Debating urban technology: technophiles, luddites and citizens

Urban technology is the new frontier, a space into which big business is entering: after defence, health care, telecommunications and utilities, the management of our cities is being altered by digital and bio-technologies – touted by the World Economic Forum (2016) as the fourth industrial revolution. Similar discourses have been rolled out many times before: heroic and innovative entrepreneurs are coming up with brilliant new ideas that will revolutionise whatever it is that is being discussed (in this case: old people’s homes, food purchases, patient monitoring, mobility, waste disposal, odd jobs, traffic management, child care, etc.). These nimble heroes are contrasted with staid and archaic municipal and public managers, portrayed as Luddites (Dickson, 2016), unnecessarily putting brakes on Uber’s wheels, picking nits out of AirBnB’s beds, imposing vaccines on Cisco’s data and pouring rain on Google’s cloud – as if somehow these corporations have society’s well-being, safety and justice as their prime concerns.

The best thing for urban administrations to do – I quote a speaker at an urban technology conference I attended in June 2016 – is to “get out of the way”. This sentiment was echoed by many of the presenters and attendees: those who disagreed – and, to be fair, even a few private sector entrepreneurs did – were not part of the Zeitgeist, were not the heroes of the show. Raising objections would have been a breach of etiquette: critical engagement with such sweepingly negative statements about everything public was clearly not part of the script.

Such technophilic and anti-public discourses need to be strident and full of confidence since they are riddled with contradictions. Can corporations such as Google, Cisco, Uber and AirBnB seriously be presented as entrepreneurial? They are powerful multinationals with an apparent agenda: to ensure that democratically implemented municipal by-laws and standards do not impede opportunities to extract value from cities. This new iteration of the growth machine consists of a-territorial actors (not local elites), with innovation (not growth) as its justification. Of course, not all urban technology promoters are part of the “innovation machine”: some start-ups put forward innovative ideas that can make life easier for citizens, and even some of the larger corporations’ ideas have merit. However, a lot of fourth-revolution urban technology consists of solutions in search of a problem (or market).

Another contradiction is revealed by the schizophrenic attitude of technology companies towards the public sector. On the one hand, it should “get out of the way”; on the other hand, it is a major client. As client, the public sector is expected to pay for the infrastructure and services that undergird all urban technology (roads, sewers, waste disposal, street cleaning, public space, social housing, schools, etc.), purchase fourth-revolution technologies (and all subsequent updates and newer new technologies) from tech suppliers, whilst furthermore providing resources and programmes to cope with the social dislocations caused by incessant change.

Where these public sector resources should come from is a subject coyly avoided by technophiles: yet all conference attendees knew that it wouldn’t be from technology companies or their wealthy shareholders. The Panama papers and UNCTAD (2016) report on FDI remind us yet again that corporations and wealthy individuals flee tax contributions like parasites flee dying hosts. Somehow the public sector should finance urban technology, pick up the pieces left in the wake of innovation’s (creative?) destruction, without raising taxes. The unspoken solution is to sell off the city, levy user fees, and further shrink the public realm: what Merrifield (2014) calls parasitic capitalism.

Another contradiction is apparent when the public sector’s role in innovation and technology is considered with fewer ideological blinkers. As Mazucatto (2014) explains in depressing detail, almost all fundamental technologies that innovative corporations rely upon – Internet, nano-technology, touch-screen technology, new medicinal molecules, etc. – have been developed in publically funded laboratories mandated to take risks that the Apples, Googles and Teslas of this world would find too dicey (and thus unprofitable) to undertake. Municipalities themselves often contribute considerable knowledge and expertise towards the development and implementation of urban technologies (Shearmur & Poirier, 2016). As Mazucatto shows, if the entrepreneurial public sector “gets out of the way” most radical innovation would grind to a halt.

Cities (as administrations with large budgets and with the capacity to tax their populations) are on the radar – or rather GPS device – of technology corporations: for them cities are relatively untapped zones of extraction. The types of innovation being thought up are intended to alter, and take over, urban processes. They will tie cities into proprietary technologies, updates and long-term service contracts that will divert funds from the spending and investment the population may desire or need. Indeed, citizens have almost no say as to which technologies are rolled out, as to what is destroyed and what is created, and as to what the alternatives and choices are. Technology is presented to them as unavoidable, as the forward march of progress, with the flinty techno-optimism of early twentieth-century Futurists: arguably, the alienation felt today by many people, of which Brexit and Donald Trump are symptoms, is fuelled by this type of elite-driven discourse that presents citizens with life-altering faits accomplis.

Innovations should be viewed neutrally and understood as a joint effort between the public and private sectors, not as heroic achievements in winner-take-all contests: as such, the rewards should be shared (the cost and risks are already disproportionately public) and innovation stripped of normative connotation. There is nothing inherently good about innovation (mortgage default swaps, asbestos, thalidomide – were all innovations), nor is there anything inherently bad about it (universal health care, bicycles, LED lighting – were also innovations). Technophilia – the glitter of a fourth industrial revolution – needs to be debunked, and new technologies weighed on their merits, i.e. their adequacy to address problems, their overall economic, environmental, social and distributional effects, and their likely long-term consequences.

This is not the first time new technologies have displaced the old without weighing their merits: the streetcar’s demise in the mid-twentieth century, engineered by corporate mobility experts of the day, is a case in point (Kuntsler, 1994). Then, as now, the benefits of new technology were talked-up by its developers: arguably, today’s car dependency and lack of public transport are the result of allowing their siren calls to drown out critical voices and debate. When technophiles assure us, today, that the only way forward for cities is through the adoption of fourth-revolution technology, a certain amount of scepticism is in order.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.