The project is based on an understanding of humans as post-social beings who live their lives as part of complex, connected and messy self-organizing yet non-naturalistic geographies (e.g., Braidotti 2013; Thrift 2011). This nature-culture continuum is not a new human condition, but contemporary technologies have radically changed the rhythm and composition of life in what is often referred to as the ‘smart city’. To young people, this means that relations with urban environments are built with digital infrastructure that includes commercial computer screens, mobile phones, navigation systems, social media platforms etc., and it is from these assemblages that their bodies and subjectivities emerge. Digital interfaces – largely shaped by the interests of the capital – bring with them new means of control through affect. Interfaces are not just passive intermediaries, but active agents in the city, which naturalizes certain behavior and knowledge, while marginalizing others (Amin & Thrift 2002). These totalizing geographies are highly affectual, ergo radically re-ordering young people’s existential conditions, bodies, and subjectivities. The project produces an analysis of the affective charges of these geographies, as well as new techniques and vocabularies to think of the ways in which young political subjects are formed in the post-social city, where sociality is no longer limited to human groups and politics is always a more-than-human endeavor.
The project asks whether the speed and continual quest for the novel – which often come with daily digital interfaces – allows for the moment of hesitation that lies at the heart of enchantment (see Pyyry 2016). Enchantment becomes possible via genuine engagement with the ordinary: it emerges in dwelling. Interfaces create a feeling of an open world, where anything is accessible. Algorithms can detect not only people’s preferences but also boredom and other moods, and content is tailored to capture the attention of users as they ‘click away’ (Karppi 2015; Paasonen 2018). The event of enchantment can be hereby foreclosed by inciting curiosity (Pyyry 2019).