User Profile

The key argument of the ‘smart city’ marketing concept is that urban management will be improved by the maximum centralization of data captured on the territory, to be displayed on an ‘urban dashboard’.

For the sales engineers of the companies offering these solutions, the aim is to promote, to local decision-makers, the effectiveness of a better understanding of the ‘functioning’ of their city, to be achieved by ‘monitoring’ it in real time and with algorithmic means to support decision-making.

The underlying idea is that all the city’s problems are purely technical, and that they can be more effectively solved using the arithmetic of ‘big data’ or ‘artificial intelligence’ than by administrations and inhabitants. In this way, debates, democratic deliberations, collective learning and administrative decision-making procedures are all tacitly evacuated.

— Bifurcate by Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross, The Internation Collective (Page 81 - 82)

In her critical study of actual attempts to build ‘smart cities’, Halpern has also convincingly unveiled their fundamentally speculative nature. In spite of the good intentions and genuine hopes their designers may possess, they rest on the same dynamics as the derivatives that have restructured the financial world of the last two decades. They function as promises, designed to raise – largely unjustified – hopes, soon to be abandoned in favour of more promising prospects.

This drift towards ever-elusive futures, which the initiators of these projects often find unmanageable (the impact of communication facilitates speculative motivations), drives a fundamentally speculative economy. At the same time, and aggravating this situation, this speculative economy makes it possible to finance major corporate R&D projects via speculation and public offerings. This dynamic explores and tests a wide range of possibilities, but its achievements are limited and barely visible, and the impact difficult for the inhabitants and administrators to assess. The ‘smartness mandate’ that rules in parallel the design of smart cities and the social logic of financial derivatives rewards forms of governance, orientation and control whose result is to disorient and mislead our collective decisions.

— Bifurcate by Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross, The Internation Collective (Page 80)

Digital or platform capitalism is characterized by the permanent and planetary interconnection of individuals, whose activities are systemically traced and processed by the intensive computation of algorithms, allowing them to be controlled by exospheric giants for the purpose of value extraction. This data economy is expressed spatially by what marketing refers to as ‘smart cities’, a term that serves to mask the subjection of territories to extraterritorial logics short-circuiting local political authorities and the practices of inhabitants.

— Bifurcate by Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross, The Internation Collective (Page 72)

Work, unlike mere labour, invents new tools and prescribes new practices, which generate new usages, that is, ways of life in the sense of habits, customs and cultures (these usages are cultivated, they do not merely involve instructions or ‘user manuals’), thus constructing new configurations of meaning for human and ecosystemic interactions. Hence work is something other than probabilistic alphanumeric combinatorics in a set of predetermined possibilities (computerized data processing). This is why a reinvention of work (and with it of the economy, both psychic and political) is necessary at all levels of society, if we are to confront the current crisis and strive to overcome it.

— Bifurcate by Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross, The Internation Collective (Page 59)