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Architetti Roma interview
The following is an interview with me conducted by the Italian architectural magazine Architetti Roma. This one focuses on issues of mobility and, as always, I hope you find it illuminating.
What are the urban contexts where technology and mobility have brought about the best outcomes?
To clarify, here we should make it plain that we're strictly talking about networked information technology, and not, say, developments in power-train technology or materials engineering. And of relatively recent developments in this field, I'm particularly fond of a smartphone app called Citymapper. It's like being handed the keys to the city.
Consider that I arrived in megacity London with nothing more than the vaguest mental map of the place, and still less of a sense of how to get around it. And what Citymapper let me do was dive right in, the night I got here. I could hop on a bus and go meet friends, and know exactly where I had to wait, what bus to take, where to get off and how long the trip would take me. It radically lowered the threshold of fear and uncertainty that keeps us sequestered in our local neighborhoods. Not within the weeks or months that it might have taken me to wrap my head around the transit network's endlessly ramified field of possibilities in any previous age — immediately. And this is a service that's available for zero incremental cost, to anyone with the wherewithal to afford a smartphone and a data plan. Now that is truly radical, a truly epochal development in urban mobility.
There are only two issues with it, really. The first is that Citymapper only works so well in London because TfL, our local transit authority, offers a generous selection of real-time APIs, the open application programming interfaces that allow a service like Citymapper to grab, represent and make use of that information. It wouldn't be nearly the same thing in a city that didn't, just not at all the same proposition.
The second, more serious problem is that Citymapper — like all other services positioned as products in the late-capitalist marketplace — is subject to churn. It's not stable. A new version can appear at any time, might even be pushed to your device in such a way that you don't get to choose whether you want it or not, and you'll find that the features, conventions and metaphors you've come to rely upon and stored in muscle memory just don't work the same way anymore. And if Citymapper's CEO decides that his personal future and his investors' outcomes are best secured by choosing to sell the service in toto to Apple or Google, then that's what's going to happen. And there's not a damn thing you or I or anyone outside that decision loop can do about it.
So, yes: we've been handed the keys to the city, but they can be yanked away at any time. At any moment, TfL can decide that it no longer wants to provide real-time APIs, Citymapper can decide that it no longer wants to support a given city, Apple can decide that it no longer wants to allow third-party journey-planning services on its platform. Our golden age is real, but it's terribly vulnerable.
Are you familiar with Rome? What in your opinion are the technology applications that could be suitable for Rome?
I've only spent three days in Rome in my adult life. I just don't think I'm qualified to speak in anything more than generalities about what might or might not work there. But, sure, in any place where there's a single accountable public transit authority, and that transit authority offers reliable real-time APIs, there's no reason that something like Citymapper couldn't work and work well.
Roman traffic is also, of course, legendary, and that's something I can very easily see yielding to automated vehicle control. The deeper question there is the extent to which Romans actually cherish the impossibility of getting around, as part of their identity in the world. Letting go of that may be more of a obstacle than any of the material challenges of implementing automated mobility.
Considering Uber and similar services, do you think they are a positive solution for urban mobility?
My position on Uber is rather well-known.
Google's self-driving car has just been presented. Do you think it will catch on? In what time frame?
Well, firstly, I think Google itself is further away from fielding a solution that will work anywhere outside of Mountain View than is generally understood. The media hype has been very misleading. And secondly, Google is far from the only actor currently working to resolve this envelope of challenges. Despite their power, reach and influence, we should never make the mistake of collapsing the ideas of "autonomous personal transportation" and "Google."
That said, it will happen, one way or another. I don't think it's a question of "catching on," so much as one of getting the necessary regulatory, legislative and risk-assessment frameworks in place. And this is one of those very rare contexts where I believe that the information-technological approach really is unambiguously superior to the way we do things now.
In the United States alone, we sacrifice more than 30,000 human lives a year to misplaced confidence in our own ability to manage the performance regime presented to us by the car. People drive drunk, while texting, when they've just had an argument with their partner. Long-distance truckers drive bent half out of their mind on sleeplessness and crank because that's what's demanded of them by the economics of contemporary logistics. People drive in the morning to minimum-wage jobs that are two hours away because they're the only ones that were on offer, on sleep that's already been brutally truncated by the two hours it took them to get home the night before. People use vehicles as weapons — to bolster their sense of self, to claim space from the others they feel encroaching on them at every turn, to assert dominance in a world that makes them feel like they've been zeroed out. And algorithms even at their clumsiest stand to do a better job in each and every single one of these circumstances.
But "unambiguously better" doesn't mean "perfect." The disruption, in particular, to working-class livelihoods will be dreadful. If unanticipated, unaccounted for and unresponded to, in fact, I venture to say it will cause misery easily on the order of those 30,000 annual deaths. And that's quite a thing to say. It's why I support the provision of universal basic income, to at least buffer the havoc automation is sure to wreak on our societies as it transforms mobility, logistics and a thousand other fields.
Could you draw some possible scenarios regarding the use of technologies in the field of mobility ten years from now?
Ten years is a long, long time in my field. It's the far future. Consider that ten years ago, we didn't even have smartphones. Given all the wildly interacting factors at play, and the ever-present likelihood that their interaction will render our world effectively ungovernable, I'm just not comfortable prognosticating.
"Gee, Officer Krupke": A close reading in the governmentality literature
In my weekly dispatch not so long ago, I'd mentioned that I'd been reading Mitchell Dean's Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. This might at first blush seem like an odd choice for summer reading, but you know me: as long as I live, I'll be immersed in the autodidact's permanent project of filling in the gaps in my own understanding. The Dean book, if dense, really is superbly lucid. I found it hugely useful, and enjoyed it greatly.
At the time, though, I'd also mentioned a text I'd described as "far and away my favorite in the entire governmentality literature": a song called "Gee, Officer Krupke," from the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. This wasn't a throwaway joke. As we'll see, "Krupke" is such a concise, vivid and memorable encapsulation of governmentality theory that it could readily be used as an introduction to this entire line of thought.
But first, for those of you who don't generally dork out over such things, it's probably best to spell out just what it is that I, at least, mean when I use the strange word "governmentality." As Dean explains, this is a way of thinking about the art of state administration that Michele Foucault first presented in a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in the winter of 1977-78. There's a specific problem Foucault is trying to address in these lectures, which is how power works in the modern, Western liberal democracy — specifically, how can a state guarantee the compliance of citizens who are at least nominally free, and upon whose ability to act freely the entire economic order is in fact predicated?
As Foucault describes it, the ultimate aim of liberal governmentality is the production of subjects who do not require much in the way of active administration, because they administer themselves. Most of us, most of the time, do not literally have a gun to our head, and yet we continue to act in ways that continuously reproduce and legitimate certain conceptions of State power and our own relation to it. Foucault's project was to ask just how these conceptions came to be, and how we ourselves came to internalize them.
In order to do this, he undertook a genealogy of the successive ways in which power has been seen to work throughout the history of the West, and the conceptions of citizenship, self and subjectivity that corresponded to each of them. Broadly speaking, the main modes of power he identified were sovereignty, which is the naked power to kill or let live, originally founded in the divine right of kings; discipline, which originates in the detailed training and regulation of human bodies and becomes a series of (predominantly spatial) technologies for the production of docile, compliant and useful subjects; and eventually biopolitical govermentality, which is concerned with maximizing State power by optimizing fertility, longevity and other biological processes at the level of entire populations. In his exegesis, Dean is careful to emphasize that though these modes emerged historically, they aren't strictly speaking periodizations: liberal power will always consist of some admixture of sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics, though the proportions will shift from state to state, and over time within a single polity.
Just to add a layer of nuance and complexity, in the Collège de France lectures Foucault also contrasted the essentially pastoral model of administration inscribed in the Christian tradition (the "shepherd/flock game") with an earlier, Greco-Roman model of public virtue that he calls the "city/citizen game." The distinction is between whether individuals are primarily understood as sentient beings with needs and a potential for wellbeing that must be discovered via the development of detailed knowledge, or as citizens, with freedom, rights and obligations that are negotiated through legal and political processes. The former conception implies a burden of care on the part of a benevolent ("welfare") State, but also the necessity of submission to that State's fundamentally paternalistic administration; the latter is perhaps better suited to a political community composed of fully autonomous individuals, but lacks any organic commitment to those who are unable to shift for themselves. The one is total in every sense, a vision of the beloved community that yet patronizes its members; the other is atomized, but also liberating. Autonomy, in other words, both giveth and taketh away. (Dean's framing of the tradeoff is stark: in a notional society of "juridical and civil equals, there are no grounds for a right to assistance but nor are there grounds to issue commands.")
And all of these complicated and, at times, fundamentally incompatible ways of constructing subjectivity are interwoven in the contemporary governance of the liberal state, as well as in the institutionalized contestation of the right to govern that we think of as party politics. (In fact, we can understand a great deal about policy — from military conscription and abortion law to subsidized public transit for the elderly and proposed limits on the sizes of sugary soft drinks that can be sold — by trying to identify which historical conception of citizenship it's appealing to.) The necessity of arriving at some kind of modus vivendi on a day-by-day basis means that in practice this unstable hybrid is patched together, but the fault lines remain and they run deep.
As I read it, anyway, those faults re-emerge whenever society encounters a situation it defines as a "problem." Different modes of institutional expertise are brought to bear, each of which proposes its own way of framing the problem, and therefore the wisest course of action for its resolution — but again, always with a mind toward restoring society to a condition of self-regulation. So-called nudge theory is perhaps the most recent elaboration of this way of thinking, but the tendency has been evident in Western societies for the better part of a century.
And this brings us to "Gee, Officer Krupke," as sung by Action, Snowboy, Diesel, A-Rab and Baby John — members of a working-class white street gang called the Jets, whose "turf" occupies a few square blocks of New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. The song is about their encounter with the agent of State power they are most familiar with, NYPD patrolman Krupke, and their sarcastic, exhausted explication to him of the various modes of expertise brought to bear on them as living, breathing exemplars of a social problem.
In "Krupke" we're not quite at biopolitics yet, concerned as it is with the administration of the processes of life at the scale of entire populations, but just about every other element of governmentality theory is given a turn in the lyrics. In fact, the song is so point-by-point compliant with Foucault's schema that I've half convinced myself he had Stephen Sondheim's lyrics in mind when he first composed his lectures.
Here, I'll show you what I mean:
Deeeeeeaaaaar kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' upke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
[First, the problem is named. Urban America in the immediate post-war period will be haunted by the specter of the juvenile delinquent — the JD, the punk, the hood. The JD is, by definition, an adolescent (or more distressingly a post-adolescent) with poor impulse control, mired in anomie, addicted to "kicks," and therefore unregulable and virtually unemployable. Corrupted by a lumpen culture of comic books and dangerously sexual jukebox singles, this figure and his lifeworld are vividly depicted in Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, amped up to a feverish 11 in Harlan Ellison's short story collection The Deadly Streets, and of course later parodied by the Ramones.
The problematic of juvenile delinquency and its management will become one of the main obsessions of American mass media and government alike, in the years before the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the emergence of a putatively "New Left" furnished them with more urgent concerns.]
Gee Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
There is good!
There is good, there is good,
There is untapped good!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!
[Again, as a distinctly liberal art of management, governmentality is concerned with the production of subjects whose behavior does not require detailed administration by the State, because they self-administer. The events of the play will demonstrate that the State clearly still has quite some way to go toward achieving this goal, but the seeds of a nascent social contract are already present in the Jets' protest that they are good. Far from rejecting the State's claim to a legitimate interest in their behavior, they here express the desire to be recuperated as usefully contributing members of society.
The Jets further propose that the question of delinquency will be decided on the terrain of the social, a sphere of human activity discovered by the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though conditioned by State power and the dynamics of an economy which is itself conceived of as natural and autonomous, the social is properly external to these. The contours of the social can most clearly be discerned at the scale of individual families, hence the Jets' insistence on the significance of familial dynamics in explaining their failure to conform.]
SNOWBOY (spoken)
That's a touchin' good story.
ACTION (spoken)
Lemme tell it to the world!
Just tell it to the Judge!
[The extension of governmentality into everyday life requires the deployment of multiple registers of specialized technical expertise, typically the sort of expertise that devises categories or taxonomies of human behavior and assigns people to them; Foucault calls this "power/knowledge."
The usual domains of this power/knowledge are medicine and public health, psychiatry, economics and law, each of which has a distinct way of conceiving of the human subject and the field of its interactions with other subjects. Are we most usefully thought of as biological bodies with a capacity for organic health or illness (and a vulnerability to contagion), economic actors with material interests, or citizens with rights and obligations under law?
This latter, legal (or, to be properly Foucauldian about it, "juridical") register of knowledge constitutes a framework of collective agreements for the formal specification and detailed regulation of the permissible limits of human behavior. As certain decisions the Jets make as individuals and as a collective mean that they are perpetually running afoul of these limits, the New York City juvenile justice system is the primary institution of expert knowledge they encounter in their lives, and therefore the first they invoke in their quest for resolution of their delinquent status.]
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all the marijuana,
They won't give me a puff.
They didn't wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!
[Note the acknowledgement that the individual delinquent may well be the issue of an unplanned pregnancy. By implication, delinquency as a phenomenon can be understood as the consequence of a failure of State policy at multiple levels, i.e. both the failure to integrate a meaningful family-planning curriculum into secondary education, and to distribute or otherwise guarantee access to contraceptives and other necessary resources. This is a presentiment of the quintessential biopolitical concern for scaled management of the processes of life.]
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs a analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!
[In the first of a series of reframings — or alternately, evasions of responsibility — that will characterize the Jets' encounters with the bearers of expert knowledge, the Judge finds that the law provides him with inadequate tools to manage delinquency. He rejects the notion, indeed, that this is a collective problem at all, suggesting instead that both the roots of delinquency and effective responses to it can best be discovered by undertaking the treatment of individual psychopathology.
Note that the vowels in both Diesel's pastiche of the Judge and the Jets' response should be sounded as a front-rising diphthong, i.e. coibed/distoibed. This is a once-distinct and broadly-recognizable New York City accent that is now rapidly disappearing.]
I'm disturbed!
We're disturbed, we're disturbed,
We're the most disturbed,
Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed.
DIESEL (spoken, as JUDGE)
Hear ye, hear ye! In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
[In speech act theory, this is what is known as a "performative utterance." That the Judge prefaces his comments with a command to hear and then literally pronounces sentence is what makes it effective. Still more intriguingly to me, the notion that there exist sequences of words so potent that uttering them properly and under the correct conditions is all it takes to do work in the world is at best only quasi-rational. It makes certain kinds of speech — here, legal speech — akin to magickal operations intended to manifest change in accordance with Will.]
ACTION (spoken)
Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived!
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
So take him to a headshrinker!
ACTION (sings)
My father is a bastard,
My ma's an S.O.B.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
Officer Krupke, you're really a slob.
This boy don't need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society's played him a terrible trick,
And sociologic'ly he's sick!
[The Psychiatrist downplays the significance of multiple traumas in the childhood household — the stigma of illegitimacy; substance abuse, addictive behavior and exposure to the narcoeconomy; and unresolved issues of gender presentation and conformity — arguing instead that delinquency needs to be understood as a symptom of market failure. Only by participating in and usefully contributing to the economy will the former delinquent find himself redeemed.]
I am sick!
We are sick, we are sick,
We are sick, sick, sick,
Like we're sociologically sick!
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
In my opinion, this child don't need to have his head shrunk at all. Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease!
Hey, I got a social disease!
[A bit of wordplay here: "social disease" is a common 1950s euphemism for sexually-transmitted disease. Action is delighted because the term implies institutional recognition and/or validation of his sexually active status.]
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
So take him to a social worker!
[Decisively denying a still-Freudian psychiatry's applicability to the problem at hand, the analyst recommends instead that the delinquent's situation be addressed by a case worker specifically tasked by the benevolent welfare State to perform outreach and propose interventions in the city's economically-deprived communities.]
Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schmuck.
It's not I'm anti-social,
I'm only anti-work.
Gloryosky! That's why I'm a jerk!
[Though as written, this passage rhymes earn a buck with be a schmuck, it was offensively (if effectively) bowdlerized for Hollywood as make some dough/be a schmo.]
BABY JOHN (as SOCIAL WORKER)
Officer Krupke, you've done it again.
This boy don't need a job, he needs a year in the pen!
It ain't just a question of misunderstood;
Deep down inside him, he's no good!
[The delinquent, reasonably enough, is starkly dissatisfied with the low-status, entry-level service jobs that are the only ones available to him in the post-industrial economy. The social worker, on the other hand, having gone to all the trouble of gathering information about available positions, is disgusted with this refusal of personal responsibility, and concludes that the delinquent's problems are so severe that they can only be resolved by his being sentenced to a penitentiary — the paradigmatic disciplinary space.
This brings us full circle: if delinquency can neither be resolved via socioeconomic provision, nor through the psychiatric care of the individual delinquent, juridical sanction may be the only arrow society has in its quiver. The cost of this reframing, however, is that if the delinquent can neither be constructed as an unwell body or a disadvantaged economic actor, he can only be understood as a more-or-less willful transgressor of the social order. Action, of course, sees this clearly, recognizing that…]
I'm no good!
We're no good, we're no good!
We're no earthly good,
Like the best of us is no damn good!
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
The trouble is he's crazy.
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
The trouble is he drinks.
BABY JOHN (as SOCIAL WORKER)
The trouble is he's lazy.
The trouble is he stinks.
The trouble is he's growing.
The trouble is he's grown.
ALL, as CHORUS LINE
Krupke, we got troubles of our own!
Gee, Officer Krupke,
We're down on our knees,
'Cause no one wants a fella with a social disease.
Gee, Officer Krupke,
What are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke,
Krup you!
See what I mean? It's all in there! One or two other songs from West Side Story are almost as good — my other favorite, "America," is about postcolonial subjectivity, the subaltern's daily experience of the metropole and the politics of differential infrastructural development — but "Krupke" really does explain how this particular mode of power works in an incredibly efficient way.
There's something refreshing, too, in the fact that by mocking the way they're framed by these successive agents of authority — as alternately unwell bodies to be treated, unfairly deprived economic actors to be restored by gainful employment, and finally as criminals to be disposed of by the State's corrective apparatus — what the putatively ignorant Jets are really doing is rejecting the State's right to define them at all. Maybe there is no "problem of juvenile delinquency" after all, they appear to be saying, and on this history at least appears to have borne them out.
Untitled RUIN liner notes, 2015
Some of you may remember that I'm lucky enough to count among my friends the members of the legendary Philadelphia-based hardcore band RUIN. Not too long ago, they wrote to let me know they've got a double-disc, fully-remastered retrospective coming out on Alternative Tentacles later on this year — and did me the honor of asking me to write liner notes for the release. With their permission, I share them with you here.
You and I, we enjoy a prerogative that very few of the several billion human beings who walked the Earth before us could possibly have imagined. Most of us have ready to hand, at this very moment, a machine that's capable of siphoning a train of modulated pulses from the ether and turning those pulses into the organized sound we call music. We can pluck down music literally from the very air, across all boundaries of human time and space and culture: as much as we want, whatever we want, whenever we want it.
It's the long dreamt-of celestial jukebox. Just about anyone who feels the itch can plumb the depths of the Cole Porter songbook alongside Ella Fitzgerald, explore the mysteries of Arvo Pärt, or queue up an hour of obscure Throbbing Gristle releases at will, complete with alternate takes. They can turn the entire Trojan Records catalogue into a playlist with a few keystrokes, encounter the name "Ros Sereysothea" for the very first time, do a quick copy & paste and be listening to her five seconds later. (You're welcome, by the way.)
It's all very effortless, is what I'm getting at. Now this is a truly wonderful thing, for those of us for whom music frames, shapes and maybe even defines the way we respond to the things which happen in our lives. It's a gift of all-but-inconceivable value.
But maybe, just maybe, it means that music doesn't weigh quite as much as it used to. It doesn't mean exactly the same thing. How could it, when each new piece of music you hear is acquired with very little investment of effort, at effectively zero incremental cost?
I want to take you somewhere else.
Welcome to Philadelphia, 1985. These were bad years in America — the mid-Reagan years. Evil little shits like James Watt, Phyllis Schlafly, Oliver North and Grover Norquist were busy laying the groundwork for the titanic clusterfuck we've since inherited, each in their own way. The center hadn't held, and the cracks were evident everywhere. The temporarily ascendent Japanese (always "the Japanese," as though the entire country were a single monolithic hive entity, burrowing its way beetlelike through the moribund US economy) were buying up American landmarks like Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center. Never mind that they were being taken for a ride. It was the optics of the thing that counted — all those drab salarymen, cash in hand, standing athwart the monuments of American cultural supremacy.
The official media papered over this and the many other hints that the American Century had come to a premature end with jingoistic schmaltz like Red Dawn and Rambo. Like the actual invasion of Grenada, these were overtly intended to reignite the national mojo, restore the sense of limitless power and the serene belief in the justice of its cause the nation had lost after Vietnam. Even at the time, they seemed pathetic.
And then there was AIDS. Nobody quite knew what caused it yet, so no matter who we were, we brought biohazard protocols to bed along with our partners — those, and more fear than is quite healthy for the growth of anything supposed to be founded in love. It was that, or get the virus, waste away and die. That happened, too. The anti-retroviral cocktail was still years away. (Ronald Reagan couldn't even bring himself to utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1986.)
In all this gloom, voices with any experience of opposition or of building an oppositional culture were in perilously short supply. The Black Panthers, of course, had long been hunted to extinction; other prominent Sixties radicals, notably Jerry Rubin and Jane Fonda, wasted precisely zero time in announcing to all concerned that hell yes they were selling out, and to the highest bidder they could possibly land. And still others retreated into the thankless, unglamorous, constant and not particularly public work of ensuring that some kind of solidarity-based infrastructure survived through the long cold years of neglect.
If the mid-Eighties were grim years for America, they were harder still for Philadelphia. The local vibes were just ugly. There had been a time when you could credibly name Philly alongside New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, but by the end of the Seventies those days were irretrievably gone. The industrial base on which the city's economic vitality had depended for over a century had evaporated, seemingly overnight; as the factories went, so went the jobs, leaving black and white working people eyeing each other warily across a shrinking pile of scraps.
And of course there were those pleased to exploit this unease for their own benefit, notably a former police chief named Frank Rizzo, who as mayor in the late Seventies ran the city with a fascist swagger his core constituency just ate up. (During a period of more than usual civil unrest in 1969, then-commissioner Rizzo famously attended a gala ball with a nightstick thrust in his cummerbund. Any exploration of the Freudian implications thereof is left as an exercise for the reader.) Though he was out of office by '79, Rizzo set the tone for the decade of Philly politics that followed; from him, the mayoralty passed first to the anodyne Bill Green, then to a nonentity named W. Wilson Goode. Briefly and justly celebrated as the first black mayor of this majority African-American town, Goode was soon enough notorious for standing passively by during what remains the only bombing of an American city by its own police force. An entire neighborhood of family rowhouses burned to the ground. Eleven people died. Five of them were children.
This was the city we came of age in: a city consuming itself in slow motion, like some particularly shabby and low-rent version of Samuel Delany's Bellona. It called forth the most intense feelings of dread and love and confusion, but offered very little in the way of anything to channel them into. If you were between the ages of, say, twelve and twenty-five at the time, things were especially surreal, because the official culture available to you didn't reflect any of this. You got Quincy scripts founded in the murderous, elemental badness of mohawked ne'er-do-wells. You got Larry "Bud" Melman. You got a double shot of the Hooters on WMMR.
It was maddening. You felt x'd out of existence. So you, we, did what all the others who felt the same way were learning to do at about the same time, in cities from Osaka to Helsinki: we made do, we made shift and we made culture of our own.
Actual concert venues were out of the question, on grounds of amateurishness and lack of pull both. Like other local punk scenes, then, the Philly milieu was cobbled together around a loose network of lodge halls, steak shops and church cellars, not to mention private dwellings from frat houses to out-and-out squats. (I saw Circle of Shit play to a crowd of seven, in a dirt-floored basement halfway to Upper Darby. That particular moldering funk of West Philadelphia earth is in my nostrils as I write these words, thirty years removed in time and the full reach of the Atlantic away.)
Commercial airtime, similarly off-limits — though thankfully Philadelphia was relatively well provisioned with noncommercial outlets willing to play the occasional Gang of Four side, and keep a channel open. Eternally manic Lee Paris hosted "Yesterday's Now Music Today" on the University of Pennsylvania radio station, and that was good. Drexel's WKDU was arguably even better, but their signal was weak — any more than twenty blocks or so from their transmitter, you'd literally have to walk your radio around the room to find a spot where whatever music was coming out of the speaker could be heard over the static.
You couldn't just hear a song on the radio and then go buy it. Before Chaos Records opened up, later on, this was a city of two million souls that offered but one place you could have any hope of reliably finding punk rock records: specifically, the milkcrate sitting in the concrete dust and mouse droppings on the floor against the back wall of the basement of Third Street Jazz. I admit that I did once, inexplicably, turn up a French Stiff Little Fingers EP at the Sam Goody in the Gallery — but otherwise you went to Third Street, you braved the sneers of the jazzbo staff and you brought home whatever they happened to have in that crate.
There was no media coverage to speak of, save for a sole, entirely risible profile in Philadelphia magazine. We made 'zines instead: shitty missives Xeroxed after hours at a parent's office, chock full of record reviews, "political" rants and terrible poetry. These we left in tottering stacks at shows, in piles beside the cash register of whatever oddball retail store would have them.
And beside all of this, and above it, and under it, and through it, some among us made the music that tied it all together.
History lesson, Part III. The Philly punk scene was always harder to get a handle on than some others that come to mind. Neither as mired in blue-collar machismo as the second-wave NYC scene then coalescing around CBGB's Sunday matinees, nor as (self?)righteous as the Dischord-centric DC community, Philadelphia threw nothing but curveballs. McRad, the Dead Milkmen, Pagan Babies, Scram: none of them quite fit the template, somehow. They were too weird, too goofy, too unpredictable, too hard to fit into the categories that were already then beginning to solidify.
Which brings us at last to Ruin.
Originally active from 1982 to 1986, in its early lineup Ruin was a five-piece unit, often described to the unaware as a "Buddhist hardcore band." (You see what I mean about not fitting easily into the established categories.) In that time they released just two albums: the definitive blast of 1984's He-Ho and the somewhat more polished Fiat Lux of 1986. An additional few tracks trickled out on compilations like the much-loved Get Off My Back, We're Doing It Ourselves and the obscure, cassette-only Welcome Worlds, before eventually being reissued on Blackhole's comprehensive Songs of Reverie and Ruin. One or two cuts, like "The Rain Comes Down," remain uncaptured. But that's the recorded output. That's it.
This leaves us with twenty-six songs, of which four are covers. This is not an unreasonable tally for a hardcore band of the era — Minor Threat's Complete Discography, for example, which sure enough does what it says on the tin, similarly clocks in at a mere 26 tracks — but it's not in absolute terms very much at all. And yet it's in those relatively few tracks that everything happens. You hear a bunch of kids throw themselves headfirst at Philadelphia, and America, and even at 1984, intent not on simply beating themselves against the membranes that contain them but on breaking the fuck through. They are, I say it again, kids, who have nevertheless understood or intuited something critical about what it means to live this life in this container or vehicle we call a body, something that most people never fully internalize at any age. They're not going to tell you what that thing is. They're going to enact it. And they're going to take you along with them.
If you were lucky enough to see them play, you never forgot it. There were rugs. There were, no lie, candles. The band filtered onto the stage dressed in white from head to toe. The message was unmistakable: whatever it was you were about to witness, it wasn't going to be yet another clutch of Black Flag wannabes, sounding off about their petty beefs with still pettier authorities.
One New York City Christmas many years ago, an ex-girlfriend took me to midnight mass at the cathedral church of St. John the Divine. Neither one of us was religious, was a believer of any kind, but we went for the fellowship and the warmth and the sheer ritualistic spectacle of it. That Christmas Eve glows in my memory as a soft haze of light and song and incense from the thurible. And for the first time in my life I understood what a cathedral is — what any church is supposed to be, really, in the layout of its nave and the arrangement of its parts. It's a runway for God, complete with landing lights and air traffic control.
I'm going to risk sounding unbearably pretentious by arguing to you that this is more or less what Ruin was trying to do on stage. They were trying to create a bubble of space and time in which musicians and audience alike could experience something heightened, something preverbal, something that words can only ever fail. I would argue to you, further, that they succeeded: not completely, but reliably enough, and for as long as ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch. Ten or fifteen minutes spent outside your name, cut loose from your ego and that collection of regrets, fears and desires you call a self, pummeled this way and that by the crowd's Brownian churn: not such a bad ROI for a few bucks at the door.
Could you have experienced something similar at another band's gig? Similar, sure…but not quite the same. Ruin were, and are, astonishingly physical performers, even by the standards of hardcore punk. They brought a commitment and an intensity of focus to the act of playing music before a crowd that I have only very rarely encountered. Most schools of Buddhism place great importance on each of us being fully present in this moment, neither caught up in retrospection nor immobilized with thoughts of what is yet to come. You wouldn't have needed to know the first thing about the band or its members to see the impact of this way of thinking on their music. It was all right there.
And here we come to the question of ancestry. You can learn a lot about how a band sees itself by its choice of covers — what it thinks it's doing, what line of descent it wishes to claim as its own. I can promise you that in the Philadelphia of the mid-Eighties, Leonard Cohen was not a major presence on the punk hit parade, that in some quarters even covering "White Rabbit" could be read as a dangerous concession to hippie lamery. By wearing these influences on their collective sleeve, the members of Ruin were declaring their independence from the petty doctrinaire bullshit that so often characterized that scene, despite its manifest weirdness, and in fact hobbles all scenes and always will. That declaration said, "You go on ahead and draw your lines." It said, "We come from a place where those lines add up to nothing." Ultimately it implied you'd be welcome in that place, too, if you didn't mind letting go of your need for lineation.
A cover song is what literary critics might call "intertextuality," and what most of us would call "a conversation." Ruin's records were having a conversation with other musics. But — and this is important — not just other musics. If you were prepared to let them, these conversations unfolded in ways you just weren't primed to expect from punk rock. They were drilling straight through Jefferson Airplane to Lewis Carroll, and right through him even to the ontological weirdness that animated his greatest work. Similarly, Leonard Cohen was just an inn and a place to rest for the night on the way to Basho.
When you place so much emphasis on the ones that came before, you also imply that someone will come after. Somebody will come along to discover your work and claim it for their own. Maybe not as a gig flier stapled to a telephone pole and left to fade in the wind and rain. Maybe not as an older sister's taped-over Elton John cassette, band logo lovingly crosshatched onto the label in smeared blue Bic, passed hand-to-hand in secret like high school samizdat. But maybe in ways that could barely be imagined at the time of creation. As a well-formed uniform resource indicator fully compliant with the https scheme, for example, which is to say: an emailed link.
So what does this music mean, in a world where music is something you stream from Spotify on a whim, rather than wrest from a maddeningly wavering college-radio signal? What does a fierce insistence on being present in this moment mean, when the very next moment could as easily hold Daft Punk or Palestrina or just as likely a leap out of the music app altogether?
One way to answer might be to say that in pressing "play," you're listening to the air of a different time and a different place. This is essentially a historical document, in other words — though perhaps one with a certain uncomfortable resonance for us, now that we once again find ourselves come upon hard times. The contemporary listener may not have lived through the Philadelphia of the mid-1980s, goes this line of thinking, but Frank Rizzos and Gary Heidniks and Budd Dwyers turn out to be sadly archetypal characters, so music forged in their time and place has as much claim to resonance and permanent relevance as any other ever penned.
Another way of answering would position these songs as a reminder that everything that means anything comes with a weight and a cost. This is not to say that meaningful things need to be joyless and self-serious. It just means that their realization invariably required some investment of human effort, whether that be a few late nights up writing, a strain on the vocal cords, a wrenched shoulder, or half a lifetime outside of the main current of human fellowship. This is music that asks its listener to sit still with the fact of that cost, if one can sit still inside a cyclone. I wish more music were like that, but the fact that these songs even exist is and will have to be enough.
Uber, or: The technics and politics of socially corrosive mobility
We can think of the propositions the so-called "smart city" is built on as belonging to three orders of visibility. The first is populated by exotica like adaptive sunshades, fully-automated supply and removal chains, and personal rapid transit ("podcar") systems. These systems feature prominently in the smart city's advertising, promotional renderings and sales presentations. They may or may not ever come into being — complex and expensive, they very often wind up value-engineered out of the final execution, or at least notionally deferred to some later phase of development — but by announcing that the urban plan in question is decidedly oriented toward futurity, they serve a valuable marketing and public-relations function. Whether or not they ever amount to anything other than what the technology industry calls "vaporware," they are certainly highly visible, and can therefore readily be held up to consideration.
A second order consists of the behind-the-scenes working of algorithmic systems, the black-box churn of "big data" analytics that, at least in principle, affords metropolitan administrators with the predictive policing, anticipatory traffic control and other services on which the smart-city value proposition is premised. These systems are hard to see because their operations are inherently opaque. While the events concerned are inarguably physical and material, they are far removed from the phenomenological scale of human reckoning. They unfold in the transduction of electrical potential across the circuitry of databases and servers, racked in farms which may be hundreds or even thousands of miles from the city whose activities they regulate. Such systems are, therefore, generally discernible only in their outputs: in the differential posture or disposition of resources, or the perturbations that result when these patterns are folded back against the plane of experience. At best, the dynamics involved may show up in data visualizations bundled into a "city dashboard" – access to which itself may or may not be offered to the populace at large – but they otherwise tend to abscond from immediate awareness.
The third order, however, may be the hardest of all to consider analytically, and this is because it is predominantly comprised of artifacts and services that are already well-assimilated elements of everyday urban life. Being so well woven into the fabric of urban experience, the things that belong to this category, like other elements of the quotidian, fade beneath the threshold of ordinary perception; we only rarely disinter them and subject them to critical evaluation. In this category we can certainly place the smartphone itself: a communication device, intimate sensor platform and aperture onto the global network of barely half a decade's vintage, that has nonetheless utterly reshaped the tenor and character of metropolitan experience for those who wield one. Here as well we can situate big-city bikesharing schemes — each of which is, despite a certain optical dowdiness, a triumphant assemblage of RFID, GPS, wireless connectivity and other networked information-processing technologies. And here we find the network-mediated mobility-on-demand services that have already done so much to transform what it feels like to move through urban space, at least for a privileged few.
Inordinately prominent among this set of mobility brokers, of course, is the San Francisco-based Uber. So hegemonic is the company that its name has already entered the language as a shorthand for startups and apps dedicated to the smartphone-mediated, on-demand provision of services: we hear the Instacart offering referred to as "an Uber for groceries," Evolux as "an Uber for helicopters," Tinder as "an Uber for dating," and so on. If we are to understand personal mobility in the networked city — how it works, who has access to it, which standing patterns it reinforces and which it actually does disrupt — it might be worth hauling Uber up into the light and considering its culture and operations with particular care.
It may seem perverse to describe something as "difficult to see" when it is so insistently, inescapably visible. To be sure, though, Uber's sudden prominence is not merely due to the esteem in which its users hold it; the company has a propensity for becoming embroiled in controversy unrivaled by its peers, or indeed by just about any commercial enterprise, regardless of scale or sector. To list just some of the most widely reported incidents it has been involved in during the past half-year:
- Concerned that the non-regulation of Uber's drivers, vehicles and fare- assessment systems resulted in an unfair competitive advantage on its part, taxi drivers in Berlin, London, Madrid and Paris called a one-day strike in June 2014 (in the wake of which the company crowed that its week-over-week ridership in London had increased by 850%);
- Over the summer months of 2014, insurance providers broadly began to refuse coverage for (and, in some cases, claims against) drivers found to be working for Uber; the company had previously assured drivers that their own personal liability insurance — rather than the vastly more expensive commercial insurance livery services are ordinarily required to provide — would suffice to protect them and their riders;
- In September 2014, it was reported that the company had used ostensibly secure and private user data to populate a real-time visualization of ridership projected onto the wall at a party, for the entertainment of guests;
- In October 2014, a second wave of complaints emerged alleging that Uber had sabotaged mobility-on-demand competitors Lyft and Gett in certain strategic markets, by among other things disseminating untraceable "burner" phones used to book some 5,560 nonexistent rides;
- A persistent drumbeat of allegations of rape and assault lodged against Uber drivers worldwide culminated in decisions by (September) German national and (December) Delhi regional authorities to ban the service entirely;
- A flurry of dismay predictably greeted the company's active (i.e. deliberate, conscious and human, not algorithmic) decision to institute surge pricing during the December 2014 Sydney hostage incident;
That any given mobility technology should become a flashpoint for so many controversies so widely dispersed over a single six-month period is remarkable. That all of them should involve a sole mobility provider may well be unprecedented. The truth is that we certainly do see Uber…but not for what it is. Its very prominence helps to mask what's so salient about it.
What is Uber? Founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick — a UCLA dropout whose only previous business experience involved the peer-to-peer file exchange applications Scour Exchange and Red Swoosh — Uber is a company valued as of the end of 2014 at some $40 billion, currently operating in over 200 cities worldwide. Like others of its ilk, it allows customers to arrange point-to-point journeys as and when desired, via an application previously loaded on their Apple or Android smartphones. All billing is handled through the application, meaning that the rider needn't worry about the psychological discomfort of negotiating fares at origin or tips at their destination. Its various offerings, which range from the "low-cost" uberX [sic] to the super-premium UberLUX, are positioned as being more convenient, and certainly more comfortable, than existing municipal taxi and livery ("black") car services. Regardless of service level, the vehicles involved are owned and operated by drivers the company has gone to great lengths to characterize not as employees (with all that would imply for liability insurance, wages, and the provision of employee benefits) but as independent contractors.
Uber is classified under California law as a "network transportation company," and while the dry legal taxonomy is technically accurate, it masks what is truly radical about the enterprise. Seen clearly, Uber is little more than a brand coupled to a spatialized resource-allocation algorithm, with a rudimentary reputation mechanic running on top. The company owns no fleet, employs relatively few staff directly, and — as we shall see — may not even maintain public offices in the commonly-understood sense of that term.
What distinguishes it from would-be competitors like Hailo and Lyft isn't so much any particular aspect of its organization or technical functionality, but its stance. Uber comes with an overt ideology. (Even if you somehow remained unaware of CEO Kalanick's libertarian politics, or his fondness for the work of Ayn Rand — both of which have been widely reported — the nature of that ideology might still readily be inferred from his company's very name.) Despite a tagline positioning itself as "Everyone's Private Driver," Uber has never for a moment pretended to universality. Just the opposite: every aspect of the marketing and user experience announces that this a service consciously designed for the needs, tastes, preferences and status anxieties of a very specific market segment, the aspirant global elite.
Uber makes no apologies about its policy of adaptive surge pricing, in which fare multipliers of up to 8X are applied during periods of particularly heavy demand. But at an average fare of around twenty US dollars, a single Uber ride can still be justified by most members of its target audience as an "affordable luxury" — all the more so when enjoyed as an occasional rather than a daily habit. Availing oneself of this luxury, and being seen to do so, is self-evidently appealing to a wide swath of people living in densely built-up places around the world — necessarily including among their number a great many who would likely be appalled by Kalanick's politics, were they ever unambiguously forced to consider them.
With Uber, Kalanick has made it clear that a service founded on a relatively high technological base of ubiquitous smartphones, sophisticated digital cartography and civilian GPS can be wildly successful when it is wrapped in the language not of technology itself, but of comfort and convenience. So enticing, indeed, is this combination that hundreds of thousands of users are willing to swallow not merely the technologically complex but the politically unsavory when sugarcoated in this way. While this will likely strike most observers as rather obvious, it is an insight that has thus far eluded other actors with a rhetorical or material stake in the development of a heavily technologized urbanity.
This state of affairs, however, is unlikely to last forever. Other interested parties will surely note Uber's success, draw their own conclusions from it, and attempt to apply whatever lessons they derive to the marketing of their own products and services. If Uber is a confession that the "smart city" is a place we already live in, then, it is also a cautionary case study in the kinds of values we can expect such a city to uphold in its everyday operation — some merely strongly implicit, others right out there in the open. Just what are they?
– Those who can afford to pay more deserve to be treated better.
Uber's proposition to its users collapses any distinction between having and deserving; quite simply, its message is that if you can afford to be treated better than others, you're entitled to be treated better than others.
This is certainly one of the logics of resource allocation available to it in the late-capitalist marketplace; as Harvard's Michael Sandel observes, in his 2012 What Money Can't Buy, this particular logic is increasingly filtering into questions traditionally decided by different principles, such as the (at least superficially egalitarian) rule of first-come/first-served. And it is not, after all, very different from the extant market segmentation dividing public transit from taxi or livery-car service: money to spend has always bought the citydweller in motion a certain degree of privacy and flexibility in routing and schedule. What specifically distinguishes Uber from previous quasi-private mobility offerings, though, and takes it into a kind of libertarian hyperdrive, is its refusal to submit to regulation, carry appropriate insurance, provide for the workers on whom it depends, or in any way allow the broader public to share in a set of benefits distributed all but exclusively between the rider and the company. (Driver comments make it clear that it is possible to make decent money as an Uber driver, but only with the most exceptional hustle; the vigorish assessed is significant, and monthly payments on the luxury vehicles the company requires its drivers to own saddle them with an onerous, persistent burden.)
Uber's "disruptive" business model forthrightly treats the costs of on-demand, point-to-point mobility as externalities to be borne by anonymous, deprecated others, and this is a strong part of what makes it so corrosive of the public trust. This becomes most acutely evident when Uber drivers are involved in fatal accidents during periods when they do not happen to be carrying passengers, as was the case when driver Syed Muzzafar struck and killed six-year-old Sofia Liu in San Francisco, on the last day of 2013. (Muzzafar's Uber app was open and running at the time he hit Liu and her family, indicating that he was cruising for fares, but the company refuses to accept any liability for the accident.)
– That "better" amounts to a bland generic luxury.
Uber's conception of user comfort pivots largely on predictability and familiarity. Rather than asking riders to contend with the particularities and idiosyncrasies of local mobility culture, or any of the various factors that distinguish a New York City taxi cab from one in London or Delhi or Beijing, the Uber fleet offers its users a mobile extension of international hospitality nonplace: a single distributed site where globalized norms of blandly aspirational luxury are reinforced.
The suggestions Uber drivers leave for one another on online discussion sites are revealing in this regard. Those who wish to receive high ratings from their passengers are advised to ensure that their vehicles are well-equipped with amenities (mints, bottled water, WiFi connectivity), and remain silent unless spoken to. The all-but-explicit aim is to render the back of an Uber S-Class or 7 Series experientially continuous with the airport lounges, high-end hotels and showplace restaurants of the business-centric generic city hypostatized by Rem Koolhaas in his 1994 article of the same name.
– Interpersonal exchanges are more appropriately mediated by algorithms than by one's own competence.
This conception of good experience is not the only thing suggesting that Uber, its ridership or both are somewhat afraid of actual, unfiltered urbanity. Among the most vexing challenges residents and other users of any large urban place ever confront is that of trust: absent familiarity, or the prospect of developing it over a pattern of repeated interactions, how are people placed (however temporarily) in a position of vulnerability expected to determine who is reliable?
Like other contemporary services, Uber outsources judgments of this type to a trust mechanic: at the conclusion of every trip, passengers are asked to explicitly rate their driver. These ratings are averaged into a score that is made visible to users in the application interface: "John (4.9 stars) will pick you up in 2 minutes." The implicit belief is that reputation can be quantified and distilled to a single salient metric, and that this metric can be acted upon objectively.
Drivers are, essentially, graded on a curve: their rolling tally, aggregated over the previous 500 passenger engagements, must remain above average not in absolute terms, but against the competitive set. Drivers whose scores drop beneath this threshold may not receive ride requests, and it therefore functions as an effective disciplinary mechanism. Judging from conversations among drivers, further, the criteria on which this all-important performance metric is assessed are subjective and highly variable, meaning that the driver has no choice but to model what they believe riders are looking for in the proverbial "good driver," internalize that model and adjust their behavior accordingly.
What riders are not told by Uber — though, in this age of ubiquitous peer-to- peer media, it is becoming evident to many that this has in fact been the case for some time — is that they too are rated by drivers, on a similar five-point scale. This rating, too, is not without consequence. Drivers have a certain degree of discretion in choosing to accept or deny ride requests, and to judge from publicly-accessible online conversations, many simply refuse to pick up riders with scores below a certain threshold, typically in the high 3's. This is strongly reminiscent of the process that I have elsewhere called "differential permissioning," in which physical access to everyday spaces and functions becomes ever-more widely apportioned on the basis of such computational scores, by direct analogy with the access control paradigm prevalent in the information security community. Such determinations are opaque to those affected, while those denied access are offered few or no effective means of recourse. For prospective Uber patrons, differential permissioning means that they can be blackballed, and never know why.
Uber certainly has this feature in comment with algorithmic reputation-scoring services like Klout. But all such measures stumble in their bizarre insistence that trust can be distilled to a unitary value. This belies the common-sense understanding that reputation is a contingent and relational thing — that actions a given audience may regard as markers of reliability are unlikely to read that way to all potential audiences. More broadly, it also means that Uber constructs the development of trust between driver and passenger as a circumstance in which algorithmic determinations should supplant rather than rely upon (let alone strengthen) our existing competences for situational awareness, negotiation and the detection of verbal and nonverbal social cues.
Interestingly, despite its deployment of mechanisms intended to assess driver and passenger reliability, the company goes to unusual lengths to prevent itself from being brought to accountability. Following the December 2014 Delhi rape incident, police investigators were stunned to realize that while Uber had been operating in India for some time, neither the .in website nor any other document they had access to listed a local office. They were forced to register for the app themselves (as well as download a third-party payment application) simply so they could hire an Uber car and have the driver bring them to the place where he believed his employers worked. Here we see William Gibson's science-fictional characterization of 21st-century enterprise ("small, fast, ruthless. An atavism…all edge") brought to pungent life.
– Private enterprise should be valorized over public service provision on principle, even when public alternatives would afford comparable levels of service.
Our dissection of Uber makes it clear that, in schematic, the company offers
nothing that a transit authority like Transport for London could not in principle furnish its riders. Consider that TfL already has everything it would need to offer not merely a comparable, but a better and more equitable, service: operational control over London's fleet of black cabs, a legendarily skilled and knowledgeable driver cohort, the regulatory ability to determine tariffs, and a set of existing application programming interfaces giving it the necessary access to data. Indeed, coupling an on-demand service directly to its standing public transit capacity (at route termini, for example, or in neighborhoods of poor network coverage) would extend its reach considerably, and multiply the value of its existing assets. Even after accounting for operating costs Uber is unwilling to bear, the return to the public coffers could be substantial. [UPDATE 29 August 2015: Something very much like this now appears to be happening in New York City.]
Like other transit authorities of its scale, TfL certainly has the sophistication to perform such an analysis. But the neoliberal values on which Uber thrives, and the concomitant assumption that public transport is best provisioned on a privatized, for-profit basis, have become so deeply embedded into the discourse of urban governance just about everywhere that no such initiative is ever proposed or considered. The implication is that the smart city is a place where callow, "disruptive" services with poor long-term prospects for collective benefit are allowed to displace the public accommodations previous generations of citydwellers would have demanded as a matter of course and of right.
Quite simply, the city is smaller for people who have access to Uber. The advent of near-effortless, on-demand, point-to-point personal mobility has given them a tesseract with which the occasionally unwieldy envelope of urban space-time can be folded down to something more readily manageable. It's trivially easy to understand the appeal of this — especially when the night is dark, the bus shelter is cold, the neighborhood is remote, and one is alone.
But as should be clear by now, this power to fold space and time comes at a terrible cost. The four values enumerated above make Uber a prime generator of the patterns of spatialized injustice Stephen Graham has called "software-sorted geographies," although it does so in a way unencompassed by Graham's original account. Its ordinary operation injects the urban terrain with a mobile and distributed layer of invidious privilege, a hypersite where practices and values deeply inimical to any meaningful conception of the common wealth are continuously reproduced.
More insidiously yet, these become laminated into journey-planning and other services when they position Uber alongside other options available to the commuter, as simply another tab or item in a pull-down menu. Ethical questions are legislated at the level of interface design, at the hands of engineers and designers so immersed in the privileges of youth and relative wealth, and so inculcated with the values prevalent in their own industry, that they may well not perceive anything about Uber to be objectionable in the slightest. (Notable in this regard are Google Maps and Citymapper, both of which now integrate Uber as a modal option alongside public transit and taxis, and Apple's App Store, which lists the Uber app as an "Essential.") Consciously or not, though, every such integration acts to normalize the Randian solipsism, the fratboy misogyny, and the sneering disdain for the very notion of a public good that saturates Uber's presentation of its identity.
Where innovations in personal mobility could just as easily be designed to extend the right to the city, and to conceive of on-demand access to all points in the urbanized field as a public utility, Uber acts to reinscribe and to actually strengthen existing inequities of access. It is an engine consciously, delicately and expertly tuned to socialize risk and privatize gain. In furtherance of the convenience of a few, it sheds risk on its drivers, its passengers, and the communities within which it operates. If in any way this offering is a harbinger of the network-mediated services we can expect to contend with in the city to come, I believe we are justified in harboring the gravest concern — and, further, in doing whatever we can to render the act of choosing to book a ride with Uber a social faux pas of Google Glass proportions.
And this is only to consider what is operating in the proposition offered by a single provider of networked mobility services. If there is a distinct set of values bound up in Uber, it is unmistakably enmeshed within the broader ideological commitments all but universally upheld in the conception of the smart city, wherever on Earth the deployment of this particular ensemble of technologies has been proposed. Chief among these are the reduction or elimination of taxes, tariffs, and duties; the concomitant recourse to corporate sponsorship (or outright privatization) of essential municipal services; the deregulation of activity between private actors; and the prioritization of other policies primarily oriented to the needs of classes and sectors within society that benefit from frictionless global trade.
A judicious onlooker might of course wonder what anything on this laundry list has to do with the attributes or capabilities of networked digital systems, but that is precisely the point. As articulated on terrain from Dholera to Rio de Janeiro to New York, we can understand the ostensibly utopian smart city as nothing more than the information-technological aspect of a globally triumphant but still-ravenous neoliberalism — a mask this ideology wears when it wishes to dissemble its true nature and appeal to audiences beyond its existing core of convinced adherents.
Dissecting Uber may help clarify the implications of this turn for those whose life chances are and will continue to be affected by it, but it is the merest start. There remain arrayed before the public for its consideration a very great number of other propositions that belong to the latter two of the smart city's three orders of visibility, from security systems equipped with facial-recognition capability to networked thermostats to wearable devices aimed at nothing less than quantification of the self. It is these systems in which even the clearest ideological commitments are most likely to be screened or obscured, whether by the seemingly ordinary nature of the product or service or by the very complexity of the distributed technical architecture that underwrites it. Given what is at stake, it's therefore essential that we subject all such propositions to the most sustained, detailed, and knowledgeable scrutiny before embracing them.
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Make City Berlin 2015 interview
This coming June, I've been invited to offer a keynote that will function as a hinge between two complementary events of Berlin's Make City Festival 2015: a workshop called "Science Fictions: Smartology as a New Urban Utopia" on Friday the 19th, followed by a public symposium called "Beware of Smart People! Re-defining the Smart City Paradigm towards Inclusive Urbanism" that takes place on Friday and Saturday the 20th both.
As part of the run-up to the events, the organizers asked me to answer a few questions for a newspaper they're putting together for free distribution at the Festival. I've reproduced this interview below, and hope, as ever, that you enjoy it.
Why is the "Smart City" relevant to a broader public?
It's only relevant because at the moment this is the predominant conception of the way in which networked information technology ought to be deployed in cities to aid in their management and governance, and it encodes within it a pathetically circumscribed vision of urban citizenship. As far as classic conceptions of the smart city are concerned, your sole job as a citydweller is to generate data which can be captured, analyzed and acted upon by administrators — those are the limits of participation.
Another way of putting it: If the municipality you live in buys and deploys this technology, your life will be affected by it, whether you particularly care about this thing we call the "smart city" or not. Your choices will be conditioned, your scope of action curtailed, and your ability to shape the circumstances of your own life constrained, in ways that might not appear immediately obvious, for the ultimate advantage of others. You do not have a voice other than in the aggregate. And while this is a rather bleak prospect, it's easily enough avoidable if enough people come to understand what's at stake in the deployment of these technologies, and refuse to let it unfold unchallenged.
How can a focus on people as urban knowledge producers help to redefine the technology and market oriented concept of the Smart City?
That's a pretty abstract and, to my way of thinking, overly intellectualized way of framing what it is we do as residents of an urban place and as participants in a community. Do we "produce knowledge"? Yes, of course we do: at all times, all of us, both individually and collectively. We produce knowledge about place, most of which is and only ever can be tacit, and it's important to understand that this is what ordinary people are in fact doing as they pursue the course of their everyday lives. It's not, or not exclusively, the regime of experts and specialists.
But is that the best — the most satisfying or resonant — way to construct what it is we do as city people? I would argue that it isn't. I would, in fact, argue that in a sense it dovetails all too well with the command-and-control model implicit in the smart city rhetoric, because if we're all "urban knowledge producers," the implication is that some sufficiently subtle array of technical systems will be able to capture that knowledge, derive actionable inferences from it and make it available to be acted upon remotely.
So I prefer to focus on participation. I prefer to understand everyone in the city as an actor, an active and vital contributor — someone who is capable of mobilizing knowledge and bringing it to bear on the matters of concern they themselves perceive.
How can smart people become active participants in new urban governance models based on knowledge sharing and coproduction?
Understand that I'm not at all interested in "smart," in smart anything. What I am interested in is creating circumstances in which ordinary citydwellers are able to acquire an refined understanding of all the circumstances that shape their participation in civic life, whether those circumstances are technical, political, economic or psychological.
We should, in particular resist the notion that every last citizen needs to acquire a high degree of specifically technical competence — the inane calls for everyone to learn to code, and so on. Not everyone has the cognitive propensity, not everyone has the ability, and quite simply not everyone wants to. But this is not the same thing as groups of neighborhood scale acquiring a greater collective sophistication as to how informational-technical systems work and what it is that they do. It's crucial that we demystify these things, but it's neither necessary or possible for everyone to acquire the habits of mind of a software engineer.
What we need, therefore, is for those who do have the propensity, the capability and the insight into the workings of technical systems to share that insight, in terms ordinary people can relate to. For many, it will mean developing a theory of mind that will guide them in understanding what it is that people don't understand, and what metaphors are best suited to helping explain these systems and their functions without condescension or oversimplification.
Everybody who possesses comfort and competence with information-technical systems needs to realize that from now on, part of their job is to function as a translator. And this will be frustrating. There are literally different cognitive styles involved, different intelligences, and bridging between the divergent models of the world people hold, however unconsciously or inarticulately, is by no means a straightforward or a simple thing. But it's not optional, not if we believe in the right of ordinary citydwellers to understand the systems that condition their everyday choices.
How do smart people redistribute urban resources and reconfigure urban spaces?
This is not, of course, a technical question. I personally believe we need to ensure that the information-technical systems which increasingly govern the distribution of (material-energetic, spatial, financial or attentional) resources in the city work in as self-explanatory a way as can possibly be achieved, and that the valuations bound up in them remain available for inspection and renegotiation at all times. But this ambition ultimately relies on how we choose to organize ourselves in a polity, what values we hold and enact in our collective decisions. We cannot achieve any such thing if we do not first believe we have the right and the affirmative obligation to do so, and in fact that the exercise of all our other rights will ultimately come to depend on our doing so.
Rhythms of the connected city
The following essay on the instrumented streetscape is one of the oldest surviving passages in The City Is Here For You To Use; parts of what you're about to read date to 2007 (!). Among other things, this explains why it's tonally more enthusiastic about the prospect of living in such a city than anything I'd be likely to write from scratch today, and also accounts for the fact that a decent chunk of it bears an unfortunate resemblance to Dan Hill's great and deservedly foundational 2008 essay "The Street As Platform." (I like to think my take is sufficiently distinct from Dan's that it's still worth publishing as-is, but I'm sure you'll let me know if you think otherwise.)
Those quibbles aside, I'm pleased with the way it stands up — pleased enough, at any rate, to offer it to you here, now, before any more time goes by. As ever, I hope you enjoy it and find it usefully provocative.
Imagine trying to apprehend everything that happens over the course of a single day, in any of Earth's great cities: all the flows of matter, energy and information; all the happenstance connections which come into being for a single moment, before passing forever into history; every sensible event which transpires. Even if you could somehow capture all of these passages in a single diagram, how could the result be anything but a writhing hypershape, forever absconding from our ability to comprehend it?
But what if we could perceive the shape of events, even for a moment? Better yet, what if we could somehow decode what it was trying to tell us? What if we could divine the subtle patterns latent in it, haul ashore from this dark sea order, insight…meaning?
Toward the end of his long and productive career, the great sociologist Henri Lefebvre took up just this question, in a project he called "rhythmanalysis." This was a notion he introduced in an essay called "Seen from the Window," and a famous passage in which Lefebvre simply stands at his balcony and gives himself up to the tides of the living city.
His view must have been spectacular. From this favored vantage point, he can take up the Centre Pompidou, the Bank of France, the National Archive, "[a]ll of Paris ancient and modern, traditional and creative, active and idle" in a single sweeping gaze. Alongside Lefebvre, we stand at the window long enough to note the diurnal washes of office workers and schoolchildren, the cyclic peaks and troughs of vehicular traffic, the blooms of tourist-friendly mummery in the museum plaza and the slow ebbing of activity into the long stretch of the deep middle night.
This depiction of the great city's surges and stutters is vivid enough, especially for readers familiar with Paris. But what Lefebvre is trying to call our attention to is what happens when we immerse ourselves in the art of watching. "Seen from the Window" isn't ultimately concerned with anything that can be captured by a single glance, as much as it is with an order that reveals itself only in time.
What the trained mind perceives in the daily cycling of neighborhood noise and activity, Lefebvre claims, is nothing less than "social organization manifesting itself." Pushing back against the modernist notion that to see something is to know it completely — a notion which inheres in the very idea of surveillance — "Window" argues that there is a hidden truth of the city, something bound up in patterns of regular activity that unfold only along the t axis: in a word, rhythms. "No camera, no image or sequence of images can show these rhythms," he insists. "One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a memory, a heart."
While it certainly resonates with other attempts to know the city via concerted application of the senses, notably Georges Perec's lovely 1974 Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris, this is something Lefebvre maintains even though "Seen from the Window" apparently postdates a few artifacts demonstrating how much more rewarding this undertaking can be when augmented with appropriate technology. Koyaanisqatsi, for example, which is nothing if not a sequence of images showing the rhythm of urban place and the underlying social order, and an extraordinarily vivid and memorable one at that. Or William H. Whyte's wonderful 1980 investigations of sidewalk life in New York City, released as a short film called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
It is surely the case, historically, that time-and-motion studies have had unfortunate Taylorist and Fordist resonances, and perhaps Lefebvre was reacting to those in insisting on the primacy of human perception. But Whyte's work demonstrated that, conscientiously applied, time-lapse photography could reveal patterns of use and activity that would have escaped the unaided human observer; if the value of such techniques wasn't obvious before his films, it certainly should have been thereafter. So while I'm always tempted to submit to Lefebvre's passionate humanism, the fact is that any attempt to understand patterns of regular activity in anything as compound in its complexity as a city is likely to fail if the proper tools are not brought to bear on it.
Could it be that we now have access to tools that Lefebvre lacked? Tools that even he might have granted would provide crucial support to his project of rhythmanalysis and, more broadly, other attempts to divine the deeper order in the surging and cycling of things? Certainly those of us with the ordinary endowments of attention and focus have a hard time wrapping our heads around the "organized complexity" Jane Jacobs thought of as emblematic of urban place; I can tell you from long experience that sitting and watching a city, straining to read its traces and signs, is an exercise in head-flexing frustration. I, at least, need help.
Consider that organized complexity, and what it implies about the dynamics of place. In any settlement worthy of the name "city," a very large number of discrete events will transpire at any given moment. We can think of each as a move in a sprawling, elaborate game — but a game in which every move changes the rules all players must abide by. Each and every event that is seen to occur alters the terms of the shared situation, however incrementally or subtly, and anyone wanting to develop any particularly robust understanding of that situation needs to account for as many of them as possible.
For most of human history, this was well beyond the capabilities of even the most ambitious state, or enterprise. As we've seen, however, we are by now collectively well-embarked on the project of installing sensing devices both on our persons, and throughout the urban environment, that can capture these fragile traces before they are lost. These devices operate in a bewildering profusion of registers, and at every scale. They generate the most torrential volumes of data about our bodies, our places, and everything that happens in and between them.
In being uploaded and propagated across a network, the flickering traces of our existence acquire an uncanny persistence. If this persistence isn't immortality, or anything like it, it is at the very least an extension in time of things we have generally expected to expire and disappear from the world entirely. Whatever is once captured by the network remains available for future retrieval, furnishing us with a repository of collective memory that another French thinker, Bernard Stiegler, thinks of as a "global mnemotechnic apparatus." And where the flood of sensed impressions easily overwhelms any unaided ability to make meaning of it, we now have access to an array of analytical techniques to help us correlate, synthesize and extract significance from the intake.
Where Lefebvre maintained that only the human eye was capable of registering the city's rhythms, and only the human heart truly able to make sense of them, we've bound ourselves and our cities in a skein of technical mediation that — in this sense, anyway — allows us to transcend the limitations of the merely human. In doing so, we acquire new and almost superhuman capabilities, collectively and individually. We can sift the onrushing flow of events, divine the presence of a signal amidst all the noise, develop a vastly refined understanding of a city's organized, compound and ramifying complexity…and act upon it.
Lefebvre is gone, but his balcony remains. The city that stretches beneath it is, like all other true cities, a manifold positively shuddering with life and activity at every scale of being. It pulses with flows of matter, energy and information, in patterns that vary from the clockwork-routine to the one-of-a-kind and never-to-be-repeated. What would you miss, if all you could know of these flows was the wedge or cone visible to you during a few hours' vigil at a window in the 6e?
It's a few moments before six, on a damp evening in early spring. From Montreuil in the east to Neuilly-sur-Seine in the west, streetlights wink on in a slow wave, as their sensors register the falling dusk. There's a rush-hour backup approaching the Porte d'Orléans exit on the Périphérique; in front of a BNP Paribas ATM in the Rue de Sèvres, a brief scuffle breaks out between supporters of the Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille football clubs. Two friends from Sciences-Po laugh abashedly, as they recognize one another before one of the few tatty multiplexes remaining on the Champs-Élysées — they're in line to pick up tickets for the 6:15 showing of an American blockbuster. Not far away, in the Avenue Carnot, a flic pins a suspected purse-snatcher to the wall; affecting nonchalance as they wait for a van to come pick them up, he leans into the man's back, putting all his weight behind the point of his elbow.
A municipal street-cleaner churns slowly through the streets of the Marais, hosing the day's grit and dust from the asphalt. Across town, on the Boulevard Ney in the 18e Arrondissement, a bored Ghanaian streetwalker seeks shelter from a brief downpour beneath the awning of a pharmacy, her emerald-daubed nails clacking on the screen of her phone as she checks her messages. In the Rue Saint-Honoré, a fashion executive urges her two matched Standard Poodles from the back of the black S600 that has just deposited her in front of her office. An American backpacker on a post-collegiate month abroad strides forth from the marble gate of Père Lachaise with a shoplifted Gide wedged in the cargo pocket of his fatigue pants. And way out in Torcy, there are RER cars being switched in from a siding to the main rail line, bound for Les Halles and the other stations of the center.
In this city, everyone passing by with a mobile phone reveals their location — whether or not the phone is equipped with explicitly locative technology, whether or not the phone is even turned on. Every transaction in the bistros and shops and cafés generates a trail, just as every bus and car and Vélib bicycle throws its own data shadow. Even the joggers in the Bois du Boulogne cast a constant, incrementing tally of miles logged and calories burned.
This is Paris: all of it, all at once. In any previous epoch, all of these events might have transpired unobserved and unmarked — except, perhaps, by a sociologist in the twilight of his life, gazing down from his balcony. Even the most sensitive observer could never hope to witness or impress upon their recollection more than the tiniest fraction of it, however long they watched the city go by. And any information or potential insight bound up in the flow of events fell to the ground like a silent, diffuse drizzle, forever lost to introspection, analysis, and memory.
But now we can trace these flows, at least in principle, and plot them in space and in time. We can turn up latent patterns and unexpected correlations, and in turn suggest points of effective intervention to those with a mind to change. We can determine that there are more rhythms in the living city than even Henri Lefebvre ever dreamed of: anticipations, reversals, slight returns. Stutters, stops, and lags. Doublings and crashes. And we can do this all because of the vast array of data-collecting devices we've seeded through the quotidian environment.
Traffic cameras and roadway sensors on the Périphérique log the slowdown, and it shows up as a thick red line splashed across a hundred thousand electronic roadsigns, dashboard navigation units and smartphone screens. Here are the rhythms of daily mobility and, by extension, the broader economy.
The ATM's security camera captures the precise details of who did what to whom in the scuffle, and when; the identities of the participants can be reconstructed later on, if need be, by a state-sanctioned trawl of the transaction records. (Those identity files will almost certainly note an individual's allegiance to a particular football club.) As with the traffic, here too we can begin to make correlations, mapping outbreaks of aggression against other observed phenomena — the league schedule, perhaps, or the phase of the moon, or the unemployment index. Or even something comparatively unexpected, like the price of discount-airline tickets. Here are the rhythms of collective mood.
The friends so embarrassed to run into one another at a superhero movie? They reserved their tickets online using their phones, and in so doing broadcast their choice for all to see, at least in aggregate; they might be surprised to learn that those who purchase tickets in this way in the streets around their campus appear to have a marked fondness for Hollywood action flicks. Here are correlated geographical patterns of socialization and consumption, and the rhythms of media consumption.
The Avenue Carnot is nowhere to be found in any official record of the bag-snatching incident. In all the relevant entries, the offense is associated with the location where it was reported, a few blocks away in the rue de Tilsitt, and so that is how it shows up in both the Mairie's statistics and a citizen-generated online map of risk in Paris; in fact, this kind of slippage between an event that happens in the world and the event's representation in the networked record is routine. But the arrogant insouciance of the arresting flic's posture bothers a lycée student passing by, who snaps a picture with her phone and submits it, time- and location-stamped, to the Commission Citoyens Justice Police, a civilian review board. In this constellation of facts, we can see something about the frequency with which particular kinds of crimes are committed in a given location, the type and density of policing resources deployed to address them, and the frictions between the police and the communities in which they operate. Here, then, are the contrapuntal rhythms of crime, its control and the response to that control.
The nature of the streetwalker's trade could perhaps be inferred from the multiple daily orbits her cellphone describes between her regular patch on the sidewalk and a cheap rented room nearby. If not this, then her frequent purchases of condoms would certainly help to flesh out the picture, even though she pays cash for them — the pharmacy she buys them from retains a service that uses each phone's unique IMEI number to track customers' trajectories through the store, and this service maps her path to the Durex display with unerring precision. Here in these ghostly trails are the rhythms of the informal economy, surfacing through seemingly innocuous patterns of fact. (Her phone calls home to Ghana, like the tens of thousands of other calls mediated monthly by the base stations of the 18e, to Nigeria and Sierra Leone, clarify not merely how deeply interconnected any city is with others, but specifically which neighborhoods within them are most associated with other places on Earth. Here are the rhythms of global mobility, global migration and, inevitably, global exploitation.)
The streetcleaner, of course, has a GPS transponder; its moment-to-moment route through the city is mapped by the Mairie itself, and provided to citizens in real time as part of a transparency initiative designed to demonstrate the diligence and integrity of civil servants (and very much resented by the DPE workers' union). Unless prevented from happening — should those workers, for example, happen to go on strike, or a particularly rowdy manif break out — here are the metronome-reliable rhythms of the municipal.
The fashion executive had her assistant reserve a car online some weeks ago, and so while there's certainly something to be inferred from whether she splurged on the S600 as usual, or economized with a cheaper booking, there's probably some lag in what it signifies. (Even if the car hadn't been booked on the corporate account, it is also, of course, equipped with GPS, and that unit's accuracy buffer has been set such that it correctly identifies the location at the moment it pulls up to the curb with the name of the house the executive works for.) Here can be gleaned solid, actionable business intelligence: both the cycling of particular enterprises and sectors of the economy, and by extension possibly even some insight into the rhythms of something as inchoate and hard to grasp as taste.
What might we learn from the American backpacker? The pedometer app on his phone is sophisticated enough to understand his dwell of eleven minutes in a location in the Rue de Rivoli as a visit to the W.H. Smith bookstore, but other facets of his activity this day slip through holes in the mesh — that boosted volume of Gide, notably, which will remain an unexplained lacuna on the bookstore's inventory-tracking software. And, bizarrely, his few hours contemplating greatness and mortality in Père Lachaise, which resolve against a flaky location database as having been passed instead in the aisles of a Franprix market a few blocks to the east. (Indeed, so often does this same error happen that after a few months, the Franprix starts getting recommended to other tourists as a destination frequently visited by people like them, and enjoys a slight but detectable bump in revenues as a result. The manager is pleased, but mystified.) Here are the rhythms of contingency and chance and stochastic noise.
And each commuter passing through the turnstiles of the RER at day's end, each of them the increment of a register in the capacity-management systems of the RATP, clarifies the contours of one final picture. The city's population at 4 AM may be half what it is at 4 PM, revealing the true Paris as something that has only a casual relationship with its administrative boundaries. Here is the rhythm of the city itself.
Where previously everything that transpired in the fold of the great city evaporated in the moment it happened, all of these rhythms and processes are captured by the network, and retained for inspection at leisure. We can readily visualize basins of attraction or repulsion, shedding light on the relationships between one kind of flow and another, and in so doing perhaps learning how to shape their evolution with a lighter hand.
By the same token, though, that which had been liminal becomes clear; what was invisible is made self-evident, even painfully obvious; the circumstances we generally prefer to ignore or dissemble stand forth, plain as day. The embarrassing, the informal, the nominally private and the illegal become subject to new and perhaps untenable kinds of scrutiny. The gaze of the state intensifies — but the state may find, to its surprise, that its subjects have many of the same capabilities, and are gazing right back upon it.
On this evening in the City of Light, a hundred million connected devices sing through the wires and the aether. Of the waves that ripple through the urban fabric, at whatever scale, very few escape their ken — escape being captured by them, and represented in bursts of binary data. Enciphered within are billions of discrete choices, millions of lives in motion, the cycling of the entire economy, and, at the very edge of perception, the signs and traces of empire's slow unwinding.
This is a city Lefebvre never saw from his balcony, and never could — any more than Henry Mayhew could have, in looking down on the wild scrum of Victorian London from the parapet of St. Paul's, or any observer of any of the great cities of history would have been able to, no matter the perspicacity they brought to the task. It's ours, the one we live in.
What might we do with it?