(A day's worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018)
The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection
and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves and have-nots. Moreover, this
binary logic follows on burgeoning urban inequalities in a neo-liberal age, and
growing chasms in wealth and opportunity only seem to confirm the either/or
logic of digital capitalism. In cities,
it echoes in the dreadful calculus of gentrification and abandonment, capital
investment and disinvestment, inclusion and exclusion. But is dis-connection
only an absence? In this paper, I
explore absences and disconnections in social media and in urban networks as latencies
visible through an application of structural holes, triadic closure, structural
equivalence and other social network tools to digital media in cities. This work is inspired both by Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet”
and his insights that even forms of social life thoroughly imbricated in
capitalism nevertheless contain a “surplus” of potentiality that gestures
towards critical, emancipatory futures. In
addition, the work is inspired by anthropological methods from Alfred Russel Wallace
and others that take absence as data points in the empirical proof of
presence. I argue that even absence itself
is imbricated by a “horror vacui” that sets up presence as a moral dialectic. In this paper, these take the form of alternatives
that connect equity, justice and utopian alternatives to disinvestment and
abandonment visible through analyses of diverse digital platforms, including
social media, app platforms and website connectivity. Ultimately, this research builds on
anthropologies that move beyond the narration of what is to the speculative
design of what should be.
