From Smartness to Wisdom: Centering Intersectionality and Organizing for Institutional Reform
This is a lightly-edited version of my keynote presentation for the “Beyond Smart” Symposium at Georgia Institute of Technology, April 25–26, 2019.
Before I get started, I think it’s important to acknowledge the strides the idea of “smart cities” has made. It has brought together participants across disciplines and domains. In these places and collaborations, we have developed an understanding of our collective future with technology. As Christopher La Dantec noted, any vision of smart cities should foreground civic engagement. What has emerged is a kind of middle route that revives the notion of Jane Jacobs that cities are constructed socially from the ground up, through the movements and actions of people. To Jacobs, cities were always a form of social infrastructure. “The city” has again become a shared project. This is to be celebrated.
That said, we are at a point where the connotations of “smart cities” are being drawn into question. just in the last year we have gone inside smart cities, and thought about how social justice can be written into smart cities. But the mainstream definition of “smart cities” is still inescapably driven by breathless technological optimism. As Shannon Mattern notes, the dominant metaphor is computational: city as “operating system.” Of course, the city is not a computer. We can’t just turn it off and back on again if it crashes. If we have bugs, we have to live with them. And “smart cities” carries both a bias for technology providers and urban spaces.
The last year has brought examples that give us pause — such as Hudson Yards in NYC and Quayside in Toronto — that build city-space from the ground up to reflect a digital imaginary. Critic Bianca Wylie has noted that participation seems for appearances, with the master plans long since written. People also have an immediate sense that data is a way to track and surveil citizens, then categorizing and generating knowledge that they are not privy to. If this is an experiment in an “urban laboratory,” there is often something off with the chemistry. Quayside and Hudson Yards seem more paternalistic and corporate than the organic and collaborative visions grassroots organizers, activists, and academics have advocated for. These experiments also seem to take place in a world of “innovation” where historical precedents seem forgotten. It is a good time to ask ourselves the very question that prompts this symposium: what do we mean by “smart”?
Is “smartness” the city itself, always watching, recording, and calculating? Is “smartness” embodied by a certain kind of citizen, one already mobilized, affluent, and tech-savvy?
Or is “smartness” simply about efficient ways to administer services?
Metaphors matter. And models matter. Therefore, as a way of helping us think through this question, my main provocation here is to elaborate on wisdom as a term that attunes us to a set of often-ignored issues. The challenge we face, I believe, is not entirely technological. Rather, the challenge of how we might act more wisely stems from the type of politics that smart cities — and related nebulous terms like public interest technology and civic technology — brings with it.
Infrastructural Politics
I believe “smart cities” reflect a particular form of infrastructural politics. When you hear “infrastructure” you may first think of physical, built infrastructure, and this is a good place to start. If you ask a law professor like Brett Fresichmann, he stresses the importance of public parks, referring to them as “social infrastructure.” Take El Dorado park, in my neighborhood. Despite its bucolic appearance, it is entirely artificial and planned, seeded in the 1950’s and constantly irrigated. Like cities, there is nothing natural about this park. Rather, it was created to generate, in economic terms, “positive spillover effects.” Parks are “public goods” because they are available for the public to use.
Communication can also be thought of as an infrastructure that benefits or hinders public benefits, such as access to information and shared rituals. Consider William Whyte’s “social life of small urban spaces” project in the late 1970s, which mapped what people did in plazas, at the time thought to be dangerous, harmful spaces. Communication research groups, like Sandra Ball-Rokeach’s Metamorphosis team at USC, call these “meeting and greeting spots.” These spaces generate new friendships and refresh old ones. In the process, communication helps maintain a strong local network and sense of community.
Infrastructure is also built on other infrastructure. Author and scholar Ingrid Burrington writes about how to view communication infrastructure in urban environments through their markings on the street. By understanding where networks flow, we can understand infrastructure as layered in urban space. To “act infrastructurally” involves tinkering with social and technological layers, with or without explicit political intent. Often statements like “city as a platform” and O’Reilly’s “government as a platform” deny their own political leanings. However, thinking infrastructurally involves seeing hidden layers of social and technological agency that undergird our everyday lives. Infrastructural politics, as I use the term, involves the study of complex and layered political relations between people, technologies, and spaces.
Infrastructure tries to be invisible, tilting towards action over deliberation. Consequently, acting infrastructurally — as a certain way of doing politics — can also be invisible. You might think of infrastructural activists as the builders. The late Leigh Star thought of “infrastructure” through a lens of materiality. To her, mundane objects like plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms — although frequently invisible — structured organizational life. Today, we can see data standards similarly, as a way to bring political parties together who may have vastly differing goals and values. Despite the collaborative nature of infrastructural politics, all these senses of infrastructure — material, social, and layered — are inherently political.
For example, Antina Von Schnitzler argues that infrastructure in the context of post-Apartied South Africa became “ethical objects, conduits of power, or wielded as tools.” As much as governments “infrastructure down,” so too do residents “infrastructure up.” We might think of the infrastructuring we do as what Egyedi and Mehos refers to as “inverse infrastructuring,” where ideas from the community can be scaled up. At different points in history, communities have infrastructure to meet their needs or be represented when government and companies are unable or unwilling.
Data as Infrastructure
One of our most familiar tools — data — can be thought of quite infrastructurally. Consider the legacy of W.E.B. DuBois and his innovative sociological methods. I believe Aldon Morris is correct when he situates DuBois as leading an “Atlanta School” of sociology that has been neglected in favor of the Chicago school. He reminds us that data should be added ethically and strategically, not blithely collected. I’m not in favor of the phrase “data-driven,” because I believe people should still do the driving. Data — whether qualitative or quantitative — is intrinsically related to infrastructural politics, because it helps map the built environment and communication networks. It gives us tools to think with. As one interviewee of mine put it, “data helps me imagine the lives of others.”
Organizations and democratic institutions also use data to imagine possible futures. Consider the promotional poster for Code for Maine, an independently-operated “brigade” for Code for America, which remixes a promotional poster from the new deal era to draw on a semiotic surplus of meaning. As David Beer notes, “it is important… to see how data are spoken of, invented, and put to work.” This work, as should be clear, is expressly political. Beer’s concept of the “data gaze” captures “how the visual the optic, and the material are privileged in the knowledge that forms around data analytics.” Consider the example of how, in the early 20th century, cities featured “statistical exhibits” to demonstrate how a health campaign was contributing to declining deaths. The Romans, too, marched through the streets with tablets demonstrating number of enemies killed and length of roads created to demonstrate the extent of their empire. Civic hackathons, dashboards, and open data portals similarly reflect the political work of the data gaze in construction a civic imaginary. Our work isn’t separate from this type of publicity — it is smack in the center of it. You cannot easily distinguish the pragmatism of politics from the spectacle of politics.
Technology Has Politics
We need the idea of the “public good” to garner public support for initiatives. But there is no technology that “works for everyone.” This is a fundamental tension of working with technology. A technology that enables me — an able, white, cis guy in the short term — may harm others in the long term. We can think about how ride-sharing has changed the landscape of middle-class jobs for new arrivals to this country, and how data-driven policing tends to reproduce existing biases against Black communities. This amnesia about technology among just about everybody drives philosophers of technology like Langdon Winner slightly mad. So by invoking wisdom, I seek to highlight the powerful, but treacherous place our infrastructural politics — through technology design and data — put us in. Rather than continue to promote a model of a universal public good, I invite us to approach the power of technology intersectionally.
Technology and Intersectionality
There is not one intersectionality. Rather, this idea has been developed over at least the last twenty-five years across different communities of practice. Foremost, intersectionality is a liberatory project of black feminism. To Kimberlé Crenshaw, it is an analytic coming out of race and critical legal studies to describe how institutions place intersectional individuals — say, Latinx, disabled, and queer — at greater risk than others. Other scholars, such as Patricia Collins, have described intersectionality as a broader “framework” for social justice — in her words, “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experience.” Ange-Marie Hancock argues for a deeper tracing of this framework beyond Collins and Crenshaw, as part of a pluralistic perspective that goes back further in time. While I still find it inescapable to think deeply about the Black experience in America, intersectionality provides a helpful specificity. It connects lived experience with institutional pressures to show how people with intersectional identities are put at greater risk. Technology is inescapably part of that conversation, both in the people affected by it, and, increasingly, those mobilized to try to improve it.
Institutional demands for efficiency should set off our alarm bells: efficient for whom?
When we talk of technology, we should be concerned with how, when combined with policies and practices of institutions, technology contributes to lived and embodied risk. Technology, as a form of power, often works to counter goals of social justice as it inherits an institutional memory of injustices. We can think of how Compstat and dashboards reduces complex social issues to points of action and metrics to be acted upon. Data-driven policing and artificial intelligence often undermine trust between governments and residents. Technology alone is a poor way to foster a robust civic sphere, particularly if we ignore the organizations that serve as the glue of democracy. I don’t think this ignorance is accidental, but the result of a particular framing of both “organizing” and “wisdom” that has taken hold.
Re-discovering Wisdom
In 2008, Clay Shirky came out with his book “Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.” Rallying against institutions, he placed his faith in a “technology-first” model of organizing: that crowdsourcing through digital technologies was more effective than traditional organizations. I follow him, up to a point, because not every problem is a collective action problem. We’re not always trying to contribute to Wikipedia. For the most part, we still must grapple with institutions when we try to convince government officials of wiser courses of action, or work with communities to understand their perspectives. It seems Shirky himself agrees that we can simply be rid of institutions or organizations. In a subsequent radio interview, Shirky backed away from his subtitle “organizing without organizations.” And, in response to criticisms that he was trying to replace organizations, he changed the subtitle of the second pressing of the book.
What am I getting at here? What is the difference between a “technology-first” and an “organizing first” perspective? I could give you an organizational communication response. That would be that organizations are more effective at gaining capacity, building bridges for collaboration, and doing the hard work of designing technologies for local situations. Or I could give you a more historical answer. We might turn to America’s favorite French import, De Tocqueville, when he was traversing a fledging America in the early 19th century. In Democracy in America, a book lauded by the political left and right, he wrote of his amazement at the resilience of organizing in small communities. He was particularly impressed by what he called the country’s “equality of conditions.” Law professor Danielle Allen similarly argued that equality undergirds freedom. “From a commitment to equality,” she wrote, comes the “power to create a world in which all can flourish.” Setting aside the historically constrictive nature of America at the time, I believe that organizing is a deeply democratic tradition that illuminates a neglected level of political action that serves an alternative to an individualistic notion of citizenship that plagues the “smart city.” Through organizing, residents can gain organizational capacity, build bridges of influence, and act collectively on local issues that matter to them. Shirky’s “technology-first” model of organizing, by comparison, places its chips on the belief that natural laws of networked communication technologies will be socially beneficial, a message that, for me, rings far less true in 2019 than it did in 2009.
Wise Organizing
To be clear, I am not advocating for a return to a world of town halls. Rather, a more dialectical move is to simply learn from what organizations are doing in this space. Because I research this stuff, I often hear calls for public sector technology design. What I don’t hear often is a recognition that there already are many organizations that do this work. For example, Code for America, emerged out of a fervent mix of activism and an abundance of tech workers in San Francisco. In the early days, Jennifer Pahlka rode a rising tide of interest in bringing “Web 2.0” talent into government work. Over time, CfA conducted a number of organizational experiments to bring techies into government, from a “fellowship” program to an incubator modeled on the tech industry. What they found is you can’t just show up at city hall with technology, or simply collect code for various projects nobody needs. You need to discover why institutions need you, then build a niche technology to meet that need. Simply put, they took advantage of political opportunity.
Consider Clear my Record, led by Jazmyn Latimer. Jazmyn became interested in learning why the legal reforms promised by proposition 47 weren’t helping who they were supposed to. She found that four out of five men imprisoned in the United States for low-level marijuana possession are black men. To say nothing of the effects on children, mothers, and the very fabric of their community. She started by following defenders and their clients as they navigated the legal system, a practice ethnographers call “shadowing.” She simply told me, “we just started showing up at their clinic.” The more time she spent shadowing public defenders, the better she understood the problem from the perspective of people who were legally-entitled to have their record cleared, but institutionally trapped. Jazmyn ditched legal jargon, and used words that everyone could understand. Information submitted on a mobile application was then relayed to county employees who guided them through the rest of the process. ClearMyRecord did not try to impose a purely technological solution. Rather, Jazmyn sought to understand the contours of the problem better to make the most of available social knowledge, and clarify lines of communication that should have already existed.
Another example of wise organizing is Large Lots in Chicago, which returns property deeds to residents, like this woman, for $1. The once-vibrant Englewood neighborhood of Chicago suffered a financial downturn in the 1960s. Vacant lots dotted the area, the result of abandoned properties that were subsequently razed. Teamwork Englewood, a local community oraganization, was trying to draw attention to the ways these spaces could be repurposed by turning the land back to the community. They came up with the idea to let residents purchase vacant lots for $1 if they committed to using the property. The city worked with community groups to craft policy that made the transfer of properties possible. Large Lots needed a hyper-local strategy that relied on reaching the right person at the right time. Datamade, a local Civic Tech company, had an idea for improving outreach. Together, Datamade, the city of Chicago, and community groups combined a sophisticated communication strategy with locative technology. Datamade created a mobile mapping application from open data that showed residents vacant lots around them to reveal local infrastructure. They also used physical assets of cities — like libraries — to spread the word about Large Lots. Finally, they created a website that saved time in the application process. City employees appreciated the streamlining since it meant less paperwork on their end. As a result, the second year of Large Lots went even better — 58% of the abandoned lots in the Garfield Park neighborhood were applied for in 2014. Technology helped Large Lots, but it was local organizations and policy-makers that made it endure.
Institutionalizing Technological Work
Wisdom acknowledges that technology cannot be wielded like a cudgel. This starts by paying attention to, as Large Lots did, changing — in small but impactful ways — the very institutions that perpetuate violence. A similar point has been made by communication scholar Safiya Noble. She has critiqued how Google searches return harmful imagery of young black women. Noble positions the new agenda-setters as ever-shifting socio-technical assemblages that interact in unpredictable ways. Google’s drive for advertising revenue out-paced its sense of ethics, resulting in further stigmatizing historically marginalized groups. In response, she suggests that public ownership and organizational oversight is a vital need to be represented in technology design.
Noble’s feminist approach opens space for imagining alternative public institutions for delivering information. She writes that she hopes “the public will reclaim its institutions and direct our resources in service of a multiracial democracy.” Noble draws our attention to the dire need for public sector technology design and implementation. In my work, I often tell people I am researching public sector technology design. Then I watch their face. I watch them think about what the hell I could be talking about, because there really is no sense in America that public sector technology design actually exists. Yet, it does, and not just in this room. In very much the same way we can “infrastructure up,” the organizations, standards, and relationships we build can add up to something more. Thomas Lawrence and Roy Suddaby write about proto-institutions as, “emergent configurations of rules, technologies, and social arrangements.”
Institutionalizing technology design is not a pipe dream. It has happened before. At the federal level, for decades the Office of Technology Assessment housed up to 200 staffers who advised Congress on technological issues, everything from the environment to personal computers. A now mostly forgotten network of tens of thousands of geeks who called themselves “Circuit Riders” advised non-profit organizations. They were guiding them on how to use the new technology of their time: the web. Times have changed, and we have different roles inside and outside of government and academia. But a sense of institutionalizing more democratic alternatives for technology design is more pressing than ever. So rather than prototype technologies, let’s prototype institutions.
As promised, I’ve probably opened up some cans of worms. However, as one of my professors always reminded me as a student, part of the challenge is asking the right questions. Together, we should present a model of democratic pluralism that alleviates intersectional issues without being absorbed into bureaucracy. We must be more than a fig leaf for surveillance capitalism. Wisdom is my move in this direction. It contrasts with the individualized “smartness” of affluent, technology-enabled citizens. The downside may be that, because technology is associated with speed and ease of use, wisdom demands our time and conscious effort. It is rarely efficient to be wise. But it may be worth leaving “smart” behind for.
Thank you for the invitation to Debra Lam, Christopher La Dantec, & Carl DiSalvo for organizing the conference, and to Alison Powell for her presentation and discussion.
