This article foregrounds the ways in which members of the Quantified Self ascribe value and meaning to the data they generate in self-tracking practices. We argue that the widespread idea that what draws self-trackers to numerical data is its perceived power of truth and objectivity—a so-called “data fetishism”—is limiting. Using an ethnographic approach, we describe three ways in which self-trackers attribute meaning to their data-gathering practices which escape this data fetishist critique: self-tracking as a practice of mindfulness, as a means of resistance against social norms, and as a communicative and narrative aid. In light of this active engagement with data, we suggest that it makes more sense to view these practitioners as “ quantifying selves.” We also suggest that such fine-grained accounts of the appeal that data can have, beyond its allure of objectivity, are necessary if we are to achieve a fuller understanding of Big Data culture.

The smart city has been both celebrated for opening up decision-making processes through responsive digital infrastructures, and criticised for turning citizens into mere nodes of socio-technical networks under corporate or government control. In line with these depictions, smart city politics is often analysed as a struggle between aspirations for bottom-up participatory democracy and authoritarian control. Drawing on ethnographic research on an Amsterdam project which encourages citizens to collect and share air quality data, we problematise this vertical reading of smart city politics. The project mobilises both republican citizenship and cybernetic citizenship, each assuming different logics regarding the ways in which citizens negotiate urban life by means of data and sensing technologies. While republican citizenship emphasises citizens’ sovereignty, cybernetic citizenship emphasises their immersion into informational environments. We demonstrate how, depending on specific situated interests and forms of engagement, both kinds of citizenship feed into appealing visions of urban life for different actors.

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This empirical-critical study looks at the Air Quality Egg project, a Euro-American effort focused on the collaborative creation of a “smart” air quality sensor network. While widely celebrated as a “best practice” example of bottom-up smart city making, the involvement of a US software company that turned the data platform into a full-blown for-profit service suggests a very different reading. Yet why did the project’s serving both corporate and anticorporate agendas not cause significant conflict among participants themselves? Which practices, forms of imagination, discourses, and types of experiences enabled this collaboration against all odds? This article addresses these questions by looking at the ambiguous ways the group’s meetings mobilized the principles and practices of open source, prototyping, and a focus on doing, configuring the gatherings as spaces of transformational possibility, detached from the networks, roles, and institutions of daily life.

Smart city projects across the world are invested with the ideal that smart technological innovation smoothly negotiates the objectives, interests, and moral orientations of many different stakeholders. This article explores the politics of this ideal of “smart seamlessness” by taking a close look at the unfolding of the Amsterdam Smart Lighting project undertaken by a consortium of civic, academic, and corporate partners at a square in Amsterdam Southeast. This project envisioned the “smartening up” of lampposts on the square by making them real‐time adaptive to local conditions. As these plans were only partially realized due to a multitude of institutional, cultural, and material frictions, the materiality of the perpetually “unfinished smart lampposts” was subject to a constant interplay of shifting understandings regarding their social, political, and technological significance. Whereas the formal narrative of the project suggests this process of meaning‐making to be fully inclusive, producing “learnings” for all participants, the article contrasts this strategic and explicit inclusivity with the implicit “action orientation” (Haughton et al. 2013) of the project. While the Smart Lighting project’s narrative explicitly gestures toward open and inclusive innovation, it produced more implicit and subtle markers of exclusion that alienated those participants unfamiliar with the jargon, style, and pace of market‐oriented forms of spatial development.

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