Is a hackable city a good idea?

As soon as it was put online, Hubert Guillaud’s debriefing of Saskia Sassen’s Smart City speech at Marseille’s Lift 2011 conference was a huge success. Retweeted left and right by geeks, bloggers, and technophiles of all kinds. Seeing this enthusiasm, of course, I wanted to put in my two cents….

The point of this article isn’t to categorically judge Saskia Sassen or the reflections that led to her conclusions (which for the moment we only have in roundabout ways from a press article, a quick interview, and a conference briefing). What I want to do is highlight the salient points (or at least clarify) to everyone who is tempted to reduce the speech down into a few short citations - as we are often inclined to do at dinner parties so we can appear sophisticated.

The central question of the sociologist, famous for her work on ”global cities,” is very interesting. How do we maintain the open and moving cities at a time when we are developing technologies that, under the guise of making them more “intelligent,” seem to close themselves up? These technologies are increasingly about monitoring and surveillance. Do they also emphasize the importance of the engineer to the detriment of the people? I am not convinced that the emergence of an ”urban open source” and “hacker” in the city are really the right answers.

New age segregation?

First off, Saskia Sassen seemed pretty annoyed at engineers for cheating inhabitants out of their rightful place in a technologically advanced urban system. Yet during her speech, didn’t she use a very specific vocabulary (“open source,” “hacker,” but also “creative” and “flexible”)? Doesn’t this place her on the side of technophiles, geeks, researches and other technology engineers (even if no one dares 

Secondly, we have to remember that not everyone is computer competent. These inequalities which often follow social class, even if it seems insensitive and inappropriate to say, are still very much present. So what do we do with the population that doesn’t master the technologies, who don’t know how to “hack” a city? Will they become second rate citizens (or stay that way, as they are in our current cities)? Is the hacked city the future of a segregated city? Certain users know how use a spatial or technical aspect to their advantage, while others just submits to its rules. Do these rules exist outside any democratic reforms?

Innovated uses required

Third, this call to hack cities reminds of me of the popular concept of innovated uses for digital tools and ICT. However, even though it would be interesting at first to refute simplistic theories such as the binary  transmitter and receiver of a media pair, there is now a real behest. It reaches a more general injunction to “freedom” (freedom of establishment, free movement of information, etc.), which in reality – through Foucault’s perspective – are the new “biopolitical” avatars in our “disciplinary societies” based on social control (see the article by Alexander Macmillan). As Raphael Josset notes in a recent article:

[...] All extremely subtle practices of ‘viral marketing,’ ‘guerrilla marketing,’ ‘alternative marketing,’ ‘buzz marketing,’ and other fields of communication, media and networks are perfectly able to assimilate each ‘innovative use’ into their own systems. [...] It’s this ability to metabolize the creative energy of dissident groups which makes it impossible for them to sabotage the projects. Perhaps it’s also due to the mere idea of ​’becoming a media mass,’ meaning the injunction to recapture or divert the socio-code technology can not  lead to an enlarged reproduction of the system under the guise of new forms.

What happens when the hacked city turns on itself?

A vague open source speech

Fourth, Sassen talks very broadly about open source and its benefits. Would open source in itself be enough to solve the problems of surveillance if, as Matteo Pasquinelli points out, the military chimes in? At the same time, the author takes the opportunity to highlight the “political myth” of the “hacker” and  ”open source,” which is readily perceived as anti-capitalist or outside the rules of market (see Open Street Map):

Technology’s risk is that of continuing to speak the language of power and capital. History is full of ‘radical machines’ that were transformed into tools of control and exploitation. Aren’t we seeing the creativity of the hacker progressively take on the appearance of industrial functionalism? The image of superiority and reliability of free software is so convincing that the military itself has adopted it. Outside of its political myth, the hacker is a pact with Mephistophelean technocracy (more with the implicit power of technology itself than with any technocrats). The definition is always the same: ‘Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.’ Behind these subtle nuances, we’re forgetting the free of the free market. As if the immaterial technology of software were as divinely infallible as a logo.

A city of individuals and private interests?

Finally, it is interesting to note that the majority of open source software only imitates existing for-profit software, as this article from The Economist underlines. Yet, how does challenging the system lead us forward when we endorse its objectives? Aren’t we legitimizing the system by imitating it? Moreover, don’t these findings reveal that a logical development of “open source” is almost entirely based on the satisfaction of private interests of individuals? Looking at the city, can it be planned by a sum of private interests (the urban “auto-entrepreneurs” carried by the slogan “Just do it yourself!”) to the detriment of public service and the community as a whole?
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Article originally published on Technogéographie [fr], under the title “À propos de S. Sassen et de “l’urbanisme open-source,” with Saskia Sassen’s response.

Image CC Flickr massdistraction