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

Introduction

‘Hacktivism’ is used to refer to activism or action for political change carried out digitally or using digital tools (Vamosi, 2011). International policy experimentation in digital hacktivism refers to the development of new approaches to securing communities from threats and disruptions on the basis of developing communal awareness and responsiveness to changes in fluid contexts, often through the development and application of new digital technologies. In traditional approaches to security, the figure of the hacker is a problematic and disruptive one, posing a threat to the computerised networks and high tech infrastructures essential to the smooth, fixed and linear running of modern economies (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011; McClure et al., 2001). However, the concept of ‘hacking’ is ambiguous (see McCormick, 2013). In the fluid and less linear ontology of the Anthropocene, hacking – as a form of political and ethical practice – has a more positive relationship with security discourses, and is used in this article to outline the development of a distinct policy methodology or approach, sensitive to contexts and inter-relationships and critical of traditional or modernist approaches to security. This will be illustrated using policy experiments in Jakarta, Indonesia, as a case study.

Key to the analysis being made here is that hacking, as a process of securing, calls into being a new approach to international policy practice in which awareness of embedded relationships enables the empowerment of communities not merely to respond to disasters but to creatively engage with emerging problems or threats. This approach is often methodologically positioned counter to a failed or failing modernist discourse of security, which assumes that security threats can be ‘solved’, ‘prevented’ or ‘removed’ through technological or engineering approaches. Hacking as a methodology thus becomes less dependent on its etymological roots in computing technology and becomes a transformative process of building engaged communities through experimentation and grasping momentary and fluid connections and interrelations. Security policy interventions, on this basis, thus no longer seek to ‘solve’ problems but neither do they ignore or disengage from them (see Duffield, 2013). Instead, the problems themselves are reinterpreted as enabling and creative opportunities.

It is important to emphasise that ‘digital policy hacktivism’ and, likewise, the conception of hacking as a policy methodology, are developed and outlined as a result of the research undertaken by the author. The international policy activists interviewed in different projects in Jakarta do not necessarily see their work in these terms and differ in their understandings of how new policy approaches can be developed as well as the political and philosophical stakes involved in their deployment. It is the process of policy experimentation itself that is the focus of this article. Of particular interest in the field work undertaken in Jakarta was the (previously unrecognized) attempt to see how new digital technologies have been deployed in ways that enact or performatively stage this broader shift in security policy understandings towards the presentation of threats or problems as enabling or revealing new forms of agency and community capacity.

The interview material that forms the bulk of the following sections is taken from fieldwork conducted in Jakarta in February 2016. This fieldwork was hosted by a flood awareness NGO, PetaJakarta, and included extended interviews with representatives from PetaJakarta, the Jakarta Open Street Map Project and the United Nations Global Pulse Jakarta Pulse Lab. ¹ The interview material is deployed as a backdrop to how new digital technologies are appropriated to enable new forms of security thinking to emerge through the Anthropocene problematic. Jakarta seemed to be one of the best places to undertake this research as these concerns motivate the work of many international agencies in the city and it is not unusual to come across references to Jakarta as ‘the city of the Anthropocene’ in both policy and academic research (see, for example, Turpin et al., 2013).

Indonesia has been a leading actor in mainstreaming disaster risk reduction approaches since the 2004 Aceh tsunami (see, for example, BNPB, 2014; GFDRR, 2015). However, it is its capital city, Jakarta, that has been at the centre of climate change and disaster risk concerns: on the one hand, it is symbolic as an ever-expanding megacity; on the other hand, it is rapidly approaching ecological catastrophe (Rukmana, 2014; Holderness and Turpin, 2016). The problem of securing the city against rising water levels (the threat from rainfall, river turbulence and rising sea levels) throws into relief the limits of structural engineering projects and has increasingly called forth new approaches that no longer assume modernist, or linear, accounts of progress (Sukardjo, 2013; Leigh Geros, 2015). This is the context in which digital policy activists have sought to re-envision ways of living with security threats and of using new technologies to engage with and transform citizen awareness.

The rest of the article draws out this argument step-by-step, bearing in mind that a number of concepts brought into the analysis have received relatively little attention in critical security studies. The following section provides an introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene and how modernist approaches to security, based on causal linear understandings, have been problematised through the rise of correlational or relational approaches, seeking to re-envision problems and solutions. The following sections then focus on the empirical research findings regarding digital policy activism in Jakarta. The article concludes by suggesting potential limits to the displacement of modernist discourses of security by a process of securing through hacking as a mode of policy engagement.

Policy hacktivism and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a concept coined by Paul Crutzen (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), and is a disputed term that refers both to a new geological era, in which human activity is seen to have profound and irreparable effects on the environment (Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’, 2016), and to a recognition that the nature/culture divide, central to modernist constructions of Enlightenment progress, no longer exists or was always problematic (Latour, 2014; Clark, 2011; Haraway, 2015; Proctor, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2011; Macfarlane, 2016; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). In this respect, the Anthropocene appears to confirm that we are living in an age of ‘manufactured uncertainty’ or ‘manufactured risk’, in which security threats can no longer be seen as external but rather are immanent to societal processes (Giddens, 1994: 4; Beck, 2009), undermining the modernist separation between security referent and security threat (Baldwin, 1997; Chandler, 2010). It is held that modernity comes up against its own limits with the end of the culture/nature divide: the end of a ‘nature’ of laws and regularities somehow external to human interaction.

In this more complex, contingent and interrelated world, the ‘reductionist’ causal connections, generalisations and ‘lessons learned’ that shaped the security projects of modernity are no longer seen to be tenable (for example, Mitchell, 2009: ix–xiii; Prigogine and Stengers, 1985; Cilliers, 1998). Without the ‘outside’ of ‘nature’, positioned counter to the ‘inside’ of ‘culture’, new forms of security governance necessarily need to be ‘reflexive’ and ‘adaptive’ (Voss and Bornemann, 2011; Berkes et al., 2003). Thus, the lexicon of international security is beginning to carry with it an asserted recognition of the Anthropocene as a fundamental challenge to previous epistemological and ontological assumptions about how we know and how we govern/secure in a world that is no longer perceived as open to linear temporalities of cause-and-effect (see Fagan, 2016).

In response to this closure, existing communal forms of living and socio-technological forms of interconnectivity and networked community, building on new ways of making connections and seeing relationships, hold new possibilities (for example, Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). It is this need for a fluid awareness of relations in their specific and momentary context that has enabled hacking as an approach to become an important form of engagement. For Anthropocene epistemologies and ontologies, the actual existing reality contains much more possibility and potential than has been traditionally recognised by policy makers and academics (see, for example, Sharp, 2011; Grosz, 2011: 77, 183). Thus, the task is that of engaging more imaginatively with the constantly emerging present, alert to the fact that these relationships need to become a matter of care, attention and opportunity. ²

The question of how to engage with the present with more creative and imaginative insight is key to discourses of security in the Anthropocene. In other words, the methodological concern is for real-time contextual meaningfulness rather than for the extraction of causal laws or theories of causation, which can be taken and applied elsewhere. This ‘new empiricism’ (Clough, 2009; see also Latour et al., 2012; Venturini and Latour, 2010) seeks a less abstract, representational or conceptually mediated access to the world ³ and is more concerned with relations in their immediate context, rather than with attempting to extract knowledge of the inner essences of discrete entities by abstracting from their context. The focus on empirical immediacy, essential for effective policy responses, is often highlighted in the contradistinction between analogue views – of sensing, affect, relations and correlations ⁴ – and modernist homogenising or ‘digital’ forms of representation and ideas of causation, which reduce reality to homogenous units based on binary distinctions (see Galloway, 2014). ⁵ A world understood as a fluid set of interrelations is not amenable to statistical regulation or to causal lines of prediction and implementation. Knowledge has to be fine-grained and real-time rather than abstract or universal. ⁶

The attraction of what are called ‘big data’ approaches stems from the promise that new computer technologies, high-speed algorithms and machine-learning can provide relational insights through pattern recognition, without the need for causal theory (Anderson, 2008). The forms of knowledge essential for policy hacktivism could, following Latour (2013: 26), be seen as post-epistemological, focused on seeing and awareness of the world in its complex empirical emergence. For big data aficionados, the term for seeing concrete relations through new human-technological assemblages is ‘datafication’ (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013; Kitchin, 2014). Datafication, driven by new forms of sensing and interconnection through the development of the Internet of Things, relies on correlations (between text message words and societal changes, between intensities of the sun and human functioning, etc.) to enable the extension of security governance to processes in their emergence, rather than remaining focused on things or entities. This is why metadata (relational data) is increasingly more important than content data for security agencies (for further discussion, see Aradau and Blanke, 2015).

The question of securing in the Anthropocene is thus one of understanding and manipulating relations and feedback processes while relying less on our reductionist thinking. This is why radical theorists are often drawn to approaches that start with the external world, by ‘following the actors’ (for example Law and Hassard, 1999; Latour, 2005) or ‘following the data’, rather than with human-centred questions and theoretical constructions and models (Chandler, 2015). It is held that this openness to the world, this new empiricism or pragmatism, needs to be vectored via social and technological means of mediation, which provide access to a relational reality obscured or hidden by the modern episteme. McKenzie Wark, at the New School, has long highlighted the links between hacking and the sensibilities of the Anthropocene, and his Hacker Manifesto gestures to the work of hacking in developing new approaches from what already exists, by the use of information to enable new relations to be seen and actualised (Wark, 2004; see also Chardronett, 2015). Wark argues, in the Manifesto, that:

The hack produces a production of a new kind, which has as its result a singular and unique product, and a singular and unique producer … Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack which gives to production its formal, social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every production is a hack formalised and repeated on the basis of its representation. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate. (Sections 158 and 160)

Hacking is the iterative, gradual approach to policy interventions, where each hack uses and reveals new inter-relationships, which create new possibilities for thinking and acting. However, as soon as a hack is reproduced (turned into ‘production’ on the basis of representation) it loses its creative capabilities. A hack is a form of intervention, which seeks to reveal new relations and interconnections: it does not seek to construct new forms (structured or technological solutions addressing causes and solutions) but neither does it passively accept the world as it is. ‘Instead, adaptation is the act of polities making-worlds by repurposing and reengineering infrastructure not as a heroic or redemptive activity, but as a strategic force of selection, affirmation, and affinity’ (Turpin, 2015). As the Invisible Committee (2014: 43) state:

The figure of the hacker contrasts point by point with the figure of the engineer, whatever the artistic, police-directed, or entrepreneurial efforts to neutralize him may be. Whereas the engineer would capture everything that functions, in such a way that everything functions better in service to the system, the hacker asks himself ‘How does that work?’ in order to find its flaws, but also to invent other uses, to experiment. Experimenting then means exploring what such and such a technique implies ethically. The hacker pulls techniques out of the technological system in order to free them.

‘Pulling techniques out of the technological system in order to free them’ from the grand designs of social engineers and technocratic planners captures well the aspirations of digital policy activists in Jakarta. The following sections illustrate how hacking approaches have been pursued both in practice and in the discourses and understandings associated with policy hacktivism as a both an ontological and epistemological performativity; the next section, ‘Citizen sensors’, focuses on the critique of ‘big data’ approaches and argument for community engagement; ‘Seeing the unseen’ analyses how working on correlational, rather than causal, relationships enables the reworking of problems; and ‘The Anthropocene of slums’ highlights the impact and importance of hacking as a methodology and raises some potential limits to this approach, further outlined in the Conclusion.

Citizen sensors

One thing about which international digital activists are clear is that they are hostile to approaches they term ‘big data’. In their understanding, big data merely replicates current thinking, providing mundane reflections on the world (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016). For example, big data analysts might do a study on fear of volcanoes and conclude that people living near them are more anxious about the possibility of a volcanic eruption, or do data-mining to discover that people prefer to lie in on a Sunday morning. The best that big data can come up with is the mundane reality, but often it fails to achieve even this, as it is not easy to train a computer to read and understand tweets, or a drone to recognise the difference between a barracks and a hospital or between a terrorist suspect and a civilian (see Grothoff and Porup, 2016; Robbins, 2016; MSF, 2015). At worst, big data is seen to reproduce dominant understandings of the world in a problematic way, serving the needs of commercial companies and producing problematic linear and securitised forms of knowledge. ⁷ As well as providing less access to ‘reality’, activists argue that passively data-mined information does little to change the people’s circumstances, as it bypasses communities and privatises data to aid governments and corporations. Even the active generation of data can be problematic when the information is never the responsibility of the community itself.

An organiser of the Jakarta Open Street Map project sees an entirely different relationship between mapping and the citizen. Rather than being the province of ‘armchair’ mappers with drone cameras, mapping was necessarily a local project as the information mapped was only ‘real’ while it was in the context in which it was generated. This was firstly because local people could identify objects and sites in fine-grained ways, which would be impossible for ‘armchair’ outsiders; secondly, because the categories used to describe or classify sites and objects were not readily transferable (the road or street classification system in use in western Europe would be of little use to a street mapper in many parts of Africa, for example); ⁸ and, thirdly, because mapping could not be a one-off project, but was necessarily an ongoing process:

Even a global fine-grained map would not be adequate. Things keep changing and changing: a sub-village could disappear and become a shopping mall, a hospital might close down. The map has to be continually updated, even in a matter of days. Really, really updated. The main challenge is to ingrain that kind of motivation/attitude in people responsible for updating the area (Interview, Jakarta Open Street Map Coordinator, 2016).

The challenge was, in effect, to engage enough people to construct living maps as a better, crowdsourced, representation of the world. Other approaches to real-time mapping, however, take a more mixed ⁹ or less modern ontology to heart in the design of digital policy projects. A leading example of this new empiricist methodology is the PetaJakarta project being developed by academics and practitioners, based on facilitating geo-social forms of collective intelligence. ¹⁰ As one of the PetaJakarta project coordinators stated, ‘Data cannot be “mined”; it is not a resource to be used by others. It is not about taking something out of one place and giving it to someone else, it is about feedbacks, not “mining”’. It is about using data in a system of ‘intimate sensing’ to enable contextual seeing and understanding (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016).

From PetaJakarta’s perspective, the population of the major city is a resource still in need of mobilisation: citizens are already extensively networked through social media and could make excellent citizen sensors, especially once the information offered can be verified through geo-spatial tagging of its precise time and location (this enables others to check and compare the information from multiple sources and makes verification much easier). Social media can be reconfigured with humanitarian apps to activate these civic citizenship elements. Different problems can then be used to construct engaged and active communities able to play a role in addressing them as a form of ‘civic co-management’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016). Rather than passively reproducing a pale imitation of reality, the development of civic communication technologies could enable a more dynamic reality to unfold, amplifying the collective networked social intelligence of the city. At present, new civic technologies are being bankrolled and tested in relation to disasters and emergencies, but the hope is that this could be the beginning of new forms of geo-social networked systems enabling much more distributed and democratic forms of real-time governance.

Radical and tech-savvy academics and activists are keen to see the possibilities for human citizen-sensor-led initiatives, in which citizen knowledge and ownership is seen as vital for the development of civic apps. Where big data approaches of data-mining are seen to be passive and led by the desire to monetise civil networked capacities, citizen-led approaches are seen to be active and transformative (see also McQuillan, 2014; Read et al., 2016; Kitchin, 2014). More importantly, they are seen to be self-transformative initiatives, generating not just information to be used by others but a different politics: ‘Recognising a problem is not the same as resolving a problem. The momentum of “intimate sensing” is to enable people to think differently and thus to feel differently’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016). For these radical policy hacktivists, it is clear that ‘big data and Twitter won’t save you, won’t stop the floods. To be successful the key point is to be able to see what’s beyond the interface … the relationships of care’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016).

Seeing the unseen relationships was also the objective of representatives of the UN Global Pulse Jakarta Pulse Lab project, who very much bought into the policy methodologies of hacking being developed elsewhere by PetaJakarta and others. Again, they were not in favour of ‘big data’ approaches, which relied on the passive data-mining of social media and other sources, instead emphasising the importance of ‘thick data’: the use of big data but also of fine-grained ethnographic research. The Pulse Lab is involved with a large number of projects, but one emphasised in particular was a study of the impact of El Niño, in conjunction with the World Food Programme.

This project relied on active rather than passive data collection carried out by (paid) volunteers, who used a humanitarian app to record a range of market prices, taking a photo of the particular item and entering its quality and price. This information was then geo-located and time-stamped to build up a fine-grained and real-time picture of market fluctuations. Like PetaJakarta, the Pulse Lab found that passive data-mining of social media was not fine-grained enough to provide reliable information. ¹¹

This actively generated market price data was then matched against other data streams, such as household resilience surveys and local weather data, to map the effects of changes in community sustainability. Importantly for the points made here, the project was based on locating outlier communities: those that seemed to do either better or worse than the average. Thus, the purpose was not so much to provide a complete picture but to see the as yet unseen: to find the communities that were in trouble (reaching their tipping points or threshold levels) and requiring intervention by the World Food Programme but also, crucially, to initiate research projects to learn from the resilience capacities of communities that did better than average.

This provides a useful performative demonstration of this approach, in that the UN Global Pulse and World Food Programme wanted to use new data technologies not to generate universal forms of knowledge and comparative measurements or to predict what might happen in the future, nor to develop large-scale interventions, but rather to locate the exceptions. The intimation here is that certain communities have ‘tricks up their sleeve’ or the ability to ‘hack’: ways of thinking or organising that enable them to engage differently with certain contingencies. The reality that is being sought is not something that can be neatly fitted into categories and charts but the reality of the sign that provides the possibility for analogic reasoning to reveal relations and connections whose importance may have been ignored. Long gone is the idea that international development organisations already possessed ways of knowing or technological solutions that could be generalised and exported through training or project grants (see, for example Haldrup and Rosén, 2013). If there are solutions to problems of climate change and poverty then these are held to be context-specific and generated through communities themselves, but the ways in which these creative solutions emerge can be learnt from and provide possible opportunities for others in the region. ¹²

Seeing the unseen

Citizen sensors are not just more attuned to reality in mobilising or inculcating the power of the geo-socially networked citizen. The immanent capacities of geo-social networks are used to enhance awareness of problems and issues in new ways. At present, many social, economic and ecological questions are not posed or are ignored. A good example from Jakarta is the city’s relationship to the river system, which often floods in the monsoon season. The city is currently undertaking a massive project of ‘normalisation’: tearing down informal settlements on the riverbanks and concreting the walls of the river. In some areas the river itself is being concreted over. For many middle-class citizens, this ‘beautification’ of the river is a good thing and they support the river being pushed underground and out of sight. For western policy activists, ‘They are turning their backs on the reality of the city. The river is an ugly monster that no one wants around’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). Thus, the attitude of covering over the problem is the problem, preventing ways of rethinking the city’s relationship to the river system and, even more importantly, this approach is seen to be counterproductive: increasing the rigidity of a river system that is constantly in flux, and therefore storing up more problems for the future.

Despite the constant and worsening flooding, it seems that the message is not getting through to either the city or its inhabitants:

When you get sick, it’s the body’s way of saying that something is wrong. Flooding is a sign that something is wrong with the city. PetaJakarta is like a thermometer. It enables us to see, it alerts us to the facts. You can’t see a fever. PetaJakarta is a quantification of the problem (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

In my own understanding, this is not really a ‘quantification’ of the problem; this would intimate that it was building up a representative store of knowledge. It is, in fact, a ‘datafication’ of the problem, bringing to light a set of relationships and interdependencies rather than just measuring something on a basis that can be universalised. This process of datafication as enabling the seeing of the unseen is crucial to new approaches of securing in the time of the Anthropocene. The data generated by PetaJakarta is not a passive representation: it is neither quantitative nor qualitative in the usual meaning of these terms. The project uses machinic or technological enhancement to construct a more dynamic and relational version of reality. It is this digitally-enabled vision that enables a community to be able to see the unseen and thereby responsively care for its now enhanced and extended relational self. ¹³

At PetaJakarta there is an understanding that a new methodology is emerging with the work being undertaken and that its full outline is still in process. The key is the desire to visualise relational infrastructures, networks and interdependencies, and new technologies are seen as central to this process:

What are data? Data are signs that can be assembled as a relational structure but can only be read mathematically. Signs produced can be read/organised by mathematics not by language. For example ‘Banjir’ [flood] is not linguistic, it is a code that is machine readable (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordinator, 2016).

A PetaJakarta coordinator continued later:

We want to develop a post-intentionality platform. The role of CogniCity [the open source software programme] ¹⁴ is not to generate greater intentionality but machine solidarities. Big data is problematic [with its predictive assumptions]: it identifies volition or will in systems without them … big data traces, it only provides the evidence of the Anthropocene’s existence rather than augmenting its unfolding (Interview, PetaJakarta Coordiator, 2016).

While the articulation may not be immediately clear, the aspiration is to use technology to see ‘posthumanly’, which means not imposing linear cause-and-effect assumptions (intentionality, will or volition), but seeing things for how they really are, open to contingent connections and relations. This is why it is argued that relational structures can only be seen ‘mathematically’, through datafication and machine recognition. The assumption is that, through seeing contingent and fleeting interconnections and relations, the unfolding of the Anthropocene can be ‘enhanced’; that is, real-time responsive adaptation can take place through iterative processes rather than through attempts to generalise and take information or data out of their context in order to instantiate major projects of social or technological engineering (which would hold back the development of ‘Anthropocene’ approaches).

As one member of the PetaJakarta team told me: ‘Understanding the river as a line is the first problem. It doesn’t move in one constant direction or with a constant thickness’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). Paradoxically, the application of modernist approaches to solve the problem of the river system has the unintended consequence of making the problem worse: sporadic concretisation of the river is held to make the river even more turbulent. This is not just an ontological problem; it also highlights the paradox of the modernist episteme itself. ‘The denial of the river as the enabler of life in the city stems from the Dutch linear view of the river, which is still prevalent since the 17th century. This means that planners are not addressing the reality: the river cannot be forced into a box’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

The more we apply modernist approaches and inherited understandings of scientific approaches to hydrological engineering (working based on equations that have not changed in a hundred years), the less we are able to know and to understand the problem and to understand the river itself:

The ‘normalisation’ of the river has made it much more turbulent and less predictable. Before, local people knew the behaviour of the river when the gates were lifted upstream. People living informally on the banks of the river had a syncopated rhythm of daily life, living with the river. They would be prepared for flooding and move their stuff upstairs and they would know when the river was receding and quickly move out the (toxic) mud before it dries. Now they can’t predict how long it will take for the water to flow. All the ways through which the city learned to live and adapt to the river have become irrelevant (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

The more responses to the problem of securing the Anthropocene take a modernist form, the worse the problems become, at the level both of ontological reality and of epistemic possibilities of thinking about approaches to these problems. ¹⁵ This negative approach is summed up by the Great Garuda sea wall initiative (Koch, 2015), a huge planned extension of the city into the sea. The image of the Great Garuda – a warrior bird, facing out to the ocean, as though defending Jakarta against climate change – is seen as particularly unfortunate (Mezzi, 2016). It ‘[promotes] the idea that climate change is something out there and we can just stop it; not let it in’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

Although they are against the city’s ‘normalisation’ approach, the PetaJakarta activists are not content to let the flooding take its course. As several of the international researchers argue, ‘resilience can only be built through community, not form’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). The general understanding of the Great Garuda and normalisation initiatives, which seek to formalise the river, to control it, is that: ‘We will be more resilient because we will be in control’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). For PetaJakarta, this is the wrong approach to take to the problem. The PetaJakarta project is therefore very different: ‘It’s not trying to solve flooding, it’s trying to give a voice to the flooding: to give a voice to the river’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). The alternative to ‘form’ is ‘community’, and the project is about ‘… communicating smarter about the environment and helping people to get through flood events’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

‘Community’ starts from a very different set of ontological and epistemological assumptions, rethinking the city from a relational perspective in which the city and river are fundamentally interconnected. Owing to this connection, ‘we need to put the river at the centre of the city, the river comes first and secondly there is the human development on top. By blocking off the river we are making the main character less visible’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016). The Twitter feedback from the project participants helps in the process of remapping the city, making it more dynamic, or lively, than the reality of the river on the map. ‘This enables thinking differently. The river is not a line but a body ever present across the city’ (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

‘Community’ is not the geo-social networked intelligence of the citizens alone but the use of the geo-social networked technology to re-envision what the city is and what it means to be a citizen of it. For PetaJakarta researchers:

We need to visualise the city as a set of relations that cannot be pinned down. We need to move beyond binaries. Information is the commodity of change … Architects and engineers need to take this on board. There are no technical solutions. Planners, architects and engineers need a whole new level of thinking about the medium we are working with (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

This view, that in the Anthropocene there are ‘no technical solutions’, highlights the fundamental shift involved in the emergence of hacking as a policy methodology for securing under conditions of uncertainty. It also poses the key question of what role planners, architects and engineers are to play in this new framework:

What are we trying to design? A better functioning image of today? Shouldn’t we be designing for the system to live better, to live smarter? Maybe it doesn’t have to look different. It’s hard to say. When you talk about resilience through form its difficult to take it away from capitalist investors. It’s difficult to take it away from who it’s meant to work for (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher A, 2016).

The PetaJakarta project works on the understanding that things do not have to look different for radical change to take place. There is already a socially networked citizenship through social media and the technology is already available for geo-spatial mapping of communication (the project sends out automated responses with a video telling people how to enable the Global Positioning System (GPS) location). The project seeks to ‘hack’ this already existing geo-social technological infrastructure to reconfigure it and to activate elements not at the fore. Thus, it takes the existing capacities and transforms them to remap problems and issues, by taking apps developed as open source software and making them capable of mobilising and re-envisioning community relations in open-ended and experimental directions. What could perhaps be seen as the extension of emergency or disaster risk reduction to the politics of everyday life is here reread as a hack to enable an empowering network able to amplify the power of self-organising community intelligence.

The Anthropocene of slums ¹⁶

It’s not just the river that activists in Jakarta seek to re-envision through bringing to the fore agencies previously held to have been ignored, problematised and unseen. The policy methodology of hacktivism feeds off, and in to, much broader resonances and synergies. Important here is the policy debate over the future of the informal or slum dwellings, or kampongs, with the kampong activist movement opposing the tearing down of informal housing and the relocation of people to social housing (Jakarta Post, 2015). Rather than removing the problem or relocating it, people argue that informal/slum housing could be improved by looking at what does and does not work and working with the resources and capabilities that are available. In fact, for some, the kampongs are the best example of how to live in the Anthropocene: building a community as a complex adaptive system. ¹⁷ International activists argue that while kampong dwellers have responded to flooding in ways of coping and seeing and communicative interaction, the modern city dwellers fail to appreciate these capabilities (Sihombing, 2004; Burhaini Faizal, 2011). Symptomatic of the approach to the river system is that those who are best placed to develop coping and responsive strategies of hacking have been ignored or marginalised in policy discussions.

Jakarta is the ‘City of the Anthropocene’, in that the nexus of epistemological and ontological shifts connected with securing the Anthropocene are at the forefront of policy discussions and reflect broader international changes. Since the early 1990s, there has been a major policy shift from earlier slum removal to slum improvement, slum rehabilitation and slum development programmes (Davis, 2006). Slum dwellings are increasingly high on international policy agendas, enabling the merging of security concerns of poverty, climate change and urban growth to be renegotiated through the lens of resilience. ¹⁸ In these developing approaches, resilience is something that can be generated through engagement with urban slums and often through the application of new technologies for community engagement and local leadership. Slums are increasingly part of the solution to securing the Anthropocene, rather than part of the problem (Castroni, 2009; Ogunlesi, 2016). As an international academic researcher, working with a Jakarta NGO, stated:

What is a kampong? A mediator between the river and the city: a safety-net for the city. A flood is an opportunity for them; they pick up the slack, see the opportunity and work as a unit; what we see as an obstacle, they see as an opportunity. They live in rhythm with the water, unlike the city. This bridges the gap, away from the ‘monster’ image of the river that we want to punish (Interview, PetaJakarta Visiting Researcher B, 2016).

The key point is that the link between poverty and vulnerability, central to disaster risk reduction in the 2000s, has been increasingly replaced by perspectives which focus on capacities for resilient forms of adaptation through reimagining relations both inside the community and with the external environment:

Though there are shared characteristics, ‘poverty’ and ‘vulnerability’ are not the same thing. While poverty reflects a lack of economic and social assets, vulnerability additionally implies a lack of capacity, security, and exposure to risks. Though the overlap is significant, not all poor are vulnerable and not all who are vulnerable are necessarily poor. This has important implications for policy – as does understanding the assets and capabilities even very poor populations possess in their resilience and response to either slow-onset climate change or disasters. Much can often be built from communities, especially once assumptions regarding their capacities are put aside. (UN-Habitat, 2014: 15)

There is increasingly a shift in the attitude to slum dwellers that flags the new approach to securing as hacking in the Anthropocene: seeing slum dwellers as both vulnerable through poverty but also as having creative capacities for organisation and resilience that need to be inculcated and developed. If new forms of seeing relationally are the model for policy intervention, then slum dwellers and the urban poor are the most proficient at organically developing solutions based on seeing the unseen. As the Economist notes:

In a way, slums are areas of high sustainability – they use less water and electricity, for example. There is also a stronger sense of community and solidarity than in big cities in general, which are much more anonymous. Slum dwellers are particularly entrepreneurial, with families converting their ground floor into a soup kitchen or a school. Policymakers in developed cities should learn to listen to citizens rather than adopt a top-down approach to planning – a core component of the ‘slum upgrading’ method. (Brillembourg, 2015)

As indicated by Global Pulse, data gathering and visualisation projects are a fast-growing area for international institutions engaged in developing resilience to climate change, particularly those focusing on urban poverty (Santa Fe Institute, 2016). Here, the approach is very different to the liberal grand schemes of social engineering and slum clearances or the neoliberal assumption that slum dwellers are, in some way, lacking capacities and in need of external agencies to provide them with resilience (a perspective that was still noticeable in some of the World Bank material until recently). ¹⁹

Conclusion: Life hacks of the Anthropocene

The PetaJakarta approach promises both an epistemological and ontological transformation in how cities, citizens and the problems of the Anthropocene are imagined. However, underneath this radical gloss is a sense of making do with what we have, not by doing nothing but by re-envisioning the problem, the river, the drought, the kampong, and so forth, and then being able to ‘hack’ into existing resources and capabilities to make the most of opportunities and interconnections. These forms of micropolitics – empowering people based on their own relational capabilities – depend on an intimate knowledge of communities and attention to shifting possibilities and are very different from traditional framings of intervention or non-intervention.

This ethos of securing the Anthropocene through attention to repurposing and re-envisioning, and by attempting to enable existing potential interconnections is, I think, highlighted in the idea of ‘Public Service Jams’ or ‘Civic Hackathons’, where Smart City Labs, the UN Development Programme or other donors invite ideas and proposals to deconstruct problems and try out prototype solutions with volunteer hackers, technologists and designers immersing themselves in the problem. These ad hoc forums are lauded as mechanisms for reaching out to citizens in order to develop new ideas, for exposing governing authorities and international institutions to new tools and skill sets and for re-envisioning problems or seeing issues in a different light (see, for example, Anggakara et al., 2016). When it comes to securing the Anthropocene, it seems that traditional forms of social research and policy analysis are barriers to this form of creative engagement. Those who follow them are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past and reproduce problems and forms of social and economic exclusion.

What this misses, though, is the temporary and short-term nature of these new community approaches. This is exactly the idea of a ‘life hack’ as a short-term solution to a problem such as a wobbly table or a bad hair day (see, for example, Lee, n.d.). When the World Food Programme organises with the UN Global Pulse to develop a dashboard of information on drought, food prices and household resilience, this is not because they have an ambitious programme of transformative initiatives for development, but precisely because they have no such programme and in its absence are seeking to design a system in which communities can develop their own resources to cope at the edge of poverty. The same can be said of the other short-term project-based initiatives enabled by data-based re-envisioning, community engagement and empowerment.

The world of digitally-enhanced geo-social intelligence and real-time empirics seems more dynamic and lively than the world of traditional security discourses. I would suggest that its dynamic appearance does not come so much from the power of open source data gathering and of geo-spatial mapping, but rather from the breaking up of reality into short-term and momentary quick fixes. This approach is neither the interventionism of liberal social and technical engineering nor the non-intervention of community self-responsibility but its engaging and transformative ethos remains perpetually stuck in the ‘life hack’ mode for fear of doing either too little or too much.

Securing the Anthropocene, it seems, cannot be done by attempts to socially or technologically engineer the world, but it can be done by applying technological applications to citizens recast as a geo-socially networked community of sensors, attuned to the ‘unfolding’ of the Anthropocene as a human-non-human assemblage of open-ended interrelations. This is what gives the correlated or datafied world its hyper-reality. ²⁰ The lack of temporality of the emergent assemblages of the Anthropocene means the ‘what-is-ness’ of the world is enhanced by seeing it only as a momentary event, liable to momentary interventions, rather than in terms of long-term problems that need long-term solutions. Securing the Anthropocene, through its ontology of interdependency, implies open-ended forms of governing and intervening that seem, at first sight, to be radical, creative and empowering. This article suggests that underneath this radical gloss is a much more humble approach to the world, which in fact enshrines the status quo as ontological necessity.