From Streets to Screens: Resisting the Commercialisation of Movement
I had the pleasure of presenting at WALKING – Thinking in Motion, “A transdisciplinary symposium on walking as an artistic practice, spatial experience, and epistemic method in the spirit of Lucius Burckhardt”, by the Swiss Institute for Land and Environmental Art.
Being based in Brazil, I couldn’t justify the time or cost to hop across the pond and join the conference in person (and I was going to be in Buenos Aires anyway), so my presentation was one of the few that was broadcast into the conference.
What follows is an overview of my presentation, on the need to develop a kind of digital psychogeography. You can download the slides.
From Streets to Screens
I’d like you to ponder a perhaps deceptively simple question: When you walk through the city, who really decides where you go?
If you give this some thought, you will find that our movement, particularly in the built, or more urban, environment, is to a large extent directed by urban planning and commercialisation and, increasingly, by digital technologies.
I’d like to make a case how the ideas of the Situationist International from the 1950s and 1960s are again, or perhaps still, relevant today, when moving through the datafied city, and that we need to figure out ways to extend the method of the dérive, as both playful and critical, into the digital realm.
The Situationist Legacy
Let’s first take a small step back, and recall the definition of psychogeography; the study of how environments shape our emotions and behaviours. Or, in perhaps simpler terms, we can describe psychogeography as the way a place makes you feel. Conceptualised by the Situationists, they paired this with the method of the dérive, a drifting without a plan, guided by chance, affect, and atmosphere.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Situationists constructed a critique of how cities increasingly were being shaped by capitalism, to encourage shopping, efficiency, and spectacle. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was a comprehensive critique of consumption shaping our experience in the public realm.
The key to pushing back against this manipulation of the individual experience in the public space was to reclaim autonomy by moving against the superimposed grain.
Today, this logic of control has expanded. It no longer applies to just the public squares and streets, but also to our private lives. The Situationists resisted the commercialisation of urban space by Big Capital. Now, Big Tech has pushed commodification and manipulation into our private lives through our screens, apps, and through continuous digital mediation.
Walking in the Datafied city
It is here where this presentation connects to one of the themes of this conference, Digitale Mobilität und die Zukunft des Gehens, Gehen als hybrides Phänomen zwischen physischer Bewegung und digitaler Steuerung, which imagines ‘walking’ as a hybrid between physical and digital control, as we have identified that walking is now shaped simultaneously by physical design and digital overlays.
Examples of how this is actualised in practice is through digital navigation, through tools like Google Maps, gamification, through environments like Pokémon GO, Ingress, and geocaching, and surveillance and tracking, like through Fitbit and Strava.
What we see is that digital overlays now script our physical movements as much, or perhaps increasingly more so, as architecture does.
So this begs the question: when we follow these apps, are we walking freely… or are we being walked?
Dérive app as Digital Resistance
Over a decade ago, I co-created and built Dérive app, the mobile app that helps to get you lost, which provides random prompts, tasks, to help you break habitual or commercial patterns, deconstructing the algorithmic logic of efficiency, consumption, and control. This connects to the Situationist tradition of playful resistance, turning everyday navigation and movement into a societal critique.
One way to think about this is as a kind of ‘reverse geocaching’, not going after the typical (tourist) destinations, but instead looking for overlooked, non-commercial features of the built environment.
If this sounds like it might run the risk of being uninteresting, I’ll remind you of the quote by academic Lori Waxman, in her book Keep Walking Intently, writing that “If something appears boring, you’re just not looking hard enough”.
Looking ahead, I would like us to consider digital dérives, resisting imposed and algorithmic logic as much as physical dérives resist urban planning.
Digital Dérives in Practice
Real world examples that have started this crossover from the physical to the virtual include:
- Dérive app workshops where participants discover unnoticed aspects of their surroundings.
- Drift Club, an Amsterdam-based collective which turns dérives into artistic events.
- CODED GEOMETRY, a walking collective that extends psychogeography into the digital realm, mapping physical space alongside digital infrastructure.
- Fake Google Maps traffic jam in Berlin by Simon Weckert.
- Yellow Arrow by Brian House, Christopher Allen and Jesse Shapins, as an alternative to bronze plaques and other official commemorative initiatives.
- Transborder Immigrant Tool, by Electronic Disturbance Theater, providing access to information to help immigrants cross the Mexico-US border.
All these examples show how walking and moving through the public space can be re-imagined as both play and protest, by subverting the technology we use to facilitate our movement.
So, how do we reclaim not just the street, but also the interface?
Bannon vs Debord
To more closely consider how we can think about facilitating this disruption, I’d like to contrast two quotes. Back in 2015, Steve Bannon, once Donald Trump’s chief strategist, identified not the Democratic Party as their main challenge, but the media: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Bannon realised that if he, Trump, and those on his side who wanted to control the narrative, were to prevail in American politics, they needed to continuously sprout actual nonsense, invalidating the ability and attempts of commentators, fact checkers, and the media in general, to push back against these absurdities, eventually creating a sense of apathy with the general public, allowing for Trump c.s. to pursue their own goals desires, unchecked.
In contrast, Debord realised that “…we must try to flood the market… with a wave of desires whose realization can be achieved through the available means of action of the material world…”, which is to say that the Situationists argued that instead of reforming old institutions, we should create new desires that can be realised with what is already around us, disrupting the spectacle of consumer culture, offering alternative ways of living and moving, without requiring the physical construct of the world around us to first be adapted to our wishes.
So, for Debord, the dérive opened up access to a counter-practice, producing playful longings for exploration and freedom, realised simply by walking differently.
As now Big Tech scripts desires through algorithms, push notifications, and endless feeds, we must seed desire for curiosity, slowness, and serendipity, using the tools, devices, apps, and infrastructures, we already hold in our hands.
This, because resistance doesn’t come from waiting for new systems to be built, but from repurposing the material means at hand, whether streets, screens, or our own attention, towards new, liberating desires.
Towards Politics of Digital Mobility
With public space commercialised by Big Capital, through malls, billboards, and privatised squares, private space has been commercialised by Big Tech through apps, notifications, and trackers.
With the understanding that walking becomes political when it resists these logics, when we reframe it as critical, playful, and disobedient, we must realise that the arena, the playing field, has changed, and that we now need a digital psychogeography; Experimental, playful, and collective practices that map out new freedoms, in both street and on screen.
Conclusion
So I argue the dérive can function as a bridge between Situationist legacy and digital critique. The dérive becomes a mindset, as we must internalise that walking is seldom neutral; It’s guided, nudged, and commodified, by signs, brands, and algorithms, in the service of extracting value, by others, from us.
The choice we have is whether to follow the scripts written for us, or to drift beyond them. On the ground, and through our phones.
We need to walk otherwise, reclaiming our paths from both the city planners and app developers.
And so, my closing question is this: In practice, how do we disrupt the intentions of Big Tech, and take back control, repurposing what Big Tech uses to manipulate us to their benefit?