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, The Internation Collective, Daniel Ross (Page 80)