Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys
“Abstract technology is not necessarily a cognitive model that is implemented but rather a set of dynamic changes that occur in any given techno cultural system which makes possible the concretization of particular technologies”, By becoming “environmental” the technology cognitively concresces with the environment albeit continues to mediate a message the form of “conditions in which particular entities may take hold”. Entering the environment; they threaten to alter the ratios of human perception, and “When those ratios change, Men change”
“But as embodied if differently directed creatures in shared worlds” – Does the smart city “threaten” to dismantle our human-central ideologies (what about my voice) in pursuit of a more concresced environment? Could that be by we feel threatened?
“Alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities” – Do DIY sensors and participatory technology not allow us to easily manipulate the outcome of data and in doing so contribute to our built environment in a more conscious “citizenship-fulfilling” manner?
“Planners, the exhibition text and book indicate, are also key to steering a city in the right direction.” In Playing the City Game, “by adjusting levers on a dashboard, a status menu indicates how well one is doing with every urban resource, infrastructure, and problem that is to be addressed must be quantified in order to be made computable”. How are citizens changed in the eyes of planners? Could a projection of the city as a data bed threaten to create a sociological divide between citizens and planners (programmer vs programmed)? The message (medium) being a status bar (low res, fast pace) vs intuitive observation and active participation in the city (high res, slow pace data)?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (Bloomberg), “Urban life must be enumerated in order to be managed within this cybernetic system. But once measured the city is meant to emerge as an easily pliable and modifiable system.” – What happens when non-quantifiable information results in false hypotheses and respective implementations?
“Ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things presents the problem of deciding which connectivities we really want as human beings on this planet” – This coincides with Sherry Turkle’s claim (Alone together) that digital connectivity has resulted in the preference of the majority of the public to choose media of communication that enable the division and distribution of attention between friends and family (physically present and not) and is constituted partially by today’s generalized “fear of missing out” (FOMO) brought forth by the speed at which information exchanged in the digital age. However, since multitasking is a proven myth, the result is merely a lowered, sporadic attention span.
“I see withness more as an articulation of processes of participation that involve becoming together across an extended array of entities. Whitehead described a community where multiple entities are effectively resonating within and experiencing a shared registered of world-making” – An active citizenship in the smart city is thereby constituted by the participation and self-expression of agency which collectively lends itself to a city that is a reflection of its citizen’s conscious decisions.
“Withness asks how are we thinking with, being with and becoming with the smart city (however) Rather than open technology to a multiple array of inhabitations, encounters and modes of withness, these projects often reduce technology to a utensil” – Is open circuit technology the answer? Is a closed circuit smart city indicative of our tendency to attempt to resolve today’s problems with (tomorrow’s) technology and yesterday’s state of mind?
Smart cities and the politics of Urban Date – Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle
“Instrumental rationality” & “Solutionism” are terms used to describe the smart city’s approach to problem solving and urban, infrastructural design implementations. “There is a belief that complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be solved or optimized through computation” – Can we not agree that some issues are indeed both complex enough and computable to warrant (SOME) smart city intervention? Should a distribution of control/power be allocated to the citizens in areas not deemed fully quantifiable by “highly reductionist” means of collection and analysis? What form will that distribution take? Can it not be argued that certain power has been allocated to the citizens (in the form of their active participation) that allows them to consciously manipulate the “system” for their own benefits?
There’s a general fear that “smart cities may well lead to a highly controlling and unequal societies in which rights to privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted”, Could this be regarded as more of a sociological issue due to the culturally imbedded notions of the importance of privacy, confidentiality and freedom of expression (set forth by print technology)? Will the actions and analyses carried by government agencies not ultimately make our cities safer in an age where infiltrations and cyber-attacks are ever more frequent?
“Cities of the world now routinely generate suites of indicator data, using them to track and trace performance, guide policy formulation and inform how the cities are governed/regulated” – Is City benchmarking any more of a benign threat to citizen morphing than a tabula rasa smart city? Used to “establish how well an area is performing vis-à-vis other locales or against best practice” – But what constitutes best practice? Or a City falling behind? If the mean of data collection is just as impersonal of that of smart sensor beds, does that not risk equally inaccurate and presumptive hypotheses and respective implementations?