Smart City by Google (Toronto, Sidewalk Labs)

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Google, through its sister company Side Walk Labs, is experimenting with so-called "smart cities", where urban equipment participates in mass-surveillance of the populations.


Letter of Solidarity to #blocksidewalk from #fuckoffgoogle & co.

The struggle of the people of Toronto against Google/Sidewalk Labs' attempt to build a "smart district" is critical for the future of humanity and the autonomy of the people. If we let these creeps define the fabric of our cities based on mass-surveillance and cybernetic control of human behaviours and populations, our chances of fighting systemic oppression would become slimmer and slimmer.

Yet, in Berlin we demonstrated that through decentralized efforts, deep local solidarity and relentless sharing of knowledge, entire neighborhoods can become strong enough to defeat -even if symbolically- the strongest of colossus. For the colossus has argile feet: its "public image" is more precious than all, and by exposing its deeds we collectively make it melt like snow in the sun... We strongly believe that Toronto can win against Alphabet/Sidewalk Labs and their plan to take over our lives and spaces! From Berlin to Toronto, to Queens, to SF, San Jose or Rennes, you can count on our undivided love, attention and solidarity!

Our struggle is the one of Humans against the centralized machines of oppression. It is the struggle for a future where we are free to be sensible humans; a future where criminals willing to turn us into numbers to better administer and control us for the sake of their profits must be kept at bay.

Fuck off Sidewalk Labs! Fuck off Alphabet/Google &co!

Stärke, Mut und Solidarität!


Privacy expert Ann Cavoukian resigns as adviser to Sidewalk Labs - The Logic - 2018

sadly paywalled; free part is this:

Ann Cavoukian, a world-leading privacy expert, has resigned as an adviser to Sidewalk Labs on its proposed Toronto smart city development. Cavoukian sent a letter advising the company of her resignation Friday. In the letter, she expressed concerns regarding Sidewalk Labs recent digital governance proposals, specifically, the possibility that not all personal data would be de-identified at the source—a concern she said she raised with Sidewalk Labs early last month. Sidewalk Labs told The Logic it is committed to de-identifying data, but that it can’t control what third-parties do. “With all due respect,” she wrote about data not being de-identified at source, “that is not acceptable.” “If personally identifiable data are not de-identified at source, we will be creating another central database of personal information (controlled by whom?), that may be used without data subjects’ consent, that will be exposed to the risks of hacking and unauthorized access,” she said in her statement. “As we all know, existing methods of encryption are not infallible and may be broken, potentially exposing the personal data of Waterfront Toronto residents! Why take such risks?”

https://thelogic.co/news/privacy-expert-ann-cavoukian-resigns-as-adviser-to-sidewalk-labs/

Google as a landlord? A looming feudal nightmare - The Guardian - 2019

To fight a housing crunch of their own creation, tech companies are planning company towns worthy of Gilded Age robber barons

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/11/google-as-a-landlord-a-looming-feudal-nightmare

Google’s Guinea-Pig City - The Atlantic - 2018

Will Toronto turn its residents into Alphabet’s experiment? The answer has implications for cities everywhere.

Alphabet division Sidewalk Labs (a sister company to Google) is poised to spend $50,000,000 to redevelop a piece of Toronto waterfront called Quayside, filling it with "modular, dynamic" buildings that can be reconfigured as their uses change, data-gathering sensors that will help Sidewalk refine its own products and also allow Quayside to tune its zoning, usage, and management from moment to moment, as well as a new Google headquarters and a bunch of startups, and "affordable" micro-apartments starting at 162 square feet.

Molly Sauter's excellent critical piece on the Sidewalk/Toronto deal in The Atlantic shows how masterfully Sidewalk played the process, presenting incredibly detailed plans for the development that wooed lawmakers and citizens, and then later quietly announcing that these plans were really just guidelines that may or may not be followed in the final build-out; they also managed to get their agreement with the City of Toronto declared a secret, so that virtually no one -- not even key city councillors -- have been allowed to see it.

Sauter interrogates the promises of Sidewalk's smart city, raising the questions the city should have answered before greenlighting any action on the project, such as whether all those shiny startups will benefit Canada, or, as is customary, whether they will relocate to Silicon Valley as soon as they're successful enough to do so -- and also, how families are supposed to live in 162-square-foot apartments.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/googles-guinea-pig-city/552932/


Google wants to run cities without being elected. Don't let it - The Guardian - 2017

"Alphabet, the parent company of Google, does not suffer from a lack of ambition. Its subsidiaries are tackling topics ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart homes, artificial intelligence to biotech life extension. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Alphabet has decided it will plan, build, and run a city, too – well, part of a city. It’s a bit more surprising that a major city is happily handing Alphabet a neighborhood of prime real estate to call their own. .../... There’s no doubt that urban labs can help in the design of powerful, useful technologies. But building the smart urban future cannot also mean paving the way for tech billionaires to fulfill their dreams of ruling over cities. If it does, that’s not a future we should want to live in."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/24/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto

Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name - The Guardian - 2017

"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. That Alphabet’s “urbanism as a service” might not appeal to the residents of Toronto does not matter. As a real estate project, its chief goal is to impress its future missing residents –above all, millions of Chinese millionaires flocking to Canada’s housing markets. Doctoroff was not equivocating when he told the Globe and Mail that Alphabet’s Canadian venture “primarily is a real-estate play”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/21/google-urban-cities-planning-data

Sidewalk family tree https://twitter.com/adrianshort/status/1118420578271137792

some choice quotes from Morozov and Bria's RLS paper

from p.6

"Combined with ever-improving drones and a new generation of policing robots, smart tech- nologies foster a context of heavily militarized urbanism previously restricted to hotspots like Fallujah."

- see also Graham, Stephen. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Ur- banism. Verso Books, 2011.

fuck off IBM! IBM is focussing on security related services - security for the reliable extraction of profits from dweebs. from p.7

" IBM solutions generally focus on law enforcement, predictive policing, and crime prevention, leading to the establishment of “Intelligent Law Enforcement Centers” and “Real Time Crime Centers.” In Atlanta and Chicago, for instance, IBM uses facial recognition, advanced video monitoring, and other pervasive surveillance technologies to provide police with accurate information allowing them to detect crime patterns based on Big Data analytics.."

most of the "smart city" solutions just use existing data feeds and turn them into extractive agents (usually through government contracts) that data could in principle be used to make life better but the finance markets are winning out by promising "innovation" and, especially security. from p.8

"Much of the value added of these technologies resides in system integration: Specifically, they take existing data feeds emanating from municipal departments and private suppliers and integrate them into an easily manageable and highly visible interface promising swift and immediate problem-solving at the turn of a knob, or—more likely—the click of a mouse.."

fuck off Goldman Sachs! from p.12

" t requires the ability to monitor and extract the maximum amount of value from resources under management, which entails perpetual surveillance coupled with nudging and other forms of producing de- sired behavior. Moreover, should monitoring capacity prove insufficient, it would be advantageous to have the means to produce statistics so obscure and impenetrable that the operating entity—in this case, Goldman Sachs— can claim that it has in fact met its target and should be paid the amount due (as regularly happens in actual projects financed through social investment bonds). Surrendering control over such statistical and computation capabilities—an inevitable consequence of the privatized smart city—is a sure way to be swindled by private service providers on a regular basis..

...The model’s obvious downside is chronic underinvestment into long-term facilities and planning of the infrastructure in question, as investors adopting a short-term perspective are not motivated to undertake expensive infrastructural upgrades. This is only part of the problem, however, as investors also seek to extract as much value from the asset under management in the short period of time they own it as possible, often degrading it much faster than a longer-term operator or owner would.

...Such models typically incentivize the operator to cut costs (e.g., by eliminating maintenance) and extract maximum rents (e.g., by charging users different rates depending on how much of the resource they consume or, say, their ability to pay). The ubiquity of “smart” and always-on sensory infrastructures allows investors to pursue both of these strategies at once: costs can be minimized and completely pushed onto users, while the ability to recognize the user and link any act of consumption with their entire life history facilitates a price that the user is unlikely to turn down. Thus, the proliferation of sensors, connectivity, and data analytics into the built environment is likely to entrench today’s highly financialized model of infrastructure provision.."

the Smart City is bait and switch p. 15

"In practical terms, the appeal of quick technological fixes to city bureaucrats cannot be explained by their ideological confusion or technocratic faith alone, for there are actual structural factors which make the enlistment of technology firms in the business of running the city as well as generating income for some of its inhabitants such an attractive choice. Understanding these structural factors should, at the very least, make us aware that articulating and executing a vision for a truly non-neoliberal smart city is much more difficult than it first appears, for it is not merely a matter of building different technologies or alternative property regimes around data generated in the city. These are necessary, but not sufficient conditions.... There are two sides to this regime of privatized welfare: One draws on advanced technology to deliver significant savings to consumers, thus concealing their rapidly falling real incomes, while another draws on the same set of technologies to produce either short-term, extremely flexible (even if highly precarious) employment opportunities in the gig economy, or quick speculative gains in the sharing economy, most- ly by turning one’s house—should one be lucky enough to own one—into a permanent hotel that also doubles as an ATM.


http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/morozovandbria_eng_final55.pdf


assembly of related resources, please expand!

cities for citizens

sustainable and dynamic urbanism, materialist political economy for cities under adverse circumstances of rapid privatisation, speculation , gentrification and segregation.

pushing back on the smart city solutionist narrative

hashtags

  1. #fuckoffgoogle
  2. #blocksidewalk Toronto initiative to stop Sidewalk Labs

German language anti-gentrification-related ‪

  1. #‎Mietenwahnsinn‬ Berlin / Germany anti-gentrification initiative
  2. #Verdrängung People forced out of their apartments
  3. #Enteignen Expropriate! the large property owners


case studies

Berlin

--> related initiative "Google is not a good neighbour"

https://www.google-ist-kein-guter-nachbar.de/english-1/actions/

before FOG it was FuckOffGuggenheim... and they really gave up https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-protests-prove-tolerance-is-a-two-way-street/a-15894900

and FuckOffDercon - gentrifying the Volksbühne (a legendary theater in the center of Berlin https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/theater/chris-dercon-quits-volksbuehne.html

Barcelona (Morozow & Bria's "Green" Smart City approach

http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/morozovandbria_eng_final55.pdf

NY:

Hudson Yards is a billionaire’s fantasy city and you never have to leave — provided you can pay for it.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/hudson-yard-billionaires-fantasy-city.html

LA:

movement against fortress city districts and trickle-down housing

https://medium.com/@LATenantsUnion/dropping-the-hammer-on-yimbyism-97724dfdb6a9

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/zoning-reform-house-costs-urban-development-gentrification/581677/

SF (the original FoG!)

techsploitation -

https://qz.com/1293874/protestors-in-san-francisco-are-using-electric-scooters-to-blockade-google-buses/

Toronto

LORINC: Sidewalk Labs and the problem of smart city governance

http://spacing.ca/toronto/2019/06/25/lorinc-sidewalk-labs-and-the-problem-of-smart-city-governance/

"Sidewalk’s proposal rejects democratic government by prescribing new and different oversight and governance for the waterfront, as one observer put it, “pushing back the city’s authority and replacing it with semiprivatized bureaucratic SWAT teams.”
Toronto, it’s not you — it’s Google By Lauren Jacobs

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/03/toronto-its-not-you-its-google.html

privatisation of essential services and infrastructure tales of woe

generally, it is stubbornly unprofitable to deliver essential services at scale

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/17/the-high-price-we-all-pay-for-the-failures-of-privatisation

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development

http://www.ipsnews.net/2016/10/privatization-the-problem-rarely-the-solution/ https://www.networkideas.org/news-analysis/2019/03/promoting-privatization/

"race to the bottom" How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class

http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Race-to-the-bottom.pdf

Public transportation

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/privatisation-of-dublin-bus-routes-the-beginning-of-race-to-the-bottom-tds-warn-867983.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/16/the-expensive-disaster-that-is-bus-privatisation

Rail

rail privatisation can only be successful where there is population density, eventually all but the most important stations will be shut down

https://www.tokyoreview.net/2018/10/japan-railway-privatization/

An illusion of success: The consequences of British rail privatisation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0155998214000416

The rail billionaires The privatisation of British Rail has proved a disastrous failure. Without big changes, things are going to get worse

https://www.economist.com/business/1999/07/01/the-rail-billionaires

Water

UN University

https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/water-privatisation-a-worldwide-failure

Paris remunicipalizes water and saves millions

http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-water-utilities-are-returning-to-public-management-in-france

Smart Cities

"competitive urbanism"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042098015597162

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/17/truth-smart-city-destroy-democracy-urban-thinkers-buzzphrase https://planning.org/planning/2019/mar/smartcities/

Adam Greenfield : Against the Smart City https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/227-tasting-data-smart-cities-craft-and-design-facts-on-fax-1.2847907/against-the-smart-city-1.2847908 https://speedbird.wordpress.com/

The trouble with Smart Cities https://www.axios.com/smart-cities-toronto-sidewalk-labs-las-vegas-cb0451e5-0b98-46c4-9ba3-4a7a04eb4ca7.html

Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor https://www.fastcompany.com/90317495/another-tax-on-the-poor-surrendering-privacy-for-survival

Songdo

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/business/article/2137838/south-koreas-smart-city-songdo-not-quite-smart-enough

http://gjss.org/sites/default/files/issues/chapters/papers/GJSS%20Vol%2012-2%201%20Benedikt_0.pdf

precrime

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530123-600-pre-crime-software-recruited-to-track-gang-of-thieves/


https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/25/predicting-crime-lapd-los-angeles-police-data-analysis-algorithm-minority-report

politicians raising concerns

https://twitter.com/lydia_kou


http://www.creativespacesandcities.com/

comic relief

https://internetofshit.net/soon


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