Networked Disobedience to Social Datafication: Backlash Against Smart Urban Technologies in (Post-)Movement Hong Kong

Burgeoning studies have examined how AI systems and data technologies have constituted both a new locus and a tool of contentious politics. Yet much remains to be understood about the ways in which social datafication opens up or closes off political opportunities for the articulation of networked activism and political contention, especially in the context of emergent authoritarian or hybrid regimes, which have thus far been neglected in the literature. During the anti-extradition bill movement (AEBM) and in its aftermath, opposing public perceptions of and responses to one of Hong Kong’s prominent projects of social datafication, namely smart lampposts, were marked by intense episodes of discontent. The case of Hong Kong offers a vantage point into the latest contours of data disobedience to smart urban technologies – that is, direct action self-mobilised and self-organised by digitally enabled citizens and activists to subvert or disrupt the dominant structure of the smart city.

Drawing on the case of Hong Kong, this papers sets out to investigate the networked dynamics and practices of data disobedience that (re)appropriates the saturated digital environment of smart city to resist and counter data-intensive technologies of the state. Using digital analysis and archival research, it uncovers how citizens and activists developed and adapted to different logics of data disobedience through 1) crowding, 2) curating and 3) crowdsourcing in the networked urban setting. By analysing the types of counter-imaginaries and citizen actions involved, it highlights how the development and evolution of the networked action repertoires of data disobedience open up mediation opportunity structure for dissent, amidst and despite the increasingly authoritarian protocols. In doing so, this paper illustrates how seemingly ordinary issues of smart city development may be repurposed as a new stake in the (re)production of contentious politics during movement protests.