Securing the Anthropocene? International policy experiments in digital hacktivism: A case study of Jakarta

Abstract

This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. Firstly, it sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process, generated through new forms of mediation and agency, capable of grasping inter-relations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with the focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in 'the City of the Anthropocene': Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of 'problem solving' but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive 'life hacks'.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

“…On the island archipelago of Indonesia, the capital city Jakarta has sought to turn its citizenry into citizen-sensors, capable of early detection and adaptive responsiveness to wide-scale flooding. One such Correlation and sensing project, PetaJakarta, sees the population of the major city as a resource still in need of mobilisation: they are already extensively networked through social media and could make great citizen-sensors, especially once flood information offered can be verified through geo-spatial tagging of the precise time and location (this enables others to check and compare the information from multiple sources and makes verification much easier) (Chandler, 2017). Social media can be reconfigured with humanitarian apps to activate these civic citizenship elements.…”

Forum 2: the migrant climate: resilience, adaptation and the ontopolitics of mobility in the Anthropocene

“…Rather than technical solutions (held to only make problems worse) or mobility solutions (equally evading the problem), indexical resilience works through the interpretation of signs as 'early warnings' enabling real-time responsiveness to problems: registering and indexing small changes in water levels, movements of other species more sensitive to water changes, data from elsewhere, or the use of computerised sensing or local community indicators (see, for example, Chandler, 2017).…”

Islands of relationality and resilience: The shifting stakes of the Anthropocene

“…We wish to engage with this new set of debates and consider how they might now disrupt the figure of the island and island studies’ scholarship in the Anthropocene. In this paper our own particular pathway into these debates is through the current widespread attention given to island “resilience.” In particular, we explore whether the established tropes of “resilience” in island studies should be enrolled into late‐ or neo‐liberal attempts to prevent or hold back the forces of the Anthropocene, or whether they should instead imply accepting that we already live within the Anthropocene (Chandler, ; Wakefield, ). The analytic point around which this shift turns is of fundamental importance for now rethinking through questions of islands and relationality in the Anthropocene.…”