An Actor of the Street: Events, Agencies, and Gatherings

Beginning with the mid-century rise of computing, the practice of tracking has relied on observational experts installed in the control rooms of military and intelligence operations—specialists skilled in the detection and interpretation of the movements of the world, arrayed before them on images or maps. Propelled by the efficiency demands of the new cultures of security, these observation-based procedures have now ceded, at least in part, to algorithmic ones, in ways that challenge the centrality of human agency.