Toward a slow criminology of sociotechnical orderings: A tale of many youth repellents

Abstract

Taking the material turn can contribute to renewing the discipline and sustaining the development of a slow criminology. Treating objects as mediators and acknowledging their ontological multiplicities protect us from our reflex to condemn rather than analyze them. Using the example of the ‘youth repellent’, we document three of its instantiations: a spatial fluidity device; a pain delivery mechanism; and an environmental pollution agent. This exploration forces us to expand the borders of the discipline to embrace others such as audiology and epidemiology. While these detours slow our analysis, they are the price we must pay for doing justice to the messiness of the human and non-human associations that constitute the fabric of our world.

Keywords

Actor–network theory material turn mediation performance technology youth repellent

Introduction

Objects ‘are back’:

After poststructuralism and constructivism had melted everything that was solid into air, it was perhaps time that we noticed once again the sensuous immediacy of the objects we live, work and converse with, in which we routinely place our trust, which we love and hate, which bind us as much as we bind them.

(Pels et al., 2002: 1)

Despite criminologists’ growing interest in technological objects, we believe that we, our own research included, did not fully take the ‘material turn’ announced by Pels and his colleagues (2002: 5) at the beginning of the second millennium. This is noticeable on two accounts: we often treat technology as a thin object and we conceptualize it as a single entity. In this article, we test our capacity to treat technological objects as thick and multiple so as to venture into ontological politics.

Some analysts interested in crime control technologies, while not completely embracing the material turn, have taken materiality seriously. To do so, they have mobilized varied conceptual tools, including those of science and technology studies (STS) (see, for example, Aas, 2006; Lyon, 2003; Magnet, 2011; Moreau de Bellaing, 2011; Smith and O’Malley, 2017). Like them, we borrow from STS, more precisely from actor–network theory (ANT), post-ANT perspectives as well as from new materialisms (Barad, 1998; Coole and Frost, 2010; Gad and Bruun Jensen, 2010; Haraway, 2000; Mol, 1999, 2003). ANT has been the target of many criticisms, some leveled by the founders themselves (Latour, 1999; Law and Hassard, 1999). It has been reproached for endowing objects with agency (Collins and Yearley, 1992), reproducing discriminations against the powerless (Star, 1990) and, relatedly, neglecting to consider structural forces at work (Harris, 2005). Many of those criticisms have been partially answered (Callon and Latour, 1992), or used to clarify further ANT positions (Latour, 2005). Specifically, we learn that agency is not the property of an object or a human being but rather the effect of an association between humans and objects. Interaction is all there is. Objects do not act alone, nor do humans. They act in relation, hence the importance of the concept of the heterogeneous networks for this perspective. Moreover, ANT focuses on power and structure. However, rather than using these concepts to explain the state of the world, ANT focuses on the mechanics of power as its research object (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992). ANT theorists, like ethnomethodologists, document how structures actually come into being, how fragile they can be and all the work required for their survival. Like analyzing a body that is continuously healing itself, ANT is interested in the micro-relations that produce and reproduce the world around us (Law, 1992). While not complete and faultless, for our purposes the scientific project that drives ANT is worthwhile: finding a way to describe the collective ‘in the making’, rather than the social ‘already there’ while considering the work of objects. Indeed, many critical criminologists and STS scholars make sense of the part political structures play in the lives of social actors, fewer look at the way social fabrics are weaved by the interactions of humans… and non-humans. This is what we are attempting with this contribution, albeit on a small scale. Indeed, we want to describe the associations being forged between humans and non-humans that stabilize our world for a moment and create a multiplicity of sociotechnical orderings. By that term, we refer to the way heterogeneous networks, such as objects, are ‘patterned to generate effects like organization, inequality and power’ (Law, 1992: 381).¹

This interest in technological objects, and the shared agency between human and non-human they imply, means more than just adding to a still-neglected branch of criminology; we want to join other analysts in making objects relevant to the discipline and therefore, slowing down our analytical reactions. This move partly echoes Isabelle Stengers’ (2011: 8) disappointment with ‘fast science’: ‘[w]hat characterizes fast science is not isolation, but rather working in a very rarefied environment’. That is an environment where only a few entities are perceived, isolated and analyzed in our explanations of the world. One way to counter this rarified environment is to ensure that our analyses take into account the other half of entities we live with: the non-humans. Moreover, we also echo her plea for a slow science.² Indeed, we share her preoccupation with the current high-speed knowledge economy that often leads us to cut corners, especially at the conceptual level: ‘I would […] characterize slow science as the demanding operation which would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists too often consider messy, that is, what escapes general, so-called objective, categories’ (Stengers, 2011: 10). We need to complete the laborious work of mapping the diverse entities, people and things that populate our world, and to describe the unlikely relations and sociotechnical orderings they produce. Following the imperative of slowness, we prefer a political engagement of abundance and extensions to a political commentary based on scarcity and shortcuts.

To explore the material turn and to slow down our analytical reflexes, we use ‘the Mosquito’, also called ‘youth repellent’, as an observatory. This device is found in public and private spaces to prevent youths from loitering. Banal enough, the sonic mechanism is audible mostly to young people who have not yet lost their aural sensitivity to specific high frequencies. Seen by some as an ingenious crime prevention mechanism and by others as an instrument of social control targeting youth, we contend that the Mosquito is much more than these characterizations. By slowly unpacking the Mosquito, we can engage more completely with the contributions that objects make to matters related to justice. It is worth noting that this device serves here as an instrumental case study, that is an empirical exploration for conceptual purposes (Stake, 1994: 237). We do not aim at offering a comprehensive study of the Mosquito per se.

As some of the literature shows, the Mosquito can be treated as a thin object that we can equate with a tool, a force or a sign.³ However, we seek an alternative and will treat it instead as a thick object by using the concepts of mediation and ontological multiplicity. Then, using three explorations of the Mosquito, we will document different sociotechnical orderings that comprise it and which it also helps to create. We will conclude by discussing how this detailed deployment of entities helps us avoid some hasty reflexes that often trap us into fighting existing conceptual and political battles and, rather, turn toward ontological politics.

From thin to thick: Intermediaries and mediators

An indicator that research on technology in criminology has not taken the material turn is that we sometimes treat technological devices as thin objects (Bunker, 2009; Leman-Langlois, 2006; McMullan and Perrier, 2003; Robert and Dufresne, 2008; White and Ready, 2009). We do so in three interrelated ways. First, by reducing technological devices to their stated purposes. Such is the case in some studies on the Mosquito whose arguments rest on moral and legal objections to the stated goal put forth by the manufacturers: driving youths away (Little, 2015; Walsh, 2008). In such studies, the device is conceived of as a private policing mechanism that creates anti-youth zones. It is criticized based on its potential for harassing youths, thus contravening human rights conventions as well as discriminating against and labeling a whole category of the population as intrinsically criminal. Here, the Mosquito does not even need to be activated. The analyses rest on the explicit objectives of the technological device:

To reduce an object to its function involves more than a failure of attention; it is a slur on the ability of human ingenuity to repurpose the material world and on the power of things to reshape the contours of human experience. Who hasn’t bent a paper clip to some untoward end?

(Alder, 2007: 81)

When we reduce technology to its aim, it becomes a mere tool for the direct transmission of intentions.

A second way we sometimes reduce technology to a thin object is when we equate it with a material base that completely shapes our relationships. Such a reduction of the Mosquito to a force happens when the device is accused of creating, not preventing, antisocial behavior (Akiyama, 2010). The argument is that the sound made by the Mosquito to drive away youths replaces the dialogue between adults and teenagers (Lee and Motzkau, 2011, 2012). Those authors note that adults are thus relinquishing their educational duties to the Mosquito, thereby possibly contributing to youth’s antisocial behavior (Akiyama, 2010). While it may give technology some power, such a conceptualization transforms it into a flat determinant force, robbing technology of its capacity to resist and surprise us.⁴

Finally, we sometimes empty technology of its richness and treat it as a thin object by conceiving of it as a sign of something else—whether it is progress or control. In the case of the Mosquito, the rationale is that contrary to other auditory schemes for regulating space (the Manilow method or the Beethoven),⁵ it aims at creating pain, thus contributing to the ‘weaponization of sound’ that has recently emerged to disperse protesters and to combat piracy (sound cannons). The fact that a painful sound is used allows the analysts to link, by analogy, the Mosquito to the combat arsenal and to make it a symbol of the ‘war on youth’ that western societies are said to be pursuing (Akiyama, 2010; Little, 2015).

These paragraphs do not sum up the existing literature on the Mosquito. However, they illustrate the analytical reflexes we might have in conceptualizing technological objects: ‘[s]lave, master or substrate of a sign—in each case the objects themselves remain invisible, in each case they are asocial, marginal, impossible to engage in detail in the construction of society’ (Latour, 1996: 235–236).

To counteract thin objects, we need ‘thick things’ (Latour, 2007: 140). This means that we document technological devices as mediators and not just intermediaries. Intermediaries, as we saw above, transport intentions and actions seamlessly. Mediators, on the other hand, elicit a difference, they ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005: 39). Doing slow criminology requires granting technologies the status of mediators and documenting the sociotechnical ordering that they produce. Pertaining to the Mosquito, Lee and Motzkau (2011) adopted this idea and conceptualized the device as a biosocial event enabling a political campaign by youths in England. However, we contend that to take the material turn completely, treating technological devices as mediators should be accompanied by a second analytical move: recognizing their ontological multiplicities.

From one to many: Epistemological and ontological multiplicity

A second indicator that some research on technology in criminology has not taken the material turn is that we continue treating technological devices as singular entities. Some claim that objects are multiple in the sense that they have no objective properties: objects are ‘social agreements’ (Becker, 1998: 49–50). Along these lines, it is easy to recognize that different actors (youth, mayors, business people) can have different perspectives on technology. This epistemological multiplicity is the dominant view in policy analysis on technological objects (Dugdale, 1999). It is often accompanied by the assumption that the technological device itself is unique (Law and Singleton, 2005: 333). Behind those layers of interpretations, a single object stands—hard and strong. This view is dominant in all reviewed research conducted on the Mosquito.

Doing a slow criminology of sociotechnical orderings requires us to go beyond epistemological multiplicity (many points of view on a single object) and, rather, consider ontological multiplicity (many objects). We tend to think of a technological object as a smooth, full, effective unity, as a bounded entity. Embracing the ontological multiplicity of objects means to let go of this simplification and conceive of objects as temporary effects of relational networks (Pels et al., 2002: 11). Objects are performed, they are continuously in the making. Moreover, those relational networks that result in objects are made of heterogeneous materials (Law, 1992: 381). They articulate values, laws of physics, instruments, knowledge, ideals, substances and the like. Since objects are performed effects of relational networks made of heterogeneous materials, they are as diverse as the practices that produce them. Finally, objects are continuously enacted through associations with other entities to produce different sociotechnical orderings; that is different organizations of the world. Hence, it is not about recognizing the varied representations of an object but about documenting the different objects that come into existence and the different orderings they produce. Adopting this view, Mol (2003) showed that atherosclerosis is a different entity in the general practitioner’s office (pain felt when a patient walks a certain distance), in the surgeon’s clinic (a weak pulse in the leg of a living patient), at the radiologist (a cloudy smear in an X-ray) and, in the pathology laboratory (a thickening of the intima in the vessel wall of an amputated leg). Those entities overlap, to a certain extent, but they are distinct and can even contradict one another. They are different enactments of atherosclerosis that point toward different medical paths. Law and Singleton (2005) arrived at a similar realization about alcohol liver disease. Our contention is that there are also different Mosquitoes.

Three mediating Mosquitoes

Since we want to show the multiplicity of the non-humans and give them a more prominent role in the processes of ordering the world we live in (Law, 1992: 386), one possibility is to start with sociotechnical controversies. Controversies are windows onto the collective being weaved out of the relationships among heterogeneous actors (Callon, 1986). For our purpose, we chose to explore the Mosquito controversy that occurred in Quebec, Canada, starting in 2008. To properly document controversies, instead of deciding what agencies are creating the world, we need to follow the actors and observe the connections they make to one another (Latour, 2005: 52).⁶ Our task is to document the networks that compose the sociotechnical device as well as the way the device enters the collective and, like all mediators, makes a difference. We present here three explorations of varying types of data that were collected as part of a broader project: promotional documents; a television news segment; and an expert’s memoir. Using these materials, chosen here especially for their contrasting qualities,⁷ we describe three different but overlapping instantiations of the youth repellent and the social it creates.

The Mosquito of its maker: A spatial fluidity device

Distributed in Canada by Moving Sound Technologies⁸ and Caméra Cachée,⁹ the contraption that spurred the controversy comes from Wales. In 2005, Howard Stapleton, an electronics engineer and owner of Compound Security Systems¹⁰ captured two experiences he had in his lifetime into a device: The Mosquito.¹¹ One experience is physical, an encounter with a sound; the other is social, a vicarious encounter with a group of youths. As a 13-year-old, while he was with his father visiting a factory that used ultrasonic welding to glue plastic components together, he had to abruptly leave the premises because the noise was intolerable to him. He was quite intrigued that his father did not hear the sound, let alone be bothered by it. Later in his life, he witnessed his 17-year-old daughter coming back home crying after unsuccessfully trying to run an errand at the corner store because a group of boys standing outside the store had harassed her. After talking to the owner, Stapleton realized that the aggregation of youth was a recurrent problem for this business and, he supposed, others too. Combining his experiences with unpleasant sound and youth, he created a sociotechnical entity in the form of an anti-loitering device:

Every day we receive calls from people wanting to buy a Mosquito Anti-loitering Device. People like you who are fed up with groups of kids damaging their property, hanging around in rowdy groups, littering, smoking and drinking, playing music and generally preventing you from enjoying your home or business. You have tried talking to them. You have tried talking to their parents if you know them. Perhaps you have even wasted your time getting the police involved. Now you need to take matters in to your own hands in a way that does not involve any confrontation. You as an individual have a legal right to peaceful enjoyment of your property or business and The Mosquito Anti-Loitering Device is the most effective and benign way of getting rid of the problem. The Mosquito device is the only product on the market that has the teeth to bite back at these kids. The Mosquito alarm works not by being loud and painful, but by being UNBELIEVABLY annoying to the point where the kids CANNOT stay in the area being covered by the Mosquito sound. The Mosquito device is 100% legal to own and use and requires no planning permissions etc. […] If you want to reclaim your right to a peaceful existence, buy your Mosquito Anti-Loitering Device now!

(Compound Security Systems, https://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/security-equipment/mosquito-mk4-anti-loitering-device [accessed 31 March 2017])

The manufacturer informs the potential buyer that the Mosquito takes the form of a small speaker that produces high frequency sounds, typically around 17 kilohertz (kHz), which can only be heard by certain segments of the population within a 40-meter range. The device exploits a phenomenon called presbyacusis. This condition is described as ‘the natural failure of hearing with advancing years, caused by degenerative changes in the internal ear’ (Jennings and Jones, 2001: 171). The manufacturer notes: ‘[t]his sound is just out of the range of an adult’s hearing, which is why it only bothers people under the age of about 25’.¹² To insure that no prolonged exposure could cause potential risks to youths’ hearing, the device can be equipped with an automatic shut-off feature that takes effect after 20 minutes of use. Once installed, the Mosquito can be pre-set to function at specific times, can be controlled remotely and can also be integrated to other surveillance equipment such as cameras. Hence, the task of dispersing the youths is delegated to the device, while the responsibility for its use is redistributed to the people who are in charge of determining the proper time-lapse for a kill switch.

The manufacturer confidently states: ‘[a]biding by international human rights legislation and medical reports we can ensure that it is safe to use without issue’.¹³ On the human rights front, Compound Security Systems hired the law firm Hewitsons¹⁴ to render an opinion as to whether the use of the device by shop owners, other premises owners and the police would be in breach of article 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (protection against torture, inhumane or degrading treatment): ‘[O]ur preliminary searches have found no instances where exposure to a particular pitch of a sound, rather than its volume, constitutes degrading treatment’ (p. 2). The firm reached a similar conclusion about article 11 (the right to assemble peacefully): ‘[t]he Device is not preventing people from assembling, but rather discouraging them from loitering in any particular place. Young people who can hear the sound emitted by the Device are not restrained but are free to move elsewhere’ (p. 2). And the same opinion prevailed about article 14 of the Act (protection from discrimination): ‘we have performed preliminary searches but have found nothing to suggest that groups of young people have the characteristics of a group that can be discriminated against’ (p. 2).

On the acoustic front, Compound Security Systems hired the Applied Environment Research Centre (AERC)¹⁵ to evaluate whether the Mosquito complies with the acoustic legislation in the United Kingdom, and to a lesser degree, internationally.¹⁶ Those laws mainly regulate noise that is prejudicial, or represents a nuisance to health in the workplace. AERC concluded that the Mosquito conformed to them because it was used in public places, not the workplace, and there were no regulations controlling frequency sounds in public areas. Moreover, the agency also doubted that it could qualify as a statutory nuisance: ‘[p]rovided that it can reasonably be demonstrated that its use, dispersing youths who may potentially cause disorder, is for the general good, it is probable that a statutory nuisance would not be demonstrated’ (p. 11).

On the health front, Compound Security had the Mosquito tested by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). NPL reported¹⁷ that the Mosquito, at a distance of 3 meters, emits 83.2 decibels (dB). The Health and Security Executive of the United Kingdom, the authority in charge of enforcing health and safety at workplaces, concluded that the international regulations set limits to avoid unpleasant subjective effects at 75 to 90 dB. The Mosquito exceeded the lower limits and was subjectively unpleasant. That is, after all, the objective. However, the same agency noted that the limits for occupational hearing damage, as opposed to unpleasant subjective noise for an 8-hour work-day, should be between 75 and 85 dB and, for an hour-long exposure, between 84 and 97dB. The NPL concluded that ‘[t]hese 1 hour exposure limits are perhaps the most relevant in the report and the Mosquito is seen to be just under this’ (p. 2). NPL inclined even more favorably toward the Mosquito when it evaluated it in relation to the UK Noise at Work regulations. Thus, exposure to the Mosquito, when it is for a period of less than an hour should not induce hearing damage, just the perception of an unpleasant subjective noise. While positively evaluating the safety of the Mosquito, the NPL was prudent: ‘[h]owever, consideration must be given to differences in the acoustical environment, the reproducibility of the acoustic output of the device and the actual distance to the observer in-situ’ (p. 2). This very topic—distance—is what became important when the Mosquito was imported into Canada in 2008. The Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, a division of the federal health authority, Health Canada, found the instructions too vague to protect people’s safety.¹⁸ It required the distributors to add a warning in the instructions to the buyer:

The device should be installed at an appropriate height (approximately 2.5 metres from the ground) to prevent people’s ears from coming within 30 cm of the device. A warning label, legible from 0.5 metre away, should be incorporated on the device indicating that hearing damage could occur of the speaker is 30 cm or closer to your ear.

(p. 2)

When we map the Mosquito of the manufacturer, the black box on the wall becomes a network of heterogeneous materials that connects a certain hearing threshold of the average youth, an age-related presbyacusis phenomenon and a desired reduction in youth loitering and antisocial behaviors in an area. The social values (the protection of private property and business profitability), desires (calm, uninterrupted customer traffic), identities (rowdy youth, a proactive citizenry, businesses as valid agents against youth antisocial behaviors, ineffective police), behaviors (‘taking the matter into one’s hands’) mobilized by Compound Security Systems are ordered through sound and space. It is the fluidity in one’s space that allows for the enjoyment of one’s facilities as well as profits and loss prevention for one’s business. This fluidity of space is achieved by skillfully mastering sound. The network the manufacturer creates also incorporates a specific materialization of human rights, an explicit measurement of acoustical effects as well as a precise evaluation of an unpleasant subjective noise and its health repercussions.

The manufacturer’s website features a long list of testimonies from house and business owners as well as police representatives declaring that, since installing the device, they have experienced a reduction in youth-loitering and antisocial behaviors in the targeted premises, as well as a drop in costs associated with those behaviors.¹⁹ In other words, the network holds all the listed entities together; the network works. The Mosquito succeeds at shaping the space into a fluid stream of passersby and customers. But, this is not the only instantiation of the Mosquito.

Arnaud’s Mosquito: A pain delivery mechanism

The controversy around the Mosquito in Quebec induced the authorities to study instances of Mosquito use elsewhere. One of them is the case of Arnaud in Aywaille, Belgium.²⁰ The stop where Arnaud and his schoolmates wait for the bus to take them home in the afternoon is situated by a bank. At one point, as part of the overhaul of its security system, the bank installs the Mosquito device on an exterior wall. The day the Mosquito is turned on, a new configuration of entities is created. The ‘high frequency waves’ travel to Arnaud’s ears while he is waiting for his bus. The effect continues over time and distance even when the bus takes him away from the school’s premises, to a point where he arrives home with a headache. The same scenario repeats over a few weeks. His mother suspects tension at school but Arnaud has another explanation: the Mosquito newly installed on the bank wall. After the mother contacts the bank to explain the situation, the authorities quickly remove the Mosquito. They explain that the device was purchased to ‘help avoiding youths gathering’ near the bank and that they did not want to cause harm to the schoolchildren.

This case could be dismissed as an error on the part of the bank that installed the Mosquito at the wrong place. However, for our analytical purposes, Arnaud’s Mosquito is instructive. It is when an object ‘breaks’ that we are better able to see past its former bounded unity and appreciate that it is a heterogeneous network ordering the world in a certain manner (Law, 1992). Three elements are noteworthy in this case: the legitimate occupation of space by youth, the changing property of space as well as the surprising invasiveness of sound and the exceptionality of the ‘average ear’.

Groups of youths can occupy a public space for justifiable purposes. Legitimately using a public space (even causing trouble doing so) and requiring intervention are two things that the Mosquito confuses. Moreover, intended discomfort turns into pain when youths cannot obey the device and move away. In this case, the conditions combine to substantiate the claim that the Mosquito is a ‘weaponized sound’ (Akiyama, 2010).

The Mosquito elucidates the property of space. While it might have been possible for the bank, the school and the street to cohabit peacefully in the past, the Mosquito reminds us that aerial space does not have finite borders and ultrasounds travel beyond the territorial limits of the land legally owned by the bank where the device is installed—40 meters according to the manufacturer’s tests. However, in the downtown core, few buildings are surrounded by so much private space; the street is right at the front door and neighboring properties have common walls. In those circumstances, it is difficult to ‘take matters in to your own hands’, as the manufacturer suggests. Moreover, contrary to what critics have said about it, the Mosquito does not transform a common space into the private site of the Mosquito owner. Rather, it actualizes the fact that the bank, the street and the school share a joint space and, in this case, are willing to work together to manage it. The Mosquito created an opportunity for a common zone of informal regulation and it forced, rather than stifled, the communication between the youths and adults. Through his mother, Arnaud’s voice was heard, and responded to, by the business people. Of course, that is not always the case regarding complaints filed against businesses whose Mosquitoes prevent children from playing outside or hurt the ears of pets or of personnel working nearby or force clientele to flee from a neighboring pub’s terrace. In all those instances, like a floating fence, the Mosquito transforms a common space into a clash or adds to an existing conflict.

The Mosquito sound is calibrated at 17 kilohertz or 83.2 decibels, a sound that should be unpleasant for the average youth in its vicinity. However, Arnaud’s case illustrates the fact that its effects can endure in time even when the exposure is brief. He experiences a ‘clinging’ sound that disturbs his hearing and provokes headaches even after he leaves the premises. Arnaud must not have average hearing. Like an average man, an average hearing might be rare. And, as we know, an average without a measure of dispersion is pointless.

The Mosquito of the manufacturer is not Arnaud’s Mosquito. The bank’s youth repellent articulates different social values (community), identities (youths legitimately occupying public space, youths with above-average hearing, businesses as good corporate citizens), desires (emphasizing virtuous neighborhood relations over preventing loitering and reducing vandalism costs) and behaviors (mediation). Arnaud’s Mosquito also mobilizes lay knowledge (pain can occur after a brief exposure, further away than the prescribed distance, and long after leaving the vicinity; average hearing is not representative of the hearing of a specific individual), as well as different material conditions (crowded downtown area). In that instance, the heterogeneous network that is the Mosquito, while retaining some of its original components, namely the high frequencies of 17 kilohertz and 83.2 decibels, is mostly a different network that generates a different ordering of the world and this one produces pain. Fortunately for Arnaud, this network of entities collapsed.

The Mosquito of the Regional Public Health Agency: An environmental pollution agent

Following the request of the Quebec municipality in 2009, the Regional Public Health Agency²¹ (RPHA) investigated the Mosquito. Its report expands the Mosquito’s actions significantly.²² Interestingly, the subjective ‘piercing sound’ that was central to other networks described so far takes a secondary place and we are facing new actors, namely a local charter of rights and freedoms and an auditory contaminant associated with community health.

The RPHA mobilizes Quebec’s own Charter of rights and freedoms and its definitions of basic rights such as access to public places, peaceful gatherings and protections against age discrimination (RPHA, 2009). Regarding the last one, the RPHA evaluates that the device causes harm to a whole generation since it does not distinguish between ‘delinquent’ and ‘non-delinquent’ youths. The figure of the loiterer is replaced here by the figure of the delinquent, heightening the burden on Mosquito users to aim specifically at somebody who has officially been apprehended by the law in the past. The RPHA further adds that preventive intervention by social workers focused on delinquents and drug users is efficient and has positive impacts, suggesting that the Mosquito has no such pedagogical and supportive effects.

Furthermore, the RPHA connects the Mosquito to community noise, a concept borrowed from the World Health Organization (WHO) and covered by the right to a healthy environment. Here the concerns relate less to the effect the Mosquito can have on its target, loitering or delinquent youth, and more to the people living and working in the vicinity of the device who are, maybe unknowingly, exposed to it. The RPHA connects the Mosquito to a complete ecology of sound. Sound and, even more so, noise, is one of many contaminants of the environment along with various solids, fluids, gases, odors, radiations and heat. Sound can be a nuisance causing deterioration in the quality of life, a difficult concept to measure but a crucial aspect of human experience. The RPHA, following the WHO, reiterates that noise can interfere with normal activities such as communication or rest, and, more importantly, can lead to individual and collective health problems. It lists difficulties in school, increases in cortisol levels in the brain, elevated blood pressure, temporary or permanent hearing loss, tinnitus, fatigue, nausea, anxiety and depression, cardiovascular diseases, increased aggressive behaviors and decline in community solidarity. For those reasons, the RPHA questions the harmlessness of the device. The agency supports its evaluation by thoroughly framing it within the technical and scientific aspects pertaining to the nature of sound, its measurement and the factors modulating the impacts of noise on health.

Sound is a material element defined in the report as a cyclical variation of pressure caused by compression and decompression of air (RPHA, 2009: 4). The RPHA affirms that a healthy youth perceives frequencies between 0.02 and 20 kilohertz (kHz). It also states that the Mosquito emits 17.5 to 18.5 kilohertz (kHz) and the equivalent of an acoustic pressure of 75 to 95 dB, at a distance of 1 meter. Below the 145 dB limit, the noise is considered a nuisance. However, in the WHO guidelines on community noise adopted by the RPHA, it is suggested that noise in open spaces during the day be limited to 50–55 dB and at night to 45 dB. Beyond those limits, the incidence of health problems listed above increases and some people may be affected sooner, and more intensely, than others.

The RPHA states that sensitivity to high frequencies depends in part on age but genetics also plays its part. Not all inner ears are created equal. Some young people will never be sensitive to the frequencies of the Mosquito; some adults will always remain so because of heredity. Hence, in this instantiation, the Mosquito does not divide the population along an age dichotomy (young/old) but along a sensitivity continuum, and sensitivity, contrary to age, is hard to identify and predict. From presbyacusis and the average youth’s aural sensitivity in the case of the manufacturer, we proceed to varied sensitivity to high frequencies according to age and heredity in the case of RPHA. This means going from no health risks to some. Because the RPHA judges that there are more fruitful alternatives (street workers) and because of the risks to individual and community health as well as the concrete environmental pollution involved, it recommends adopting the precautionary principle in relation to the Mosquito.

The Mosquito network enacted by the RPHA is comprised of the social values and desires of environmental purity and community health. This network is also built on the identities of delinquent, age and genetically auditory-sensitivity as well as Quebec as a quality-of-life champion. As in the manufacturer’s network, the RPHA mobilizes law and science. The laws and governing bodies are both local (Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and global (World Health Organization). The science of acoustics is also different from the science invoked in the other two cases. Whereas the estimated frequencies and acoustic pressures of the Mosquito are similar to the ones measured by the manufacturer, the threshold of pain and nuisance used for evaluating its effects are not the same. RPHA is not so much interested in the repercussion of high frequencies on their designated targets, it is interested in the effect the Mosquito has on the ambient level of noise for the people living and working in the area. The Mosquito of the RPHA orders the world mostly according to ideals and standards of global community and environmental health.

Discussion

Like many criminologists, we are interested in the ‘mechanics of power’ (Law, 1992). Alongside other STS inspired researchers in the discipline, we want to participate in carving a more prominent role for non-humans in this mechanics. To do so, and following ANT and similar perspectives, we conceive of objects as mediators and multiple:

To use Langdon Winner’s (1980) phrase, artefacts may, indeed, have politics. But the character of those politics, how determinate they are, and whether it is possible to tease people and machines apart in the first instance—these are all contingent questions.

(Law, 1992: 383)

Objects have politics. Objects and humans (the technical and the social) are intricately connected. And objects’ politics are situational. These are the foundations of our analysis of the youth repellent.

A box emitting ultrasounds to drive out youths from some locations is hardly advanced technology. Yet, despite its apparent simplicity, the Mosquito mediates between people and space by acting on a subtle physical marker: the inner ear’s sensitivity. It absorbs the complexity of situations by connecting specific symbolic and physical entities together. In doing so, it patterns the world around us. The Mosquito of the manufacturer does it through the following categories: humans are either adults (beyond 25 years old) or youths, valuable customers or impediments to business, the sound emitted is either not heard or only felt as an annoyance. Youth is equated with other nuisances that must be managed. Arnaud’s Mosquito patterns the world through different criteria: average or above average ear sensitivity, mobility or captivity, cramped or spacious neighborhoods. In this case, youths need to be protected from the sound. Finally, the Mosquito of the Regional Public Health Agency sorts out the world through gradients such as genetics of audition, levels of environmental noise pollution and ranges of long-term individual and community health repercussions. It is a patterning of the world where the youths targeted by the Mosquito are secondary to the collective body. In brief, the Mosquito is not a mechanism that seamlessly achieves the objectives of its designers. It is much more inventive and powerful than that. It engages local heterogeneous entities in ways that produce different orderings.

It would be too quick a conclusion to think that the box on the wall emitting high frequencies is a benign preventive technology that decreases loitering and its related costs, or that it is a pain delivery mechanism, or that it is an environmental pollutant. Those instantiations are all real and possible but they are contingent. They come to life depending on the distance between the device and its targets, the heredity of the people in the vicinity, the density level in a neighborhood and so on. Materials and material conditions enable, direct, make some actors pertinent and some actions possible but others not. Since the Mosquitoes are sociotechnical networks, composed of social and material elements, and not only representations, they might not all coexist in a local situation. To return to the example from Annemarie Mol (2003) we referred to previously, the atherosclerosis in the surgeon’s clinic (a weak pulse in the leg of a living patient) cannot coexist with the atherosclerosis in the pathology laboratory (a thickening of the intima in the vessel wall of an amputated leg). The three Mosquito networks we described undoubtedly share some common elements, such as 17 kilohertz frequencies, but the analysis specifically aims to illustrate that one is also many (Mol, 2003).²³ It is tempting to fall into a technological determinist or essentialist position and impose a unity upon these three networks, to subsume them as facets of one single object or to assign importance only to the parts of those networks that overlap, rejecting the others as idiosyncratic representations. However, this would negate the specificities and relative independence of each youth repellent. They all are effective in changing the world around them in different directions.

Without denying the fruitfulness of existing criminological analyses of technology, and of the Mosquito in particular, we want to join those who revisit the assumptions behind some predominant theoretical models, more specifically their tendency toward a human-centered perspective. The emphasis on the latter might restrict our analysis to the world of ideas and even take us toward a form of relativism. Objects count: ‘[A]ll of our interactions with other people are mediated through objects […] [and those objects] participate in the social, they shape it’ (Law, 1992: 382). The Mosquitoes modify business owners’ practices, turn a sidewalk into a segregated zone, bring neighbors together to negotiate their shared spaces and raise concerns at the town hall meeting over noise pollution.

Moreover, we are looking for a way to engage with the world that is more coherent with the relative indeterminacy of realities that are in the process of being born and continuously re-made. Social change is the product of differences occurring in micro-associations, among humans and non-humans that are perpetually being enacted in our daily lives; hence, the interest in the material turn. It calls for methods that do justice to the messiness of our world. The Mosquito cannot be anything and everything (representations), but it can be many things (sociotechnical reality) and we need an analysis that allows for it.

‘For many scientific researchers, to slow down and lose one’s time with questions that do not directly contribute to the immediate and evaluable progress of their field is something akin to a sin—to a temptation a true scientist knows he has to resist’ (Stengers, 2011: 4–5). In a field of study that some conceive as social engineering aiming at fixing crime and order problems, the same view exists. However, not only is there space for theorization in criminology, there is also a practical value in ‘thickening’ our views. Indeed, when deployed, the performances of a technological object open up different options for political engagements. Simplification, whether it is choosing to conceive of objects as intermediaries over mediators or selecting epistemology (unicity) over ontology (multiplicity), comes at a cost.²⁴ While it might be neat and tidy, the model resulting from simplification rarely fits the intricacies of experiences (Gomart, 2002; Gomart and Hennion, 1999; valentine, 2007). We have had very partial success when trying to order the world, both conceptually and practically, through thin objects. It might be time to realize that we need to deal with thick things. Opting for complexity, we observe orderings that differ from one another by privileging some entities over other ones. Therefore, we can witness the way an ordering is built and maintains itself. This ontological politics opens up possibilities: ‘[o]ur task is to study these materials and [patterning], to understand how they realize themselves, and to note that it could and often should be otherwise’ (Law, 1992: 390).

Why not slow down and engage in a criminology of sociotechnical orderings, one that could shed a different light on technologies? Why not take the time and engage with material reality and its requirements, agreeing to ‘follow the actors’ (Latour, 2005) through surprising empirical exploration rather than instrumentalizing the ‘data’ according to a view decided a priori. Why not develop sensitivity to distinctions and explore the situated heterogeneous networks that make a technological object and that result from it? Being ontologically curious requires being analytically slow. It is an invitation to become an amateur engineer, lawyer, audiologist, political scientist, urban planner, epidemiologist, if only for the duration of a research project. Slowing down means transgressing disciplinary borders just like the technological objects that populate our world continuously do. Criminology was born at the crossroads of different disciplines (law, psychology, sociology). The material turn invites us to renew this intellectual engagement and accelerates it so as to become even more inclusive.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the organizers of and the participants in the second FORCCAST (Formation par la cartographie des controverses à l’analyse des sciences et des techniques) Summer School, held in Paris, 26–28 August 2015, for their thoughtful comments on a preliminary version of this article. We are also grateful to Joeri Bruyninckx at the Max Plank Institute for History of Science, Berlin, for sharing with us his work on high-frequency technologies for animal control and their potential re-purposing for controlling youth. We want to thank Uri Ben-Gal for his diligent editing work. Finally, we are indebted toward the editors and anonymous evaluators for their careful readings and enlightened suggestions.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Patrick Savoie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.

Martin Dufresne is a Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.

Dominique Robert is a Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.

The three authors are pursuing research inspired by Science and Technology Studies on topics such as big data and the renewal of biocriminology.

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