Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the states infrastructure monitoring systems for disaster management during Australia's recent bushfires, with analysis focused on how interactions between individual citizens was mediated, producing information and incoherence, access and exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

During Australia's recent bushfires, state control centres used phone applications to map threats and manage populations. Newly developed information management systems for monitoring infrastructure pushed out live updates directly to users on how to circumnavigate danger. Over the 5-day crisis, an array of notifications advising socio-spatial processes for self-preservation were generated. But it was unclear how state-controlled ways of knowing and acting integrated with local systems of care. This paper examines how citizens well-informed by 4G networks circulate in a critical scenario. The aim is to consider infrastructure monitoring as a method that manages populations and ask how can its deployment be managed to ensure the weakest survive. Analysis is based on an autoethnography of sheltering in and evacuating from Mallacoota, a UNESCO world biosphere reserve, alongside a 90 and 5-year-old far from home. The dynamic situation framed users of the state's app as architects of collective action plans. But as the fast-moving fire fronts became more animated, the infrastructure monitoring systems converted knowledge holders from key actors into populations receiving transmissions. Is the state's insistence on transforming locals threatened by bushfires into app users and information managers a problem? With the state investing in more and more infrastructure monitoring, coupled with the advent of mobile capabilities that index localised movements, how people navigate disasters is constantly updating. Navigating material and media environments during Australia's 2020 bushfire laid bare how the live maps we follow enact a particular version of events, remediating how those on the ground define informed decision making and diagnose action plans.