The Battle for Control of Smart Cities
20th February 2011
Who will own the brains of smart cities–citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of “gov 2.0” champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.”
You have to love an article that fills up your Buzzword Bingo card in the first paragraph. What I find most amusing about such things is the artificial separation it assumes between alleged ‘huge corporations’ like ‘IBM or Cisco’ and us aw-shucks down-home folks like … the Rockefeller Foundation and the ‘Institute for the Future’. How thin and threadbare that curtain is can be seen by looking at the contributors:
The roster of expert contributors comprises a who’s who of ubiquitous computing and gov 2.0 types, including MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti, Everyware author Adam Greenfield, the Santa Fe Institute’s Nathan Eagle, Intel Labs Director Genevieve Bell, Microsoft Research’s Jonathan Donner, and San Francisco CIO Chris Vein.
All members in good standing of the Crust, whether from ‘huge corporations’ or their academic/governmental counterparts. The whole emphasis of projects like this is top-down ‘design’ and control, rather than getting these fumblers out of the way of individuals working on market-based solutions to problems of which the top-downers are the primary cause. I am reminded of the scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the crowd shows up outside of Brian’s house and plead with him to tell them how to think for themselves.
February 20th, 2011 at 10:22
I’m sorry, son, but that’s just wrong. You’re mistaking affiliation for motivation. If you’d actually done your homework and bothered to learn anything about the named individuals, you’d find that none of them believe in imposing a damn thing from the top down.
I myself don’t believe the magic “market” is the solution to all ills — it doesn’t take much more than a functioning set of eyes to diagnose neoliberalism at the root of a great many contemporary crises — but neither am I opposed to entrepreneurialism and hustle. Don’t believe me? Read the few thousand words I just wrote explaining just what is at stake here, and why top-down models are not merely wrong but irrelevant.
And while I’m here, I’ll also thank you not to describe me as Crust.
February 20th, 2011 at 16:23
And I’ll thank you not to call me ‘son’, since I’m undoubtedly older than you — certainly in civilizational terms. Affiliation and motivation are deeply linked; if they aren’t congruent at the start, they eventually become so. Methinks the laddie doth protest too much.
If you don’t think that the ‘magic market is the solution to all ills’, then you don’t understand markets … which makes you Crust in outlook if not in actual socioeconomic status. Let’s compromise and call you ‘Crust-wannabe’. (Prediction: If the President offered to appoint you to a Commission, you’d take it.)