“Free, widespread Internet connectivity for the masses, how brilliant! As we’ve previously argued, connectivity is the critical underlying fabric of not only the Internet, but life itself. Imagine what the promise of ubiquitous connectivity holds! That is, until you inspect the underlying fabric of LinkNYC as the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) are so adept at doing.
Benjamin Dean, President of Iconoclast Tech and Fellow for Cyber Security and Internet Governance at Columbia SIPA, did exactly that in his presentation, raising what for us are two critical concerns regarding the future of ubiquitous connectivity infrastructure.”
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Over the weekend, I took part in the 11th Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City.
To continue an ongoing exploration into the origins and history of techno-utopianism, I invited Burcu Baykurt (PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School) and James Cropcho (Adjunct Professor at NYU ITU) to discuss 'Smart Cities and Blockchains: New Techno-Utopian Dreams or Nightmares?’.
We made specific reference to blockchains and ‘smart cities’ given the feverous hype around these two technological trends.
My personal view is that techno-utopian dreams end up failing when a vision is imposed upon people or a society. This has been the approach adopted since the turn of the 20th century and finds its roots in a believe that emerged from the Enlightenment that greater technology and knowledge will naturally and necessarily lead to progress for humanity (John Gray’s book ‘Heresies’ is particularly good at framing this ideology).
The most striking part of the whole discussion, to me at least, was when Burcu explained a conversation she had with programmers she working on Kansas City’s Google-backed municipal broadband project.
Their approach was to collect data and then, after analyzing the data, find where the problems in the city might lie then apply technology to solve them. If no problems emerged from the data, they intended to go back and collect more in the hopes of finding where the problems are.
I asked, “if they want to find problems in Kansas City, why don't they just ask people what the problems are?” The people who actually live there day-to-day are going to have a pretty good idea what the problems in their lives are.
The issue for the smart city boosters is that, were they to do this, they might find that many of the real problems cannot be solved by technology. A Google-backed broadband network might not do anything to remedy these problems - it may even exacerbate them. Burcu’s example on how, in essence, red-lining emerged is particularly striking.
In order to roll-out the broadband access to those who would use it first, Google asked residents to signal their intention to use the network by paying a $10 fee to sign-up. The outcome of this was that the historically poor part of the city became differentiated from the historically rich part. The poorest people in town didn’t have $10 to spare. They therefore would receive the broadband access last - compounding the systemic reasons for their poverty.
It was a thought-provoking talk and one that I hope to build-on at a later date. From my discussions after the panel, it became clear to me that the idea that one might actually ask someone what their problems are then design technology to address the problems is anathema to many in the tech community. These are important misconceptions to dislodge if we are to avoid repeating the same techno-utopian mistakes that have occurred over the past century.
