Tech Won't Save Us - How Smart is the Smart City? w/ Shannon Mattern

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Shannon Mattern to discuss what we miss when we see the city solely through the lens of the computer, and how other institutions and ways of knowing can help inform richer ways of understanding the city.Shannon Mattern is a professor of anthropology at The New School for Social Research and President of the Board at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. She is the author of “Code and Clay, Data and Dirt” and “A City Is Not a Computer.” Follow Shannon on Twitter at @shannonmattern.📚 Get 30% off “A City Is Not a Computer” when you buy it from Princeton University Press and use the code “TWSU” at checkout before the end of September 2021!🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Ursula K. Le Guin ranted about the meaning of the word “technology.”Google wanted to build a smart city in Toronto, but activists killed it.Gökçe Günel wrote “Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi” about the Masdar smart city project.Songdo was supposed to be South Korea’s city of the future. It didn’t work out.Kevin Rogan wrote about the human labor Sidewalk Labs was hiding.Support the show

If you're looking at a city through multiple metaphors and then seeing how each of them adds to your knowledge, I think that's much more productive than the reductive, everything is computationally modifiable model. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Shannon Mattern. Shannon is a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research and president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council. She's the author of the 2017 book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, and a more recent book that came out this week called A City is Not a Computer, Other Urban Intelligences. That new book was published by Princeton University

Press, and if you want to get a copy, you can get 30% off until the end of September by buying it through the publisher's website and using the code TWSU for Tech Won't Save Us. You can find the information on that in the show notes. Shannon and I had a great conversation about the book and the things that she has been writing about and thinking about for a while now. In our conversation, she made the point that her previous book was about thinking about the history and how that informs our understanding of technology, the city, and the intersection between the two. And this more recent book was about looking at other sectors and other knowledges that exist in the present to inform our understanding of technology and the city as well.

I think those broader perspectives that Shannon brings are so important, especially when, you know, kind of these ideas of technology and the very particular understanding of technology that comes out of Silicon Valley are so dominant in our conversations today. And if we want to think more broadly about how we build better cities and better technologies, then we need to look beyond that narrow lens and learn from both those historical perspectives, but also those other ways of seeing the world that Shannon identifies in the newer book that we're talking about primarily in this conversation. I highly recommend taking advantage of that discount code and buying a copy for yourself. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media

Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to find out more about the other shows in the network, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. I haven't mentioned this in a while, but Tech Won't Save Us does also have a weekly newsletter called The Hammer that gives a recap on what's been happening in tech news for the past week with a very critical perspective. And you can find out how to sign up to that in the show notes if you're interested. And finally, every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is free for everybody because listeners like you support the

show. If you enjoy listening to the podcast and feel like you learn from these conversations, you can join supporters like Jens Boreessen from Sweden and Andro from Leiden in the Netherlands by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Shannon, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me, Paris. It's nice to be able to chat with you. Yeah, I'm really excited to chat with you and in particular about the new book that you have

recently published, A City Is Not a Computer. A lot of my work in recent years has also focused on this kind of intersection of what's happening in cities, transportation in particular on my end, and technology. And so I was really happy to read this book where you are also kind of digging into this kind of intersection and doing so in a way that, you know, obviously I've read a bit from your other work, but that I found really compelling and really interesting. And so I wanted to start with kind of a broader question to get us started, and then we can kind of dig into more specifics. But obviously, your book talks a lot about the implementations of technologies in cities and how that alters the way that governing structures and that people in cities kind of perceive what is important or what should be guiding decisions. But I wanted to ask you, what do we miss when we only perceive the city through the lens of the computer, through the lens of what it can track and what it

can report on? That's a great question to start with because it's essentially the titular premise of the book. I'll just say kind of as a footnote there that I was asked several years ago to write a chapter for an edited collection about how the city is a computer. And then in writing that piece, I realized how much was left out or how insufficient I found the metaphor to be, which is why I then essentially kind of wrote a contrarian piece. I wrote the opposite of what I was asked or assigned to do, which is hence the article, The City is Not a Computer, which then became the kind of the signature chapter of the book. And in terms of what we miss when we reduce cities to computers, I've had this discussion ever since I published the article that then

went into the book. I've had this discussion with a lot of folks who are kind of urban tech proponents, people who work in programming and related fields who argue that if we think really capaciously about what a computer is, pretty much everything can fall under that umbrella. And I am sympathetic to that idea that there are analog computers. If you look at the deep kind of international history of computing, that there are many more ways of thinking about what a computer can do than the MacBooks that is sitting in front of me right now. So realizing that there are multiple genealogies of computing. At the same time, if we look at some of the principles that it boils down to, things like digitality, computation, calculation, addressability is something that a

couple of people have identified as one of the signature functions of a computer. Even those are still kind of limiting. If you think of a city as a computer, the idea of computation, of datification, of algorithmicization, of addressability, even a city is more than those. It exceeds those. So when we think of a city or reduce it to a computer, we lose all of those kind of more poetic, embodied, indigenous, amorphous, uncertain, mutable things that really make a city, I don't want to sound too romantic here, but really make it kind of this beautifully inscrutable thing that it is when we try to think of it all as being computable. So those are among the things that we miss out on. And also just the association of computation with kind of new tech, with digital

technology. We sometimes forget that technology is often stuff that's analog. Humans are technology. So just the way that thinking of computation kind of rhetorically limits what we can think about and talk about. Yeah, you know, I think that's a great way to kind of set up the discussion to start us off. And what you're discussing there about how when we talk about technology, that word today kind of means digital technology in the way that most people think about it,'s ranting about that word technology and saying it doesn't cover what technology actually is. It's a very narrow idea of high technology, when technology is so many other things that are in society, so many of these basic things that have been developed over the course of hundreds and thousands of years, but what we consider to be technologyization, and many other folks in kind of these, especially Canadian school of media studies from the 1950s, 60s, Harold Innes, even Marshall McLuhan. You know, you might want to put some caveats by some of their names. I think contemporary historians might question some of their methodologies.

That said, they do have a much more inclusive understanding of what constitutes technology. And as I mentioned, people, people can be technology. Some folks consider language to be a technology. Culture, kind of broadly conceived, could be regarded as a technology also. The book that preceded this current one was the one I wrote in 2017 was called Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, 5,000 Years of Urban Media. And there I'm arguing that thinking about cities and computation or smart cities has essentially a several thousand year history if we take a much broader understanding of what counts

as technology. So everything from clay tablets to mud building materials to the way that we design amphitheaters as amplification apparati. So really look at how physical spaces can also be technology too. So I think it's really fruitful to expand the understanding of that term. I completely agree with the importance of what you're discussing there, right? And if we then think about how these digital technologies are positioned in our society today, they are often sold to us as this apolitical kind of thing, right? But we know that that's not the case, because as you're saying, you know, naturally, these technologies do shape kind of the way that they're used. And that's

discussed a lot in your book. And you say that these smart city infrastructures and ideas merge ideologies of technocratic management and public service to reprogram citizens as consumers or users. So how does that change urban governance and who that governance is then supposed to serve? So if we are using their, as you probably know, and as I am sure you've discussed in some of your previous episodes of the podcast, lots of city and even federal state governments have contracted with, they've procured technologies from big tech companies, Palantir, Microsoft, Total Domain Awareness, Google. I've written in the book and I've written in several articles over the past five or so years about Google's

kind of infiltration or foray into the urban tech realm through sidewalk labs and replica and all of its spinoffs. So just the fact that so many governance bodies at multiple levels of government have contracted with technology companies who are then really reshaping how public process works, who has the ability to change the code, both metaphorically and literally speaking, which then in turn on kind of the user experience side, on the flip side, on the other side of the interface, determines how people interact with their cities, what their kind of quote-unquote customer service experience is, and the fact that citizens then are, in many cases, framed as customers to a city. So just

the fact that that software is there as a mediator between a governing body and its citizens really shapes, you know, the roles that both play on both sides of the interface and really reshapes what the nature of governance and the nature of citizenship is. You know, you talk there about Google and how Google has done so in a way that is really visible, you know, through intersection through sidewalk Toronto is one that many people will probably be familiar with where, you know, they tried to build out a neighborhood in Toronto, but were, you know, eventually kind of kicked out by the citizens. So what do you see as, you know, the actual effects of these projects when they go into cities, because it's not just like proposals like Sidewalk Toronto. We've also seen things like Mazdar in the UAE or Songdo in South Korea, where these smart cities are supposed to transform kind of the ways that people live to make urban life this kind of like efficient, technologized thing. But then when the implementation actually comes

through, we see that so often, you know, there's not the follow through on all these big promises. And what actually comes out the other end looks very different than what was in kind of the concept drawings. Yeah, so I do write about that a bit in the book. Some of the pieces that ultimately made their way into the book were things I've published over the past eight years or so, maybe 10 or 12 different articles I remixed, added a bunch of new material. And then I was invited to turn them into a book. And this all happened right before the pandemic, right before the Black Lives Matter uprisings and all of the attendant crises of 2020, 21.

And it really created a bit of a crisis for me thinking about how do I reframe these discussions that have been going on about urban technology for the past, especially vibrantly for the past 10 years or so. And around the time last year, as folks were saying, we'd even seen a few think pieces published saying like, well, smart cities, the balloon has been popped, the flash is gone. And it is true that we hear a lot less about things like Masdar. A colleague of mine, Gokhe Gunel, has written a really great book called Spaceship in the Desert about Mazdar. She's done several years of ethnographic work there, seeing how just the dreams that informed the project and then how and why it didn't pan out. Same thing with Songdo in South Korea. All of these really kind of flashy

renderings and aspirational goals for how it would make cities much more efficient and inclusive. And then you don't hear a whole lot about how it has played out in part because it hasn't lived up to those dreams. That said, I don't think we should presume that the fact that the shiny representations maybe haven't materialized, that the underlying aspirations have also dissipated or evaporated because we see things like with Sidewalk Labs, even though Sidewalk Toronto didn't work out. There are plenty of opportunities in the pandemic and the urban unrest of last summer in particular has given a lot of these companies plenty of opportunities to reframe, to rebrand the technologies that they would have put towards the end of increasing

efficiency and convenience towards things like public health and governance. So you're just essentially reframing the purpose of the same technology. You've rebranded it to serve a different purpose. So even if, again, those renderings haven't become realized, the component parts of them, I think, are very attractive to urban governments and are being implemented. Yeah, you know, I think that's a really important point. And, you know, when we're talking about these technologies being deployed into the city, so often, you know, I think we're used to understanding part of what these tech companies do, especially Google. data about us, tracking the way that we operate online, forming profiles about us. And a lot of those technologies, as they move into the city, also seek to collect data to

track and create profiles and create models of how people are going to move around to live within the city for tracking purposes. But naturally, what can be tracked depends on where sensors are placed, where technology is deployed. And that affects how not only the companies, but people who make decisions in cities, governments, things like that, respond to that data. So what is the concern with, I guess, reorienting governance and decision-making around data that can be taken from these technologies that are being contracted from these major tech companies? Well, there are a whole bunch of concerns. I mean, of course, there are benefits too. I mean, we can see the potential benefits if we can use the tracking of

public transit to more efficiently deploy public transit kind of vehicles where they're needed at different parts of day, especially in maybe disenfranchised communities who haven't been historically well served. We can see data being used in a very pro-social beneficial way in public health, for instance. But even in those more affirmative contexts, there is an ugly underbelly or potential dangers. The most obvious one being privacy. And there are multiple populations or communities who exist on various vectors or facades or various directions in relation to this whole privacy concern. There are the folks who maybe aren't included in the data set because they don't have smartphones or because they don't live in target neighborhoods. We see this playing out in historical infrastructures as well, the fact that several of the more kind of marginalized neighborhoods in many cities don't have

adequate access to broadband internet, don't have adequate access to public transit. We see the same thing with the deployment of things like city bikes and other types of quote unquote smart technologies. At the same time, we might have some of those marginalized populations who will have historically been subject to excessive surveillance and tracking who don't want to be. So this capacity to perhaps opt out maybe is or isn't available to them. So there are folks who may want to be included who aren't, who have very valid and important and underrepresented needs that need to be seen that aren't being seen. At the same time, we have populations who were overexposed and don't want to be seen for all of the political and kind of issues of algorithmic bias, et cetera, that make

that excessive visibility a hindrance or a danger. Then we also have the fact that certain things need to be tracked. Tracking is the wrong word because it has such a kind of a data-driven kind of methodological implication. Certain things that need to be paid attention to, attended to, that we need to be concerned about, that don't readily lend themselves to tracking and tracing. Things like, you know, public health or people's affective comportment, how people feel with their mental health, for instance. How do you operationalize that? What some people have done is doing kind of voice recognition to see what people are talking about. There was just something published recently about some tech companies wanting to put voice recognition platforms into commercial spaces to hear what people are talking about so they know what the most popular products are, how to target advertisements to them. This is not a new phenomenon, obviously, but that's such a reductive way of thinking about what affect and what emotion and human connection is. It's really a challenge to operationalize these really complicated,

culturally informed, historically nuanced concepts when you have to figure out how to turn them into variables to then make them measurable in a way that can fit on a dashboard or be kind of datified in some way. So these are the types of really meaningful things that are often left off when you have data-driven ways of monitoring and governing a society also. I'm happy that you brought up both sides of it, right? Because as you say, it's not that collecting data or producing data in an urban space is necessarily a negative thing or a bad thing. There are things that we need to understand. There are things that we need to follow just to ensure that people are being helped or that services are being provided in a way that should happen. But, you know, I think as you're saying there too often, that collection

of data or that production of data can miss important things, or maybe, you know, things that are important can't easily be tracked in this kind of way. And, you know, one of the chapters in the book is dedicated to the urban dashboard, where a lot of this data comes together so that decision makers, you makers, whether it's in government or various agencies within the city, can make important decisions. But there are clear concerns about what information is displayed in those dashboards, how that information is displayed, whether the information is even accurate. So when seeing the city through the dashboard, what are the

potential issues that arise from it? And is understanding the city in this way, in this kind of datafied way, you know, a concern? So I started the book with a chapter on the urban dashboard, which again, was based on an article I wrote maybe, I don't know, five or six years ago now, in part because I thought it was a perfect crystallization or an object lesson, a physical thing that people probably were familiar with, and especially after the pandemic with the kind of the COVID dashboards that have been so ubiquitous. So I wanted to start with the thing that maybe seemed familiar and then denaturalize it, because I think the urban dashboard is, as I said, a perfect way to think about how all of these methodologies, ideologies, epistemologies, which is essentially a way of asking how we know what we know,

all converge on this thing of the urban dashboard. And not to say that all smart cities are essentially use it urban dashboard because maybe not everybody does, but it is a really great and familiar way to kind of crystallize this phenomenon. So there can be really great things about urban dashboards. As COVID dashboards, we would draw a parallel there. It was really helpful for people to have a sense of the waxing and waning of cases and hospitalizations, to have a sense of how to gauge their own need for personal caution taking,

their own personal risk, not only personal, but community-wide, national risk. So it helped us to gauge where we were in the long arc of this phenomenon, this tragedy that we're all going through together. If we track that over to thinking about an urban dashboard, there can be helpful if we want to know how well the air quality is on a particular day, or the water quality. Or it could be in some places where you've kind of implemented sensors in a sewage system that can detect certain viruses and bacteria. You can maybe get a sense of hyperlocal infection of particular diseases by looking at your local urban dashboard. We could also look at things like traffic, whatever metrics or whatever kind of key performance indicators have been identified as the city and the dashboards

creators as being the most salient, important measures of what we want to track as going well and not going well in a city. That can all be really helpful. It can help to orient us within a large and kind of complex system. At the same time, if you think about, if I'm looking at one screen, there's only so much you can fit on a screen for one thing. Everybody knows like back from the newspaper days that there's something called above the fold. Anything that goes below the second half of the page is sometimes relegated to oblivion. People might not even flip over the

paper. So you really have to squeeze onto one screen what you think are the most salient things. So what doesn't make the cut? There's a lot of really important stuff that might not just because it doesn't fit on the page or the screen. It might be there because it doesn't lend itself readily to widgetization. Can you make a bar chart? Can you have a dial? Can you have a feed of some sort? What techniques of data visualization do we have or not have to represent something that could actually be really important? And then going back to what I said earlier about what maybe doesn't lend itself well to datafication? What are these really complicated things? Can you imagine having a dashboard that's tracking the status of reparations for systemic racism? I mean, I kind of like thinking about through these thought experiments of things that

just don't readily lend themselves and maybe even seem absurd or speculative to realize that there are so many sticky, complicated, intersectional, kind of historically fraught things that are really hard to reduce to widgets and tickers, et cetera, on a dashboard. So there have been some designers who've played around with these more absurd cases, but I think the absurdity is actually a really great lesson to show what just doesn't fit. So again, as with the previous question, there are both really positive things that come with the use of these technologies, but just a lot of caveats that have to come with them too. Yeah. One of the things that stood out to me when I was reading that chapter as well, on top of the things that you just described there, was also how the dashboard displays the data that has been collected or produced on the city and these various metrics that are being tracked about the city.

But one of the things that isn't shown on the dashboard is where all of that data comes from, how it is produced, who produces it, the infrastructures and the people who are behind creating the data that eventually is displayed on these bar charts or whatnot on the screen. Yeah, that's a big problem too. And that they present, they're presented as this reified thing. This is kind of part of the whole etymology of the word data. You know, it's a given a thing that exists in the world. You just pluck from the world as a

representation of objective truth when that, as I'm sure you've discussed this on your podcast is not the case. These things have to be operationalized in a way. They have to have to develop a methodology for extracting them from the world. And all of these are kind of political and epistemological choices that people are making. So this is something that's not often recognized in a dashboard. If you have this thing that looks like it's giving you this really conveniently comprehensive, omniscient, critically distanced, objective view of all the components, the widgets, the makeup, what's important in a city, you don't often think to ask how the data are derived. Even if we look

at something like the Johns Hopkins COVID dashboard, for instance, we often, we didn't, not sure that there was really a footnote there saying that, for example, people of color, data for Black Lives, other organizations made very clear that the way data were harvested about public health crises often marginalizes and undercounts marginalized communities as well for a whole host of historical reasons that, again, are really hard to put on a dashboard. So we don't have those footnotes. It's kind of hard, although data visualization experts and graphic designers have thought about how do you show ambiguity or uncertainty or mutability and these other kind of fuzzier categories. But it's really difficult for a layperson to look at a data visualization, a map, and get at those deeper methodological questions and understand kind of all of these caveats and conditionals. I think that's a really important point and a really good way to lay it out. There's a short

passage in the book where you talked about Lewis Mumford, who was obviously a critic of cities and of technology. And you know, you mentioned him earlier as well. And you said that he would clearly oppose these kind of implementations of smart city technologies. A few weeks ago, I talked to Zachary Loeb about Mumford's ideas on technology and computers in particular. So I was wondering if you could expand on how Mumford's work has informed your response to smart city technologies. So Mumford was one of these incredibly, he was a public intellectual, wrote architectural criticism for the New Yorker, a really prolific writer, writer of several really ambitiously, we might even say hubristically massive, all-encompassing books, Techniques and Civilization,

The City and History, Cities and Civilization, essentially covering all of urban history. Not many people have enough confidence in their own intellectual and methodological training to write such a comprehensive book. And I'm sure that some historians would take issue with some of the claims that Mumford offered and the methods he deployed. There is not a lot of citation in his works as well in some cases. So we have to maybe put a little footnote or add a caveat to some of his scholarship. But I do think that this desire to look across history, to see the recurring topoi, the recurring questions we're asking, how the things that we think of are new have materialized in cities hundreds or thousands of years ago.

So just seeing these kind of recurring patterns helps to denaturalize or to help us to appreciate the non-newness, the recurrence of what we're dealing with today, which is, I think, really especially useful in the tech kind of criticism world of today, where so much of the information we receive is through kind of these corporations, PR agencies, and tech reporters who really tend to have a presentist orientation, in part because the industry itself is conveniently, in many cases, oblivious to or willfully ignorant of history. You kind of have to do that to make the claim for your own innovation, your own kind of watershed contributions to civilization. So there's not a whole lot of

consideration of history. So I think Mumford's huge span is really useful in showing us that there's a really deep history to a lot of the stuff that we think of as really new today. So just the fact that he talks across multiple historical periods, cultures, forms of materiality, kind of flavors of technology, helps us to realize that there are other ways that other cities have served as computational devices that they've attempted to make their processes intelligible to the people who live in them. So just again, the array of places he goes can, I think, help to denaturalize the present. I love that. And, you know, what you're describing there about having that kind of historical perspective, I have also found is really important. You know, the more and more that I read about the history of technology, but also the history of cities and transportation, you know, in particular, in my case,

the more that I find that so many of the issues that we are discussing today have been discussed in the past many times. And, you know, even the new innovations that are supposedly like coming right around the corner for, you know, whether it's technological implications in cities or cars or transportation or things like that are promised so often and then don't arrive or are not delivered in the way that people expect. And so, you know, I think what you're saying there, and I would echo it, is that, you know, having this historical perspective and one that Mumford provides in particular can be really informative in kind of breaking out of this, I think, really narrow perspective that is often promoted so often when we talk about these digital technologies in

particular. Absolutely. And that was really the focus of the previous book that I wrote, the one that's called, you know, Code and Clay. It was providing that deep historical perspective. The focus for this current book, The City is Not a Computer, is to look more kind of across sectors in the contemporary realm to see that not only thinking about thinking historically about technology can help us to realize the fact that we're asking. There's a lot to learn from people who came before us, but also in the new book, looking at other sectors like other knowledge institutions, libraries, archives, which maybe don't have the resources that Silicon Valley has, but are actually doing some of the things that they have aspired to do in more ethical fashion on a shoestring and are connecting to their communities in really useful and fruitful ways that can be illustrative to other sectors. And then I also have a chapter about maintenance and care because I think this focus on innovation leads us to ignore the fact that we make something

new. We then have to think the fact that we make something new, we then have to think about its lifespan, its environmental impact, how we're going to care for it and maintain it. So it's not only looking to Mumford for historical framework, but also looking to other sectors to see how, again, we can draw some important lessons to apply to the use of technology. Yeah. And I think that those are really important lessons, right, that you provide through the book. And libraries in particular are one piece of it that I wanted to talk to you about. And so how are libraries being altered to serve smart city aims? And what role should they be playing to promote, I guess, a more critical perspective toward this digitalization? So this really varies by part of the world and funding structures. You know, libraries are funded in different ways in different parts of the world, different cities, different states throughout the country. Some libraries have been seriously and tragically

defunded. New York has historically been pretty good, at least with this past administration. de Blasio has been a pretty reliable supporter of libraries. They could always use more. But if you look at like the UK, they have been subjected to quote unquote austerity measures for the past decade or so. And they have lost, I think over 800 last time I counted libraries over the past eight or nine years. So it really varies by part of the world. If you look at the places where they're really considered to be a vibrant part of the public realm and supported by the government, places like Singapore, a lot of South Asia. They have been used as a way to educate digital citizens. They're regarded as a place for kind of lifelong learning to train people to work in a digital economy. Also in the United States, we see this in some cases too.

Another function is to have kind of entrepreneurial activities, kind of helping people to think about how to develop startups. I'm not saying that I'm necessarily a proponent. These aren't always the most exciting things about libraries to me, but the way they're often justified to a government and a way to elicit funding for them is to say that they're going to support a digital economy. There's always kind of an economic selling point there. But I think there are more critical ways that libraries can be and should be and maybe aren't always being involved in kind of digital technologies in the urban realm. And that is helping people to think more critically about what they're being subjected to or what resources are available to them, what they should be cautious about. I'm on the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, which serves a couple hundred

libraries and archives throughout the metropolitan region. And we worked with the three library systems in New York and the mayor's office for the chief technology officer a few years ago to develop a digital privacy pedagogical and exhibition plan that went throughout the branch libraries to help people who maybe don't think much about data sovereignty or digital privacy, to essentially put this as something that they could physically encounter when they go to pick up, I don't know, whatever the latest bestseller is that's on hold for them, to give them something to think about and maybe to encourage them to engage in a discussion with their librarian about how algorithms work or how they can maybe change the settings on their phone or what they can opt out of. So these are among the ways that

I think libraries can serve both, you know, for the pro-business, pro-kind of economic development world, which is not really the one I'm super excited about, but it's often how they get money and high influencer buy-in, but also the really critical roles they can play in educating a population about the changing technological world around them. And furthermore, and this is really ambitious, providing maybe public alternatives to these commercial systems. This is something that Sophia Noble, a lot of kind of library labs have attempted to do. What if we had a public interest Google? What if search weren't driven by advertising? So it's really hard to develop because Google is so entrenched and there are so many path dependencies build up. But in an ideal world, I think we would have like a public media stack

with public media, public technologies, public infrastructure, digital infrastructure that really is supported by and connected by the values that are inherent to public libraries. I completely agree with that. And I would absolutely love to see, you know, public technologies and public alternatives coming from libraries. You know, one of the things that stood out to me as I was reading your book, but also reading, you know, other work on libraries and what is happening to libraries in this recent period, is that it seems like funding is one of the things that is particularly troubling, right? In the sense that a lot of libraries, as you were just talking about in the UK, you know, it's something that we've seen in Canada, where libraries have faced cuts to funding.

And one of the things that they need to do to try to obtain that funding is to kind of position their role in an economic sense and in a sense of, you know, promoting economic opportunity and in particular technological economic opportunity to justify their funding and their role in society. And so I wonder, you know, how do you see that playing out? And does that work against the goals that you are trying to, you know, have libraries fulfill in playing this more critical role of informing the citizens about, you know, the technologies that they're increasingly interacting with and being surrounded with? Well, I think the institution can serve multiple ideological and kind of functional ends. It doesn't have to necessarily be one or the other.

You can have your kind of tech startup incubator in the library. You can have your kind of business library that helps people think about how to start their own businesses. You can promote entrepreneurialism. So all of these things can coexist with the more critical digital literacy type of programming or the developing of alternative or maybe even kind of anarchist, anarchic technologies. So I don't think it has to be one or the other. This is one of the, I think, the beauties of a library. It's not a neutral space.

This is something that has been a big subject of debate, especially over racial justice. It's not a place that exists to encompass and to give a safe ground to all ideologies, to all ways of thinking. It's encompassing and making a space for those ideologies and ways of thinking that promote inclusion and justice. So you're not going to have essentially kind of a white power rally in a library, although some libraries have done that and then face backlash for it. But because it is a platform for lots of different kind of communities to do things with and on, you can have both entrepreneurialism and kind of critical engagement happening at the same time. And ideally, they would be informing one another. I mean, it'd be really great if we thought about an entrepreneurial culture that actually

considered things like social good, social impact, environmental impact as primary concerns and not just profit. So you can have multiple things, but you're right that the selling of the financial implications of a library is typically what gets administrators and lawmakers to buy into the institution. I wish that weren't the case, but economics is usually the motivating factor for so many of our policy decisions. Yeah. You know, unfortunately, it's been disappointing to see that kind of turn, right? And to see libraries, unfortunately, have to

justify their funding in this way, instead of being seen as like this institution that serves a really fundamental role, and, you know, should be given the funding and the resources that it needs to provide this important public service in the community. But unfortunately, I'm sure that it's part of larger changes in kind of orientations toward public service among governments and things like that, you know, through the neoliberal period. But unfortunately, that seems more and more difficult to justify for so many governments.

But you're right. And then another dimension of this is further that as so many cities and governments, again, at multiple levels of governance have cut back on the resources they provided for other types of social services, libraries have had to take on a lot of those roles. So where we might have kind of homeless services cut, mental health services cut, children's services, senior services, In many cases, the library is the institution that is a jack of all trades for better and for worse that has to pick up the slack. So then you have people trained to be librarians, most of whom have MLIS, Masters of Library Science degrees,

very few of which actually address things like how to administer Narcan to somebody who's going through an overdose, what to do with kind of contamination, public health issues in a library, how to kind of best serve homeless population. These are all really integral and important parts of a public library. Again, if we had really robust social services that wouldn't have to be all on the back of this one institution, but a library as an information hub can be a really useful way to help people to know what other services are there for them if they were all as well-funded as they should be. What you're describing there makes me think about what you wrote as well about the importance of maintenance and care in the city. And when I was reading that and reading

other aspects of the book, I was also thinking about a piece that Kevin Rogan wrote in real life in 2019, where he discussed how the plan that Sidewalk Labs put forward for its smart neighborhood in Toronto was all about hiding the human labor that was inherent in making all the smart gadgetry and the nice concept art and things like that actually fundamentally work, right? And so the book addresses the importance of the need to pay attention to maintenance the importance of the need to pay attention to maintenance in cities and the need to pay attention to the infrastructures, I guess, of care. I don't know if that would be the best way to frame it in terms of an infrastructure.

But can you talk about the importance of this care and the maintenance and, you know, these human aspects of urban life and how they fit into or are ignored or left out in some of these smart city plans and why it's important for them to be at the fore when we think about what's important in cities. Sure. I mean, it's kind of interesting that you mentioned Kevin's project because he was a former advisee of mine. So I was able to kind of see some of his thinking evolve, which was a real pleasure and lovely to see that piece published ultimately. So yes, the fact that we're focused so much on technological solutions to things and technology often being equated with innovation and novelty, then often turns our attention away from the need to maintain these things or non-technological modes of care or of serving the same function

that we promote a technological solution. Maybe it's just a human modes of care or of serving the same function that we promote a technological solution. Maybe it's just a human element of care that would actually serve the ends better than an app, for instance. You know, one of the classic examples is, you know, providing an iPhone app for homeless individuals to find resources for themselves. Well, how many of them are actually going to have access to an iPhone and a data plan, for instance. So instead, maybe it's kind of a human care infrastructure that would be much better positioned to serve those goals in that particular population. So there have been quite a few people who've written about care and maintenance over the past couple of years. The article that I wrote that then went into the book

was kind of a literature review, a survey of all the burgeoning interest in maintenance care over the past few years, in part as a response to this fetishization of innovation, arguing that we need to think about other things in addition to or kind of as an alternative to innovation. And the discourse has been gone across economics, of course. Again, here we have the economists thinking about like, what's the value proposition of maintaining things? People in philanthropy thinking about the fact that so much of our public infrastructure in the United States is funded through philanthropic, even the pandemic. We have individual philanthropists throwing their money at these things. The whole library

infrastructure is in many cases funded by philanthropy historically. So there, it's not always as sexy to put your name on the maintenance of a boiler or fixing an HVAC system. Instead, you want to have your name on a novel solution. So just the way that so much of our funding and economic, political economic structures are really prioritizing and incentivizing a focus on the new and the novel. Also within architecture, there's an increasing interest, especially as folks are more interested in environmental impacts and lifespan, building lifespans. Thinking about maintenance is one of the issues that one should think about at the moment of design. So not only are you designing something for its pristine and kind of spectacular presentation at the beginning of its life, but how will it age?

How will it work for the people who have to care for it and clean the bathrooms and do whatever else is necessary to maintain it in good working order? at age? How will it work for the people who have to care for it and clean the bathrooms and do whatever else is necessary to maintain it in good working order? And then people who work in the digital realm are people who work on gadgets. The right to repair is a recent thing that has gotten a lot of public discussion in recent weeks and months. So just the way that we design technologies, gadgets, appliances, embedded smart technologies, as Kevin wrote about, that are kind of actually buried in the street. How do you maintain those?

And then more at the data realm. So how do you clean data? How do people maintain data sets? Even the dashboards we were talking about earlier. I wrote the original piece about five or six years ago and then revisited a lot of them in rewriting the chapter for this book and found that many of them are gone. A lot of them have dead feeds. So what was once this beautiful kind of mosaic dashboard screen now has a third or half of it giving you errors, essentially kind of 404 errors. So just the really kind of salient presence of the lack

of maintenance, even in the digital realm. So maintenance isn't only about physical things. It's not about cables and bridges and dams, et cetera, which it certainly is. And there are life and death situations at play there, but it's also in the realm of maintaining data, maintaining databases, maintaining kind of archives. So I really wanted to kind of connect those scales and show that in order to maintain something at any one of those levels, you really have to think about how it intersects with all the others. And there's a human element to all of that as well. At the end of the book, you talk about how we need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute. And you talk about, you know, all the other wisdoms that are contained within cities that, you know, are ultimately much, much smarter than a

supercomputer. So in your view, what would a better way of approaching cities look like? When I say a city is not a computer, which of course is maybe an intentionally provocative title of the book, I am arguing that a city is in part computational. There are plenty of kind of information processing, storage, et cetera, execution activities that happen in cities. And to the good, we've also, you and I just now have discussed some of the risks too, but it's not just a computer. I mean, the title was in part a reference to a lot of these, again, corporate urban development practices where they're essentially saying, how do we design a city from the internet up, which is what sidewalk labs try to do. Or how do we think about a city as something that's kind of completely computationally modelable, which again,

leaves out all of those kind of more humanistic and poetic and fuzzier dimensions that we were talking about. So a city is a computer and that can be productive in some ways, but there's a lot that is left out. So a city is a computer, but it's also a lot of other things. If we look historically, planners, designers, architects, urban administrators have used so many different metaphors. The city as a pneumatic pump, the city as a machine, the city as a steam engine, the city as a biophysical body, the city as an ecology. Each of them is, of course, driven by whatever the kind of the prevailing science, the new

knowledge was of its day, what the fasc the kind of the prevailing science, the new knowledge was of its day, what the fascinations were of the time. And I think each of them can have something productive to offer to us. If we pair the city as a computer with, for example, like the city as an ecology, and maybe something that's also looking at the city as a palimpsest of historical social structures, which allows us to address things like the history of digital redlining and literal redlining and racial injustice. If we layer or kind of compound those metaphors, I think we can have a much more prismatic is one of my favorite words, like a prismatic way of thinking about a city. It's like this methodological term of triangulation.

To know that you've kind of operationalized your variable well in a valid way, you often try to get at through three different ways to see if they all give you kind of corroborating responses or results. Same thing here. If you're looking at a city through multiple metaphors or multiple lenses and then seeing how each of them adds to your knowledge and your set of methodological tools for addressing challenges, I think that's much more productive than the reductive, everything is computationally modifiable model. I love that. The idea of looking at the city through these different metaphors, seeing what they offer, and then putting them in conversation with one another to kind of maximize the value that you're getting out of that metaphor and that way of thinking about the city. Shannon, you know, the book makes such an important contribution, I think,

to the way that we think about cities and the implementations of technologies in cities, and how we should think about that and approach it. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about it with me today. Thanks so much. Thank you very much, Paris. Shannon Mattern is a professor at the New School for Social Research and president of the board of Thanks so much. Thank you very much, Paris. P-W-S-U at checkout. You can follow Shannon on Twitter at at Shannon Matter. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com.

And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.