Tag Archives: Smart City

SMART CITY WATCH: IT’S ONLY A GAME

SMART CITY WATCH

The ‘Smart City’ prophets love games and play and promote them hard because what you need to understand is that the ‘Smart City’ is a whole lot of fun. Harmless fun entirely for your benefit. It brings jobs, growth and innovation to make you wealthy and delivers entertainment, play and games to keep you happy.

Here in Bristol we have a publicly funded organisation dedicated to promoting what a load of harmless fun a ‘Smart City’ is – the Pervasive Media Studio at the Watershed. “It’s a world of amazingness and wonder. If Willy Wonka existed, he’d be jealous of it :)” Kieron Kirkland, their former Magician-in-residence uncritically assures us. Magically unaware that the manufacturing of confectionary doesn’t conjure huge amounts of behavioural data for tech firms to appropriate and monetise.

The Pervasive Media Studio’s big idea is the ‘Playable City’. “There were a lot of older people,” these ageists tell us, “who were totally terrified at the notion of a smart city and how cold and alienating it was. So we decided to reappropriate smart cities’ technology for play.”

pokemon

 But who’s playing what game and what is really being reappropriated in a ‘Smart/Playable City’? Are “older people” right to be alienated? On the face of it, Pervasive Media, once you get past its creepy name, is pretty harmless. ‘Playable City’ is little more than an annual international conference and accompanying prize for daft ideas such as creating smart phone enabled talking street furniture or randomly triggering projections of animals at unsuspecting pedestrians at night.

So far, so much municipally imposed fun courtesy of hipsters. However, the corporate Godfather of the outdoor digital play market, Pokémon GO, is taking digital play somewhere else entirely. Initially this ‘augmented reality mobile game’ involved finding and capturing, on your phone, virtual cartoon characters in your neighbourhood. Then Pokémon GO struck deals with the likes of McDonalds, Starbucks and other corporates who handed over hard cash in exchange for the behavioural and location data held by Pokémon GO.

These transactions transformed Pokémon GO. A cheap, harmless hour in the park with the kids hunting virtual characters became the completely different game of nudging you through the door of a corporate outlet to spend money.

Pokémon GO is a step forward in the use of your behavioural data by tech firms. They’re moving beyond storing and analysing data to predict your behaviour (say through promoting certain ads on the internet at you) to trying to directly manage and control your behaviour through your digital device. Behavioural control and management is the new frontier for big data firms in the ‘Smart City’ test bed and play and games are among the tools in their box.

When you pick up your phone to play, regardless of how old you are, be sure to know what game you’re playing.

SMART CITY WATCH

SMART CITY WATCH

On September 12 the Reverend Rees launched the city’s Smart City Strategy at the ‘Bristol – Sweden Future Cities Summit’. This five-year strategy, “sets out how Bristol City Council will support Bristol’s smart city journey” and, “aims to ensure smart city projects will provide opportunities to more people and communities to assist in the city’s inclusive growth and help towards solutions to issues such as public safety, traffic congestion, energy poverty and health and social care”. But what is a ‘Smart City’ and what are ‘smart city projects’ and why do we need them?

When you see the word ‘smart’ prefixing an object it means one thing. Deploying the internet – originally devised by the US military as a weapon – to collect as much behavioural data about the ‘Smart’ device owner as possible so that the data can be used to predict, suggest and, increasingly, control the user’s actions. Often through ‘nudging’ victims into better corporate citizenship if not outright threatening them with extra-judicial sanctions.

It began with the smart phone. A mini computer in your pocket beaming detailed behavioural data about your life back to unaccountable tech firms and their government and corporate partners. This is the ‘big data’ you hear about or what Google call ‘data exhaust’ as if it’s a harmless waste product without value. If you’ve got one of these phones, then you’re likely to be providing real time information to unaccountable corporations about where you are and what you are doing. And, rest assured, this information is being stored and analysed by tech companies, the government, security services and various corporate third parties.

The smart phone has been so successful at collecting your data and making tech corporations money through the ruthless competitive dynamic unleashed by big data that there’s a huge economic imperative to produce more ‘smart’ products to collect more data about you and your family. Silicon Valley has given this all out assault on your life and privacy a cuddly name, ‘The Internet of Things’.

Cars, homes, public services, exercise aids, finance, shopping, health products, utilities, white goods and much more are all in the firing line for a ‘Smart’ makeover. Google even owns the tech to know what’s in your smart fridge. (Imagine visiting your GP and being told you have been struck off because you had too many pies in your fridge contrary to your ‘Smart Health Agreement’?)

However, to collect this huge amount of behavioural data from the digital crap being foisted on us, you need a ‘Smart City’ infrastructure. A dense mesh of 5G transmitters and receivers throughout the city that can upload and manage the huge amounts of real time behavioural data the ‘Smart City’ prophets require for their big data society.

This is sold to you as “innovation” that will create “jobs and sustainable growth” while delivering personal benefits such as faster internet speeds to download a movie to your handheld screen or the quicker uploading of holiday photos for gran.

Don’t be fooled. The internet is a weapon and the smart city aims it at you.