‘Should cities be run like businesses?’ ask Graham, Kitchin, Mattern and Shaw. ‘Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses?’ To explore these questions they have gathered 38 thinkers and writers to imagine cities run under various different business models: Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, and so on. Some of these chapters are essays; most are short stories, fictional extrapolations — science fiction, no less. Most are thought-provoking and engaging, even if 38 stories is too many, and at 350-pages the book lacks somewhat of sprightliness.
In their introduction the editors note that ‘Let’s Run Our Cities Like Amazon!’ is a real-world position advanced by real-world people:
In an article to promote their new book — ‘A New City O/S’ — Stephen Goldsmith (a former Mayor of Indianapolis and Deputy Mayor of New York) and Neil Kleiman (Director of the NYU/Wagner Innovation Labs) contend that cities should act more like Amazon to better serve their citizens. They argue that cities will be more efficient and productive if they become data-driven, using analytics and machine learning to parse data about citizens and city services/ infrastructure into insights that provide a responsive, tailored experience.Many people, the editors point out, find such an idea concerning: ‘concerns about profit being placed before people and the environment, widening inequalities between citizens, a loss of rights, and the erosion of democracy, fairness, justice and accountability, the privatisation of public assets and corporatization of surveillance.’ It’s certainly true that the stories in this collection overwhelmingly skew in this direction.
A number of the stories here imagine cities run by data-brokerage companies, using the data they have gathered to reward or punish citizens (better or worse housing, better or worse access to city services and so on): Rob Kitchin’s ‘You’re Entitled to What the Data Says [sic] You Deserve’; Jathan Sadowski’s ‘I Am The Score Machine’; Jeremy W. Crampton and Kara C. Hoover ‘the Unseen’ (a city as run by Cambridge Analytica). The same Black Mirror-ish points about the danger of putting ourselves at the mercy of data rankings are repeated in many of the stories here. The inhabitants of James Ash’s Twitter-run city (‘Seeking Follows’) obsessively chase followers, since ‘follows’ are the actual currency by which the economy runs; it is not a good way to live. In Lizzie Richardson’s ‘Too Much Fulfilment’, a Deliveroo-run town not only has all citizens eating delivered food, it has citizens punished for ‘de-synchronising’ — not being at home as the delivery is made, and so throwing-out Deliveroo’s routine. Mark Graham’s ‘City of Loops’ imagines a virtual reality city, ‘The Looped Web’, which is run according to the logic of Facebook or Weibu.
Jennifer Gabrys’s ‘Saving the Shire’ models a Palantir-run city, modelled on Tolkien’s hobbitland, built in a 477-acre chunk of New Zealand and inhabited by people so interpenetrated with tech they are effectively ‘human-computer symbiots’. It’s sharply dystopian, is this Shire: ‘The cognitive elite will oversee this monarchical urban shire of well-equipped analysts. People of color, queers, the disabled, gender nonconformists, the poor, dissidents, deportees, women, and failed analysts: these undesirable subjects are exiled to the remote Pacific SeaSteading facilities for producing necessary supplies for MiddleEarth.’ Palantir? Boo!
In Andrew Iliadis’s ‘The Semantic City’, citizens have an actual Siri implanted in their brains. Sophia Maalsen and Kurt Iveson’s ‘Welcome to Jobstown’ imagines city run by Apple, or more precisely their fiction maps corporate demographics onto a shiny imagined urban space
Google gets several goes: in Leighton Evans’s ‘Seeing the City Through Google’s Eyes’ everyone is wearing Google-made ‘ARLens’ spectacles, which enables Google to control what they see. Tooran Alizadeh’s ‘There Is No Such Thing As Free Infrastructure’ tackles Google Fiber. Ayona Datta’s WhatsApp story, ‘A City of People, for the People, by the People’ imagines a city in which justice is rough and ground-up: if somebody shares video of you having sex on WhatsApp, you don’t go to the authorities; you share a more click-y story that shames your enemy, or distract the populace with some other online bait.
One of the best stories here, Pip Thornton’s witty ‘Subprime, Language and the Crash’, concerns a city in which Google has monetized the very words people speak (‘People know that if they use certain words, they get more data and cheaper Wifi bills, and this changes in different areas, so if you talk about how wonderful Google is here in the Bay area, you end up with loads of money. And if you talk about rival products in a building sponsored by a particular advertiser, you get less data at a higher price’). It leads to disaster, when words as such become ‘subprime’ and the market collapses.
But most of these 38 stories are pretty samey. The prose is generally grey, the characters mouthpieces for their author’s ideas, the satire — when the stories are satirical — tends to the clomp-clomp. Many authors take a tech company or product and imagine a city saturated with that tech rather than governed by that tech — but perhaps I’m nitpicking. There are certainly lots of interesting things in here, and since Meatspace give you the option of setting your own price when you download the PDF, you can certainly afford it. I recommend it, too.
In Andrew Iliadis’s ‘The Semantic City’, citizens have an actual Siri implanted in their brains. Sophia Maalsen and Kurt Iveson’s ‘Welcome to Jobstown’ imagines city run by Apple, or more precisely their fiction maps corporate demographics onto a shiny imagined urban space
The Jobstown local government launches significant updates, new services and new generation products in arena-style events; iPhone Video recordings of these events show an audience of young designers and tech-heads dressed in black polo necks, cheering on their Apple-determined future. These videos, immediately uploaded to social media accounts, reveal an interesting trend — the majority of Jobstown residents are white men. A demographic analysis shows that Jobstown is comprised of 70 per cent men compared to 30 percent women, and 55 per cent of residents are white.A lot of the work here manifests a scholarly caution that shades, sometimes, into a deadening shore-hugging. Matthew Zook’s ‘Cryps, Chains and Cranks’ imagines a city run on the principles of Bitcoin, and begins: ‘The sky above the city was the colour of encryption, tuned to an old hash solution, three blocks back in the chain’, which is quite a nice opener — except that Zook adds a footnote, ‘borrowed from William Gibson’s (1984) novel Neuromancer’, which underestimates his readership. If Jobstown is a cultish pseudo-utopia, Bitcointown is a comical disaster.
Back in 2020 a bunch of Bitcoin billionaires bought up four downtown blocks to make a model of a fully self-executing blockchain neighbourhood via a series of smart contracts and Dapps within a larger a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Some bad coding in a couple obscure smart contracts — one for tracking waste output from toilets and another polling music preferences — got stuck in a loop and since then every 47.31 minutes the septic systems discharged into the streets and speakers in the district played an indie folk interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody.Alison Powell’s ‘Registering Eve’ is based on a different blockchain, Etherium. Anthony Vanky’s ‘The Most Magical Place on Earth’ imagines a Disney-run city, and is, unfortunately therefore, a story that includes such phrases as ‘tee-hee-hee’ and ‘bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!’ In Manuel B Alber’s ‘Easycity’, Easyjet runs a city: in such a place a basic house is ridiculously cheap, but literally everything else is very costly. You start to see, I’m sure, the underlying principles by which these stories have been confected. And so the collection goes on: Matthew Claudel’s city is based on the business model of notorious academic publisher Elsevier (‘The Civic Method’): that is to say, the city is flashy but restrictive and exorbitant. Gavin Brown imagines a ‘Grindr City’, divided into tribes (‘Bear, Clean-cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz, Rugged, Trans or Twink’). The city in Dietmar Offenhuber’s ‘Premium Places’ is run according to the logic of Pornhub (he thinks it would ‘in several ways like Facebook’, only with more sex).
Google gets several goes: in Leighton Evans’s ‘Seeing the City Through Google’s Eyes’ everyone is wearing Google-made ‘ARLens’ spectacles, which enables Google to control what they see. Tooran Alizadeh’s ‘There Is No Such Thing As Free Infrastructure’ tackles Google Fiber. Ayona Datta’s WhatsApp story, ‘A City of People, for the People, by the People’ imagines a city in which justice is rough and ground-up: if somebody shares video of you having sex on WhatsApp, you don’t go to the authorities; you share a more click-y story that shames your enemy, or distract the populace with some other online bait.
One of the best stories here, Pip Thornton’s witty ‘Subprime, Language and the Crash’, concerns a city in which Google has monetized the very words people speak (‘People know that if they use certain words, they get more data and cheaper Wifi bills, and this changes in different areas, so if you talk about how wonderful Google is here in the Bay area, you end up with loads of money. And if you talk about rival products in a building sponsored by a particular advertiser, you get less data at a higher price’). It leads to disaster, when words as such become ‘subprime’ and the market collapses.
But most of these 38 stories are pretty samey. The prose is generally grey, the characters mouthpieces for their author’s ideas, the satire — when the stories are satirical — tends to the clomp-clomp. Many authors take a tech company or product and imagine a city saturated with that tech rather than governed by that tech — but perhaps I’m nitpicking. There are certainly lots of interesting things in here, and since Meatspace give you the option of setting your own price when you download the PDF, you can certainly afford it. I recommend it, too.
One thing, though, strikes me, having gone through the whole collection. Nobody questions the underlying premise. I don’t mean, the question as to whether life in a city ruled by Cambridge Analytica or Twitter would be dystopian — I’m sure it would be. I mean the principle behind all these stories: corporatocracy, the notion that corporations are capable of or indeed interested in running actual countries. It’s a staple of cyberpunk, this: the belief that not only are corporations interested in governing us, but that just such a grimly deracinated, money-over-people, violent corporatocratic future is coming our way. I’m not sure it is.
Facebook, Google, Apple and Disney are huge corporations, no question, and they make obscene amounts of money. But none of them have taken over the business of actual governance. On the contrary, the nation state is as strong as it’s ever been (arguably, with Brexit and the election in so many territories of aggressively tribalist-nationalist quasi-fascist leaders, nationalism is stronger than it’s been for a while). Indeed, it seems to me a moot question whether Google, Facebook and Apple are huger, as corporations, than were (say) the Ford Motor Company or BP a century ago. We forget: not only did Ford generate eye-popping profits throughout the 1920s, he even bought up a five-thousand-square-mile chunk of Brazil in order to establish his own Fordlândia quasi-country, with a view to ensuring a steady supply of rubber for his US factories. That came to nothing, of course. But actually that coming-to-nothingness is my point. Big corporations have always pursued the best ways of maximising their profits. That’s what they do. It transpires taking over the business of national and international governance is not one such. Which, if you think about it for thirty seconds, makes sense, actually. Running a country is not profitable. Profit is maximised by identifying one aspect of life and mining it as deep as you can. Running a city is not about one aspect, but an interlocking series of many aspects, and the most effective way to orchestrate such a thing is via not profit but ideology. I’m not suggesting Corporations are ideologically neutral entities, of course. But I am suggesting that whilst the various individuals who make up corporations, from senior management down, are each congeries of ideological framing and signification, the corporation as such is determined by a very narrow ideology — make $$$. Maximise profit. Shareholder value, all these euphemism for the abduction of money. Money exists ‘in’ society (and cannot exist outwith society) so it is logical that the most efficient strategies for getting are version of niche identification and extraction. It’s a hostage to fortune, but I don’t believe we’ll see a real-life Neuromancer-style social future in which Google or Rotten Tomatoes or whoever are running everything. Nation-states are loss leaders, necessary frames that enable corporations to make mucho-mucho money.
This is not really a criticism of How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables — these are thought-experiments, satires and exercises in ludic conceptualising, not prophesy, and Feyerabandian principles quite properly govern such things. But a little more variety of approach would have leavened the lump, and such thoughts are one such variant.
Facebook, Google, Apple and Disney are huge corporations, no question, and they make obscene amounts of money. But none of them have taken over the business of actual governance. On the contrary, the nation state is as strong as it’s ever been (arguably, with Brexit and the election in so many territories of aggressively tribalist-nationalist quasi-fascist leaders, nationalism is stronger than it’s been for a while). Indeed, it seems to me a moot question whether Google, Facebook and Apple are huger, as corporations, than were (say) the Ford Motor Company or BP a century ago. We forget: not only did Ford generate eye-popping profits throughout the 1920s, he even bought up a five-thousand-square-mile chunk of Brazil in order to establish his own Fordlândia quasi-country, with a view to ensuring a steady supply of rubber for his US factories. That came to nothing, of course. But actually that coming-to-nothingness is my point. Big corporations have always pursued the best ways of maximising their profits. That’s what they do. It transpires taking over the business of national and international governance is not one such. Which, if you think about it for thirty seconds, makes sense, actually. Running a country is not profitable. Profit is maximised by identifying one aspect of life and mining it as deep as you can. Running a city is not about one aspect, but an interlocking series of many aspects, and the most effective way to orchestrate such a thing is via not profit but ideology. I’m not suggesting Corporations are ideologically neutral entities, of course. But I am suggesting that whilst the various individuals who make up corporations, from senior management down, are each congeries of ideological framing and signification, the corporation as such is determined by a very narrow ideology — make $$$. Maximise profit. Shareholder value, all these euphemism for the abduction of money. Money exists ‘in’ society (and cannot exist outwith society) so it is logical that the most efficient strategies for getting are version of niche identification and extraction. It’s a hostage to fortune, but I don’t believe we’ll see a real-life Neuromancer-style social future in which Google or Rotten Tomatoes or whoever are running everything. Nation-states are loss leaders, necessary frames that enable corporations to make mucho-mucho money.
This is not really a criticism of How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables — these are thought-experiments, satires and exercises in ludic conceptualising, not prophesy, and Feyerabandian principles quite properly govern such things. But a little more variety of approach would have leavened the lump, and such thoughts are one such variant.
Is there a story about running a city like the Trump Organization?
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