![]() Is that a good thing? Could be worse, I suppose, but could be better as well. The smart city is the city imagined as a vast computer, and as this review says :ĭiscussions that were once about values and beliefs – about what a society wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror – have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics. Today’s smart city and its profusion of sensors and server farms have a long lineage. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. What such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. Here’s a relevant quote from from Farrell and Shalizi’s insightful article : There’s no way to understand vast systems of human organization - states, markets and cities included - without understanding that they have always been computers. Huge bureaucracies emerge to ‘process’ all this information. It is these needs of the state that prompt the census, the survey and the registry. ![]() Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. Scott says it well in “Seeing like a State:”Ĭertain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. ![]() Power never seeks uncontrolled knowledge. Unfortunately, an emperor can never be an idler or a loafer, for he’s always concerned about what’s happening in his empire. French, a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way an idler or loafer. These urban escapades humanize the king, but does it make him a flaneur?įlaneur: noun,plural flâ
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