Digital infrastructure, ultra-fast broadband, and citizenship in the Gigatown competition in the South Island, Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Gigatown (2013–2014) was a joint initiative between the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand government to award a town ‘The fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere’ through a social media competition. Gigatown involved the production, by participating towns, of social media content that demonstrated the economic and other benefits of ultra-fast broadband and gigabit connectivity. This paper argues that the competition’s logics are biopolitical in the valorization of citizenship as tied to social media and information and communications technologies (ICT) proficiency. Focusing on the South Island city of Dunedin, and drawing on the conceptual framework of somatechnics for understanding the embodied relationship between governance and technology, I show how the competition somatechnically positions residents as consumer-citizens whose social media proficiency and digital labour facilitate their participation in policy planning and development. In order to meet infrastructural planning priorities for the penetration of ultra-fast broadband into business and consumer domains, the competition incited and relied on residents’ civic love and volunteer labour for their city’s future. Such labour is ‘spaced-off’ as de-materialized and de-territorialized, construed as something done for fun in spare time, which left some participants experiencing burnout in their somatechnical embodiment of active digital citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Gigatown
• biopolitics
• somatechnics
• digital policy
• urban planning
• internet

Introduction

Gigatown (2013–2014) was a joint initiative between the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand government to award a town ‘The fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere’ (Chorus – ‘#Gigaschools Questions’ n.d.-a) through a social media competition. The competition formed part of the National Government’s telecommunications policy to implement a national broadband scheme and foster the widespread adoption of ultra-fast broadband (UFB) (see Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment 2017). Gigatown involved the production, by participating towns, of social media content that demonstrated the economic and other benefits of UFB and gigabit connectivity. The Gigatown initiative deployed a competition as a policy and planning mechanism through which resource allocation is implemented. This paper argues that the competition’s logics are biopolitical and have implications for the urban governance and valorization of citizenship as tied to social media and information and communications technologies (ICT) proficiency.

Focusing on the South Island city of Dunedin, I contextualize Gigatown within broader neoliberal urban rationalities that extol entrepreneurialism and creativity as solutions to economic decline resulting from de-industrialization and diminishing state funding for city infrastructure. Drawing on the conceptual framework of somatechnics for understanding the embodied relationship between governance and technology, I show how the competition somatechnically positions residents as consumer-citizens whose social media proficiency and digital labour facilitate their participation in policy planning and development. In order to meet infrastructural planning priorities for the penetration of ultra-fast broadband into business and consumer domains, the competition incited and relied on residents’ civic love and volunteer labour for their city’s future. Such labour is ‘spaced-off’ (Pugliese 2010) as de-materialized and de-territorialized, construed as something done for fun in spare time, which left some participants experiencing burnout in their somatechnical embodiment of active digital citizenship.

The research presented in this paper is drawn from a University of Otago Grant: ‘Competing Futures: Community building and the Gigatown competition in the South Island’. This project collated policy documents, media reporting, promotional material, Gigatown website and social media content, and through interviews, community and participant views of the Gigatown competition (2013–2016). South Island towns and in particular, Dunedin, formed the focus of the Gigatown material collected. Fifteen interviews were conducted in total from the end of 2015 to the middle of 2016. Two interviewees were involved in Invercargill’s Gigatown bid, three were from Chorus’ marketing team, and the remainder were from Dunedin. The latter included personnel who managed the competition as part of the Digital Office, on behalf of the Dunedin City Council (DCC), as well as volunteers. Mahdis Azarmandi, Lewis Rarm, and Sarah Gallagher provided research assistance in the collation, coding, and summarization of the project data. The overall aim of the project was to understand citizens’ views regarding a competition as the policy mechanism through which vital telecommunications infrastructure might be implemented in their town. Previous publications from this project have examined the competition as a digital cartography enterprise which involves the spatial planning and mapping of particular places for digital futures (Randell-Moon 2018a) and the competition as a form of digital infrastructure allocation which assumes and normalizes the digitization of municipal services as a neutral or efficient process (Randell-Moon 2018b). This paper focuses on the financial and planning value extracted from volunteer labour, which is de-materialized and de-territorialized as fun and undertaken in participants’ spare time.

To provide a geographical context, Aotearoa was separated by settler colonial geographies into two islands, the South or Te Waipounamu and the North or Te Ika-a-Māui. The latter is smaller geographically but more populous owing to the major economic and governmental institutions of the country being located in either Wellington (Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara) or Auckland (Tāmaki-makau-rau). Dunedin or Ōtepoti is located in the South Island. Due to the location of the University of Otago and previous manufacturing and export industries that operated out of its harbour, Dunedin is one of the most populous and prosperous towns in the South Island. However, population drift to the North, a transitory student and worker population associated with the University, and de-industrialization have led to efforts by the DCC to brand Dunedin as a creative, cultural, and digital city to attract professionals and revitalize its economy (see Dunedin City Council n.d. (a),(b),(c)). At the ‘Seminar: Drivers of Urban Change – Dunedin’ public event, Mayor Dave Cull emphasized that ‘Dunedin’s liveability’ was crucial to attracting ‘a highly skilled workforce’ who could create ‘light’ product, ‘easily transported down a fibre optic cable’ (author notes 2016). Such workers are desirable because they have a high level of expendable income and are thought to settle in places that offer significant lifestyle benefits through culture and infrastructure (see Florida 2005).

As someone who is employed in the university sector and took up residence in Dunedin because of this work, I am intimately implicated in the city’s strategies for economic revitalization and benefit enormously from the resources and infrastructure dedicated to this task. At the same time, I am aware of the power geometries created by my place, and others like me, in the city. Power geometry is described by Doreen Massey in terms of the differentiated mobility afforded to some groups and individuals within city spaces (1994, 149). As an example, she points out that whenever someone uses a private car for transport, they are reducing the ‘financial viability of the public transport system’ (150). Massey’s ideas are useful for thinking about the political implications of digital and marketing strategies such as Gigatown. On the one hand, the competition evidences community participation and engagement with a town or city’s economic and digital infrastructure and future. On the other hand, the parameters of the competition and economic discourse surrounding the information and knowledge economy necessarily prioritize lifestyles and forms of employment associated with that economy.

Before examining the social and political implications of the competition’s facilitation of citizenship, I will provide an overview of the competition and contextualize it as part of a broader digital infrastructural drive to extend internet consumption in New Zealand. I then discuss the digital and marketing strategies for UFB that constitute a somatechnics of digital infrastructure that equates good citizenship with a desire for the future economic benefits projected to occur through ICT. This somatechnical construction of good citizenship is biopolitical because it depends on spatial and classed access to ICT. I suggest that in order for the Gigatown competition to promote social media proficiency as unproblematically beneficial to communities and towns like Dunedin, the spatial and bodily predicates of this labour are ‘spaced-off’ (Pugliese 2010). That is, in the climate of community spirit generated by the competition and the significant contribution made by volunteers, the labour and time required to implement digital infrastructure and the transformation of urban services may be overlooked.

Participating in the Gigatown competition

As explained above, Gigatown was jointly executed by the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand government. It was run as a social media competition to award a New Zealand town Gigabit connectivity at wholesale prices (prior to its installation in other cities) and a $200,000 development fund (Chorus – ‘The Prize’ n.d.[c]). It was officially launched on 28 October 2013 and concluded on 17 September 2014. At a gala function in Wellington, the Communications Minister Amy Adams announced Dunedin as the winner of the competition on 26 November 2014. When it was launched, towns had to pre-register with Gigatown to compete. Larger cities such as Auckland and Wellington were separated into distinct areas in an attempt to equalize the population proportions of participating areas (see Randell-Moon 2018a). The competition also excluded places where Chorus did not hold the contract for delivering the fibre for ultra-fast broadbandfor instance, Christchurch, Whangarei, Hamilton, and some other North Island towns (Crown Fibre Holdings Limited 2016).

Participation and progression in the competition was visualized through a live leader board on the official #Gigatown site (http://gigatown.co.nz/) with points indicating each town’s position relative to others. Towns accrued points based on the number and volume of social media use, which included Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and blogs. Towns were assigned hashtags to indicate the production of Gigatown content, for example, #gigatownqueenstown and #gigatownqtn. Social media content comprised 25% of the total score determining the winner. The remainder comprised 6% for an Instagram selfie video, 6% for a finals quiz, 13% for supporter sign ups and 50% for producing a ‘Plan for Gig Success’ (see Randell-Moon 2018a). The latter was required from the five finalists (Gisborne, Dunedin, Wanaka, Timaru, and Nelson) and judged by ‘a panel of influential Kiwis including Andy Hamilton, Cecilia Robinson, Rod Oram, Sam Johnson, Lillian Grace and Lorraine Menta’ (StopPress 2015) and the public (the panel and public were allocated 35% and 15% weighting respectively). According to Chorus, 50 towns participated in the competition, there were 990,917 visits to the main Gigatown website, and ‘5,950,000 conversations on social media about Gigatown and the power of UFB’ (Chorus – ‘The Idea’Chorus, n.d.-b).

Because the competition took place for a little over a year, Chorus introduced one-off competitions and special prizes to mobilize continued participation. For instance, mini-contests such Gigaschools and Gigabusinesses involved schools and businesses creating videos outlining the benefits of UFB to their respective fields. Two representatives from each of five finalists were also partially sponsored by Chorus to visit Chattanooga in Tennessee, United States. This visit showcased an international city that had already benefited from fibre infrastructure and which boasted one of the fastest internet speeds in the world (see Lanaria, Vincent 2015). Given the local purchase from smaller participating towns (see Randell-Moon 2018a) the competition was successful in promoting its message broadly across the islands. Chorus won a prestigious advertising award (see StopPress 2015). Gigatown was a lively and affective development project marked by accusations of cheating, spamming, trolling, misplaced intra- and inter-town loyalties, wasteful spending (namely from the government, Chorus, and local municipalities), and technical misinformation (other locations had UFB before the competition and internet service providers [ISPs] didn’t sign on to deliver it until late in the competition) (see Otago Daily Times 20133 News 2014; Telfer 2014). The competition was incredibly effective from a governmental perspective as widespread business and consumer adoption of UFB was achieved (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment 2016).

In its efforts to facilitate community engagement with a town’s planning and future, Gigatown can be located within broader global incentives for cities to demonstrate self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism in response to economic decline from de-industrialization and decreases in state funding for urban infrastructure (see Banks 2009; Johansson and Kociatkiewicz 2011; Ruppert 2011). For instance, endeavours such as the privately funded North American ‘Healthiest Cities & Counties Challenge’, Sweden’s ‘Speed Camera Lottery’ (which encourages drivers to keep within speed limits by rewarding them arbitrarily with a prize), and Chattanooga’s use of a fibre-optic network to initially help reroute power during short-outs and then enable gigabit connectivity (Rushe 2014) evince both a managerial and community approach to leveraging city resources for maximum efficiency and liveability. In the case of Chattanooga, municipal bonds were used to fund a smart grid to secure energy and telecommunications infrastructure in the absence of corporate investment in the city. Such examples evidence the governmental organization of ‘globally-oriented cities with supranational ambitions’ (Maxwell and Miller 2012, 138). What this means is that cities like Dunedin no longer view themselves in relation to other New Zealand cities but are positioned in a global economy where they are competing for tourists and workers. This phenomenon of demonstrating good governance, through the capacity to creatively manage resources well in order to attract tourists and creative workers, is a response to national and global economic imperatives but should not be viewed as an externally imposed set of conditions. Initiatives such as Gigatown and their success are facilitated by community participation and contestation over the life of cities. Wendy Larner argues that New Zealand neoliberalism entered a ‘“partnering” ethos’ towards the late 1990s where economic and social policy was rationalized through a ‘mutual’ approach to wellbeing and development (in contrast to the previous ‘punitive’ phase) (Larner 2003, 510). Gigatown could be viewed as an exemplary form of partnering neoliberal rationalities where communities are invited to share in municipal towns’ entrepreneurial planning strategies. I conceptualize this elsewhere as a digital cartography enterprise (Randell-Moon 2018a).

Gigatown relies on and encourages both a caring and strategic investment in infrastructural futures. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose argue that the affective dimension to urban citizenship has been the site of shifting forms of neoliberal governance and attention. In their essay, ‘Governing cities: notes on the spatialization of virtue’, they write:

the life of the city, and life in the city have been the target of a series of strategies of governmentalisation that have sought to preserve this immanence as resource of power; to convert the unsociable sociality of the city to the ends of government whilst preserving the apparently spontaneous undetermined character of the city itself.

(1999, 758)

For Osborne and Rose, the shift to the neoliberal economic governance of cities is premised on attempts to harness the spontaneity and social character of urban living that in earlier historical periods might have been viewed as disorderly to the operation of good governance and citizenship. Urban scholars and speakers such as Richard Florida (2005) and Peter Kageyama (2011) have made a successful living touting the benefits of community pride and investment in city infrastructure. In 2016, Kageyama was a guest speaker at the Local Government New Zealand conference held in Dunedin. Florida and Kageyama’s work urges the facilitation of citizens who ‘love’ their cities enough to enact change and bring creative suggestions to municipal authorities, which will yield ongoing economic and social capital. In the context of Gigatown, it is precisely this love or immanence that is valorized and fostered in the incitement to produce social media about a city’s community, culture, residents, and future. At the same time, this immanence and love has very real material and temporal demands on participants in the competition as I will discuss below.

Even negative forms of engagement with the competition (such as criticism) stimulated media and community interest in the possibilities of digital infrastructure for regional economies and futures. The latter was a function of the way information is accumulated in the networked Twitter system. For instance, residents who were critical of the competition used the tags, #gigashite, #gigashit, #gigacrap and #gigaspam, rather than official tag issued by Chorus to Dunedin. Sarah Gallagher hypothesized that those annoyed or aggrieved at the competition did not use the gigatown hashtags because they did not want their tweets to provide points for the campaign. This was also a way to avoid Chorus’ copyright rules which meant any Gigatown content became the intellectual property of the former (see Randell-Moon 2018b). Many tweeters using #gigaspam objected that their Twitter feed was full of unwanted gigatown-related tweets and that they were unable to block them all. Thus, the social media infrastructure through which the competition took place was generative in drawing attention to gigabit connectivity, whether this attention was negative or positive. In the following section, I explain how this incitement for citizens to desire a digital future can be understood as somatechnical.

The somatechnics of digital infrastructure

Locating participation in the competition through a somatechnics lens highlights the spatial and bodily dimensions to internet governance and the post-industrial economic discourses of speed and efficiency associated with it. Somatechnics was developed by Susan Stryker and ‘conjoins soma (derived from the Greek and Latin word for “body”) and technology to draw attention to the ways bodies find expression through social techniques of manipulation’ (Randell-Moon and Ryan 2016, vii). These techniques can be ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ technologies for moulding the body. Importantly, ‘Viewed through the lens of somatechnics, the body is not a “natural” entity that comes to be changed by society, but is already inscribed by the social training and techniques of presentation learned in the particular environment a body occupies’ (Randell-Moon and Ryan 2016, vii). Somatechnics is also inextricably connected to power, or power geometry, since the types of technologies bodies have access to, or are encouraged to make use of, reproduce power relations and inequalities in relation to gender, sexuality, ability, and race. In stressing the productive role of technology in shaping subjectivity, somatechnics is also underpropped by Foucauldian concerns with biopower and power/knowledge (1980).

Drawing on a Foucauldian version of somatechnics, I will examine how participation in the Gigatown competition reproduces neoliberal governmental rationalities that encourage citizens to provide volunteered labour as a means of both promoting and securing digital infrastructure. This labour is de-materialized and de-territorialized by an economic discourse which constructs online activities as a pleasurable excess of time and energy that can be channelled towards entrepreneurial ends. In so doing, the competition establishes a somatechnics of digital infrastructure that relies on significant labour donations from participants in the competition. Importantly, participants and mangers of the competition alike refer to these donations as primarily civic, which they certainly are, but this framing potentially obscures the financial benefits that accrue to corporate and governing authorities from this donated labour.

A cornerstone of the National Government’s telecommunications policy is the implementation of a national broadband scheme. As explained elsewhere (Randell-Moon 2018a), Chorus was awarded the major contract for delivering 70% of the fibre that enables ISPs to provide UFB, the contract is worth $929 million (McBeth 2013). The company is a telecommunications and fibre optic infrastructure service that cannot sell directly to consumers. Rather, it provides the fibre infrastructure for other retailers. The Gigatown winner therefore is essentially a ‘wholesale’ retailer in receipt of the prize. One possible impetus for the competition was the need to switch consumers from the existing copper broadband connection. The government introduced a so-called ‘copper tax’ which aligned ‘price for copper broadband connections with the cost of new fibre broadband connections’ (Coalition for Fair Internet Pricing n.d.). The Gigatown competition is then a strategically useful publicity tool to promote the benefits of UFB and achieve this aim through the media promotion and communication produced by participants and local municipalities.

In the encouragement for consumers and municipalities to demonstrate the benefits of UFB, its implementation can be understood through what Michel Foucault describes as governmentality (1991). Governmentality refers to the ‘tactics and techniques’ deployed by the governing institutions (100) so that ‘seemingly without coercion’ subjects can organize themselves in ways that are integrated ‘into a much broader system of regulation’ (Burke 2007, 43). As Osborne and Rose note, the meaning of governmentality ‘is not reducible to’ a government because a range of strategies and creative applications are required to mobilize the actions of citizens towards a particular end (Osborne and Rose 1999, 737). They suggest that cities play a crucial role in the establishment of ‘good (or bad) government’ because ‘the very existence of the city becomes inseparable from a whole series of initiatives that sought to produce true knowledges concerning the social fabric of the city’ (739). The competition fostered the re-organization of businesses, city planning, modes of citizenship and digital consumption, and municipal infrastructure and services as responsive to UFB and its touted economic benefits without ‘direct’ intervention from the national government or Chorus. Such a governmentalized undertaking is crucial for securing the viability of broadband infrastructure given the vast amount of material, space, and funding needed to underwrite its establishment.

In a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, available on the Chorus website, the authors note that ‘Internet-related consumption and expenditure is now bigger than agriculture or energy’ (du Rausas et al. 2011, 2). The report states that internet growth requires ‘full penetration’ of this technology by businesses and consumers (Alcatel-Lucent 2012, 2). The key economic benefits of the internet are the ‘consumer surplus’ generated by consumer internet access such as the use of email or search engines (du Rausas et al. 2011, 23). Alcatel-Lucent, one of the sponsors of the Gigatown competition, suggests further gains from UFB such as the redundancy of in-person visits to businesses, hospitals, and education because ICT ‘frees’ up time for other efficiencies and that digitizing information and data reduces the production of ‘hard’ materials (2012, 2, 5). As other scholars have notedfor instance, Tiziana Terranova (2000), André Gorz (2010), and David Hesmondhalgh (2010), this post-industrial economic discourse disappears digital time, labour, materials, and space into an immaterial field of limitless entrepreneurialism. That is, the benefits of ICT are that it apparently enables more time and efficiency but the time, labour, and materials needed to implement and run ICT do not appear to be factored into this efficiency equation. Rather than being more efficient, it could be that the restructuring of urban services around ICT simply replaces one form of labour with another. Crucially, these types of labour are not equivocal. Efficiency is correlated in digital infrastructure discourse with better service and governance so there is an inherent value judgement about labour being made in these policy and corporate statements. I’ll return to this point shortly. Presently, I outline the biopolitical implications of framing participation in digital infrastructure as a competition.

Social media proficiency as urban biopower

Drawing again from Foucault, biopower refers to the calculated management of and intervention into the population in order to foster lives and modes of living seen to be the most conducive for the overall health and economic viability of the population (Foucault 1991). Like governmentality, biopower and its manifestations through biopolitics do not work directly on the population as such but through discourse and the provision of incentives for self-regulation and integration into governing arrangements. I have characterized the incitements to labour in the Gigatown competition as somatechnical, which connects the corporeal labour of individual residents to broader forms of urban biopower that harness mass participation for strategic planning ends. The competitive dimension to Gigatown is intended to stimulate creativity to ensure the winner has actively demonstrated that they deserve UFB. As the Chorus promotional materials urge, ‘We’re looking for the town that wants it the most … by listening out for the town with the loudest voice on social media’. The mechanisms for participation reiterate Evgeny Morozov’s point that: ‘These days, it seems, just carrying your phone around might be an act of good citizenship’ (2013). The Gigatown competition is then implicated in the cultivation of digital citizenship (along particular lines as discussed below) as well as the governing logics that would produce the same.

The social media proficiency promoted and enabled by the competition is positioned as a key participatory planning resource for local municipalities. According to Dunedin’s Plan for Gig Success, ‘the entire city responded [to the competition] − 235,000 Facebook comments, 135,000 Tweets’. The Plan thus concludes, ‘The community had taken ownership. It confirmed a community-wide shift in the vision of what our City could be, and the role the Gig will play in that future’ (n.d., 1). Such statements are indicative of what Osborne and Rose identify as the ‘labour of seeking to tell the truth about the city’ (Osborne and Rose 1999, 739) in urban forms of government. That is, the role of social media users in ‘owning’ Dunedin’s digital future affirms the infrastructural legitimacy of UFB and its centrality to the town’s economy. Such an economic and civic valorization of social media is reflective of the generosity and commitment of the participants who volunteered their labour for the competition in order to secure digital infrastructure for their city.

At the same time, there are political implications to the rhetoric that extols the good citizenship of residents with social media proficiency because those who lack access to ICT, and cannot contribute to the city’s digital economy, are potentially construed as bad citizens. At the time of the competition, the most recent statistics from New Zealand revealed that households with annual incomes greater than $100,000 ‘were five times more likely to be connected to the Internet than households with incomes under $15,000’ (Statistics New Zealand 2004). As the Plan notes, ‘North Dunedin has the highest take up of Ultra Fast Broadband in the country. South Dunedin has the lowest, yet they are less than eight kilometres apart’ (n.d., 1) (see Figure 1). It is commendable that the Plan acknowledges this digital divide as a significant problem and aims to ‘accelerate’ access and expansion of UFB in this area (n.d., 1). It is not clear though that these asymmetries can be ameliorated through a digital somatechnics that cultivates the attributes of an economically productive citizen via an extension of their already existing media consumption or through volunteered labour as discussed below.

Figure 1. Screenshot (20/10/17) from ‘Digital Divide Map’ (https://digitaldivide.nz/) outlining the differences in access to infrastructure and digital literacy in central Dunedin. The light pink areas indicating medium access and skill correspond with South Dunedin. Note that ‘social well-being’, however problematically conceived, is marked as extremely low in this area.

The competition not only promoted UFB and its vitality for urban futures but a range of ICT applications that extend the somatechnics of digital infrastructure. Many of our interviewees commented that using social media for the competition revealed its applicability to their businesses. For instance, Darren Ludlow, broadcaster on Radio Southland and then Deputy Mayor of Invercargill, explained in an interview for the project that while the Invercargill bid was unsuccessful, participating in the competition

forced us to become more aware of ah, some of the strategy around digital media posting, um … how to ah create posts that will attract more attention and perhaps encourage people to share kinds of posting and the types of social media that we use, we increased, um, I think we were only on Facebook and twitter at that stage so it forced us to look at um other platforms as well, that were being used mostly by younger people, but you know if that, that’s our growth area and they see value in to so … [inaudible] we see them as spaces that we should be in as well.

Promotional materials for the competition also emphasized an active media consumer. The ‘Gig FAQs’ pamphlet states: ‘accessing broadband over fibre … means a great experience for all users of online shared applications such as cloud computing, video conferencing or online gaming’ (n.d.). Once the competition had finished, ISPs sent sign up letters to houses in Dunedin. One addressed to me (as ‘The Householder’) from Spark suggested the reasons for signing up include: ‘Stream video with less buffering/Get better performance when everyone’s online/Run online games faster’. In addition to gaming, the Gig citizen is expected to own a house or at least be in a position to approve fibre installation, afford a gigabit plan costing around $89 to $99NZD a month depending on the service provider, and reside in particular areas of the city (see Figures 2 and 3). While many ISPs provided free connection to fibre, renters’ ability to access gigabit connectivity is dependent on building or landlord approval as well as place of residence. For instance, I requested gigabit connectivity when I saw my street had fibre access on the Chorus map in 2017 but my building’s landlord initially refused the connection until 2018. Such bureaucratic humdrums perhaps reveal the spatial and capital privileges of residents who can afford to wait for gigabit. I draw attention to these micro-incidents of differentiated mobility in terms of who the ideal consumer of this technology is because they signal how the delivery of this infrastructure throws into relief the materialities of so-called ‘weigthless’ ICT.

Figure 2. Screenshot from chorus (https://www.chorus.co.nz/tools-support/broadband-tools/broadband-map) (29/11/16) indicating planned rollout of fibre in Dunedin.

Figure 3. Screenshot from chorus’ broadband capability map (29/11/16) showing a random address, close to the centre city, typed in by author to indicate how spatially tiered the initial fibre rollout was.

There is also a clear age divide in the take-up of this infrastructure and competition participation. For instance, one of the project’s interviewee’s noted how difficult it was to get elderly communities involved, ‘nobody from their end … was willing to kind of pick it up and really drive it’. The competition both promotes and encourages the consumption of ICT in order to ensure infrastructural security and viability for UFB. In doing so, the competition intersects with a range of digital strategies and companies that reproduce the new media consumer as central to urban and civic life.

The surplus benefits of ICT use, for faster media consumption and greater efficiency of services, are what augment the economic efficiency of UFB infrastructure. For instance, the Alcatel-Lucent report mentioned earlier cites the greater effectiveness of medical and education services that operate remotely, by reducing in-person visits, but offers no specific evidence that these projected effects are more pedagogically or medically beneficial to students or patients. It is simply assumed that a reduction of in-person contact somehow equates to increased quality of service. Similarly, the Gig Plan enthuses:

Shared services and high quality internet access has allowed new teaching and learning pedagogies – virtual learning classrooms, blended learning, collaborative teaching models, a virtual school, extended communities of practise, personalized learning, teacher training pilots – in modern learning environments.

(Digital Community Trust n.d., 13)

This promotional item suggests possible uses of UFB but it is important to note that the practices specified are predominantly delivery methods not pedagogies. That these practices can become digitized in and of itself is assumed to deliver efficiency and innovation. As noted earlier, in this conflation of time-space compression with efficiency, time, space, and labour are rendered an immaterial surplus to UFB implementation and operation rather than necessary for the same. The immaterial nature to ICT and its attendant economy are reiterated in the strategic planning goals for Dunedin. For instance, at the ceremony announcing Dunedin’s win, Mayor Dave Cull stressed the opportunities enabled by ‘weightless product in all its forms’, suggesting that citizens are ‘either in the digital space or nowhere’ (Paredes 2014). Sarah Simmers, a Partner at Anderson Lloyd and a member of the Digital Community Trust, frames the potential of UFB by saying, ‘geography is no barrier; we operate from the bottom of the world’ (Digital Community Trust, n.d., 2). Such rhetoric suggests the benefits of UFB accrue from de-territorialization and the flow of commodities and information across geographical borders. This infrastructure undoubtedly enhances the city’s ability to participate in a global economy and improves the lifestyle and working conditions for some of Dunedin’s residents. The key point to be made about portrayals of the digital economy as ‘weightless’ is that it removes from view the material conditions of its making. It is to these conditions that I turn in the final section.

‘Space-off’ in digital discourse

The de-materialization of online activity found in the corporate and municipal statements cited above constitutes an economic and urban form of ‘space-off’. I borrow this term from the work of Joseph Pugliese. Using film theory scholarship, he argues that biometric technologies operate similarly to cinematic framing and exclude certain bodies from the parameters of what can be made visible or legible. What is visible within the frame of visual technologies nevertheless has an intrinsic relationship to what remains outside (Pugliese 2010, 62). The possibility for meaning within a medial frame takes place through its constitutive exterior. Likewise, questions of access, finance, digital proficiency, the space and time required to execute online activities among others, are consigned to an ontological and epistemological ‘elsewhere’ in order to shore up the legitimacy and centrality of ICT to the contemporary knowledge and neoliberal economy. Consigning the materiality of ICT to an ‘elsewhere’ has consequences for the obfuscation of the spatial politics of where infrastructure is located and its environmental harms (see Maxwell and Miller 2012; Taffel 2016).

Importantly, policy and discourse that ‘space-off’ the materiality of digital work potentially devalues the enormous amount of labour and time put into the Gigatown competition to secure Dunedin’s win. Here are some of the excerpts from our interviewees when asked directly to give an account of their labour:

Interviewee: I pretty much leveraged any friendship and family member and, you know, business connection that I had

I would never do it again. Like I did not realize how much it was going to eat away at my family time and my recreational time. It was … yeah, it was my life.

Interviewee: there were eighteen hour days every day of the week.

Interviewee: by the end of it, people were just like: ‘Oh my God, I’m exhausted, I’ve been going for like two weeks or a month and I’m like, when does it end?’ Just like trying to keep the involvement constant, um, over months, was definitely a challenge.

Tweetathons, for like, I think we did a few of them. Where like, all – I remember one of them, near the end, we had a big, [Anon] ordered a whole lot of pizzas, and we just had everyone set up, and we were just tweeting constantly.

Interviewee: at one stage – in one of our early competitions there was a competition to make videos of how you can contrast current broadband speed, with ah, um … with gigabit broadband, and ah, I made 156 different videos I think showing the different examples … No, I think it was about 180 actually … Chorus didn’t approve all of them as showing difference ‘cause you had to show like, does it actually show the difference in capacity and speed? So Dunedin as a city put together about 950 um videos, our small group of about 6-8 people, did about 850 of them –

Interviewee: quickly became fifty tweets a day, and in fact in that sort of six or eight-week period I think I did 24,273 tweets, um, which effectively meant I was doing – tweets and re-tweets – I did, I came … I ended up being the fourth or fifth highest tweeter in the whole competition, um, from around the whole country.

So I would, I think, by the end I was sort of doing a hundred at a time, so I would do a hundred in just a bit under an hour.

In describing the amount of time spent on the competition, interviewees acknowledged how taxing the competition activities could be but were generously resigned to the need to undertake social media work to secure important digital infrastructure for Dunedin. This selfless community spirit was emulated broadly across different sectors of the city. The Gig Plan notes, ‘businesses across the city freed up staff on the final morning of competition to help our bid’ (Digital Community Trust, n.d., 11). This anecdote was corroborated in our interviews. For instance, one interviewee reflected that their individual labour was complemented by businesses in town such as ‘ANZ or one of the banks, closed for an hour or something, just so they could um, Tweet and Facebook and whatnot’. Another interviewee from Dunedin City Council also commented, ‘a couple of banks in town shut in their doors, so their staff could all sit around and tweet which was pretty amazing’. An interviewee involved in high-school outreach noted that one school allowed students to be on their phones for one hour during class time to support the competition. This labour was mobilized at the local level through networks and relationships between volunteers and the competition managers. The amount of time residents dedicated to the competition attests to Gigatown’s success in facilitating community belonging and investment in the digital futures of towns. Keeping in mind though that the social media users in the competition were earlier portrayed as representative of the entire city’s participation, the interviews indicate a significant portion of the total number of tweets and videos were produced by a relatively small number of participants. How participation in the competition is generated and framed has important implications for who is included and excluded from resource planning and infrastructure.

It is important to note the community benefits that can accrue from the networks and relationships built out of Gigatown participation. It is precisely because these benefits and relationship building occur through the time and generosity of Gigatown participants that critical questions should be asked about the labour expended in the competition. I have earlier contextualized the Gigatown competition within infrastructural efforts to revitalize cities through culture and creativity. While lifestyle attributes have taken on a branding priority in the strategic and infrastructural planning of cities, such priorities can be used to render the city’s intelligibility in economic terms that simultaneously devalue civic experience. In an interview with a Council worker about participation in the competition, she described volunteer labour in the following way:

They weren’t being paid, and they didn’t really care they just wanted to be part of something and just see what we could do, um, they would have been bitterly disappointed had we not won, but, the kick in it was that we did win, and that there was a pay-off, straight away, you know, for all of that effort that they put in.

Here, crucially, winning the competition retroactively justifies the labour and resources put into it. Ostensibly, losing towns and cities also gain from the urban planning and organization stimulated in their bids. The statements outlined above concerning participants’ labour in the competition constitute ‘a corporeal vocabulary of the city’ (Osborne and Rose 1999, 742) that demonstrate how it is now possible ‘to render the city as an economic subject, not a favourable geographical location’ (755). In advancing the benefits of gigabit connectivity, Dunedin becomes de-territorialized and re-positioned into a global information economy dependent on the maximization of resources, time, and relationships. ‘Being part of something’ in the competition aligns with Osborne and Rose’s description of the

ethico-economic character of enterprise imbuing a city as a whole by virtue of the motivation, the sense of pride and competiveness, the installation of a relentless rivalry between cities and regions mobilised by means of the enterprise of each and of all.

(1999, 756)

In the ‘ethico-economic’ incitement to participation, the competition involved both the transformation of leisure time and social media use into productive labour as well as the suspension of ‘normal’ work and education activities to concentrate effort on the competition. This extension of the competition across different spheres of citizens’ lives exemplifies the governmentalized aspect of engaging in the competition. The cessation of capital production, for instance, in order to (maybe) facilitate more capital in the future is an effective governmental and biopolitical strategy on the part of businesses and local governments that enhances the labour capacity and skillset of subjects by allowing them more knowledge of contemporary forms of media (as identified by some of the interviewees). The facilitation of this expanding skillset can be experienced as problematic when a biopolitics of speed subsumes the pleasurable or leisure dimensions to social media usefor instance, in the way ‘normal’ tweeting ‘quickly became fifty tweets a day’ under the exigencies of the competition. Gigabit connectivity is valorized because it speeds up ICT services and applications but also appears to incite a corresponding user-experience in the case of the Gigatown competition. Subjects’ labour and leisure time are enrolled in an infrastructural somatechnics premised on the discursive and technological ‘greater good’ of winning Gigatown. The extra-labour time devoted to this enterprise enacts a space-off where future ICT economies and more effective modes of generating capital are expedited now. That is, the cultivation of a healthy workforce involves an intense amount of online labour whose spatial and bodily predicates are suspended, consigned to an elsewhere, in order to paradoxically yield tangible outcomes that are, at present, speculative. I have previously described this speculative investment as a digital cartography enterprise (Randell-Moon 2018a) where despite promises of easy accessibility to a global online space, significant resources are required to participate and make one’s place in such a digital environment. Such actions are attempts to reproduce the governing truth of digital infrastructure by demonstrating that Gig cities’ ‘governability should arise out its spontaneous, ungoverned features’ (Osborne and Rose 1999, 758).

Conclusion

Cities in the South Island such as Dunedin are caught within a number of competing infrastructural, community, and economic demands. They require digital infrastructural in order to participate in the global and knowledge economy, attract mobile, high-income earning professionals, and communicate the lifestyle benefits of Dunedin to a global tourism market. They must also respond to an ageing population and a skillset gap exacerbated by digital inequalities. It may seem mean-spirited to critically interrogate a competition designed to provide infrastructure that can address these planning and policy priorities, but it is precisely the use of competition as a policy through which resource allocation is implemented that is potentially problematic. The Gigatown competition stimulates information and media about the necessity of an infrastructure that is deferred on the basis of deservingness. It is this latter aspect of the competition that enables an alignment of an ‘ethico-economic character’ with ‘good’ forms of citizenship that may not be inclusive of individuals and communities lacking ICT or social media proficiency. The enterprise of citizens in other towns and cities are also moralized by losing the competition.

I have argued that the competition’s facilitation of a citizenship that is invested enough in a town’s digital future through attention to their own entrepreneurial capacities and practices of media consumption is constitutive of a somatechnics of infrastructure that unites the individual citizen’s ethics with the broader economics of the population identified by Osbourne and Rose. I have suggested that the deployment of somatechnics to explain the relationship between citizens and infrastructure can serve as the corporeal connection where the macro economic and governmental conditions mapped by Osbourne and Rose find expression at a local embodied level. The competition positions residents as both citizens, with an enhanced capacity to participate in policy planning and development, and consumers, who must be proficient in social media in order to do so. Discourses of civic volunteerism and social media use shape citizens somatechnically as desirous of an urban broadband future that aligns with government and corporate digital infrastructure policy. Touted as an initiative that could bring cities into the ‘weightless’ economy of online global markets, Gigatown exemplifies the tensions between the embodied creative participation in policy development and the mechanisms through which participation can take place.

While the competition was enormously successful in generating community participation, this participation required a significant amount of labour and time that was often donated on behalf of or in lieu of media content that was not produced fast enough by the official competition managers and by a small number of volunteers proportional to the overall number of participants in the competition and the city’s population as a whole. The use of a social media competition as the policy mechanism through which resource allocation is implemented therefore highlights problems with the inequalities of immaterial labour in a development scheme assumed to yield benefits for all community members. The competition was incredibly successful in mobilizing such labour as volunteered and incited communal interest in the infrastructural development of Dunedin. City planners and managers would do well to recognize and value this ethical commitment to city futures as an embodied and highly emotional form of labour. A number of the volunteers in the competition had visceral remembrances of the temporal deflation from the competition and the subsequent management of the prize and rollout of fibre. I had to stop the interviews several times when I asked questions about whether interviewees continued their participation with the DCC or Digital Community Trust. Noting the community confusion over why gigabit connectivity was not available immediately, because ISPs need to deliver it to businesses and homes, one interviewee who volunteered in the competition explained, ‘But yeah right now it feels like there’s been a big … nothing. You know?’. Another volunteer articulated a disjuncture between the post-competition management and community sentiment:

Interviewee: In that very slow, um, bureaucratic kind of process, the energy and the momentum and everything that we’d built up for the city–

HRM: Is disappointing?

Interviewee: It didn’t even just go down to nothing, it went down to people, just like, what the hell? Have you ruined this amazing this that we created? I was just like, oh, okay … But I went to a meeting, like a community meeting, and some people were really angry (laughs). Yeah. And I can understand why. Because yes, what a monumental stuff-up to make nothing of that thing that we created.

These interviewees suggest that further involvement in the volunteer labour and community interest in the competition could have ameliorated feelings of burnout and ensured that engagement with future planning was stimulated on positive terms. It is understandable that having invested so many resources in the competition for over a year, the Digital Community Trust and DCC needed to utilize the win to strategically shift into post-competition management and implementation of the Gig Plan. The exigencies of institutional processes of urban planning, which require consultation, documentation, and transparency, are also sometimes inherently incompatible with grass-root community-led practices. In harnessing community pride to a competition over ICT resources, Gigatown does nevertheless demonstrate the compatibility of the two (community-led action and urban bureaucratic planning) in some circumstances and for urban rationalities that I have defined as neoliberal governmentality. But if such community activity is space-offed and reiterated as pride in place of labour, residents may become disengaged and disenchanted with the very urban policies and infrastructure they are positioned within governementalised rationalities to effect.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Otago.