City Leaders Are Selling Us to IBM, Google & Amazon. It’s A Shame.
Cities and Beauty Pageants
Amazon’s beauty pageant to determine HQ2 is not the first time that cities have had to parade themselves before corporations, it’s just the most shameful and blatant. In 2016, the Department of Transportation (DOT) asked for cities to send in their application for a $40M smart city grant. Columbus won after DoT whittled down the list from 78 cities. Most of the 78 cities are the same cities scrambling for Amazon’s HQ2. What most people who hailed the initiative missed is that Amazon, and a few other companies I will mention below, were the same corporate partners for the DoT initiative. If we know anything about the big technology companies, especially Amazon, this is not about altruism. No one is of the impression that Amazon will pick the city that has the most walkways or lakes. Instead, you know it’s just a numbers game. Numbers that largely revolve around tax benefits. Tax benefits that YOU pay for.
Less obvious, but no less dangerous, are the other companies that are focused on providing the technology layer to willing cities that want to become ‘smart cities’. I use the word ‘dangerous’ because these companies will have access to information that we, the residents of these cities, made available to the city willingly but have not given the cities permission to give to corporate entities to use for their commercial purposes. For the DoT program, the partners were Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc., cloud partner Amazon Web Services, NXP® Semiconductors, Mobileye, Autodesk, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, AT&T, DC Solar and Continental Automotive. I can name at least 4 companies on there that I believe most citizens would like to know what they’d be doing with their data.
We gave the cities our information believing that it granted us access to the civic services our cities are mandated to provide to us; garbage cans and trash collection schedules, permit applications to enable us perform patio modifications to our homes etc. But now all the ‘required’ information for 5 cities — Busan, Palermo, San Isidro, San Jose and Yamagata — will be provided to a company like IBM for its Smarter City Challenge. Whether the residents like or want it or now. And that’s a problem. All in this desire to become a smart city…
Why, Vancouver?
While the 'smart city' technology company gets a ton of resident data all the city gets, for example, is ‘expertise and technology to address their top strategic challenges. with Winning cities receiving a team of experts deployed full-time for a period..with all costs assumed by the benevolent company. That sounds like an unfair exchange to me. But the biggest culprit right now is Vancouver in its engagement with Sidewalk Labs (an Alphabet company). The agreement actually reads much like the Amazon beauty pageant; Sidewalk Labs will commit $50M over 12 months and move its Canadian headquarters to the Eastside Waterfront where the smart city project will be deployed.
But wait! Before you scream ‘Sidewalk is committing $50M, what more do you want from them?’ The first $10M of funding for the project from Sidewalk will only be deployed if the government commitment of CAN$1.25 billion to complete the Port Lands flood protection is put in place. Name me a city in the world today that is currently able to deploy CAN$1.25B for environmental disaster contingencies? I’ll save you thinking time, NONE.
Messy Nature of Cities
Cities are organically messy and city governments try to manage this mess providing us safety, security and basic amenities. But what technology companies try to do is bring order to the mess for their own financial benefit and this will get worse even as these technology companies get more powerful. The layer of technology that is put on this mess is how these corporations make money. And they truly do not care about the trampling of our civic rights. When companies do this, add a layer of technology on messy states, easily captured metrics are used as proxies for natural phenomena that are part of the organic nature of situations. In attempts to put objective measures on subjective human interactions and conditions, we forget that the sum of the parts never (ever) equals the whole. This sometimes leads to negative consequences for the citizenry but financial returns for the corporation. As the CEO of Sidewalks Labs as said 'we are in this business to make money'. It’s how we ended up with the RAND Corporation recommendations to the Fire Dept of New York, which excluded traffic times in algorithms for determining where to locate fire stations, that led to closures of some fire stations in areas that needed it most!
Literally, Handing Over The Keys
These companies have our social interactions and shopping information but they do not yet have the personal information we share with our cities. To willingly hand the information over to these companies is a huge failure on the part of our governments; it’s a shame all that information is being handed to them for a few pennies (in city funding terms) and a ‘smart city’ label that truly means nothing. The keys to the city are (literally) being handed over by short-term thinkers to long-term and intentional extractors of value. At best these companies will bring faster internet and always-on connectivity. At worst these corporations will increase inequality by providing more to the haves, and further marginalize the have-nots. It’s a shame we are letting our leaders let this happen to us.
What outcomes are you expecting?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/city-leaders-selling-us-ibm-google-amazon-its-ashame-seyi-fabode/