Flashing lights in the quantified self-city-nation

As I recall I know you love to show off

But I never thought that you would take it this far

What do I know? Flashing … lights.

What do I know? Flashing … lights. (West, 2007, n.p.)

In the quantified self-city-nation, the flickering of screens, the dynamics of real-time data and the prospect for behavioural change intersect in a glossy imaginary where being technologically fashionable and facile supersedes concerns of differential docility. In other words, the technophilic projections of the coming society do very little to grapple with inequalities across human and non-human life. Instead, we are assured of the untapped potential at the touch of the flat screens in some of our pockets, that the possibility of our ‘fittest’ bodies and ‘smartest’ cities rests with individual behaviour. At moments, the hyperbole of the ‘smart city’ feels much like ‘flashing … lights’, to reference and invoke Kanye West (2007). It is akin to ‘showing off’, flexing a representational muscle that attempts to frame discussion not around the implications of quantified self-city-nation – around who, what bodies will benefit – but around how quantified, how smart, how flash these systems can be. Gee whiz.

Enter the media observation deck of Rio’s Center of Operations. In Figure 1, the image to the right displays what can be seen from above the command centre, while the image to the left provides a viewpoint on the ground floor, generally off-limits to the public. This centre has quickly become the poster child celebrating new public–private partnerships in the securitization of urban space – and more importantly the securitization of perception – such that mobile capital finds a nurturing nest in global cities that manage their (visible) precarity well. Rob Kitchin and his programmable city research team have well-documented a typology of these emerging systems of indicators, benchmarks and dashboards. They suggest, and I underscore, that many smart city advocates view these systems as enacting measurements, and not productions, of the urban. Kitchin, Lauriault, and McArdle (2014) discuss this epistemological uneasiness, and encourage a different approach to dashboard development: ‘that they do not reflect the world as it actually is, but actively frame and produce the world’.

Figure 1. Rio’s Center of Operations.

To this I would add that the development of quantified self-city-nation is increasingly big business and big for business. McKinsey & Company consultants clearly understand this relationship between technological hype and the privatization of the city:

We wanted to understand how cities and technology vendors could collaborate more effectively on smart-city projects and grow the market for these solutions. (Laartz & Lülf, 2014, p. 45; added emphasis)

Rapid diagnosis of the current and future operating and financial potential, asset by asset, with fine-grained benchmarking and interviews, can often reveal substantial opportunities to unlock value, including cost-reduction programs and partial equity sale, sale-and-leaseback, contracting for operations, and obtaining a credit rating. (Palter & Shilson, 2014, n.p.; added emphasis)

And, if the hype and consumer demand for wearable electronics is read alongside the market for smart city tech, then we are dealing with a global infrastructural effort that is only partially hardware – there is a discourse deeply at play. The mandates of these developments – to make manageable through sensing, analytical and visualization systems – are reinforced as transnational corporations like IBM, Cisco and Siemens move more directly into consulting services to provide support for a rising technological determinism in urban management: for a fee, of course. As Matturi (2013) writes, ‘IBM’s transformation story provides a prudent example of the trajectory of technological advancements in data gathering, sensing, mapping, and image processing’ (p. 3), a story that parallels the rise of citizens-as-sensors in governance literature more generally (Gabrys, 2014).

As the ubiquity of television advertisements and airport displays for new socio-technical solutions to spatial problems evidence, these ‘smart’ indicator and dashboard systems are always more than mere techniques for data collection, analysis and representation. These systems are also more than a hardening of a realist epistemology. We are witnessing what I have previously called a multiscalar system of attentional control (Wilson, 2014), where the everyday is increasingly the object of reconfiguration, and the mechanism that produces that reconfiguration is, as Stiegler (2012) suggests, the human capacity to pay attention (Wilson, in press-a). To attend to and re-present one’s body and one’s city through these kinds of systems is to speed up a process by which for-profit entities control the time in front of the mirror. Who controls how individuals and cities see themselves locks in a power–knowledge geometry that may determine what questions and what types of data may be asked about, tracked and acted upon (Wilson, 2011a, 2011b).

These quantified self-city-nation systems of re-presentation are fundamentally unable to witness socio-spatial phenomena outside of their vision:

A system feeds back on itself in order to settle things for itself: in order to settle a territory. Its mode of coherence is self-reproductive. Its operations feed back on themselves in the interests of their own conservation. What this means is that a system is self-referencing. (Massumi, 2009, p. 169)

For many of these sorts of urban management systems, Massumi’s realization is not particularly new (for instance, see multi-criteria decision-making and spatial decision support systems of a couple decades ago; Wilson, in press-b). Relatedly, it is not entirely clear what part of the ‘new science of cities’ (Batty, 2013) is all that novel: many of these pattern-seeking systems draw upon an analytics and epistemology long in the making (Barnes & Wilson, 2014). What does seem quite novel – and perhaps more significant given planetary economic crisis – is the amassing of capital by tech and consulting firms in the midst of crumbling urban and social infrastructure. The feverish pace in which these industries create the sensors for and hoover up indicator data should bring social scientists pause to consider who, what bodies, what companies and what places stand to benefit most from these developments, for which the academy has been called upon to provide intellectual aid and co-constitution. I never thought that you would take it this far. Flashing … lights.