Making a scene via counter-data mapping : the digital cartography of Hong Kong’s resistant economy

Abstract

Abstract: Studies of contemporary social movements have explored the role of digital maps and mapmaking in the organisation and visualisation of protest events, yet little is known about the contentious political potential of maps when the political opportunities for street politics fade. This article examines the digital cartography of Hong Kong’s yellow economic circle, a networked system of retailers and consumers linked by political values that support pro-movement stores and boycott pro-establishment businesses, for which citizen activists amassed crowdsourced data to create and update counter-maps that galvanised political consumerism to uphold dissent. Drawing on a renewed conception of the networked movement scene, I contend that counter-data mapping demonstrates a connective structure of self-mobilisation that affords the (trans)formation of (a) dissent spatiality, (b) sociality, and (c) solidarity during the declining stages of movements. Based on digital ethnography and archival research, I show how this nascent cartographic data-as-repertoire not only helped establish and sustain a resistant economy but also allowed people to maintain and refashion their contentious political participation via everyday engagement with data. While the state authorities attempted to expand their territorial control amidst the crisis, counter-data mapping, as a digitally enabled, joint practice of scene-making, (re)invented dissent territory, enabling dispersed citizen activists to continue to connect and mobilise amidst intense urban policing and social distancing protocols. This article casts new light on the utility and capacity of digital cartography during movement latency while illuminating the understudied contours and consequences of counter-data mapping in a non-Western context.