Social Engineering SMART CITIES: There is emerging evidence that smart cities are not the egalitarian utopias we want them to be.

Let's get to it before it's too late - there is a logical argument to be made over the ideology used. Smart city advocates - like city officials here in Mesa - talk about monitoring and data streams to promote that ideology - but we could definitely use another more familiar name "Surveillance".

HYPER-LOCAL: Here's an example from the next post on this blog of all that Happy-Talk:

WHERE THIS IS GOING > Key Priorities: Next 18 to 24 Months
City of Mesa Smart City Master Plan
10-Page Power Point Presentation
What is A Smart City?
In short, a Smart City is one in which the latest technologies and data-driven insights are leveraged to improve the quality of life, civic engagement, economic development, service delivery, and community vibrancy for its citizens, businesses and visitors.
A Smart City is actually about people versus tech itself.
A Smarter Mesa is where modernized communications infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) connected smart systems and data work together to provide responsive solutions that enhance the live, work & play experiences of people in our community.

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The danger lies with the quantity and quality of personal and private data that is being collected without consent or, in many cases, knowledge of the subjects by the public.

Collection Of Massive Amounts Of Public Data Is Now The Norm

INSERT: The digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy—and some are even actively pernicious—but they absolutely will be used in cities.
 They already have an urban heritage.
When you bury fiber-optic under the curbs around the town, then you get internet.
When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity.
When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things.
These tedious yet important digital transformations have been creeping into town for a couple of generations.

At this point, they’re pretty much all that urban populations can remember how to do.

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Is there a dark side to smart cities based on surveillance and control?         

Information Age

"There may be a darker side to smart cities hidden behind the optimistic marketing that paints a colourful metropolis leveraging the ubiquity of IoT, geospatial data, automation and machine learning to provide better services and the more efficient allocation of resources. This, in turn, it’s repeated and repeated and repeated  leads to better places for citizens to live, work, and play.

 

After nearly 20 years of the War on Terror we are now blind-folded to the dangers of the all-seeing state. There is emerging evidence that smart cities are not the egalitarian utopias we want them to be. And it seems that the disconnect starts with the competing requirements of administration and citizenry.

“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
George Orwell, 1984

One of the leading proponents of smart cities seems to be the leveraging of technologies for a form of social control, reminiscent of Black Mirrors Nose Dive (S3E1). The Chinese system of ‘Social Credit’ is designed to monitor every part of a citizen’s life, recording consumer, social, legal and financial behaviour.

> Few people outside the conspiracists believe the majority of smart city initiatives in democratic societies are guided by bad intentions. But the motives and pressures on city administrators inevitably change over time and freedoms are rarely recovered easily.

The danger lies with the quantity and quality of personal and private data that is being collected without consent or, in many cases, knowledge of the subjects.

1 In cities where our every movement is monitored and a variety of recognition technologies are used to identify us, smart city initiatives ask us to trade our privacy for largely undefined and ultimately mutable aims. The burghers of the West have been progressively trading privacy for the illusion of security.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Benjamin Franklin

But smart cities are more invasive than the current CCTV and ANPR monitoring we accept as normal. And the dangers are equally nebulous and potentially less recognisable than those of the War on Terror.

 

2 ‘We become our own self monitors’

In our homes smart sensors report on when we wake, how long we wash and what we consume – the arrival of wearables heralds a new wave of health and emotional data. Our homes are sensors, our appliances are sensors, we are sensors. All this data will be available via the neural network of the smart city to be analysed by the algorithms of machine learning. As we become our own self monitors, the bias of technology adoption and capability towards the more prosperous, there is a real danger that it may lead to misrepresentative data that could exacerbate inequality rather than narrowing it.

3 The danger lies with the quantity and quality of personal and private data that is being collected without consent or, in many cases, knowledge of the subjects.