In 2023, the San Francisco-based activist collective Safe Street Rebel launched a subversive intervention targeted at autonomous vehicles (AVs) by companies like Waymo and Cruise. The companies had deployed their so-called Robotaxis within San Francisco, effectively turning urban spaces into testbeds for autonomous sensor technologies without the consent of the local residents. Utilizing objects scavenged from the surrounding urban environment, the self-proclaimed “non-hierarchical, non-violent direct action group whose core values are about making frequent public transit and car-free spaces available for all”1“Safe Street Rebel: About,” Safe Street Rebel, accessed May 4, 2025, https://www.safestreetrebel.com/about/. devised a decentralized tactic to immobilize these autonomous vehicles without inflicting physical damage — an act emblematic of tactical urbanism and material counter-coding.
The group’s actions were choreographed through digital platforms. As the group demonstrated in a video clip that soon went viral on TikTok and Twitter,2A reposted version of the video clip can be found here: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1676968755522588682, last accessed May 4, 2025. Robotaxis could be effectively paralyzed by stepping in front of them and placing traffic cones on their hoods. This tactic transformed the traffic cone into a symbol of resistance against both car-centric urban infrastructures and the corporatization of public space through sensor technologies. The simple act of cone-placing took on the highly complex and expensive sensor systems of autonomous vehicles and, by extension, the multi-billion dollar companies behind them. Cone-placing had turned into a symbolic gesture of anti-car and anti-tech protest, with many international news outlets picking up on the unlikely David-vs-Goliath story. The protests culminated in the “Week of Cone,” a period of activism strategically scheduled to take place before the CPUC’s (California Public Utilities Commission) decision on the expansion of Robotaxi deployments in San Francisco.
Rather than interpreting these interventions as mere acts of sabotage, we consider them to be forms of playful resistance — experimental, performative engagements with sociotechnical systems that expose, test, and unsettle their logics. The cone protest, while simple in material terms, constituted a complex semiotic and political act: it highlighted the fragility of sensor infrastructures, re-appropriated public space, and challenged the supposedly context-awareness of autonomous mobility. It is not difficult to imagine why the Safe Street Rebel’s actions elicited attention and support from around the globe: as we move towards “sensor societies,”3Mark Andrejevic and Mark Burdon, “Defining the Sensor Society,” Television & New Media 16, no. 1 (2015): 19–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414541552. in which ubiquitous networked sensors datafy ever-more aspects of geo-cultural spaces and our day-to-day routines, turning technology’s sensing capabilities against itself is a liberating proposition.
The use of counter-practices4Christoph Borbach and Max Kanderske, “Counter-practices: Understanding sensor datafication through subversive action,” Dialogues on Digital Society 1, no. 2 (2024): 177–197, https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640241305970. like cone-placing extends beyond their immediate value for activist causes: counter-practitioners intentionally probe the limits of sensing systems they target, generating knowledge about them in the process. By drawing on theoretical perspectives from Science and Technology Studies as well as Game Studies, we conceptualize these interventions as sensor games, playful practices that strategically engage with and expose the socio-technical assumptions embedded within infrastructures of capture and surveillance. We argue that such counter-practices enact a form of ludic Luddism5Marguerite Charmante, “Real Player Manifesto,” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 1, no. 1 (2007), https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol1no1-5/5810. — a politically motivated and critically reflexive reconfiguration of sensor regimes that operate at the intersection of play, politics, and infrastructure. Through techniques of masking, mimicry, and operational disruption, these practices re-claim agency in technospheres increasingly defined by non-consensual and opaque forms of machine sensing. Ultimately, we suggest that the politics of play offers a potent grammar of resistance in the face of algorithmic governance, turning urban spaces into playful sites of protest, and rendering visible sensors’ biases, thresholds, and vulnerabilities.
Put to the Test
The rise of sensor-based governance systems in urban environments signals a paradigmatic shift in how space, behavior, and subjects are organized. Within those technospheres, agency becomes increasingly entangled with nonhuman operations of sensing, prediction, and automation. In such sensor environments, the capacity to opt out of surveillance or datafication is difficult to realize. As the choice to be sensed or not is increasingly taken from us, it is not always clear in what ways we are actually being measured, datafied and algorithmically classified in any given situation. When non-consensual sensing proliferates in urban technospheres, the stakes are high: within sensor environments, questions of privacy, algorithmic discrimination, and traffic safety come to the fore.
When the Safe Street Rebel group launched their protest, the California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) had already received more than 70 autonomous vehicle collision reports for 2023, “including a 21 May incident in San Francisco in which a dog was struck and killed by a Waymo vehicle.”6Rose Horowitch, “Self-driving Waymo car kills dog amid increasing concern over robotaxis,” The Guardian, June 7, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-kills-dog-self-driving-robotaxi-san-francisco. The total number of collision reports has since risen to 808,7“Autonomous vehicle collision reports,” State of California: Department of Motor Vehicles, accessed May 4, 2025, https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/. with many more reports of cases in which autonomous vehicles endangered road users and interrupted traffic.8Ricardo Cano, “Self-driving cars are causing mayhem on S.F. streets, officials say. Will their expansion be restricted?,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 2023, https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/.
When companies like Waymo and the now defunct Cruise put vehicles with autonomous driving capabilities on the streets that barely qualify as “good enough” and routinely require human assistance, they enact a regime of ubiquitous testing.9Lora Kolodny, “Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles,” CNBC, November 6, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html. As Nortje Marres and Peter Stark observe, these tests are not only aimed at evaluating the technologies in question; rather, they test and reconfigure the social environment in which these tests are carried out.10Noortje Marres and David Stark, “Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing,” The British Journal of Sociology 71, no. 3 (2020): 423–443, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746. The Safe Street Rebel group acknowledges and criticises this relation, when they state plainly that “San Franciscans are just tired of being tech’s guinea pigs.”11Itay Hod, “Activists hit San Francisco streets, use orange cones to thwart robotaxis,” CBS News, July 25, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/autonomous-vehicles-activists-hit-sf-streets-orange-cones-thwart-robotaxis-cruise-waymo/. Could a laboratory animal at one point hope to escape the confines of the lab? Today’s test beds have, at least in some parts of the world, expanded to cover our cities in their entirety. How, if at all, can we move past the state of passively being sensed and regain control over our urban spaces?
Entering the Sensor Game
In his seminal work on wartime aerial photography, artist and critic Allan Sekula describes the competing practices and technologies of camouflage and aerial reconnaissance as “a low-level language game,” in which “the indexical status of the sign was thrown into question, thereby inflating the suspicions of the photo-interpreter.”12Allan Sekula, “The instrumental image: Steichen at war,” Artforum 14, no. 4 (1975): 28. If we want to escape our role as perpetual test subjects, we have voluntarily — and intentionally13Notably, this move from passively being sensed to actively shaping the sensing process not only corresponds to the etymology and lived practice of activism, but also to many classic game definitions that stress the importance of entering into the game voluntarily, see e.g. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture (The Beacon Press, 1950). — enter a similar cat-and-mouse game of observing and eluding the observer’s gaze that plays out within urban sensor technospheres. As we are engaged in a multiplicity of overlapping sensor situations that involve a wide variety of equipment such as cameras, ultrasound sensors, microphones, accelerometers, and Lidar scanners, to name just a few, the possibilities for sensor games are virtually endless: delivery riders and streamers spoof their GPS signal to appear in more lucrative locations, for example, and the surveillance regimes enacted by health insurance providers are being tricked by customers who move their smartphones in ways that simulate physical activity.
It is not without irony that these counter-practices are themselves enacted as a form of counter-testing, this time of the technological actor’s sensing and sense-making capabilities. If the ubiquitous testing regimes outlined by Marres and Stark put the social environment itself to the test, urban counter-testing takes aim at the sociotechnical structures behind the technologies in question, turning the city into a playing field. Counter-practices emerge as forms of epistemic play,14Rita Santoyo Venegas, “Digital play as an epistemic experience,” in Play, Philosophy and Performance, ed. Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell and Emily Ryall (Routledge, 2021). a re-appropriation of the city-turned-laboratory and its knowledge-generating powers by playful means. As testing and counter-testing become mutually entangled, the sensor game evolves: when new forms of sensing and algorithmic sense-making are developed, counter-practitioners have to re-evaluate their approaches, while the manufacturers of sensor technology take known counter-practices into account when designing their products to be “more robust” in the face of adversity. The members of the group Safe Street Rebel outline this dynamic in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian:
The cars are getting smarter, they say, swerving more quickly when they leap in front of them. And while Cruise has claimed the cone protest “has not had a meaningful impact on its fleet’s operation,” the group has noticed cars taking different routes to avoid them.15Kari Paul, “The rebel group stopping self-driving cars in their tracks—one cone at a time,” The Guardian, July 26, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/26/san-francisco-stop-self-driving-cars-traffic-cone-safe-street-rebel.
A cycle of mutual adaptation occurs, wherein the logics of the sensor game guide both players’ hands. Here we are reminded of German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer’s insight that “all playing is a being-played. […] Whoever ‘tries’ is in fact the one who is tried. The real subject of the game […] is not the player but instead the game itself.”16Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Sheed & Ward, 1989 [1960]), 106. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of “tactics” and “minor practices,” counter-practices can be regarded as embedded, subversive acts that manipulate dominant power structures from within.17Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (University of California Press, 1984). The ludic architecture of the sensor game circumscribes agentic possibilities, revealing how infrastructural conditions script the modalities of both resistance to a particular technology and the usage of the very same technology. Sensor games do not promise revolution, but they enact friction. And in a world where technologies are designed to function and appear as seamless as possible, such frictions matter.
Ludic Luddites
While the Safe Street Rebel group does not describe themselves as players nor their activities as a game, their actions exhibit decidedly ludic qualities. One reporter describes their efforts to “cone” each individual Cruise vehicle as a challenge in the style of Pokémon’s “Gotta catch them all!” — an effort that was inspired by the vehicles’ paint jobs which conveniently rendered them uniquely identifiable.18Paul, “The rebel group stopping self-driving cars.” During another protest that took place on Halloween, members of the group dressed up as a coven of witches (with cones for hats, of course), putting autonomous vehicles in a spell-induced stasis while chanting “omyaw ixatobor,” which is “robotaxi Waymo” in reverse.19Arthur C. Clarkes famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It seems fitting that the protest against supposedly advanced technology like self-driving cars should also be indistinguishable from magic. Here the cone figures as the (literal) pièce de résistance in two interlinked contexts: as the “unruly object” around which the playful protest is structured, it disrupts the cars’ sense-making operations.20Sam Hind, “Maps, Kettles and Inflatable Cobblestones: The Art of Playful Disruption in the City,” Media Fields Journal 9 (2015), http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/tactical-frivolity-and-disobed/2015/8/21/maps-kettles-and-inflatable-cobblestones-the-art-of-playful.html. At the same time, it acts as the central element in a dress-up game. This example is particularly instructive as, first, the costumes and, second, the reversal of the machine’s name provide helpful motifs for understanding playful resistance and its relation to counter-practices.
First, mask and role playing are considered classic examples of what Roger Caillois calls mimicry, an archetypal mode of play in which one pretends to be another.21Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (The Free Press, 1961). Expanding on that understanding, the Safe Street Rebel’s Halloween protest is carnivalesque in a twofold sense. As Miguel Sicart notes, playfulness vis-à-vis a machine is “a carnivalesque attack on the seriousness of computers, on the system-driven thinking that gives maximum importance to the dictates and structures of a formal structure.”22Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), 23. Dressing up to confuse the technological Other, be it through cone hats or dazzle make-up designed to subvert facial recognition as media artist Adam Harvey famously illustrates, provides the protest with a carnivalesque outward appearance that matches its inner logic of disrupting the intended flow of algorithmic processes.23Adam Harvey, “CV Dazzle,” https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle, last accessed May 5, 2025. There is another, more pragmatic reason for donning a mask when protesting playfully: as the cars are mobile sensing stations that carry cameras, it is vital that protestors hide their faces to avoid possible legal troubles.
Second, the reversal of the technology’s name points towards the counter-practitioners goal of critiquing through re-ordering and re-configuring, akin to the hacking practice of reverse engineering: “[i]nstead of the destruction of the machine, its inversion is cultivated,” as Marguerite Charmante puts it in her “Real Player Manifesto.”24Charmante, “Real Player Manifesto.” In doing so, counter-practices are closely related to the practices of glitching and queering which make use of certain systemic qualities to disrupt the system itself, be it a technological or a social one.25Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, “Glitch epistemologies for computational cities,” Dialogues in Human Geography 12, no. 3 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221075714. Charmante characterizes players whose “plays are a sustained practice in glitching forms of Lebenswelt (life world)”26Charmante, “Real Player Manifesto.” as ludic Luddites, a label also fit to describe counter-practitioners who glitch the perceived ontological environments (Lebenswelten) of sensing machines. Indeed, the practice of “coning” autonomous vehicles can only succeed because a systemic answer towards perceiving a traffic cone is ‘hard-wired’ into the cars programming: If a cone is registered at a certain proximity, a safety protocol dubbed “panic mode” engages, effectively rendering the car immobile until a human operator removes the obstacle and resets the system.27Richard Luscombe, “Driverless taxi vandalized and set on fire in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” The Guardian, February 12, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/12/waymo-car-fire-san-francisco. From this perspective, playful resistance through counter-practice emerges as the art of finding and making use of these kinds of systemic yet exploitable protocols, routines and algorithms, re-claiming a “right to the city,” as Henri Lefebvre would put it.28Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Anthropos, 1968). Playful resistance offers a way to engage with technological infrastructures that are otherwise opaque, automated, and abstract. It creates the capacity for unsettling systems from below through improvisation, subversion, and symbolic inversion.
Characterizing Safe Street Rebel as ludic Luddites risks collapsing their situated critique into a caricature of technophobia. Yet, their interventions exemplify a politicized playfulness that resists the infrastructural hegemony of sensor-driven urbanism. Following Gavin Mueller’s understanding of Luddism as a form of protest against the re-shaping of labor in the interest of capital,29Gavin Mueller, Breaking things at work: The luddites are right about why you hate your job (Verso, 2021). we conceptualize the Rebel’s efforts as a ludic Luddite’s way of resisting the re-configuration of urban spaces by sensor technologies. The group has stressed in various social media posts that their protest should not be reduced to safety concerns, but rather understood as a contribution to the discourse about the future of urban technospheres that includes ecological and privacy aspects, but is not restricted to just these, as the following screenshot illustrates.
The self-description on the group’s website also professes a nuanced stance. Their commitment to neither involving possible passengers nor harming the car itself — keeping the protest non-violent — while taking care not to block public transportation with the stopped vehicles, clearly shows that they do not protest autonomous vehicles out of ignorance. How Safe Street Rebel conduct and frame their playful resistance rather indicates an acute awareness of the harmful ways in which self-driving cars appropriate public space, displacing and endangering other road users in the process.
How (not) to get hit by a Self-Driving Car
Machine vision models are trained on large data sets to develop sense-making capabilities. Likewise, sensors have to be calibrated before they are able to capture a carefully designated slice of the surrounding environment, for example a certain temperature range or a part of the electromagnetic spectrum.30Florian Sprenger, “Critique of sensoric mediality—An experimental approach to chains of translation between the analog and the digital,” Convergence 31, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251318328. It follows that the designers of sensor technology have to work backwards from what the sensor can plausibly expect within the situation it will be placed in. For sensor media, recognition is re-cognition in the Platonian sense. They can only detect objects or persons if those conform roughly to what the models have been trained on in the past. This is cause for concern when it comes to the possibility of biased datasets and the inability to detect edge cases, like a person walking with their bicycle by their side or jaywalking pedestrians.31Richard Gonzales, “Feds say self-driving Uber SUV did not recognize jaywalking pedestrian in fatal crash,” npr, 7 November, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777438412/feds-say-self-driving-uber-suv-did-not-recognize-jaywalking-pedestrian-in-fatal-. At the same time, it is the precondition for the Safe Street Rebel’s protest to work in a safe manner. As we have outlined, getting the car to stop by stepping in front of it and freezing it with a cone presupposes that the system will recognize both the person and the cone and come to a stop. What emerges here is the notion of an ideal or implied sensed subject; one that the system can safely deal with because it has been designed and trained to do so. For the practice of cone-placing — and for safely interacting with autonomous vehicles in general — it is actually desirable to conform to these machinic expectations, to make oneself recognizable. But what happens if players in the sensor game intentionally decide not to correspond to this ideal, as many counter-practitioners who wish to evade sensor surveillance do?
Media artists Tomo Kihara and Daniel Coppen pose that question with their game installation “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car.” Participants in their game first must disguise themselves with items commonly found in urban environments, before crossing a road segment while evading detection by an image recognition algorithm that approximates the perceptive apparatus of autonomous vehicles. Kihara and Coppen’s installation generates an epistemic surplus from a clever inversion: the “intended player” of their game corresponds to a “transgressive player”32Espen Aarseth, “I fought the law: Transgressive play and The implied player,” DiGRA ’07—Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play Vol. 4, 130—133. — or counter-practitioner — who formulates their own goals within the sensor game and employs every tool in the shed to reach them. As Kihara and Coppen state, “each victory generates edge case data showcasing the AI’s biases and flaws. Upon winning, players can choose to contribute the data to improve the model or delete it, raising questions about the trade-offs in developing these technologies.”33Tomo Kihara, “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car. Installation exploring the consequence of evading AI detection on the streets,” https://www.tomokihara.com/en/how-not-to-get-hit-by-a-self-driving-car.html, accessed May 5, 2025.
As in the Safe Street Rebel’s Halloween protest, disguise plays a crucial role in Kihara and Coppen’s articulation of an epistemic play that operates at the edges of image recognition algorithms. “Playfulness,” as Miguel Sicart says, “can be a revolt, a carnivalesque exploration of the seams of the technologies that excel at performing operations but limit the expression to that which is computable.”34Sicart, Play matters. While the carnivalesque revolt against sensor datafication can be carried out within the magic circle of games and art installations, we nevertheless feel that the tech companies’ attempts at turning our cities into technological testbeds for sensor technology warrants an answer on the streets. Meaningful ludic resistance necessitates engagement from within the operational logics of the sensor regime — playing with, through, and against the more-than-human infrastructures that seek to pre-empt and predict our bodies and movements. Through techniques of masking, mimicry, and operational disruption, we can re-claim agency in technospheres increasingly defined by non-consensual and opaque forms of machine perception. The politics of play offer a potent grammar of resistance in the face of algorithmic governance, turning urban spaces into playful sites of protest.
Notes
| ↑1 | “Safe Street Rebel: About,” Safe Street Rebel, accessed May 4, 2025, https://www.safestreetrebel.com/about/. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | A reposted version of the video clip can be found here: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1676968755522588682, last accessed May 4, 2025. |
| ↑3 | Mark Andrejevic and Mark Burdon, “Defining the Sensor Society,” Television & New Media 16, no. 1 (2015): 19–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414541552. |
| ↑4 | Christoph Borbach and Max Kanderske, “Counter-practices: Understanding sensor datafication through subversive action,” Dialogues on Digital Society 1, no. 2 (2024): 177–197, https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640241305970. |
| ↑5 | Marguerite Charmante, “Real Player Manifesto,” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 1, no. 1 (2007), https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol1no1-5/5810. |
| ↑6 | Rose Horowitch, “Self-driving Waymo car kills dog amid increasing concern over robotaxis,” The Guardian, June 7, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-kills-dog-self-driving-robotaxi-san-francisco. |
| ↑7 | “Autonomous vehicle collision reports,” State of California: Department of Motor Vehicles, accessed May 4, 2025, https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/. |
| ↑8 | Ricardo Cano, “Self-driving cars are causing mayhem on S.F. streets, officials say. Will their expansion be restricted?,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 2023, https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/. |
| ↑9 | Lora Kolodny, “Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles,” CNBC, November 6, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html. |
| ↑10 | Noortje Marres and David Stark, “Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing,” The British Journal of Sociology 71, no. 3 (2020): 423–443, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746. |
| ↑11 | Itay Hod, “Activists hit San Francisco streets, use orange cones to thwart robotaxis,” CBS News, July 25, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/autonomous-vehicles-activists-hit-sf-streets-orange-cones-thwart-robotaxis-cruise-waymo/. |
| ↑12 | Allan Sekula, “The instrumental image: Steichen at war,” Artforum 14, no. 4 (1975): 28. |
| ↑13 | Notably, this move from passively being sensed to actively shaping the sensing process not only corresponds to the etymology and lived practice of activism, but also to many classic game definitions that stress the importance of entering into the game voluntarily, see e.g. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture (The Beacon Press, 1950). |
| ↑14 | Rita Santoyo Venegas, “Digital play as an epistemic experience,” in Play, Philosophy and Performance, ed. Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell and Emily Ryall (Routledge, 2021). |
| ↑15 | Kari Paul, “The rebel group stopping self-driving cars in their tracks—one cone at a time,” The Guardian, July 26, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/26/san-francisco-stop-self-driving-cars-traffic-cone-safe-street-rebel. |
| ↑16 | Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Sheed & Ward, 1989 [1960]), 106. |
| ↑17 | Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (University of California Press, 1984). |
| ↑18 | Paul, “The rebel group stopping self-driving cars.” |
| ↑19 | Arthur C. Clarkes famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It seems fitting that the protest against supposedly advanced technology like self-driving cars should also be indistinguishable from magic. |
| ↑20 | Sam Hind, “Maps, Kettles and Inflatable Cobblestones: The Art of Playful Disruption in the City,” Media Fields Journal 9 (2015), http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/tactical-frivolity-and-disobed/2015/8/21/maps-kettles-and-inflatable-cobblestones-the-art-of-playful.html. |
| ↑21 | Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (The Free Press, 1961). |
| ↑22 | Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), 23. |
| ↑23 | Adam Harvey, “CV Dazzle,” https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle, last accessed May 5, 2025. |
| ↑24, ↑26 | Charmante, “Real Player Manifesto.” |
| ↑25 | Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, “Glitch epistemologies for computational cities,” Dialogues in Human Geography 12, no. 3 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221075714. |
| ↑27 | Richard Luscombe, “Driverless taxi vandalized and set on fire in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” The Guardian, February 12, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/12/waymo-car-fire-san-francisco. |
| ↑28 | Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Anthropos, 1968). |
| ↑29 | Gavin Mueller, Breaking things at work: The luddites are right about why you hate your job (Verso, 2021). |
| ↑30 | Florian Sprenger, “Critique of sensoric mediality—An experimental approach to chains of translation between the analog and the digital,” Convergence 31, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251318328. |
| ↑31 | Richard Gonzales, “Feds say self-driving Uber SUV did not recognize jaywalking pedestrian in fatal crash,” npr, 7 November, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777438412/feds-say-self-driving-uber-suv-did-not-recognize-jaywalking-pedestrian-in-fatal-. |
| ↑32 | Espen Aarseth, “I fought the law: Transgressive play and The implied player,” DiGRA ’07—Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play Vol. 4, 130—133. |
| ↑33 | Tomo Kihara, “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car. Installation exploring the consequence of evading AI detection on the streets,” https://www.tomokihara.com/en/how-not-to-get-hit-by-a-self-driving-car.html, accessed May 5, 2025. |
| ↑34 | Sicart, Play matters. |
Christoph Borbach, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. Borbach previously researched and taught at the University of Vienna, the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Leuphana University Lüneburg, among others. His research areas are: history of technology and media theory, epistemology and praxeology.
Max Kanderske, MA, is a PhD student at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. Kanderske was previously a research assistant at the chair of Science, Technology & Media Studies at the University of Siegen. His research interests include augmented and virtual reality, media geography and sensor media.
