Cities from scratch.
the growing threat of elitism in technology
There is no shortage of hype around technology integration in urban environments: self-driving cars, smart grids, networked sensors, and data-driven planning. It’s easy to be seduced by the vision of a traffic-free commute or the elimination of your power utility bill. Most urban residents probably assume that these conveniences are inevitable; a product of the technology industry’s unstoppable march, like the ever-increasing computing power of the devices in our pockets. But the very advent of technological saturation in cities is more fragile than it seems on the surface. In the October 10, 2016 edition of The New Yorker, Tad Friend gives us a blunt account of the rise of a Silicon Valley overlord, Sam Altman. In the article, Altman — at the helm of the world’s most influential startup accelerator (and arguably, venture capital firm) — hints at his vision for building a whole new city… from scratch. He believes that a blank slate is the only way to develop urban technologies to their limit; traditional cities are too bloated, too slow, and too constrained. Altman is not alone in that belief. Peter Thiel founded the Seasteading Institute — a think tank committed to designing floating technology utopia cities somewhere in the ocean. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is already building a new city from the ground up, where Google engineers will rely on infrastructure designed around self-driving cars.
If the de facto leaders of our technological generation, the Googles, Apples, and YCombinators of the world, don’t believe in existing cities as a viable laboratory to advance civic technology, then nobody can. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario that follows the tech industry’s traditionally oligopolistic form, wherein there are two types of cities: those ingrained with cutting-edge useful technologies, and those that get left behind. It only takes one courageous technology company to set the precedent of a “new city” that would drive a deep wedge between a technically literate elite, and everyone else. It’s an unnerving notion: society’s brightest minds focused on the growth of new cities for the elite, rather than the pressing social issues of existing cities. That vision of the future is entrenched with elitism and divergence that would be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Not all of these technologically centered utopias are being proposed for faraway lands or the middle of oceans — the blank slate approach. We see hints that a v2.0 city can be superimposed on the places that we live and work in today. San Francisco startup Leap provided a bus service that allowed the wealthy programmers of Silicon Valley to commute to work in the company of other rich, young, and headphoned programmers, rather than the crying children or homeless people on a city bus. Geographically, Leap was built in San Francisco, but culturally and ideologically, it may as well have been operating on Mars. Fortunately for the Bay Area, economic viability trumped the elitist grandeur of Leap’s founders and the company went bankrupt after a few months of operation — but it would be naive to assume that Leap was the last of its breed. “New cities” are a direct threat to the quality of critical public services.
It’s adapt or fall behind for today’s major urban centers. Unfortunately, the super powers of technology have the lion’s share of power in defining the future of urban technology innovation. But city governments can be proactive in ensuring that the benefits of urban tech are shared amongst everyone in a city, and not just the technical elite. Tight integration with critical public services is paramount. Governments need to be adaptive, open, and experimental. Partnership and common vision should come before regulation and containment.
Sources:
Friend, T. (2016, October 10). Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com
