, tech-politics researcher, sci-fi writer, co-organiser of Work Hard! Play Hard!. Part of an artistic collective eeefff (Minsk/Berlin)that makes software-based projects, publications, networks, and platforms that critically explore digital labour, value extraction, and community formation. methods include: public actions, online interventions, performative seminars, software and hardware hacking, framing environments and choreographing social situations.
Nicolay Spesivtsev: Computer scientist, artist, researcher, hacker, initiator. Part of the group eeefff, WHPH, Flying cooperation.
This project was conceived at BG |berlinergazette.de’s annual conference 2024 entitled KIN CITY. All text and images: Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). All images were taken at the KIN CITY conference.