Glitch(ing)! A refusal and gateway to more caring techno-urban worlds?

A glitch is known as a visual or audible phenomenon of disruption in the technological environment, but has become a much wider concept in queer-feminist as well as artistic theories and practices. In increasingly ‘smartified’ (urban) spaces, in which the digital and the analog are inevitably intertwined, thinking about glitches in the code and concrete of our cities has become a popular conceptualization and bottom-up practice to challenge power dynamics. This paper advocates for understanding the glitch as threefold: the glitch can be 1. a fleeting, but potentially violent error – either by mistake (technical) or by design (social). 2. It marks a moment of refusal or block of prevailing systems; and 3. It functions as a gateway for changing what it reveals as flawed.
This paper explores to what extent glitches are a helpful concept to analyze patriarchally dominated technocapitalist cities today in order to point out undesirable, exclusionary developments. Often being programmed out of systems’ designs, grassroots urbanist actors, in particular, have reclaimed glitches to refuse these tendencies. Drawing on (auto-)ethnographic fieldwork in 2021-22 we demonstrate how glitches open up new possibilities for resisting (technological) restraint of spaces and bodies – on an individual level as a flâneuse* and collectively as hackfeminists. “Fixing” unpredictable, desired, and even self-produced glitches as a way of refusing current power dynamics, however, bares the risk of romanticizing violent misrepresentations and mending what needs systemic change. Nevertheless, the portrayed bottom-up practices are important examples for breaking with hardcoded binaries. Be it as lone flâneuse* or cyberfeminist collective: their refusal formulates alternative, plural futures which uses glitch(ing) as gateways to more caring techno-urban worlds.