Drifting Through Empire: From the Situationists to Big Tech and the Dérive
Next week, Saturday November 29, I’m hosting a Dérive app workshop in Yogyakarta, together with Kunci and Jalan Gembira. You can still sign up, check the announcement for the signup link.
In preparation, we kicked off with an online presentation, to ease participants into concepts surrounding the dérive, specifically its origin with the Situationists, and its objective as pushing back against capitalist control of public space, and it’s role in connection to today’s control of private space by Big Tech, as seen in the historical arc, initialised by the rise of the chartered companies of the 17th century.
Below is also an approximation of what I talked about. The slides were primarily used as only a visual aid, with something pretty to look at.
Slide 1 — “Drifting Through Empire”
Hello everyone, I’m Babak Fakhamzadeh. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you, not yet in Yogyakarta, but almost. A city that, as I understand, wears its histories and contradictions right on its… streets. Today I want to invite you on a journey. Not the kind we make with Google Maps, Uber, or Grab, but one that wanders through ideas, resistance, technology, and the streets around us. We’ll drift from 17th-century colonialism, through the Situationists of the 1960s, all the way to today’s Big Tech, and we’ll settle on Dérive app. So let’s take a walk.
Slide 2 — Why Walk? Why Drift?
Walking is something we do every day, and when done attentively, it’s one of the simplest tools we have for seeing the world differently. Yogyakarta is an excellent example for this; it’s layered, lively, and unpredictable. The dérive, which we’ll do next week, is a practice of letting go of routines and predefined destinations, and instead lets curiosity guide you. It’s playful, but it can also be deeply political.
Slide 3 — The Situationists Appear
In the 1950s and 60s in Europe, a group called the Situationist International, artists, thinkers, misfits, Marxists, came together and questioned capitalism, the city, and everyday life. They rejected the prevailing western idea that we should simply consume and conform. Instead, they looked for ways to disrupt the ordinary. And one of the tools they developed was the dérive, the drift.
Slide 4 — The Dérive Defined
A dérive is a playful, open-ended walk where you follow the flows and moods of the city rather than a destination. Guy Debord described it as letting yourself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain. It’s about paying attention, to architecture, sounds, encounters, and emotions. It turns the city back into something alive, not just something to move through efficiently.
Slide 5 — Public Space Under Capitalism
The Situationists were reacting to the way capitalism had begun to transform public space. Cities were becoming giant advertising machines. Billboards, commercial districts, shopping streets were being designed to shape how people moved, what they saw, and ultimately, what they bought. The city had become a stage for consumption. The dérive was a way to reclaim the city from this spectacle.
Slide 6 — Today’s Spectacle Lives in Your Pocket
The situation has not improved. The spectacle hasn’t gone away, it has moved into our pockets. Our phones are the new billboards. Fenced apps are the new streets we walk through. And these streets are privately owned, designed by corporations whose only goal is to extract attention and money. What the Situationists saw happening to public space 60 years ago is now happening to our private space.
Slide 7 — Big Tech as the New City Planner
Urban planners used to decide how we move through cities. Today, Big Tech decides how we move through digital space. The logic is the same: guide behaviour to maximise profit. We’re nudged, tracked, recommended, redirected. Old school city planners would salivate over the extent to which the likes of TikTok and Google Maps influence our behaviour.
Slide 8 — Surveillance and Enclosure
In this system, data has become the new raw material. Our clicks, our preferences, our movements, these are extracted and monetised. The colonial logic of resource extraction has gone digital. The enclosure of public space the Situationists criticised has become the enclosure of inner space: our attention, our imagination, our choices.
Slide 9 — Step Back: Colonialism
But, the underlying attitude isn’t new. If we look back to 16th and 17th-century colonialism, including right here, we can look at and investigate the early formation of capitalism, where we saw massive extraction of resources, human labor, and cultural knowledge. The early chartered companies, including the Dutch VOC, were essentially shareholder corporations with a private army. They pioneered the model we see in corporations today: concentrate wealth in the core, extract from the periphery, at whatever the consequence.
Slide 10 — Core & Periphery: Then and Now
Colonialism created a world where the periphery served the core. Today the geography has perhaps changed, but the structure, and attitudes, have not. Instead of spices or minerals, the resource is us, our data, our behaviour, our time. What used to be extracted from colonised territories is now extracted from everyone with a phone. The empire has shifted from messy geography to streamlined technology. The periphery is no longer a place, it’s everywhere the common man is.
Slide 11 — Resistance Begins on Foot
So can we push back? How do we push back? One answer is beautifully simple: walk. Not for efficiency, but for awareness. Not for productivity, but for imagination. Walking reconnects us to place, to our senses, to our agency. When you meander, when you drift, you reject the logic of efficiency and control. You reclaim something that algorithms cannot predict.
Slide 12 — Urban Play as Counter-Spectacle
Urban play, like interventions, street art, and unexpected encounters, breaks the monotony of the city and disrupts the spectacle. It reminds us that cities are not machines; they’re living spaces where we can invent new experiences. Play is a form of resistance because it refuses to be optimised.
Slide 13 — Introducing Dérive App
Dérive app is one tool that grew out of these ideas. It helps you to step outside your routines and re-engage with the city. Instead of telling you where to go, it prompts you to explore. Instead of routes, it gives you possibilities. It turns your phone from a device of control into a device of curiosity.
Slide 14 — How It Works
The app uses decks of task cards, simple prompts like ‘Follow a sound,’ ‘Turn toward something red,’ or ‘Walk in the opposite direction of everyone else.’ These create small disruptions that open up new paths, new encounters. No experience can be replicated, every dérive is different. It’s a gentle push toward noticing the world again.
Slide 15 — Why It Matters Today
In a world designed to keep us scrolling, drifting is an act of freedom. Dérive app lets technology serve curiosity rather than consumption. It helps us reclaim attention, presence, and imagination, things that are increasingly colonised by the logic of platforms. It’s a way to re-enchant the everyday
Slide 16 — Yogyakarta: Your Laboratory
And so we find ourselves in Yogyakarta. The city is full of layers; colonial history, contemporary art, kampung life, street culture, student culture, religious spaces, chaotic traffic, quiet alleys, all creating a perfect landscape for drifting. Next week, we’ll come together to explore the city on your own terms, but, if you feel like it, you can start today.
Slide 17 — Conclusion: Drift as Resistance
So to bring it all together: colonialism laid the foundation for capitalism; the Situationists critiqued how capitalism colonised public space; Big Tech has moved that colonisation into our private lives. Walking — drifting — offers a way to reclaim attention, agency, and imagination. To drift is to resist. To resist is to reimagine. To reimagine is to reclaim the city, and our lives.
Slide 18 — Join the Walk
Thank you. I very much look forward to meeting you next week, and join the dérive at Kunci, with Jalan Gembira. You can scan this QR code to download the app. During the workshop, we’ll explore Yogyakarta together, not through maps or algorithms, but through curiosity and play. Let’s wander.