The smart city is often approached by its critics as a “system” that exploits optimal connectivity and efficiency for an urban society of control. Meanwhile, the actual operation of “smart city” assemblages in globalizing cities—characterized by development and breakdown, connectivity and disconnection—is seldom the basis of analysis. By focusing on the interplays between these dualities, this article aims to underscore the modalities of power and political possibilities of dissent in Istanbul, Turkey. Data-based smart city apparatuses are supposed to at once fix infrastructural breakdown and stabilize the socio-political order. However, during the Gezi protests of 2013, the integrated tactics of sabotage in urban space and data vandalism in the digital realm undermined both data control by the state and its political authority. Yet Gezi’s example also shows that hyperconnectivity, data motility, and virality by themselves do not necessarily lead to more meaningful participation in urban politics.

Generally, the literatures on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and on networked resistance are evolving isolated from one another. This article aims to integrate these literatures in order to critically review differences and similarities in the techno-centric conceptions of agency and social change by political adversaries that are rooted in their socio-technical practices. We repurpose the critique of technological determinism to develop a multi-layered conception of agency that contains three interrelated dimensions: (1) “access” versus “skill” and the normative concept of inclusion; (2) fixed “system” versus “open-ended network” and savoir vivre; and (3) “institution” versus “extra-institutional network” and political efficacy. Building on our critique, we end by exploring the political possibilities at the intersections of conventional institutions or communities and emerging, extra-institutional networked formations.

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This article maps the parameters of an emerging field of struggle around “openness” pertaining to digital data in the postcolonial smart city. Whereas colonial governance operated in relative secrecy with archives not quite available to ordinary citizens, what do we make of current institutions from government departments to banks flaunting their commitment to Open Data? Looking at data activism in Hong Kong, this article highlights the (post)colonial histories that have shaped the reception of Open Data in this context. More so, it explores the ways in which the techno-materialities of data infrastructures affect and reconfigure postcolonial struggle. Building on Kelty’s discussion of “recursive publics” and Hui’s account of recursivity, my notion of recursive politics underscores the mutuality of social history and techno-materiality. While recursive politics can contribute to technodiversity, I analyze how such politics weigh up against the political and ethical investments of postcolonial struggle.

Despite their imposing material presence, the values and harms stemming from the construction of infrastructural megaprojects remain speculative affairs in Istanbul, Turkey. This article distinguishes two modes of speculation pertaining to megaprojects that present different ethical and political possibilities, namely de-materialising and re-materialising speculation. Contributing to debates about material politics informed by Noortje Marres (Material Participation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and William Connolly (The Fragility of Things; Duke University Press, 2013), our framework of de-and re-materialising speculation avoids isolating material and planetary agency to instead consider how their uncertainties and potentials play a role at the intersection with politico-economic life. Accordingly, we analyse the coalescence of ecological and democratic crises. In Turkey, populism's anthropocentric construction of "the will of the people" exacerbates ecological collapse. But also, ecological collapse inspires a search for a politics and ethics that acknowledge human-nonhuman ecological entanglements. The contestation between de-and re-materialising speculation underscores possibilities and limitations of ecological politics in contexts of populism and post-truth.

This paper points to phenomena that are undeniably intrinsic to the datafied society, yet that themselves belie the dream/nightmare of total control through datafication: electronic waste (e-waste) and its recycling. In recycling industries and reverse logistics, invisibility, opacity, and uncertainty persist despite worldwide networks of surveillance, datafication, and algorithmic calculation. Mobilizing different technologies from RFID to big data, data assemblages enact particular regimes of visibility that cohere three “gazes”: security’s gaze, efficiency’s gaze, and speculation’s gaze. Yet along with these gazes come various forms of sightlessness, which I frame respectively as “blind eye,” “blind spot,” and “blindsight.” Looking at datafication through e-waste teaches us that critique should not start from the presumption of increasingly all-encompassing datafication, but instead analyze the (constitutive) limitations and (productive) excesses at stake in data assemblages.