Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Evgeny Morozov
Sun 22 Oct 2017 00.05 BST
Cities surely wouldn’t mind but what about Alphabet? The company does take
cities seriously. Its executives have floated the idea of taking some struggling city
– Detroit? – and reinventing it around Alphabet services, with no annoying
regulations blocking this march of progress.
All of this might have looked counter-intuitive several decades ago, but today,
when institutions such as the World Bank preach the virtues of privately run
cities and bigwigs in Silicon Valley aspire to build sea-based micronations
liberated from conventional bureaucracy, it does not seem so far-fetched.
Alphabet already operates many urban services: city maps, real-time traffic
information, free wifi (in New York), self-driving cars. In 2015 it launched a
dedicated city unit, Sidewalk Labs, run by Daniel Doctoroff, former deputy mayor
of New York and a veteran of Wall Street.
Alphabet already operates many urban services: city maps, real-time traffic
information, free wifi (in New York), self-driving cars. In 2015 it launched a
dedicated city unit, Sidewalk Labs, run by Daniel Doctoroff, former deputy mayor
of New York and a veteran of Wall Street.
Sidewalk Labs has committed $50m to the project – mostly for hosting a year-
long consultation after which either party can exit. Its 220-page winning bid
provides fascinating insights into its thinking and methodology. “High housing
costs, commute times, social inequality, climate change and even cold weather
keeping people indoors” – such is the battlefield Doctoroff described in a recent
interview.
Toronto, led by its own visionary leaders, will have Alphabet. Amid all this
platformaphoria, one could easily forget that the street grid is not typically the
property of a private entity, capable of excluding some and indulging others.
Would we want Trump Inc to own it? Probably not. So why hurry to give its
digital equivalent to Alphabet?
Who determines the rules by which different companies get access to it? Would
cities be saving energy using Alphabet’s own AI systems or would the platform be
open to others? Would its self-driving cars be those of Waymo, Alphabet’s
dedicated unit, or those of Uber and any other entity that builds them? Would
Alphabet support “urban net neutrality” as actively as it supports net neutrality of
the conventional type?
In reality, there is no “digital grid”: there are just individual Alphabet products.
Its bet is to furnish cool digital services to establish complete monopoly over data
extractivism within a city. What passes for the efforts to build the “digital grid”
might, in fact, be an attempt to privatise municipal services – a staple feature of
Blackstone Urbanism, not a radical departure from it.
For Alphabet, these constraints are no more: ubiquitous and continuous data
flows can finally replace government rules with market signals. Now, everything
is permitted – unless somebody complains. The original spirit behind Uber was
quite similar: away with the rules, tests and standards, let the sovereign
consumer rank the drivers and low-scoring ones will soon disappear on their
own. Why not do this to landlords? After all, if you are lucky to survive a house
fire, you can always exercise your consumer sovereignty and rank them down.
Here the operating logic is that of Blackstone Urbanism, even if the techniques
themselves are part of Google Urbanism.
Google Urbanism means the end of politics, as it assumes the impossibility of
wider systemic transformations, such as limits on capital mobility and foreign
ownership of land and housing. Instead it wants to mobilise the power of
technology to help residents “adjust” to seemingly immutable global trends such
as rising inequality and constantly rising housing costs (Alphabet wants us to
believe that they are driven by costs of production, not by the seemingly endless
supply of cheap credit).
Normally these trends mean that for most of us things will get worse. Alphabet’s
pitch, though, is that new technologies can help us survive, if not prosper, by
using self-tracking to magically find time in the busy schedules of overworked
parents; by making car debt obsolete as car ownership becomes unnecessary; by
deploying artificial intelligence to lower energy costs.
Google Urbanism shares the key assumption of Blackstone Urbanism: our highly
financialised economy – marked by stagnating real wages, liberalised housing
markets that drive up prices due to persistently strong global demand,
infrastructure built on an opaque but highly lucrative public-private partnership
model – is here to stay. The supposedly good news is that Alphabet has the
sensors, networks and algorithms to restore and maintain our earlier standard of
living.
The Toronto proposal is still vague on who will pay for this urban utopia. It
acknowledges that “some of [the project’s] most impactful innovations are major
capital projects that will require large volumes of reliable offtake to be
financeable”. Short of that, it might become the urban equivalent of Tesla: a
venture propelled by infinite public subsidies that derive from collective
hallucination.
Alphabet’s appeal to investors lies in the modularity and plasticity of its spaces;
there is no function permanently assigned to any of their parts. Much like in the
early cybernetic utopias of eternally flexible and reconfigurable architecture,
there is no function permanently assigned to any of its parts. Everything can be
reshuffled and rearranged, with boutiques turning into galleries only to end up as
gastropubs – as long as such digitally enabled metamorphosis yields a higher
return.
After all, Alphabet is building a city “where buildings have no static use”. For
example, the centrepiece of the proposed neighbourhood in Toronto – the Loft –
will offer a skeleton structure that “will remain flexible over the course of its
lifecycle, accommodating a radical mix of uses (such as residential, retail,
making, office, hospitality and parking) that can respond quickly to market
demand”.
Here lies the populist promise of Google Urbanism: Alphabet can democratise
space by customising it through data flows and cheap, prefabricated materials.
The problem is that Alphabet’s democratisation of function will not be matched
by the democratisation of control and ownership of urban resources. That’s why
the main “input” into Alphabet’s algorithmic democracy is “market demand”
rather than communal decision-making.
Aside from the institutional investors shopping for entire city blocks, Alphabet
understands the real audience for its cities: the global rich. For them, the
narratives of data-driven sustainability and algorithmically produced artisanal
lifestyles – Sidewalk Labs even promises “a next-gen bazaar” replenished by local
communities of makers – are just another way to justify rising values of their
property portfolios.
Alphabet’s urban turn also has a broader political significance. The courting of
Alphabet by Canada’s politicians along with the bidding war that has erupted
over Amazon’s second North American headquarters – some cities have offered it
incentives to the tune of $7bn to relocate there – suggest that, despite the
growing backlash against Silicon Valley, our political classes have few other
positive (and, as importantly, cash-positive) industries to draw upon.
This is clearly the case with Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who has
recently pitched his country as “a “Silicon Valley, plus everything else Canada is”.
In one respect, he is certainly right: it has been Canada’s pension funds that
turned real estate and infrastructure into the lucrative alternative assets they are
today.
Let us not have any illusions about Google Urbanism. One has to be naive to
believe that the emerging urban alliance of the technology and financial
industries would produce results detrimental to the latter. Blackstone Urbanism
will still be shaping our cities even if Alphabet takes over their garbage disposal.
“Google Urbanism” is a nice way of camouflage this truth.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/21/google-urban-cities-planning-data