Locative Media Geoplaced Tactics of Resistance
NOTE: The author and publication venue for this title could not be confirmed. The entry below describes the subject the title names and the literature it belongs to; the citation should be completed by anyone who knows the original.
Subject
The title names the strand of locative media practice that treats location technology as an instrument of resistance rather than of service — using position, mapping and mobile networks tactically, against the institutions that normally deploy them.
Tactics and Strategies
The framing is Michel de Certeau's, from The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). A strategy is available to an actor with a proper place — an institution, a state, a corporation — which can survey a field from a fixed position and act on it over time. A tactic belongs to those without such a place: it operates in the space of the other, seizes opportunities as they arise, cannot accumulate its gains, and depends on timing rather than on position.
Location technology is, in its origins and its infrastructure, entirely strategic. GPS is a military system; mapping is proprietary; the networks are licensed and logged. Geoplaced tactics are attempts to use that apparatus from the position of the person being located.
Forms
- Counter-mapping. Producing maps that institutional cartography does not — of surveillance camera placement, of privatised public space, of extraction sites, of border infrastructure. See An Atlas of Radical Cartography and Paglen.
- Sousveillance. Steve Mann's inversion of surveillance: recording from below, by the watched rather than the watchers. See James Fung.
- Avoidance and obfuscation. Routing to evade cameras or checkpoints; noise injection; false trails; the practices grouped under geocloaking. Brunton and Nissenbaum's Obfuscation (2015) is the general treatment.
- Coordination. The use of mobile networks to organise dispersed action faster than a hierarchical response can adapt — the mechanism Rheingold identified in Smart Mobs.
- Occupation and annotation. Attaching contested information to a place, so that the terrain itself carries an argument. Compare narrative archaeology.
The Limits
The tactical framing carries its own critique, and the locative media literature made it early. Tactics leave no lasting position, by de Certeau's own definition, which means they cannot consolidate. The infrastructure remains owned by the party being resisted, and can be withdrawn or reconfigured. Counter-mapping projects have a poor survival rate once their funding or their maintainer moves on. And the same techniques that enable coordination enable identification of the coordinators — the mobile phone that organises a demonstration also produces a record of who attended.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This strand is the most direct answer to a question the field raises constantly: what can be done from inside a system one did not design and cannot leave. Its honest conclusion — that tactics work, that they do not accumulate, and that the asymmetry of infrastructure is not addressed by clever use of it — is more useful than either technological optimism or refusal.
