A response to So-Far’s interview re: Smart Cities
https://www.so-far.online/issue-01-smart-cities/is-pokemon-go-the-future-of-governance
Okay, I really like the set up of this interview and the questions posed. But the point Noah Raford makes, as Futurist-in-Chief of the Dubai Future Foundation, seems really unexamined. It is consequential to how we think about smart city-as-model, and bears further examination, so I would like to make two points:
I.
He suggests that forms of domination/dominated power structures will no longer be of great concern in smart city models and planning. Good leaders will seek out the most “efficacious” ways of working.
Most smart cities initiatives that I’m involved in and am knowledgeable of are not intended to be a tool of domination. They’re sought out as a way to manage the public realm better, and to help people live happier, healthier lives. I think it’s a very good thing when we see countries like the UAE or Singapore where there is a very strong sense of the government’s commitment to the public good. As technology becomes more robust, intelligent, independent, and more available to different players and parties, it’s in these countries where those kinds of questions and experimentations on governance will play out in the best possible ways.
So I don’t think we have to be so concerned with the ideology of control in the 21st Century. The truth of the matter is, it will become harder and harder to maintain control. Intelligent leaders, who have the interest of the public good in their hearts, are going to seek it out, whatever the most efficacious tool to help achieve these greater goals of enhancing the public good.
We need only look at the way protocols written by scripts or systems enforce modes of behaviour that become commonsensical, that create our mental models (he uses the term without further substantiation but it is relevant here). Protocols need not be intentional in themselves; but they provide the backdrop against which all agentic actions, all agents can act. And they “vastly increase the number of actors that can interact”, as Felix Stalder writes in The Crisis of Epistemology and New Institutions of Learning.
Similarly, people may not intentionally seek to harm or hurt, but the institutions they submit their labour to hold massive institutional power to relay, block, and enable communications, advertising, and the transfer of user data and cognitive formatting. These institutions may consume planetary and socioemotional resources, and leave physical and mental traces at best. (One example is what I’m starting to think of as the OOTD-Health-Food-Body-Fitness Nexus which layers organic/raw foods, Instagram, meal prep, psychological discipline, and body fitness all into one package. A quick-moving package for quick-moving products.) At worst, they make people their labour force for the “greater good” - such as a national ideology - with little payoff except in base material needs
He asserts, “There is a close relationship between epistemology, that is ways of creating statements about the world, what can be stated, and who can make such statements, and power, that is how to organize the world, what needs to be organized, and who can do it.” Raford, as the Futurist-in-Chief of the Dubai Future Foundation, might be in a position to make statements about the world and also to organize some of it. But just as history examined from the point of view of the winners is an incomplete history at best, futures forecasted from the perspective of the blueprint-maker are blind to the collateral effects of on-the-ground construction, where futures are “made”, as Arjun Appadurai shows, in their haphazard, unplanned, contingent ways. A blueprint does not see these other ways, so how can we permit its statements to be read as fact?
II.
Raford also dimisses Foucauldian notions of power and reduces these to the Panopticon, saying we’re beyond that now.
And that might be decentralised systems, things like blockchain. In the UAE, we’re rolling out massive blockchain initiatives for all government services [6]. And that has profound political implications, or at least implications on governance — that people own their own data. You have to grant access to who gets to own the data. You would never have a Facebook moment, because your data isn’t centrally stored anywhere. So this groundswell is shifting – at least in theory – and there is nothing inevitable about it. I think we will have to have new ideas, new mental models and mindsets about citizenship, governance, social relations and social values in order to make the best of the world that is unfolding around us. So, yeah… I’m not too much of a fan of Foucault. We’re not in the Panopticon anymore!
Teow Yue Han: I do agree with you that we’re now occupying more of a Deleuzian model… [7]
But he doesn’t say what we are on to now - and while one might suggest a “deleuzian model”, this whole exchange reflects a lack of understanding of Foucault’s theory of power. Which is, that power is always constituted by force and response: force and resistance, domination and a build-up of a countering force. The formations of power can be multiple; Foucault does not specify a ‘model’ but a theory of power. The “deleuzian model” - this strange chimerical phrase that puts deleuze and computational “modelling” together - has roots (heh) in this moving, amorphous notion of power as well. And, if we leave aside these two thinkers and see where their work has extended, their concepts continue to be negotiated in theories of assemblage, temporality of change and action, connection and hybridity.
So:
Foucauldian ideas of power continue to be hugely important to making sense of this Future are we imagining populated by smart cities. The form of power is changing, but the Panopticon has not been made absent: it’s just been internalized on inside and outside surfaces, protruding and extruding from us from our behavioural to neural and molecular level.
