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The Stupidity of Smart Devices and Smart Cities

Kampmark, Binoy
http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/29/the-stupidity-of-smart-devices-and-smart-cities/

Date Written:  29/08/2019
Year Published:  2019  
Resource Type:  Article

Smart phones, smart bombs, and, it follows, Smart Cities (capitalising such terms implies false authority), do not exist in that sense, whatever their cheer squad emissaries in High Tech land claim. They are merely a masterfully daft celebration of tactically deployed cults: there is a fad, a trend, and therefore, it must be smart, a model option to pursue.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The fallacy of naming in order to vest technology with a sensibility persists in other areas. Labelling teams work around the clock. Domestic appliances have not be spared; the home has been invaded by their language. As a world-weary David Capener observes, “Marketers know that we, the public, are often stupid enough to believe that thanks to their technology, life is better now than it was way back in, say, the primitive Nineties.” The anatomy of such a city is based on its technological expression, one as equally sinister as it is questionable. It takes the form of continual, mass surveillance typified by sensing devices; vending machines with in-built biometric sensors; concealed black boxes located through the city’s urban settings.

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In terms of cities, London is considered one of the smartest, despite its crowding, desperate chaos and poor planning. As a sceptical Bruce Sterling reminds us in The Atlantic, “London is a huge, ungainly beast whose cartwheeling urban life is in cranky, irrational disarray. London is a god-awful urban mess, but London does have some of the best international smart-city conferences.”
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