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The Competing Humanisms of the Digital City

The realization of the digital order through the human is more than an empirical observation; it is more than a discursive trope developed by policy makers, the media, advertisers; it is more than the enactment of a neoliberal system of control. At the heart of this book is the thesis that the digital order reflects the revived and contradictory mobilization of humanist values across different quarters of the city - but only for opposing purposes. These are values that, through their contradictions, are gaining renewed currency by imagining and planning relationships between humans and data, humans and machines, humans and humans, humans and non-human life. For example, 'smart camera' networks expand in the name of sustainable urbanism and are used for managing 'the complex urban metabolism', as suggested by D'Amico et al. (2020), who adopt the language of living organisms ('metabolism') to describe the seemingly convergent needs of the city and its people. A corporate-academic-local governance network, TmplTalks, is concerned with urban populations' loneliness, setting as its goal 'to use technology to enhance life in the city and decrease the negative effects of always being connected' (Collier 2019). And the United Nations now identifies Internet connectivity and information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures as 'digital public goods' - these being considered fundamental to fighting the social inequalities (United Nations 2022b) that impoverish so many and destabilize several societies.

Fundamentally, the mobilization of humanist values for order (and sometimes against it) reflects the discursive and performative struggles for the city: on the one hand, these values rally to obscure the cruelty of urban inequalities by relocating hope for change within technology; on the other, when integrated into oppositional political imaginaries, the same values appear as a call for imagining different ways of 'being human in a connected planet' (Plummer 2021). Alongside Chernilo (2017), I am wary of the revived currency of humanism, especially as it is historically tied to a Eurocentric humanist episteme and the contemporary reproduction of specific conceptions of humanity and its values - not least because these reproduce 'racist claims of Enlightenment rationality in the West/North as well as the equally racist claims laid by elite postcolonial theories that see universal values as unique to the Western project' (Dutta and Pal 2020: 350). But, like many scholars of critical humanism, from Fanon to Mbembe and from Chernilo to Plummer and Gilroy, I, too, am aware that what is at stake in the revival of humanist values surpasses their hasty dismissal. As humanist values in fact drive many humanisms rather than just one, they reveal struggles between power and resistance and between opposing promises about the urban world and statements about what it should be like. These dynamics are reflected in the coexisting but competing humanisms that emerge for, within, and against the digital order: popular humanism, demotic humanism, and critical humanism. In what follows I will discuss them one by one.

The ideology of the digital order: Popular humanism

If humanism was to be understood merely as an old discursive property of colonialism and racial capitalism, the advance of the digital order in the name of the human good could be simply read as a marketing trope of corporate, media, and state actors. Digital practices centred on the individual or collective self could be simply read as performative enactment of datafied lives. This book questions this reading. It challenges conceptions of the performative and discursive manifestation of digitization as mere effects of an order determined in Big Tech's headquarters, laboratories, and factories. Instead, it identifies the rhetorics and performances of the digital order as core elements of deep and wide processes of change in the relational constitution of cities, technology, and power. The more I have observed practices and studied discourses of digital transformation, the more it became apparent that the rhetorics and performances privileging progressive values against patriarchal and racial capitalist domination are not an add-on to the digital order. In fact, when we think of established or aspiring technologized cities, we cannot understand their current constitution outside these rhetorics and performances of greener, more equitable and diverse urbanism, what I understand as the popular humanism of the digital order. This proliferation of the popular humanist rhetoric is the first manifestation of ideas and practices showing how the digital order cannot be normalized and legitimized through infrastructural and market priorities alone. The digital order also needs a cultural justification, a promise for better human futures.

What does this mean? The digital order, as it emerges in the contexts of deepening systemic crises and growing public mistrust, works not as a technocentric but as a humancentric project. Popular humanism elevates the human who consumes, works, and socializes digitally to the condition of agent who makes and changes cities - a new, digitally constituted, but also progressive and ethical entrepreneur of the self and of the city. This humancentrism is not interchangeable with anthropocentrism - which is the elevation of (certain) humans' interests above all forms of life, with catastrophic effects for the planet (Plummer 2021). Rather anthropocentrism, as we will see in what follows, is hidden behind popular humanism's contradictory narratives, which range from individual well-being to sustainable cities.

In the rehumanizing discourse of popular humanism, we are being repeatedly told, technology is not the endpoint. It is instead the means for achieving better lives, sustainability, and freedom. Investment in digital infrastructures advances equitable, green, and sustainable cities (Mayor of London 2018a), reliable connectivity, and sustainable relationships (Collier 2019) among humans and between humans and non-humans, while smart technologies are fundamental to ensuring political accountability and transparency (World Bank 2023). Anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism are at the heart of the rehumanizing rhetoric of popular humanism. This is seen, for example, in a corporate campaign of France Digitale for humane technological futures, and in Big Data for Humans (2017), a start-up declaring that it programs data and platform applications to listen and speak to users as humans, and not the other way around.

'The popular' in popular humanism speaks to Raymond Williams' (1958) and Stuart Hall's (1981) influential definition of popular culture as a site of power. The concept of popular humanism works in tandem with that of demotic humanism, as will be shown later. The former mobilizes a technological populism to take possession of everyday life by promising progress through digitization, while the latter reveals how culture, as an ordinary presence, remains a site of negotiation, struggle, and resistance (Williams 1958) at a time when these conditions are being rearticulated in tech cities. The concept of popular humanism also draws on current conversations around the manifestations of the popular as a site of struggle within digital cultures - important conversations, which have been a source of inspiration for this book. Most notably, Banet-Weiser (2018) speaks of popular feminism as a normative realm where claims for gender equality are mediated through the lens of a consumer- and screen-friendly positive change within, and never against, the heteronormative whiteness of the capitalist and corporate order. Popular humanism is situated on the same terrain of technological, visual, and discursive economy that in this case normalizes digital change as a necessary and unique pathway to progress, sustainability, and freedom in the city.

The digital order's popular humanism needs to be situated within the political and moral ecosystem, where the concept of humanity seems to gain new relevance as a political and moral category. Even now, at a time of fierce critique of the Anthropocene - the disastrous domination of humanity over nature - or perhaps precisely because of this critique, many claims are being made on behalf of humanity (Cielemecka and Daigle 2019). The rise of new social movements most powerfully expresses the recentring, in crucial matters, of a decentred and pluriversal humanity: Black Lives Matter puts the value of living in safety and dignity back at the core of its activism, #MeToo reclaims care, solidarity, and respect for women in its campaigning, while Extinction Rebellion contests environmental catastrophe's threat to all life and well-being on the planet. Resulting from many urban citizens' shattered trust in the state, the market, and technology, these claims have been anchored in cities and amplified through decentred networks of communication. They are claims to pluriversality and justice that often originate at the social margins and can in principle destabilize order. While their oppositional politics may and sometimes does still achieve that, as we will discuss in Chapter 5, what we often also see is their incorporation into market-based discourses that celebrate difference and digital solutionist responses to inequalities.

In the context of the now perpetual crises that hit cities hard, urban humanity has become a site of...