Smarty city – Townsend
“It was a full fledged crisis of control…Never before had the processing of material flows threatened to exceed the capacity of technology to contain them”, The telegraph was developed in reaction to the communicative/organizational crisis brought fourth by the industrial boom in the 1800s, now almost 150 years later “enhancing global competitiveness, innovation and standard of living” is Wim Elfink’s reason for pursuing a global communications network infrastructure, but how hard is communicating/organizing as is? Are we/our businesses in the face of a communicational breakdown or is a global network merely a corporal pitch to collect, analyze and sell our data to major third party corporations?
Is the promise of a smart city worth “surrendering to the guardians behind the screen”? Have we not already?
Smart Urbanism: Utopian vision or False dawn?
Does corporations’ pursuit of smart systems as an opportunity to boost profit revenues and market share effectively prevent the informed public of their belief in the technology’s ability to better our lives? Or can we look at it from a smart citizen’s perspective as the promise of a more efficient, traversable platform on which we can bring new inventions to light; interacting in a way we never thought possible?
“Every wall every surface can become an interface that offers users everything..”, “Their hope is to use this latent reserve of date gathered on users to produce services that can be paid for through advertising”, Are those “integrated services” really smarter than the capabilities available on our phones today? Is the “reward” worth assuming the risk of more insecurely connected devices?
Does it not seem that as the city becomes smarter as a result of corporations like Cisco and IFEZ’s efforts, our “cognitive freedom” will become more of a commodity? That our privacy in some cases will be a thing of the past – “Legal system in Songdo is being lobbied to enact changes in privacy laws that would allow transfer of medical data outside of the hospital”
“There can be no smartness without dumbness” Does the dumb become smarter as the city does or does he effectively morph into a bit?