Shanghai, September 2024

Deepseeking the city (3/3)

Third of three, drawing together the learning from Shanghai’s urban environments with thinking about distributed technologies—to understand how we best might handle not only streets but AI too.

Part 3 of 3. The first part explored how Shanghai’s streets are produced via diverse and inventive arrays of everyday small vehicles and culture. The second describes their alternative, the bruteforced Australian and American cities. This third part explores the alternative; that is, metaphorically at least, DeepSeeking the City, bringing together design, culture, technology and urbanism.

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek hit the news in early February 2025, generating endless column inches and podcast minutes whilst dissolving billions of dollars of US tech stocks within 24 hours. One might have legitimate concerns over several aspects of DeepSeek’s rise, though many such accusations could equally be levelled at several large US tech companies at this point, whether theft of information or exerting undue political influence. For what it’s worth, those tech stocks will rebound because economic policies need them to, just as similar policy settings cannot countenance making housing affordable by letting house prices deflate. Those valuations are too big to…