MIT Press unveiled today the Civic Media Project. It includes over 100 case studies clustered around 4 subject categories: play + creativity, systems + design, learning + engagement, community + action.

(image by Tangible Interaction)

I’m very excited that my study of Mashnotes – a street installation commissioned by the Museum of Vancouver and built by Vancouver-based design outfit Tangible Interaction – was selected to be included in the project. You can find it here. It will also appear in the accompanying book, The Civic Media Reader, which is scheduled for publication in 2016.

What happens when you allow researchers to enjoy the liberating effects of the imagination? How would the capacity to break from the constraints of the “now” and project different futures open up new and exciting research directions? A recent CFP sent by Daniel Pargman, in preparation for Critical Alternatives 2015, gave Alec Balasescu and me an opportunity for some playful experimentation. Here’s what we came up with (and yes, we are being somewhat ironic):

(work by Douglas Coupland, Vancouver Art Gallery, July 2014)

Universal Sustainability Sensorial Regulation (USSR)

Abstract

The Universal Sustainability Sensorial Regulation system (or USSR) was developed in response to stalled negotiations for a global treaty to curb GHG emissions, and to the catastrophic failure of geoengineering. Building on recent advances in nanotechnology and the consolidation of the Internet of Things, USSR is designed to regulate the human sensorium based on real-time input from atmospheric and machinic agents. Following an expedited process of ethical approval, the system has now been operational for 20 months, in 5 sites on 3 continents. Our initial findings show that as hypothesized, (1) manipulating human thermal comfort levels by only 2°C saved an average of 1500 kW/h and reduced GHG emissions by an average of 5 tonnes annually, per household; (2) initiating higher levels of gluten intolerance in response to global grain shortages proved successful in preventing food riots; (3) while our comprehensive surveys and interviews indicate that human subjects find the system to be relatively satisfactory overall (m=6.4), we are still grappling with what can only be described as overzealous behaviour by machinic agents (OBaMA), resulting in 31 confirmed injuries. We intend to investigate this further by deploying the innovative techniques of machine anthropology.

Research Setting

The conception, development and deployment of the USSR system was made possible by the coalescence of three crucial elements: (1) the emergence of a wide global consensus around the need to develop new ways to adapt to climate change; (2) the availability of unprecedented research methodologies, techniques and tools; and (3) the maturation of a philosophical and ethical disposition within which this research can be justified. These catalyzed the reorganization of academic knowledge into a single, universal science.

Necessity

As the effects of climate change were felt with increased intensity, the global community scrambled to find solutions. However, mired in geostrategic conflicts of interest, international negotiations failed, while existing technologies with GHG reduction potentials such as nuclear energy, were rejected by popular opinion. Some new technologies did not fare better, as a series of colossal failures caused the abandonment of geoengineering, and the insistence of Lockheed Martin to maintain strict control over its patents, prevented fusion energy from scaling up sufficiently. With the growing realization that political and cultural solutions were either too meagre, too slow, or too late, a consensus has emerged: since the primary factor driving climate change is human behaviour – a product of neural and physiological activity, metabolism – human behaviour itself would become the object of action. If we can’t change the atmosphere we must change ourselves.

Means

With the development of nanotechnology, and the ubiquity of smart, sensing, networked objects, scientists are now able to “sense” the world and make digital records of its every fluctuation. Supercomputing technology has broken new grounds in terms of monitoring and managing all this input, generating detailed information about millions of entities in realtime. Deep Informationalization (the lesser evil twin brother of Big Data), has ignited imaginations all over the world, and has given scientists unprecedented powers (such as could only be dreamed of by Francis Bacon or B.F. Skinner).

Ethics

Treating humans as objects of research and molecular manipulation has become much more accepted, due in large part to the popularity of posthumanism. With a view of ontological parity between humans and nonhumans, scientists have been given philosophical license to initiate research projects that mobilize invasive technological innovations in ways that may have been far too controversial hitherto. As the critical discourse of culture, ideology and consumerism was replaced by scientific experimentation and technical tinkering, science stands-in for politics. Marx was replaced by the MRI. Furthermore, the impending end of civilization as we know it, has made the sacrifice of a few “casualties of science” much more palatable. This eased the burden of research ethics reviews and gave researchers practically unfettered access to the very somatic core of their subjects.

The Emergence of Machine Anthropology

The unprecedented availability and consequent centrality of data has redrawn academic fields and initiated a reorganization of academic knowledge. The academic reform was threefold:

1. Multidisciplinarity was replaced by a single universal science. What were once considered separate – even antithetical – disciplines such as the arts and engineering, have now converged into a single, “machine anthropology”. Its hallmark is the treating of all entities through the same methodological lens, extending ontological parity into epistemological terms.
2. Knowledge production was extended to include all forms of sensorial perception. What were once considered separate realms – ‘raw’ data and ‘refined’ judgement – are now understood as mere stages in a holistic process of knowledge production. Thus, the human sensorium and the kind of aesthetic judgments it enables, along with machinic sensations and machinic modes of expression, produce a continuous flux of data, whose analysis, development and application has come to replace the lengthy, time consuming, and at times crippling process of peer-review.
3. Technology is regarded as both an object of study and as a subject-for-itself that produces knowledge on its own account. Within the emergent machine anthropology, machine-enhanced sensorial perception is treated symmetrically, completing the decentering of humanity’s view on itself.

Here is some fictional research inspiration from others:

‘ICT4S 2029: What will be the systems supporting sustainability in 15 years‘ by Birgit Penzenstadler, Bill Tomlinson, Eric Baumer, Marcel Pufal, Ankita Raturi, Debra Richardson, Baki Cakici, Ruzanna Chitchyan.

‘The Age Of Imagination: A History of Experiential Futures 2006-2031‘ by Trevor Haldenby and Stuart Candy.

(Are smart cities inhabited by the Sims? SimCity 5 model built by a team from MIT)

Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology. (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 158)

Who doesn’t want to live in a smart city? Who wouldn’t want to benefit from the efficiency, responsivity and security promised by the smart city’s streamlined, seamlessly integrated electronic metabolism? Just imagine the gains in sustainability… Really, what’s there not to like?

Lots, if you’re asking mega-architect Rem Koolhaas. In recent comments made at a conference in Brussles, Koolhaas had some pretty scathing remarks about smart cities. The (short) piece is really worth reading in its entirety, but here’s what stood out for me.

What does “smart” stand for? Koolhaas thinks that smart cities represent yet another stage in the bearing down of financial imperatives on urban life forces. While the financialization of cities comes in different shapes and forms, Koolhaas points to how it catalyzes the transformation of cities from spaces full of surprises and productive friction into highly regulated zones of commerce. As he puts it, “With safety and security as selling points, the city has become vastly less adventurous and more predictable.” Predictability, of course, is good for business. And so are order and efficiency.

So it only makes sense, then, that the smart city finds a natural alley in the “creative class”, snuggling alongside “innovation” in the rhetorical basket of civic decision-makers and administrators. As Koolhaas writes, “Mayors are particularly susceptible to the rhetoric of the smart city: it is very attractive to be a smart mayor”. This rhetorical alliance was in full view in a recent event organized by Simon Fraser University’s Public Square program. The title of the event, which brought together Richard Florida and Ray Kurzweil, was “will innovation save us?”, and the answer, unsurprisingly, was a resounding ‘yes’. But which innovation will save us? The kind that attracts the “right” kind of tax payers to the city, or the one that aims to transform cities into more affordable, inclusive and just spaces?

(inside Rio de Janeiro’s IBM-built control room)

Since urban populations tend to be more agitating, the residents of the smart city are first and foremost entities to be managed. In Koolhaas’s words:

The citizens the smart city claims to serve are treated like infants. We are fed cute icons of urban life, integrated with harmless devices, cohering into pleasant diagrams in which citizens and business are surrounded by more and more circles of service that create bubbles of control. Why do smart cities offer only improvement? Where is the possibility of transgression?

So is the smart city the new face of technocracy – the coming technocracity?

For Marcuse, technocracy stood for the way ideology becomes habituated as bureaucratic procedures and structures, mobilizing science and technology as means to normalize domination. In technocracy, the modern embrace of scientific knowledge and technological innovation – the march of progress, the will to innovate, and so forth – becomes part of the ideological edifice. As means trump ends, reason itself becomes domination. In this sense, is it possible that the smart city is merely a veneer of financially-motivated, neoliberal flavoured innovation serving as barrier for progressive social innovation? What room do we have to shape future cities when more and more of the city’s life processes go unnoticed under the hood of interlocking technological systems? Is this not Democracity coming to life as Frankenstein’s monster?

(apparently not a smart city)

At the end of his talk, Koolhaas states that “Smart cities and politics have been diverging, growing in separate worlds. It is absolutely critical that the two converge again.” But seen through the lens of technocracy, what Koolhaas identifies as the severing of civic innovation from democratic politics is actually the inverse: smart cities are not nonpolitical but in fact are hyper-political, only they mobilize a different mode of politics, one that becomes ever harder to engage since it hides behind the rhetoric of innovation, and operates through expert-driven technological development. The smart city seems woefully like Haussmannization by other means.

SFU’s Institute for the Humanities announced its Fall lecture series, Democracy & Dissent, which includes my lecture on Nov.12th. I’m so honoured and excited!

(click to embiggen)

Here’s the abstract + bio:

(click to embiggen)

(more on maps featuring sea monsters here)

Maps establish, formalize and stabilize relations between entities. They also set boundaries around human knowledge – think of how ancient maps articulated what we knew to be true and what we speculated about. So if maps solidify a set of relations that are co-extensive with human knowledge, why not extend them to include those elements that, under the spell of modernity, we have shut out of our sociotechnical imaginary?

Timothy Beatley, professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia, suggests something like this in a recent interview for Grist:

Instead maps of coastal cities that end at the shoreline, they could extend out into the waters, to show where kelp forests outside of Los Angeles are as magnificent as the redwoods outside of San Fran, or where deep-water reefs lie largely unexplored off the coast of Trondheim, Norway, or the tracts of ocean where orca whales migrate by Seattle and Vancouver.

Extending maps in this manner would have a multiplying effect on “matters of concern” (as Latour would put it), with interesting ethical effects: if it’s on a map we can no longer ignore it. In this sense new mapping practices may help restore the diagrammatic essence of maps as means to “blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive absolute deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.136).

[addendum 1: as is so often the case, Google is already there with its new underwater streetview]

[addendum 2: “The shrinking of the Arctic ice sheet in the 10th edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World is one of the most striking changes in the publication’s history”. Climate change must be real, then. But there’s more than meets the eye here since arctic ice is extremely dynamic – both between seasons (obviously) and between years. Not only is the choice of data crucial (in this case 2012, which saw historically low arctic ice levels), but the mapping itself strikes me as exercise in territorialization.]