Category: Big Tech

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The metaverse and other toys of the giga-rich

It is often said that technology is developing at a rapid speed, and ‘we’ must keep up with the vanguard. The suggestion is that this development is autonomous, which is not true. Instead, Big Tech is the force behind it. About 50 tears ago, governmental bodies, like Darpa (US), the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany) and TNO (the Netherlands) were forerunners in technological development, which resulted in a certain degree of democratic control and relevance for society.

Big Tech has earned an incredible lot of money and pays only a limited amount of taxes. Therefore, its resources are unlimited.  The same applied to its founders and ceo’s fortunes, only think of multibillionaires as Jeff Bezos and Egon Musk. Because of the wealth of Big Tech and its leaders, these companies can spend – they call it investing – as much as they want. At the same time, governmental resources seem to decrease while its responsibilities become bigger. 

Now that innovation is in the hands of wealthy and narcistic men like Egon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Marc Zuckerman, nobody must be surprised if its development is not inspired by any social goals but by the desire to have their own toys. The metaverse is the new one.  In a world were combatting poverty and diseases, providing clean water and sanitation, and becoming carbon-neutral ought to be prioritized, they invest billions in the creation of a virtual world, the metaverse. A welcomed toy for the leisure class. 

The metaverse is the ultimate form of augmented reality, the digitally supplemented substitute for reality. Metaverse was first described by Neil Stephenson in his dystopian book Snow Crash in 1992. As the power of computers grew, the idea of ​​the metaverse gained new impetus and recently Marc Zuckerberg announced that his new company Meta Platforms will gradually turn Facebook into a fully digital world. This immerses the users in the most diverse experiences, which they partly evoke themselves, such as communicating with other avatars, attending a concert, going to the disco, and getting acquainted with strangers and of course going to shops, because it remains a medium to make money.

Already now companies are buying advertorial space and the rich issue famous architects to design the interior and exterior of the digital mansions their avators will live in.

It remains to be seen whether a younger generation, less consumer-addicted and more concerned about nature, is waiting for a such a completely artificial world.

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

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If ‘smart’ is the solution, what exactly is the problem?

Most adepts of the smart city-idea suggest a tight link between technology and the wellbeing of the citizens, symbolizing a new kind of technology-led urban utopia. They promise the solution to many urban problems, including crime, traffic congestion, inefficient services and economic stagnation, or a healthy life for all. 

Siemens makes the strongest and most explicit statement of the philosophical underpinnings of the smart-city: Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption and provide optimum service…The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems[1].

It is unmistakably that business leaders, having in mind a multi-billion smart city technologies market overstate the benefits of technology, despite many examples that prove otherwise. Therefore, according to The Economist it is not surprising that a ‘techlash’ is underway: The monopolistic dominance of behemoths like Google, Amazon and Facebook and their treatment of sensitive data, the lack of transparency and accountability of algorithm-based decision making, the aversion of the gig economy are major drivers.  

Neglecting the human component is by far the worst mistake any aspiring smart city can make. If these future smart cities aim for efficiency, they just cannot be planned without the community. Robert Holland wrote: The real smart city has to begin to think with its collective social and political brain, rather than through its technological tools….. It is made up of myriads of initiatives where technology is used to empower community networks, to monitor equal access to urban infrastructures or scale up new forms of sustainable living. 

A human-centric turn of the smart city narrative starts from the problems that citizens and their representatives experience. Then possible solutions are discussed and finally these solutions are specified, the role of technology included. 

This post is based on 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

[1] Cited in: Adam Greenfeld: Against the smart city. A pamphlet

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Forget the ***city

In 2009, IMB launched a global marketing campaign around the previously little-known concept of ‘smart city’ with the aim of making city governments receptive to ICT applications in the public sector. The initial emphasis was on process control. Emerging countries were interested in the first place: Many made plans to build smart cities ‘from scratch’, in the first place to attract foreign investors. The Korean city of Songdo, developed by Cisco and Gale International, is a well-known example. 

The emphasis soon shifted from process control to using data from the residents themselves. Google wanted to supplement its already rich collection of data with data that city dwellers provide with their mobile phones to create a range of new commercial applications. Its sister company Sidewalk Labs, which was set up for that purpose, started developing a pilot project in Toronto. That failed, partly due to the growing resistance to the prospective violation of privacy. This opposition has had global repercussions and resulted in many countries in legislation to protect privacy. China and cities in Southeast Asia – where Singapore is leading the way – ignored this criticism.

The rapid development of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, gave further impetus to discussion about the ethical implications of technology. Especially in the US, applications in facial recognition and predictive police were heavily criticized.

This current situation – particularly in the Netherlands – can be characterized on the one hand by the development of regulations to safeguard ethical principles and on the other by the search for responsible applications of digital technology.

The question is therefore why we should still talk about smart cities. Touria Meliani, alderman of Amsterdam, prefers to speak of ‘wise city’ than of ‘smart city’ to emphasize that she is serious about putting people first. But instead of introducing other adjectives, skipping them all is better.

The best way to understand human life in the city is respecting the complexity of the city and life within it.

Precisely because of the complexity of the city, the use of reductionist adjectives such as ‘smart’, ‘sharing’, ‘circular’, ‘climate neutral’, ‘resilient’. ‘inclusive’ – even my own favorite ‘humane’ – is better avoided. The doughnut-principle is the best way to analyze the city from different perspectives and to define the way people can live in a social and ecological sustainable way, the use of digital technology included.

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

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Data is not the new oil

I suggest that anybody who is talking about ‘big data’ and ‘data driven policy’ or using grotesque statements like data is the new oil to revisit the foundations of scientific research and the embedded vision on data. 

Without elementary insight in the way scientists arrive at their conclusions ‘data driven policy’ can have disastrous consequences. The city of Chattanooga has build a digital twin. That is a digital model that is connected to reality with the help of sensors. Such a dynamic model can be used for simulation purposes if the connections between the variables have been established. Here things can go wrong. In Chattanooga the model was used to simulate the impact of flexible lane assignment and traffic light phasing. It turned out that this could result in a 30% decrease of congestion.

Had this experiment been carried out in the real world, the result would probably have been disastrous. Traffic experts note time and again that every newly opened road gets satiated after a short time, while the traffic on other roads hardly decreases. In econometrics this phenomenon is called induced demand. In a study of urban traffic patterns between 1983 and 2003, economists Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner found that car use increases proportionally with the growth of road capacity: Every road user reacts differently to the opening or closing of a road. Those reactions can be to move the ride to another time, to use a different road, to ride with someone else, to use public transport or to cancel the ride. To understand this pattern data must be collected from e sufficient large sample of road behavior of individual drivers. 

What the computer scientist in Chattanooga did wrong is assuming that only the adding of a single lane and changing the intervals of the traffic lights would cause all drivers’ behavior change into the same direction, as if they were metal balls, reacting upon a change in the magnetic field. If the ICT-experts had collaborated with traffic experts, the digital twin might have been fed with an empirical justifiable model, that incorporates the assumption of induced demand. 

In essence, data is useless without a theory, based on already established insights or views. 

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

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Bigg 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! 

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