Paula Bialski

The dynamics of software – and thus also of its development – is an inherent part of the story of how mobilities are made and work. Building on this argument, this ethnographic study explains how navigation software development is caught in a constant culture of acceleration through commercial competition and shifting transport conditions, on the one hand, and a logic of routing and navigation based on creating the fastest route possible for its users, on the other hand. Behind this overall process of technological acceleration lies a multiplicity of forces – sometimes accelerating, but at other times slowing down, stuttering, moving in reverse, or completely coming to a halt in breakdown, shifting the pace of such technological progress. Bringing software development practice into the picture of how mobility systems work (or don’t work) allows us to understand the multiple temporal orders of speeding up and slowing down that push and pull at the fabric of our mobile infrastructures. Doing so will help us counter the popular discourse that our networked, seamless digital technologies are invincible. Based on an ethnography at ‘BerlinTech’, a large commercial navigation software company, this paper provides a multilayered understanding about the temporal forces fuelling our software driven mobility infrastructures.

Hardly a day passes without news of a major hack, leak, or breach; with the scale of computer use and reliance on digital forms of data, no sector of society is immune to these data dumps, infiltrations, and floods. From the surveillance of dissidents to the hacking of elections to the weaponization of memes, hacking is changing in character, and it is changing the world. In this issue we ask whether hacking and hacks have crossed a techno-political threshold: how are hacks, leaks and breaches transforming our world, creating new collectives, and changing our understanding of security and politics. How has the relationship of hacking and hackers to their own collectives, to governments, and to the tools and techniques been transformed recently? What does it mean to be a hacker these days, and how does it differ from engineering, from “cyber-security,” from information warfare or from hacktivism?

Abstract: Who exactly defines the internal flows of the city, and what happens when this 'flow' is rendered bottom-up? Rather than exploring the ways in which the digital affects the organisation of the city, in this paper, I aim to show how certain smart systems of coordination – based on a non-digital 'smartness' – exist in parallel to the increasingly digital smart city today. Various forms of improvised coordination and humanled calculation are an integral part of the smartness of a city and must not be overlooked. Drawing on ethnography of train ticket sharing networks in Germany, this paper explores the assemblages of human and non-human, digital and analogue actors that can attach themselves to an existent system, acting as 'parasitic infrastructure'. Understanding how these parasitic infrastructures emerge highlights how systems of calculation and computation exist beyond just the digital.

This special issue of ephemera maps social practices of collective organizing on a low budget in cities today. ‘"Saving" the city’ expresses the imperative to economize while at the same time harbouring the desire to ‘rescue’ – recollecting an urban civil society via mobilising the public, helping neighbourhoods, creating public spaces, and heterogeneous possibilities of living to cope with today’s and future challenges. To overcome established, purely economic dimensions of saving, the contributions explore the complexity of ‘saving’ through the interplay of organizations, resources, lifestyles and moral economies. We collected contributions from an interdisciplinary set of researchers as well as urban ‘practitioners’ to explore the way in which discourses of austerity, of resource scarcity and urban life interconnect and are producing a sort of different urban practice.

New technologies in use today like CouchSurfing.com are allowing people to create planned encounters, en masse, between other strangers. These ‘technologies of hospitality’ are producing new rules of engagement, and new relationships that blur the boundaries between friend, acquaintance, stranger and enemy – boundaries that are yet to be defined.