June 2022 – Music: Listen, Look and Enjoy

June 17, 2022June 15, 2022

Democracy beyond voting

There is a widespread desire among citizens for greater involvement in political decision-making than cast a vote periodically. The participation ladder, developed in 1969 by Sherry Arnstein, is a useful summary of the degree in which government and citizens share power. Below, I jump to the highest rung of the ladder: Local government empowers citizens to make independent decisions, or partial autonomy.

In Italy this process has boomed, and the city of Bologna has become a stronghold of so-called urban commons. Citizens become designers, managers, and performers of selected municipal tasks, such as creating green areas, converting an empty house into affordable units, operating a minibus service, cleaning, and maintaining the city walls, refurbishing parts of the public space, keeping open a swimming-pool and much more.

The most important instruments are cooperation-pacts. In each pact, city authorities and the parties involved (informal groups, NGOs, schools, entrepreneurs) lay down agreements about their activities, responsibilities, and power. Hundreds of pacts have been signed since the regulation was adopted in 2011. The city provides what the citizens need – money, material, housing, advice – and the citizens make their time, skills, and organizational capacity available.

The commons-movement will influence urban governance in the longer term. The Italian political scientistChristian Iaione predicts the emergence of a city of commons. Here, many urban tasks are performed by commons and cooperatives. The city then is a network of both, decision-making is decentralized and deconcentrated.

A similar idea The city as a platform has emerged in the US coming from a completely different direction. Instead of simply voting every few years and leaving city administration to elected officials and expert bureaucrats, the networked city sees citizens as co designers, co-producers, and co-learners, according to Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder of GovLab. In the city as a platform residents look individually and collectively for new and better ways to meet their needs and enliven public life. These may be neighborhood-based initiatives, for example the redevelopment of a neighborhood or city-wide initiatives, for example a cooperative of taxi drivers, competing with Uber.

Without saying it in so many words, everyone involved sees both the city of commons and the city as a platform as a long-term opportunity to make citizens the engine of urban development instead of enabling multinational companies taking over that role. For the time being, city administrators can best focus on enabling and supporting citizens’ joint action to make cities more beautiful, liveable, and sustainable.

This post based on by the new e-book Better cities, the contribution of digital technology. Interested? Download the book here for free (90 pages)

Content:

Hardcore: Technology-centered approaches

1. Ten years of smart city technology marketing

2. Scare off the monster behind the curtain: Big Tech’s monopoly

Towards a humancentric approach

3. A smart city, this is how you do it

4. Digital social innovation: For the social good

Misunderstanding the use of data

5. Digital twins

6. Artificial intelligence

Embedding digitization in urban policy

7. The steps to urban governance

8. Guidelines for a responsible digitization policy

9. A closer look at the digitization agenda of Amsterdam

10. Forging beneficial cooperation with technology companies

Applications

11. Government: How digital tools help residents regaining power?

12. Mobility: Will MaaS reduce the use of cars?

13. Energy: Smart grids – where social and digital innovation meet

14. Healthcare: Opportunities and risks of digitization

Wrapping up: Better cities and technology

15. Two 100 city missions: India and Europe

Epilogue: Beyond the Smart City

June 2, 2022September 1, 2024

Big Tech’s monopoly

Two recent books deal with this problem in depth and call for tailored actions. These books are Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) and Cory Doctorow’s How to destroy surveillance capitalism (2021). Zuboff describes in detail how Google, Amazon and Facebook collect data with only one goal, to entice citizens to buy goods and services:

Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.

The unprecedented power of Big Tech is a result of the fact that these companies have become almost classic monopolies. Until the 1980s, the US had strict antitrust legislation: the Sherman’s act, notorious for big business. Ronald Reagan quickly wiped it out in his years as president, and Margaret Thatcher did the same in the UK, Brian Mulroney in Canada, and Helmut Kohl in Germany. While Sherman saw monopolies as a threat to the free market, Reagan believed that government interference threatens the free market. Facebook joins in if it sees itself as a ‘natural monopoly’: You want to be on a network where your friends are also. But you could also reach your friends if there were more networks that are interoperable. Facebook has used all economic, technical, and legal means to combat the latter, including takeover of potential competitors: Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

In the early 21st century, there was still a broad belief that emerging digital technology could lead to a better and more networked society.

Bas Boorsma: The development of platforms empowered start-ups, small companies, and professionals. Many network utopians believed the era of ‘creative commons’ had arrived and with it, a non-centralized and highly digital form of ‘free market egalitarianism’ (New Digital Deal, p.52). Nothing has come of this: Digitalization-powered capitalism now possesses a speed, agility and rawness that is unprecedented (New Digital Deal, p.54). Even the startup community is becoming one big R&D lab for Big Tech. Many startups hope to be acquired by one of the tech giants and then cash in on millions. As a result, Big Tech is on its way to acquire a dominant position in urban development, the health sector and education, in addition to the transport sector.

Thanks to its monopoly position, Big Tech can collect unlimited data, even if European legislation imposes restrictions and occasional fines. After all, a lot of data is collected without citizens objecting to it. Mumford had already realized this in 1967: Many consumers see these companies not only as irresistible, but also ultimately beneficial. These two conditions are the germ of what he called the megatechnics bribe.

The only legislation that can break the power of Big Tech is a strong antitrust policy, unbundling the companies, an absolute ban on acquisitions and rigorous taxation. In addition, governments should take back control of technological development, as they did until the end of the last century. Democratic control of the development of technology is an absolute precondition!