Ha! This Marketing Lingo Isn't So Hard To Learn: Just Fancy It Up Beyond Recognition!

April 12's "Uber Is Launching A Car Rental Company Inside the App" mentioned in passing that in addition to renting cars Uber had purchased a dockless bicycle company, Jump.Bikes. And, being a smart ass, declared:

Just so you know, in future we will be referring to the bikes as "A component of the multi-modal transportation system that is Uber"

A week later, April 19 SmartCitiesDive noted that rideshare company Via Transportation and bicycle co. Mobike had hooked up:

Dive Brief:

• This week, Via and Mobike launched a joint Earth Day-inspired initiative allowing Via users in Washington, DC to purchase a 4-week "multi-modal transportation bundle," dubbed ViaPass, that includes unlimited access to Via rides and Mobike dockless bikes for one upfront fee....

Google Ventures General Partner: "Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality."

From M.G.  Siegler at 500ish Words*:

Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley
As we slip out of touch with reality…

There’s something that has been in the back of my mind for some time now. And while it pre-dates the Facebook fiasco, that situation certainly brings it to the forefront. Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.

You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People — really smart people — saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if they were able to take a step outside of their own heads and hear, they’d be embarrassed by.

Or, at least, these are stances, thoughts, and ideas that these people should be embarrassed by. But they’re clearly not because they keep saying them.

This isn’t only about Facebook — far from it. That’s just the most high profile and timely example of a company suffering from some of this. And in that case, it’s really more in their responses to the Cambridge Analytica situation, rather than the situation itself (which is another matter, though undoubtedly related). They don’t know the right things to say because they don’t know what to say, period. Because they’ve slipped out of touch....MORE

*M.G. Siegler General Partner @ GV (née Google Ventures). In past lives I wrote at TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and ParisLemon. A man of few words. Except when writing

Note from the editor

As someone who used to write for a living, I believe most things that I read on the internet these days are far too verbose. With that in mind, I try to keep everything here around 500 words. Sometimes it will be a bit less. Often a bit more. Sometimes quite a bit more. But I try. Thanks for reading.

What Did George Soros Know When He Blasted Google and Facebook Last January?

"The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered." 

From Quartz, January 25:

At Davos, George Soros tears into Facebook and Google

Davos, Switzerland

Financier and philanthropist George Soros criticized Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at his annual Davos dinner, decried the state of global democracy, and warned about the rising threat of nuclear war.

While his words were certainly chilling, Soros has sounded some of these warnings before. This year, though, he flagged a brand new threat—the unchecked power of Google and Facebook, which Soros feels now have “monolithic power” that they’re using to manipulate and deceive consumers. The net result could be totalitarian control, Soros said. Here is a transcript of his full remarks on the topic:

These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.

Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment. This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.

The distinguishing feature of internet platform companies is that they are networks and they enjoy rising marginal returns; that accounts for their phenomenal growth. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable. It took Facebook eight and a half years to reach a billion users and half that time to reach the second billion. At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than 3 years.

Facebook and Google effectively control over half of all internet advertising revenue. To maintain their dominance, they need to expand their networks and increase their share of users’ attention. Currently they do this by providing users with a convenient platform. The more time users spend on the platform, the more valuable they become to the companies....MUCH MORE

China and Pigs and Soybeans: It's Complicated

What if China doesn't really need as many American soybeans as they once did, what if China has hit Peak Pork?
From Asian AgriBiz:

Plunging prices slow down pig production in China

April 23, 2018
After years of expansion, Chinese pig producers are slowing down or postponing expansion projects as oversupply has dragged prices down to an eight-year low in March. A report by Reuters said this development indicates that “years of frenzied investment to boost hog production has been overdone” while growth in demand has not kept pace and global pork supply is at its highest. With the country being the biggest producer and consumer of pork, the glut is already affecting the global market, especially as many key pork exporters like the EU and the US are seeing higher pork production.

What if  the tariffs are just political theater making use of a situation that was going to happen anyway.
We'll have more later this week.

Soybeans
	May-2018	1019'2	-1'4
	Jul-2018	1030'4	-1'6
	Aug-2018	1033'2	-1'2

-AgWeb

Shipping: French Giant CMA CGM Looking to Expand Logistics Business with Investment in CEVA Logistics

Splash 24/7 headlined their report on last month's Maritime CEO Forum: "...Shipping Anywhere From 30 to 500 Years Behind the Technology Curve". Everyone is looking at logistics as the magic bullet with talk of blockchain being the silver bullet magic bullet. Some links below.

From gCaptain:

CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping company by TEU capacity, will acquire 25% stake in supply chain management company CEVA Logistics as the French shipping giant looks to grow its presence in the logistics sector.

CMA CGM announced Friday that it has committed to subscribe for mandatory convertible securities of CEVA in an estimated amount between 380 and 450 million Swiss francs, or approximately USD $389-$461 million.

Headquartered in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, CEVA Logistics specializes in both freight management and contract logistics. The company employs approximately 56,000 employees and temporary/agency workers in 160 countries. In 2017, the company posted revenues of over US$7 billion....MORE

Previously:
Shipping: Carriers Fear Becoming the "Uber Drivers of the Sea" (but quants to the rescue?)
"Maersk Tankers invests in quantitative hedge fund CargoMetrics"
"10 Startups Making Ocean Container Shipping Easier"
New Orwellian Hedge Fund Watches All The World's Shipping For Billionaires
 
Shipping: Freight Forwarder Flexport: "...Digitizing The Entire International Shipping Process"
Shipping: Every Link In The Global Trade Supply Chain That Blockchain Could (maybe) Transform
"10 Startups Making Ocean Container Shipping Easier"
Norwegian Government to Chip In $17 Million to Develop the First Electric Autonomous Cargo Ship
Shipping: "Value of Autonomy Questioned"
Shipping: "Amazon vs Maersk: The clash of titans shaking the container industry"
"TEU Tokens and Blockchain Could Shape the Future of Container Shipping"
Shipping: Despite $300 Million Revenue Hit From Cyber Attack Maersk Is Upbeat 
Shipping: "The True Implications of the Technology Revolution"
Shipping: Following Maersk,"Now CMA CGM signs with Alibaba for online booking of container space"
Shipping: A Warning To Freight Forwarders, The Good Times Are Over
Shipping: "Amazon Enters Trillion Dollar Ocean Freight Business" (AMZN)
Shipping: Maersk, Alibaba Team Up To Offer Space On Container Ships.    

"US Army Figures Out How To Do Facial Recognition in the Dark"

From Defense One:

New method uses machine learning to extrapolate features from thermal images.

It’s no mean feat for a computer to identify an individual’s face in daylight. The process involves precisely measuring a photograph — eye size, distance from nose to mouth, etc. — adjusting the distances for three dimensions, and searching a database for a match. But to do it at night, when all you have is far lower-resolution thermal images, the Army Research Lab used a technique that allows software to mimic the human brain.

Our brains “see” by extrapolating a picture from a relatively small amount of sensory data, filtered through the eye. The brain uses several times more neuronal mass to construct images from visual data than the eye does collecting the data.

The Army researchers saw a parallel with thermal images. Such images show what parts of the face are hotter and cooler, but generally contain fewer data points than a comparable optical image from a camera, making it hard to pick out distinct features. So they set up a convolutional neural network, or CNN, a deep-learning method that uses specific nodes similar to the brain’s, and set it to infer faces from limited data.

The method that the researchers use breaks a thermal picture of a face into specific regions and then compares them to an optical image of the same face. The network estimates where key features are in the thermal image in relation to the conventional image. The network’s final product is something like a police sketch — not a perfect match, but with enough overlap in key points to make a high-certainty match....MORE

Here's the US Army press release:
Army develops face recognition technology that works in the dark

"'Smart Condom' Tracks Thrust Speed and Velocity and Lets you Share the Data"

Share the data?
Even Facebook might demur.

From c|net:

Sex wearable is coming to track your performance and judge you
It's basically a Fitbit for your man bits that tracks thrust speed and velocity. But don't be too hard on yourself.

The i.Con Smart Condom, which markets itself as the "world's first smart condom," is actually a ring that fits over a boring, dumb condom and claims to track the exercise of your man bits, as well as detect chlamydia and syphilis.

The ring, first announced last July, is currently available for preorder on British Condoms for £59.99 (about $74, AU$97) with an unknown release date. But you can't actually put a ring on it yet -- the company says it won't take your money until the product has a firm release.

In short, the i.Con ring promises to answer every burning question you've ever had about your sex session. Don't worry, it will pair with an app for all your data visualization needs.
According to the preorder page, the ring will answer questions such as:

• What's my thrust velocity?
• How fast are my thrusts?
• How many calories did that sesh just burn?
• How many times did I just have sex? 

...MORE

i.Con? Is that one of them psychomimes? (not to be confused with a Psycho Mime—the silent killer)

HT: Librarian Shipwreck who, like us, is a year late to the story.

If you go home with someone, and they want to use a “smart condom” - just leave.https://t.co/Hg8oI20O1Z

— LibrarianShipwreck (@libshipwreck) April 9, 2018

"FTC Puts Uber on a Short Leash for Security Breaches" (plus Didi encroaches)

Did Chuxing just started-up in Mexico.*
Uber has to feel as if the world is closing in on them.

From IEEE Spectrum:

For the next 20 years, the agency will review reports on Uber’s privacy and security practices
It’s not nice―or smart―to deceive the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, especially while you’re in negotiations with the agency over penalties it’s going to impose for previously being dishonest.

Last August, the ride-hailing company Uber entered into a consent agreement with the FTC regarding its supposedly “securely stored” and “closely monitored” (pdf) customer and driver information. Uber bragged that it was using “the most up-to-date technology and services to ensure that none of these are compromised,” and promised that information was “encrypted to the highest security standards available.”

Alas, the FTC found these claims were more chimera than reality. As a consequence of its lackadaisical security practices, Uber experienced a data breach in May 2014 that allowed attackers to access the names and driver’s licenses of 100,000 Uber drivers, along with many of the drivers’ bank accounts and Social Security numbers.
In that consent agreement, Uber agreed to stop misrepresenting the quality of its security and privacy practices; put a comprehensive privacy program into place, and; get independent third-party risk assessments of its privacy program every two years for the next 20 years. The first assessment report would be sent to the FTC, while the rest would be retained by Uber, which promised to act on any recommendations made in the reports.

Then, in November 2017, Uber admitted there had been another data breach about one year earlier. This time, hackers accessed some 25.6 million names and email addresses, 22.1 million names and mobile phone numbers, and 607,000 names and driver’s license numbers of U.S. Uber drivers and customers. Furthermore, Uber confessed that it had paid $100,000 in ransomware disguised as a “bug bounty” to intruders to delete the data and keep the breach out of the public eye....MORE

*Here's the Didi story via VentureBeat:
China’s Didi launches ride-hailing service in Mexico, one of Uber’s biggest strongholds

"Big Week For Earnings"

Via Global Market Monitor:

Autonomous Vehicles: "Who’s the Lidar IP Leader?"

From EE Times:

MADISON, Wisc. — Among the host of sensors nowadays loaded into autonomous vehicles, lidar (light detection and ranging) projects as both critical and lucrative. 

As the automotive industry girds for a wave of autonomous car rollouts, Pierre Cambou, activity leader for imaging and sensors at market-research firm Yole Développement (Lyon, France), said he can’t imagine a robotic vehicle without lidars. “You need a lidar,” he noted.
Yole forecasts that revenue generated by lidars will reach $1.6 billion in 2022 and will balloon to $31.5 billion by 2032.

However, the technologies that drive lidars are still in flux, with new developments still in he pipeline. As Akhilesh Kona, senior analyst for automotive electronics and semiconductors at IHS Markit, previously told EE Times, lidar technology suppliers continue to improve durability, size, and cost by developing a variety of beam-steering technologies that range from mechanical to MEMS and solid-state.

As the race for better lidar heats up, the inevitable question is: Who’s the lidar leader? One way to find out is to look at lidar-related patents filed.

Knowmade, one of Yole's group companies that specializes in IP analysis and patent assessment, recently examined lidar devices and systems for automotive. Knowmade identified more than 6,480 lidar-related patent families for automotive.

 (click to enlarge)

Although this patent activity began as early as the late 1960s, the number of patent publications has exploded in the last several years. In particular, between 2007 and 2017, lidar patents had an annual compound growth rate of 21 percent.

In the early days, companies such as Bosch, Denso and Valeo dominated patent filings related to automotive lidars. Paul Leclaire, technology and patent analyst at Knowmade, describes these as “historical IP players.” Their patents are mostly related to “ADAS applications, based on incremental technologies, and with limited amount of white spaces,” he observed. By “an area with a limited amount of ‘white spaces’ means that it is difficult to file a patent with claims that do not overlap other patent claims,” he explained. “Thus, new patent applications have less chance to be granted.”
However, those historical IP players’ activities alone cannot explain the recent escalation in lidar IPs, Leclaire said.

The newcomers in lidar break down in several categories.

Next page: Semimconductor companies' lidar IPs

Page 1 / 10 Next >

...MUCH MUCH MORE

Shipping: "The dry bulk freight market: Just treading water?"

From Black Sea Grain:

A decade has passed since the 2008 dry bulk freight rates began a long downturn which coincided with the Financial Crisis and culminated with a historic low in January 2016. And while many are encouraged by the rebound since then, a cursory look at the Baltic Dry Bulk Index (BDI) indicates how serious the collapse was and how modest and fragile the recovery is.

Not only has the dry bulk market not returned to pre-collapse levels, it’s struggling to maintain freight rates last seen in the previous millennium. Consider that in 1999 the BDI averaged 1,338. While it managed to breach the 1,500 mark briefly in late-2017, it is, for the most part, hovering below 1999 levels.

Rather than a recovery then, this seems more like “a back to the future” scenario. Either way, dry bulk owners and operators are just happy to be able to operate their businesses profitably.

So how does the bulk sector in 2018 really measure up to conditions in 1999? The numbers tell all: while the total capacity of the global fleet of bulk ships has more than tripled from 264 million dwt to 817 million dwt by Q1 2018, bulkers haven’t been as productive, hauling less cargo. While they carried 8 to 9 tons of cargo per deadweight ton (dwt) in the 1999-2008 decade, they handled only 6 to 8 mt of cargo per dwt since 2009.

Of course seaborne bulk cargo has increased — from 2,185 million mt in 1999 to 5,096 million mt in 2017. It just hasn’t kept up with the growth in capacity.

The prognosis is reflected in the figures: there are way too many ships on the water.

Vastly improved technological efficiencies compounded by a significantly slower Chinese economy – not to mention the unlikelihood of another China-sized economy rising anytime soon – all mean one thing: capacity needs to disappear, lots of it. In fact, about 200 million dwt of capacity – 30% of the current operating fleet, equal to 5,000, 40,000 dwt ships! – needs to vanish before we can achieve a ratio of seaborne cargo to capacity last seen pre-2008....MORE

ARM Chips with Nvidia AI Could Change the Internet of Things

SoftBank owns ARM, which had been the pride of British high tech. Softbank had a $5 billion stake in NVIDIA that they contributed to the Vision Fund. Mr. Son has a plan.
Along those lines the Japan Times had an hilarious headline a couple months ago:
ARM embraces tech revolution under SoftBank and loses money

Despite the young pup chip companies nipping at the big dog's heels in AI,  NVIDIA is still out front and pivoting away from stuff like the crypto miners where dedicated chips make more sense, to:
"UPDATED—NVIDIA Wants to Be the Brains Behind the Surveillance State (NVDA)"
and "NVIDIA Wants to Run Your City: Smart City Control Centers (NVDA)"
and ""Nvidia's Slightly Terrifying Metropolis Platform Paves the Way for Smarter Cities" (NVDA)"

Lifted in toto from TechCrunch, Mar. 27:

Nvidia and Arm today announced a partnership that's aimed at making it easier for chip makers to incorporate deep learning capabilities into next-generation consumer gadgets, mobile devices and Internet of Things objects. Mostly, thanks to this partnership, artificial intelligence could be coming to doorbell cams or smart speakers soon.

Arm intends to integrate Nvidia’s open-source Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) architecture into its just-announced Project Trillium platform. Nvidia says this should help IoT chip makers incorporate AI into their products.

“Accelerating AI at the edge is critical in enabling Arm’s vision of connecting a trillion IoT devices,” said Rene Haas, EVP, and president of the IP Group, at Arm. “Today we are one step closer to that vision by incorporating NVDLA into the Arm Project Trillium platform, as our entire ecosystem will immediately benefit from the expertise and capabilities our two companies bring in AI and IoT."

Announced last month, Arm’s Project Trillium is a series of scalable processors designed for machine learning and neural networks. NVDLA open-source nature allows Arm to offer a suite of developers tools on its new platform. Together, with Arm’s scalable chip platforms and Nvidia’s developer’s tools, the two companies feel they’re offering a solution that could result in billions of IoT, mobile and consumers electronic devices gaining access to deep learning.

Deepu Tallam, VP and GM of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia, explained it best with this analogy: "NVDLA is like providing all the ingredients for somebody to make it a dish including the instructions. With Arm [this partnership] is basically like a microwave dish."

TechCrunch home

"Lunch at the Forgotten Rothschild Party Palace"

The fact that always struck me was: these folks lived as well as the sovereign rulers they loaned money to. An example from the blog, of all the Fabergé eggs we've looked at over the years, the only non-Imperial was the Rothschild egg which, at the time we posted had changed hands for the highest price known, $18,500,000. (it has since been surpassed by the Imperial egg found in the American Midwest)

Egg Decorating: The Rothschild Fabergé Clock Egg

And today story from Vanessa at Messy Nessy Chic:

I stood looking up at the gates, hands on my hips, wondering what forgotten chateau I’d stumbled upon this time. We’d taken a detour to avoid the traffic back into Paris and suddenly pulled over into the ditch by the side of the road at my absolute insistence. What I didn’t know then, peeping through the iron bars, was that I was standing at the back entrance of the largest and most luxurious 19th-century château in France. These overgrown gates gave access to the hunting grounds of the Chateau de Ferrières, the Rothschild country castle not more than 30km east of Paris. Upon visiting the chateau in the late 1800s, the Emperor of Germany once said, “No Kings could afford this! It could only belong to a Rothschild.” But in the end, not only the Rothschilds could afford to keep it– which is why, after snooping around its un-manicured back entrance, I was able to return a few days later for lunch…MUCH MORE

 When she says party palace, she means palace:

Goldman Sachs on Asteroid Mining: As If Luxembourg Wasn't Insufferable Already

Luxembourg, with their #3 in the world GDP per capita (PPP) and their Jean-Claude Juncker and...
Insufferable. It's like Bono and Elevation Partners. Besides being Bono, they ran $90 mil. to $1.5 billion in Facebook.
Billion with a 'B'. As in Bono.

Here's Goldman:

Long dominated by government agencies, space is now in play for private companies and venture capital firms, which see big potential in areas like launch, communications and exploration. Noah Poponak, senior Aerospace and Defense equity research analyst for Goldman Sachs Research, says this investment interest has helped reduce launch costs and spur innovation across related industries, opening up a new chapter in the history of the space economy....MORE

It's a 24 minute podcast, something one could listen to while in transit but did anyone bother to tell me about it?
No. That's why we're getting to it a year late, despite my avowed interest in becoming the world's first trillionaire.
And ignoring that Alchemist's Fallacy thing and all.

Here's ZeroHdge from April 19th (yes, they're a year late as well but how does that help moi?): 

The World's First Trillionaire Will Be A Space Miner

Famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Goldman Sachs share a common belief: The next trillion-dollar industry will be in the mining sector - in outer space.  
As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it:

"The first trillionaire there will ever be is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids. There's this vast universe of limitless energy and limitless resources. I look at wars fought over access to resources. That could be a thing of the past, once space becomes our backyard."

While the renowned astrophysicist sees the potential for peace, Goldman Sachs sees the radical arrival of a trillion-dollar mining industry in the 21st Century.

It may sound like a long-term gamble, but Goldman has been eyeing improvements in technology and the trends toward lowers costs for manufacturing spacecraft. 

A year ago, Goldman noted in a 98-page report:

"While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn.”

So, science fiction is becoming the narrative of reality, and radical opinions are starting to seem rather sober.

All the more because the whole idea is being given a major boost in Luxembourg of all places.
Asteroid mining is being led by private sector interests that are dead set on making money in outer space.

Two of the leading companies formed with this in mind are California-based Deep Space Industries and Washington-based Planetary Resources. Both have been operating for several years, and both plan on profiting from asteroid mining.

But the tiny European country of Luxembourg is hoping to become the hub of cosmic mining—a tax haven banking center-turned-asteroid-exploiter. So it’s no mystery why Deep Space Industries, for instance, has offices both in Luxembourg as well and a partnership with the government of Luxembourg....MORE

We never got invited into the deal.
And we were so nice to Luxembourg. February 2016, Luxembourg’s Asteroid Mining Plan:

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for a duchy..."

Followed by:
Luxembourg Invests €25 million in Asteroid Mining 
Luxembourg’s Bid to Become the Silicon Valley of Space Mining
Luxembourg's New Space Mining Law Is Basically "Finders, Keepers"

Artist's depiction, not actual asteroid mining

And nothing.
You know what really burns?
When people would try to shame them for their wee size, who defended them? I'll tell you who:

Dammit! Luxembourg Is Not A Microstate!
From Brilliant Maps:

The map above shows how big Luxembourg is compared to Singapore, Andorra, Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, and the Vatican....

I thought we were hedged with their fellow tax haven but noooo:

Swiss space agency boss is kidnapped by hitmen who beat him senseless then tried to burn him alive
Swiss Space Systems founder accused of ‘staging’ own attack
Swiss Space Systems: Just "Fugget About It!"
Swiss Space Systems Declares Bankruptcy-Parabolic Arc

So, about that Alchemist's fallacy:
2015's  "It is Now Legal to Own an Asteroid in the U.S."

You know the first things they want to mine are those things with the highest price per ounce back on earth which ex-truffles and saffron probably means the so-called precious metals.
However, with all that gold and platinum coming back, you might want to bone up on Another Post On Glass, This Time With "The Alchemist's Fallacy" (And Professor Nordhaus).

The miners will probably also keep an eye peeled for Californium-252 at $27 million per gram, but finding any is a bit of a long shot, 8 grams known to date....

And
Platinum Extends 6 1/2-Year Lows as Asteroid With $5.4 Trillion Worth of the Stuff Whizzes Past Earth

See also:
"The Price of Gold in the Year 2160"
And "We Are About to Start Mining Hydrothermal Vents on the Ocean Floor" (now with added alchemist's fallacy"

The thing is, such an enormous increase in supply would crash the market, something the ancient alchemists didn't mention when they were pitching their lead-into-gold private placements to their version of accredited investors, the princely class, back in the day.

It is for this reason that the astro-miners have changed their approach and are now talking about looking for oxygen, water, nitrogen and other elements that can be used to take us farther into the universe.
Presumably to sell to Elon Musk to speed him on his way. 

I first heard the concept from Yale's Professor Nordhaus in 2005's "Schumpeterian Profits and the Alchemist Fallacy"
Here's some exposition from FT Magazine in 2015: "Another Post On Glass, This Time With "The Alchemist's Fallacy" (And Professor Nordhaus)".

And another thing.
When did Neil deGrasse Tyson start talking like an old man with the "In my day..." stuff, and all?

In my day, the word “Awesome" was reserved for things like curing Polio and walking on the Moon, not for food or TV shows.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 13, 2018

Cambridge Analytica, Macau Casinos, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and Triad Mobster 'Broken Tooth’ Wan Kuok-koi

From the South China Morning Post, April 19:

Macau issues cryptocurrency crime warning after link to former triad boss emerges
Authority warning reminds residents that virtual currency is not legal tender

Concerns over a Macau cryptocurrency firm backed by a notorious former gangster, and which has links to the company behind the Facebook data-mining scandal, have prompted monetary chiefs in the city to issue a warning over possible “fraud and criminal activities”.

In a statement of concern, published on the website of the Monetary Authority of Macau, the regulator reminded residents that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender.

The warning comes in the wake of revelations that Macau Dragon Group, a firm associated with “Broken Tooth” Wan Kuok-koi, employed the British company, Cambridge Analytica, to promote Dragon Coin, a new virtual currency created to help gamblers transfer money to Macau casinos.

Wan is one of Asia’s most infamous organised crime figures, and spent more than 10 years in jail for an array of gangland crimes including being leader of the 14K triad group in Macau....MORE

Here's Global Mafia News:

Broken Tooth Koi: Profile of a Triad boss

And back to the SCMP, April 19 for some backstory:

The cryptocurrency linking Cambridge Analytica and Macau’s most notorious gangster
Involvement of data-mining company – being investigated over Facebook privacy breach – piles pressure on monetary chiefs in casino hub, as worries persist over dodgy transactions

Finance chiefs in Hong Kong and Macau were on Wednesday facing fresh pressure to act after it emerged that the firm at the centre of the Facebook data privacy scandal, Cambridge Analytica, worked with a cryptocurrency firm backed by Asia’s most notorious former organised crime boss.

The connection between the British company – widely criticised for abusing the data of tens of millions of Facebook users – and ex-14K triad gang leader “Broken Tooth” Wan Kuok-koi will deepen concerns over a lack of regulation in the burgeoning digital currency business.

In a report published in The New York Times on Tuesday, former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser said the data-mining company retained Dragon Corporation – also known as Macau Dragon Group – as a client and helped publicise its US$500 million initial coin offering (ICO).

Kaiser told the newspaper Cambridge Analytica’s involvement with Dragon was linked to a plan to raise money for the creation of a system to help people store their online personal data and sell it to advertisers. ...MORE

Also at the South China Morning Post, Oct. 8, 2017: "A cryptocurrency deal and a triad boss called Broken Tooth – what can possibly go wrong?"

Among Wan's other ventures: "Broken Tooth Koi’ offers to provide Belt and Road muscle"
Wan Kuok-koi, a former triad leader in Macau, has said his security group would be a patriotic private organization to protect Belt and Road interests 

HT the story was out there and home of the Belt and Road story immediately above, Asia Times:
What do we get when we mix big data, blockchain and casinos?

Climateer Line of the Day: "2018: AI will start separating the winners from the losers" Edition

Via TechCrunch:

“New breakthroughs in AI, enabled by new hardware architectures, will create new intelligent business models for enterprises,” says Nigel Toon, co-founder and CEO at U.K.-based Graphcore.

“Companies that can build an initial knowledge model and launch an initial intelligent service or product, then use this first product to capture new data and improve the knowledge model on a continuing basis, will quickly create clear class-leading products and services that competitors will struggle to keep up with.”

—Enterprise AI will make the leap — who will reap the benefits?, April 17

In November 2016 we headlined a post Artificial Intelligence: What Could Derail NVIDIA? A Lab in Shenzhen; A Basement in Moscow; An Office in Bristol (NVDA).
Bristol?...

Graphcore was the "Office in Bristol".
A year later: "Sequoia Backs Graphcore as the Future of Artificial Intelligence Processors" (NVDA; INTC):
Huh.
Sometimes you get lucky...

This past January the "Lab in Shenzhen":
AI: "Google moves into Shenzhen in latest China expansion" (GOOG; NVDA)
Not saying that Google's Tensor Processing Unit chips are a threat to NVIDIA (yet) but, at the same time NVIDIA's Mr. Huang was publicly stating the GOOG was no threat, his research peeps were saying "we should make those thingies."

Still waiting on the "Basement in Moscow." 

The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of The Smart City

We are fans of Professor Pasquale, don't know his co-author.

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From First Monday:
Volume 20, Number 7 - 6 July 2015 
By Jathan Sadowski and Frank Pasquale

About the authors
Jathan Sadowski is a Ph.D. candidate in the “Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology,” in the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University. His research mostly focuses on social theory/justice and political economy of information-communication technology. He is currently writing a dissertation on the socio-politics of “smart cities”.
E-mail: Jathan [dot] Sadowski [at] asu [dot] edu

Frank Pasquale is a Professor of Law at University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law. His research addresses the challenges posed to information law by rapidly changing technology, particularly in the health care, Internet, and finance industries. He recently published The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information (Harvard University Press, 2015), which develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance.
E-mail: fpasquale [at] law [dot] umaryland [dot] edu

There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as elites fill cities with “smart” technologies — turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet — there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power. This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control.” We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.”

Contents
I. Introduction
II. What is a smart city?
III. The ideology of the smart city
IV. Smart cities in societies of control
V. The soft power of biometric surveillance
VI. The hard power of policing technologies
VII. Cyborg urbanization, blurred boundaries
VIII. Taking back control

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I. Introduction
There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as government and corporate actors, often in close partnership with each other, fill cities with “smart” [1] technologies — turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet — there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance (cf., Hollands, 2008; Townsend, 2014; Neirotti, et al., 2014). Soon, for example, shoppers and viewers will be as “known” by a store or gallery as they are able to know it (Arnsdorf, 2010). Facial recognition software, or smartphone emanations, can project your identity, likely spending habits, and reputation: shoplifter or big spender, “Mortgage Woes” or “Boomer Barons” (to use actual categories from marketers) (Castle Press, 2010).

“Big data” is the new currency of commerce, but like money, some have far better terms of access to it than others. In finance, the average borrower must turn over detailed, personal records to receive a loan; the bank is under no parallel obligation, though, to explain its own internal decision-making in nearly as much detail (Pasquale, 2015). The same dynamics are emerging in the IoT: powerful entities centripetally attracting more data from their users, but denying access to users and regulators, even when very troubling data uses and breaches occur. It no longer makes sense to think of “the Internet” as a thing that one accesses via a computer. Not when the city itself is reimagined and reconstructed as a platform for and node within networked information-communication technologies (ICT).

Wired’s flagship article on the IoT asks, “Have you ever lost an object in your house and dreamed that you could just type a search for it, as you would for a wayward document on your hard drive?” (Wasik, 2013). Well you can now, we are assured, thanks to a startup called StickNFind Technologies that sells cheap, small, “sticker” sensors. Lose a child at the mall? “Smart fashion” RFID tags will keep him or her plugged into the network and tracked at all times. And why stop with kids when making sensor-laden sartorial choices? Before long your car, house, appliances, and every other part of your environment will be engaging in a constant stream of networked communication with each other. Taken at the urban scale, the city becomes a cocoon of connectivity that engulfs us — or, alternatively, it becomes a web that ensnares us — as smart technologies are integrated into our everyday lives. These technologies are billed as modes of finding, of wayfaring. They are technologies of search (when we apply them) and technologies of reputation (when used to evaluate us) (Pasquale, 2015). They map, categorize, and classify — and what could be more innocuous than mere information?

Calculating the costs and benefits of the innovation is a Sisyphean, and deeply ideological, task. Who knows what sinister or spectacular applications may emerge? Scenario analysis and planning could be a valuable alternative to cost-benefit studies (Verchick, 2010): these methods acknowledge the incommensurability of the gains in convenience, and losses of privacy, portended by the IoT. But corporate and government discourse on IoT has tended to marginalize the most important negative scenario analyses, downplaying them as paranoid projections. Technocrats distort policy evaluations of pervasive surveillance and control in urban environments. Moreover, their normative tools of evaluation, focusing on consumer and citizen “consent” to surveillance, are manipulable enough to embrace even the most disturbing technologies of control — such as drone-driven crowd control directed at protesters, or automobile loan technology that disables cars mere minutes after a payment is late — as expressions of democratic will and market rationality.

Technocrats’ convenient blindness to the most worrisome aspects of the “smart city” invites a more balanced theoretical response. We propose one such response that lays out the characteristics and consequences of a dominant socio-political logic that courses throughout and ties together many of the various practices and ideologies related to “smart cities.” We begin by providing a contextual overview of the “smart city,” building from the burgeoning analytical work on the topic. This leads into a critical introduction to the ideology of the “smart city,” focusing on the stated aspirations of some of its most notable corporate, governmental, and academic exponents. We then offer a Deleuzian alternative, outlining a social theory of the “smart city” in service to capital as a form of control (rather than emancipation) of its subject-citizens. Next, we present two illustrative examples along the resulting spectrum of control: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. Our penultimate section makes explicit the stakes of the deep integration of person–machine — city in our “post-digital-dualist era” (Jurgenson, 2012). And we end by offering some normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute the emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.”


II. What is a smart city?
Globally — in terms of market valuation, expendable capital, technological development, and transformative influence — the smart city movement has been growing at a rapid pace. A 2013 report, released by the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, estimated that “the global market for smart city solutions and the additional services required to deploy them [will] be $408 billion by 2020.” Linked to this growth is the exponential expansion of the IoT. According to commonly cited numbers from telecommunications giant Cisco, one of the major industries involved in the IoT and smart cities, billions of things are already connected — “over 12.5 billion devices in 2010 alone.” And they predict, “Some 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020.” [2] Less conservative estimates place the smart city market into the trillion(s) of dollars over the next five to ten years, with the IoT market being worth even more. Case in point, IBM recently announced it would be investing US$3 billion over the next four years in creating a new IoT unit (Reuters, 2015) — an investment that will surely boost IBM’s already lucrative, multi-billion dollar “Smarter Planet” initiative. As an urban planning and governance movement, a lot of effort is expended on pushing and pulling “smartness” — the major corporate players work hard to push smartness as an ideal and to pull city leaders and investors into the smartness orbit. These corporations did not just stumble upon an existing market for which they could fill the needs. They, rather, have worked hard to create this market and to shape it in certain ways.

Yet, with this massive growth and capital investment, the label “smart city” is nebulous. There’s not a single definition that can be called up and applied anytime the label is invoked (Hollands, 2008). This ambiguity does a lot of work for smart city proponents and purveyors. The label is treated like a floating signifier that can change referents whenever needed. Allowing for a flexible, dynamic space in which to plug a variety of products, practices, and policies. Giving them discursive cover in case they need to distance themselves if something goes wrong or doesn’t deliver on a promise.
One important and constant characteristic of these different visions, however, is that they aim to evoke positive change and innovation — at least as the proponents see it — via digital ICT; essentially, building an IoT at the city-scale by installing networked objects throughout the urban environment (and even human bodies) for a wide range of different purposes. The typical examples used to illustrate an IoT-filled world are consumer products — like the ever-present smart fridge that tells the store when you need milk. But, Bruce Sterling argues, this is a “fairy tale,” instead “the genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost” [3]. Restricting our focus to the consumer devices poses a red herring that keeps our attention at the surface level, halting analyses that should go beyond the alternating currents of absurd farce and gee whiz excitement. “These grand, world-scale [corporate] alliances did not form in order to sell the reader a smart refrigerator. Most of them would really like the reader to dwell in a ‘Smart City’ where they supply the ‘smartness’ on their own terms — and they’re not much concerned about the reader’s consent as a citizen” [4]. The smart city is not just a linearly scaled version of the smart home where all of our personal devices and domestic appliance are networked, automated, and good communicators. It is fundamentally about infrastructural and civic applications — the kind of things that constitute the techno-political ordering of society — and it is about the data and control those applications generate. To be sure, not all “smart cities” are implemented in the same way; we see three main types.

First, by far the most common ‘actually existing’ smart cities are those that are retrofitted and renovated with upgrades that transition current cities from dumb to smart. Many estimates place the number of cities and towns with smart initiatives into the tens or hundreds of thousands around the world. In these cases, “the smart city is assembled piecemeal, integrated awkwardly into existing configurations of urban governance and the built environment” [5]. Typically the underlying motivations are political economic, the result of an increasingly entrepreneurial form of urban governance that seeks to make the city into a center of (regionally or globally) competitive economic growth and activity (Harvey, 1989). Getting smart is the handy panacea for overcoming austerity, managing the urban system, and becoming an attractive place for capital to flow into — all by using “networked infrastructures to improve economic and political efficiency and enable social, cultural and urban development” [6]. Hence, smart initiatives promise to provide city leaders with the means necessary for achieving their entrepreneurial ends.

Second, there is the ‘shock therapy’ method — or, what we might call smart shock — wherein a city undergoes a quick, large-scale integration of ‘smart’ ideals, technologies, and policies into an existing landscape. There are not as yet any cities that have experienced a full shock, but rather there are examples where the smart city transition has occurred to a greater degree and at a more rapid pace than the typical retrofits. Perhaps the best example is the Intelligent Operations Center built in 2010 by IBM for the city of Rio de Janeiro, which “draws together data streams from thirty agencies, including traffic and public transport, municipal and utility services, emergency services, weather feeds, and information sent in by employees and the public via phone, Internet and radio, into a single data analytics centre” [7]. With this NASA-esque control room, the city of Rio is turned into a system for optimization and securitization. Different parts of city life can be scrutinized and managed at a more exacting level, thus amplifying the already existing practices of militaristic urban control (Wacquant, 2008). IBM and other technology corporations have created similar data centers elsewhere for single agencies like police departments, but none have yet reached the magnitude of Rio’s Intelligent Operations Center. Though, there is plenty of indication that Rio foreshadows the type of systems we can expect to see being rapidly built and deployed in other cities.

Third, the idealistic models for the smart city are the built from scratch projects that are being constructed where nothing existed before. A canonical case is New Songdo in South Korea, which serves as a global test-bed (Halpern, et al., 2013) and urban laboratory (Gieryn, 2006) for implementing large-scale smart systems in the wild. At a cost of approximately US$40 billion, Songdo’s corporate and government backers hope to make it the world’s first fully smart city. As Christine Rosen (2012) remarks, “Songdo claims intelligence not from its inhabitants, but from the millions of wireless sensors and microcomputers embedded in surfaces and objects throughout the metropolis.” This type of implementation represents a zone of futurity. That is, a window into a grand, but plausibly potential, urban future. Furthermore, this type also reveals striking historical similarities that exists between the smart city ideology and the ideology of twentieth century high-modernist architecture. Consider that Brazil’s federal capital of Brasília — a monument to the high-modernism ideals of technocratic administrative ordering — was built, in only 41 months (1956–1960), by clearing out a plot of land in the Amazon rainforest (Scott, 1998). “Point by point,” writes Adam Greenfield [8], “whether they do so out of ignorance, ahistoricity, heedlessness or hubris, the designers of Songdo and Masdar and PlanIT Valley [other canonical smart cities] recapitulate the overspecification, overweening scientism and ponderous authoritarian pomposity of Chandigarh and Brasília, right down to the grand ceremonial axes.”

Even with this plurality of methods and motivations, we believe it is possible and necessary to begin parsing out the underlying socio-political logics that these smart city initiatives hold in common. As we have shown, there’s no sign that the smart city is slowing down. The ideals and practices of the movement — in the various styles they are implemented — continue to colonize the urban landscape and political imaginations of city leaders. Given the constraints of this paper, our overview is only meant to set the stage for the critical social theory at the heart of this paper. For a more exhaustive genealogical analysis of the dominant discourses and ideologies that are driving these sociotechnical systems and policies — specifically those emanating from the major corporate actors of IBM, Cisco, and Siemens — we point the reader to Adam Greenfield’s thorough pamphlet, Against the smart city (2013). What’s more, we should be clear that our generalized use of “smart city” in the rest of the article is meant to be a shorthand for technologies and techniques that align with both the practices and ideologies of the “smart city” label — no matter what their scale or style of implementation. We don’t intend to homogenize or flatten out the differences in what the “smart city” means for different cities, policy-makers, and corporations. Rather, our hope is to draw attention to the ways in which seemingly disparate technologies and techniques have origins in and reproduce common socio-political logics — and we will do this by discussing specific initiatives. But first, the next section introduces the ideologies — updating and adding depth to Greenfield’s own study — that are embedded within and enacted by smart city initiatives.


III. The ideology of the smart city
In more formal spaces of policy advocacy, a stark meliorism informs a Whiggish imaginary of technological progress via the IoT. In a widely cited article for Foreign Affairs, two chief executives for Cisco trumpeted the benefits of applying the “Internet of Everything” to nearly all aspects of city infrastructure and governance (Chambers and Elfrink, 2014). They promised “intelligent and efficient stewardship of growing cities” to reduce “traffic, parking congestion, pollution, energy consumption, and crime.” Who could be against such a program? The only cost, the executives assure readers, would be a slight reorientation in governance and IT procurement strategies. First, “the world must rethink IT investments” by “moving away from purchasing isolated services and instead focusing on end-to-end solutions that are integrated across disparate or siloed systems.” Second, “hyper collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors” with strict “adherence to deadlines” is essential. As one of their principles for making smart cities the global “norm” proclaims, “the world can’t be afraid of embracing technology in new ways. This means rethinking the contract with citizens and the services IT firms and governments provide them” (Chamber and Elfrink, 2014).

The shift in political language — wherein the social contract is replaced by the corporate contract — is subtle, but critical for understanding the politics smuggled into the technocratic agenda of smart cities (cf., Sadowski and Selinger, 2014). This explains why the six principles they propose are all based on admonishing “city leaders” for not valorizing (enough) the products and services offered by the ICT sector. Like savvy businessmen, the authors recognize the asymmetry of public-private partnerships in an era of neoliberalism. When top managers at firms earn many multiples of top civil servants, the latter readily allow the private sphere to reshape the public sphere in its own image. Corporations can afford a phalanx of economists, designers, attorneys, and public relations specialists, all skilled in presenting one possible future for the city as a technocratic pensée unique. Indeed, other than the corporate model, “there exist no large-scale alternative smart city models, partly because most cities have generally embraced a pro-business and entrepreneurial governance model of urban development” [9].

Of course, Cisco has a commercial interest here: designing, manufacturing, and installing the hardware for these networks is Cisco’s lifeblood, and future profit margins may depend on the firm’s ability to craft seductive narratives of ‘smartness.’ But numerous municipal leaders and non-profit foundations have jumped on the bandwagon, as well. There are material motivations here, too, as politico-economic analyses of revolving door employment patterns between private, public, and “third” sector concerns reveal. When civil servants can easily multiply their pay by moving from government to corporate offices, as long as they are pliable and cooperative, few have an incentive to ask hard questions (Carpenter and Moss, 2013). The boundaries between public office and private consulting are porous.

Just as important as material motives and career ambition, the narrative of the smart city, as an interpretation of technological systems, rationalizes these urban transformations (Söderström, et al., 2014). In a commentary on smart cities research, geographer Rob Kitchin argues that it is problematic the way in which “much of the writing and rhetoric about smart cities” — whether stemming from business, academia, or government — “seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical and pragmatic” [10]. This is an outgrowth of a technocratic neoliberal ideology, and a broader political economic imaginary of stable extraction of profits and taxes. Advocates of the smart city style themselves as hard-headed problem solvers who transcend the zero-sum politics that cause other to become embroiled in gridlocked conflict. Yet, they all too often slip into the attitude memorably parodied by Clifford Geertz as “I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology” [11]. Here the “I” might be smart city contractors; the “you,” city leaders; and “he” the various interest groups raising deeper concerns about the implementation of mass surveillance, data processing, and control. Take, for instance, a speech by Samuel Palmisano (2010), then the Chairman, President, and CEO of IBM, in which he asserted, “Building a smarter planet is realistic precisely because it is so refreshingly non-ideological.” However, as Geertz advises, the deployment of the term ideology is one of the most ideologized practices of modern rhetoric, a way of concealing the more contestable values and assumptions driving those dismissing their opponents as ideological. In this paper, we do not use the term ideology as an a priori accusation, but rather in its descriptive capacity — and somewhat ironically since many technologists and neoliberals alike expend so much energy claiming that their practices are the results of a value-free, Progress-driven, extra-human force (e.g., technology and markets).

To better understand the invariably political character of the smart city, consider a logical extension of some current smart city thinking, proposed as a thought experiment by philosopher and legal theorist Lawrence Solum. Singapore has “smart intersections that var[y] their red/green cycles according to traffic” (Baum, 2001), and one can imagine far more elaborate methods of controlling the flow of automobiles. Solum posits the development of an “Artificially Intelligent Traffic Authority (AITA),” which could “adapt itself to changes in driver behavior and traffic flow” [12]. The system would be designed to “introduce random variations and run controlled experiments to evaluate the effects of various combinations on traffic pattern” [13], recalling Jim Manzi’s (2012) recommendations for far more experimentation in public policy. But the system would not be very forgiving of individual experimentation with, say, violating its rules. Rather, as imagined by Solum, “[v]iolations would be detected by an elaborate system of electronic surveillance” and offenders would be “identified and immediately would be removed from traffic by a system of cranes located at key intersections” [14].

Solum uses this example to break down the usual distinctions between human and artificial meaning in law, rather than as a policy proposal for the future of traffic. The scenario is just as useful to flag the inevitably legal and political aspects of automated law enforcement, even in an area as seemingly technical as traffic. Would the cranes posited in Solum’s hypothetical surgically remove protesters, like the Ferguson marchers, who blocked highways (Harcourt, 2012)? Would anyone with an expired license or tags be plucked away as well — in a vision already half-realized by subprime lenders who stop cars remotely as soon as a payment is late (Sadowski and Pasquale, 2014)?

The problem for smart city advocates is one of overcoming several tensions, if not outright contradictions, in their ideal-type of corporatized governance. Who is ultimately in charge of “hyper collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors?” What are the penalties when, say, deadlines are not met? Who imposes them? What are the problems that the smart city will use “end-to-end solutions” to solve? How will the imposition of such “solutions” be sequenced?

To take some obvious examples: should new forms of surveillance focus first on drug busts, or evidence of white-collar crime, or unfair labor practices by employers? Wage theft is a massive problem, but rarely taken seriously by authorities (Bobo, 2011). Do the cameras and sensors in restaurants focus on preventing employee theft of food, stopping food poisoning, and/or catching safety violations? Does “traffic control” include efforts to stop honking of horns and loud motorcycles late at night in urban neighborhoods, or is that health-damaging noise deemed just as unworthy of computational scrutiny as it is casually excused by millions of small acts of policing discretion each year — as opposed to the charge of “blocking pedestrian traffic” that is commonly used by police as an excuse to harass African-Americans standing on empty sidewalks (Taibbi, 2014)? Would autonomous car control systems prioritize preventing pedestrian deaths, or merely aspire to smooth flows of cars into and out of the city?

The ideology of neoliberalism all too often provides rapid, “obvious,” and unchallenged answers, based on dubious cost-benefit analyses. Its summum bonum is to improve the business environment and spread market logics to all dimensions of human life. Yet problems multiply even within the neoliberal framework, particularly as it expects state actors to realize business goals (and vice versa). The state itself must capitulate to (and coordinate) its subjects’ purported emancipation from it. So, as Philip Mirowski argues, there is a neoliberal pattern of “hav[ing] it both ways: to stridently warn of the perils of expanding purview of state activity while simultaneously imagining the strong state of their liking rendered harmless” [15]. These tensions are a formal feature of ideological thought: it is a way of containing and coordinating commitments that are contradictory either in theory or practice (Geertz, 1973).

Although these ideological beliefs are most often pegged to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, they can be found, without much difficulty, in even our highest legislative bodies. In February 2015, the United States Senate held a hearing called “The Connected World: Examining the Internet of Things” [16]. The hearing featured statements from senators and testimony from a panel of five witnesses. The attitudes throughout were overwhelmingly excited for the smarter lives we will all be leading thanks to the IoT. While there were occasional mentions of basic issues related to security and privacy, most of the concern stemmed from worries about “over regulation,” which meant anything more than a “light touch” approach. In his statement, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D–NJ) neatly encapsulated the political economic ideology on display in the hearing — and while he was more enthusiastic and explicit in tone than others, his remarks are representative and worth quoting at length:

“This is a phenomenal opportunity for a bipartisan, profoundly patriotic approach to an issue that can explode our economy. I think that there are trillions of dollars, creating countless jobs, improving quality of life, [and] democratizing our society in ways that gives advantages to people who are being marginalized on the edges, breaking down barriers of race and class. We can’t even imagine the future that this portends of, and we should be embracing that ... And so a lot of my concerns are really what my Republican colleagues also echoed — which is, we should be doing everything possible to encourage this, and nothing to restrict it ... But for us to do anything to inhibit that leap in humanity to me seems unfortunate ... And I also believe that this should be a public-private partnership. We all have a role.”

Booker’s statements are not radical. He is in fact channeling the mainstream views about innovation in society. The least we can do is get out of the way. At best, our duty is to provide all the legal, material, and ideological support we can for innovations — and their innovators — like the IoT. Anybody who wishes to ask critical questions about the future, let alone actually constrain and slow down technological development, is de facto extinguishing an exploding economy and standing in the way of a democratizing force for justice.

Booker’s language recalls the puffery of finance capital — the same group he vigorously defended in 2012 after the leader of his political party (Barack Obama) gently suggested the possibility of ending private equity tax loopholes. Overclaiming the value of the smart city is vital to contemporary capital markets, since extreme inequality in wealth allows rentiers to live well even on the very low interest rates offered by nearly risk-free sovereign debt. The “smart money” probably will understand the “smart city” as an even more speculative bet if it peruses security experts’ warnings about the security problems now endemic in the Internet of Things. (As Bruce Schneier (2014) has observed, when computing is embedded into hardware (as is the case in most of the IoT), sensors and routers are “riddled with vulnerabilities, and there’s no good way to patch them”). The riskier the investment, the more spectacular the potential gains must be: thus the proliferation of characterizations of smart city technology as epochal, groundbreaking, world-making.

Of course, the rhetoric is not always so grandiose — there are cross-cutting, technocratic pressures to sound cool, analytical, and mechanically objective when describing new technology. Bland bipartisanship is also a favored rhetorical mood. Boosters lard manifestos, manuals, and exhortatory books with simple, straightforward examples of problems all can agree need fixing (Newsom, 2013; Townsend, 2014), in order to obscure the stakes of automated surveillance and regimentation of every moment and place. A pothole-spotting app, for instance, is a step toward at least informing (if not guaranteeing the filling of) an unmitigated, car-harming bad. But not everyone agrees with, say, Goldsmith and Crawford when they argue for “postprogressive” city management that focuses on “results not compliance” [17], once the “results” desired move far beyond fast trash pickup or smooth roads. Indeed, the very choice to deploy resources for road smoothing (rather than, say, train or bus air conditioning, or green spaces) is an inherently political one. Goldsmith and Crawford celebrate a new, “smart” fingerprinting initiative aimed at criminals [18], with nary a reflection on the ways in which these records databases create underclasses of effectively unemployable individuals.

Smart city advocates may counter that such conflicts over resource allocation are inevitable in any political order, and stress that their own deployment of sensors, apps, open data, and progress reporting cannot be expected to unravel them. But realities of scarcity apply to political attention, problematization, and action as well. Time spent organizing to deploy a “platform for citizens to engage city hall, and each other, through text, voice, social media, and other apps” [19], is time not spent on highlighting the role of tax resistance by the wealthy in creating the very shortage of personnel that smart cities are supposed to help cure by “force multiplication” of the cities’ remaining workers (Winters, 2011; Bady, 2013). Would Newark, New Jersey, need Mark Zuckerberg’s donation of US$100 million to its school system, if so many others in the billionaire class had not fought so hard to reduce their own (and corporate) taxes, shelter wealth abroad, and defang regulation? Each time a “quantrepreneur” proposes ingenious new ways of measuring and maximizing the “output” of government workers, a critical citizenry should ask: how did we come to this pass? Where has the constant pressure to “do more with less” come from? Focusing on the tech of “doing more” displaces critical debate on the why of “less” governmental resources and employees.

The corporate and governmental actors behind the smart city ideal have distorted debate in two ways. First, focusing on the narrow goals of promoting transparency and efficiency, they have obscured the revolutionary changes in law enforcement’s intensity, scope, and punitive impact portended by pervasive surveillance systems that are easily embedded into a regime of ambient law. Second, they offer a doubly crabbed view of the politics and ethics of digitizing space via the IoT: as a post hoc constraint imposed on technical systems, primarily to encourage “privacy,” in the individualistic sense of the right to control the collection of information about oneself.

By applying a hermeneutics of suspicion, a more complete — and troubling — social theory of the smart city emerges. Even at the least intrusive end of the spectrum of control enabled by the IoT, there is far more at stake than the nebulous set of concerns about perception and reputation traditionally encapsulated in the umbrella term “privacy.” And at the far end of control, the stakes are very high. The IoT is not simply a chance to watch people, but to produce and reproduce certain patterns of interaction (Bogard, 1996), and to replace people with robotic agents once data about them has been so pervasively recorded that it can be downloaded into an automaton to simulate their actions.


IV. Smart cities in societies of control
What will a social theory of the smart city demand? As opposed to the ideology of advocates, social theory is a “systematic, historically informed and empirically oriented theory seeking to explain the nature of ‘the social,’” where the social “can be taken to mean the general range of recurring forms, or patterned features, of interactions and relationships between people” [20]. To take on ideal-types of interactions in urban environments, critical patterns include relationships of allocation/extraction, oppression/emancipation, and recognition/misrecognition (Fraser, 1995). Close examination of the phenomenology of being a surveilled subject, a data subject, reveals the vulnerability of each resident of the smart city to extraction, oppression, and misrecognition.

In many ways, Foucault’s concept of biopower has explanatory fit. One form of biopower is, he writes, “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” [21]. In contrast to the modes of sovereign power that exercised the right “to take life or let live” [22], the modes of disciplinary biopower exercise the ability to administer and manage bodies and populations. The smart city not only operates on people in this way — for instance, viewing citizens as analog-cum-digital information nodes, or “citizen sensors” [23] — but it also reimagines and reconstructs the city, in itself, as a machine, which can and must be administered and managed. One theorist, inspired by Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” has deemed this type of disciplining “smartmentality” (Vanolo, 2014).

While the concept of biopower is certainly illuminating, it doesn’t give us the full picture. We can reveal more about the smart city by applying a different social theory — one that explicitly sought to succeed Foucault’s disciplinary societies, just as Foucault’s model succeeded the “societies of sovereignty” — namely, Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) notion of “societies of control.” If the sovereign power was, as Foucault points out, symbolized by the sword, and disciplinary biopower was represented by industrial machines, then control corresponds to computer networks (Deleuze, 1995). Now, of course, the existence of one mode of power does not abolish the others. Rather, it is a question of which one is the dominant operational logic. And, when applied to ICT, especially the networked technologies of smart cities, Deleuze’s framework makes clear the common logics underlying these practices and ideologies. We will provide a preliminary application of this framework to demonstrate its merit as a social theory of the smart city.

A Deleuzian “society of control” has at least three crucial components — dividuals, rhizomes, and passwords — which come together to form a continuously acting logic.

When one person observes another, a basic perceptual apparatus of sight and vision demands at least some minimally holistic assessment. It is hard to register what a walking person is wearing, for example, without also noticing gender, if the person limps or strides, is tall or short, among the hundreds of other bits of tacit knowledge that may be conveyed by an appearance. Monitored by sensors, by contrast, city dwellers are becoming less individuals than “dividuals”: entities ready to be divided into any number of pieces, with specific factors separated, scrutinized, and surveilled. What the person does becomes less important than the consequences calculated in response to emanated data streams. For example: the metadata from a phone call may be far more fateful than the talking which we usually take to be its purpose.

With digital technologies, the individual is atomized, blown apart into streams of data fed into processors. And as these sensors gain immediate influence over physical objects like doors, fences, and automobiles, there is little to no chance of the communicative dialogue that is a hallmark of human interaction. Instead, these relations are at their core strategic, in the Habermasian sense, rather than communicative (Habermas, 1984). Consequences will result not from the “unforced force of the better argument,” or even coaxing and cajoling, but rather, by force alone, as programmed by a set of managers and software developers far removed in time and space from particular implementations of programmed rules [24].

For example, facial recognition software enrolls a person’s face, and by extension the person it is associated with, into a network, whether the person wants to be enrolled or not. Hackers now claim they can even use photographs to identify fingerprints as well (Santus, 2014), a potentially massive boon for law enforcement. The health wristband paints a picture of a self by collecting and analyzing somatic data. The location-tracking sensor registers geospatial coordinates. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cell-All initiative senses “deadly” chemicals. The RFID reader only cares about the chip in your wallet. The biometric lock is only concerned with your fingerprint or irises. The list of ways that people are dividualized goes on. It is identity via synecdoche, where a factor — which factor depends on the system — becomes representative of the whole and becomes all that matters.

The array of underlying technical systems, which are often hidden from sight and mind, can be conceptualized as what Deleuze calls a “rhizome” — like the roots and shoots of a persistent, massive set of plants, it seems to pop up everywhere. Rhizomes are assemblages of concepts, relationships, materials, and actions. They have no distinct boundaries; rather, they are fluid fields, always acting, pulsating power, emanating from multiple directions with varying intensities. The city’s networked, ‘smart’ technological apparatus can simultaneously be: sensing chemicals in the atmosphere; tracking bodies as they move through space; surveilling the types of faces on the street; sending police to remove unwanted people; moving traffic along the roads; and more.

Even as a swarm of disconnected, “dumb” machines, this emerging rhizomatic apparatus of monitoring and control can be intimidating. No one wants to be on the wrong side of its algorithms. As urban technological networks grow vaster and more interconnected, secondary uses of data barely imaginable at the time “users” begin participating in the IoT may well become commonplace (Hoofnagle, 2003). Data gathers and brokers — from corporations to governments — will find a plethora of uses for the information. Consider the biometric lock: Surely the times, places, and identities of who is granted access will be categorized and logged, but what might be even more interesting to authorities is the data for who is denied access.

And people-qua-dividuals have freedom only insofar as all their “passwords” — the products of dividualization that mark access or restriction, allowing one to move freely through or be stymied by the rhizomatic system — are in working order. (Do you wish to enter through a keypad lock? Your PIN is the password. Do you wish to purchase something? Your credit card is the password.) Life is filled with these passwords. Yet, at any moment a password could be rejected — rightly or wrongly, with or without your knowledge — and the amount of control the array of underlying mechanisms have over you become bluntly apparent. Deleuze asked us to imagine “a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours” [25]. As infrastructure decays and the rhizomatic tendrils extend further, city dwellers increasingly feel the Kafkaesque frustration such a scenario entails.

Technology critics often portray these unexpected developments in technological control as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster or sorcerer’s apprentice, one that “we” have unleashed via thoughtless adoption of technology [26]. Social theorists must push the question of causation and agency further, identifying the powerful actors who remain above the fray of dividualization, weaving a web of forces that increasingly constrain the time and space of city dwellers (Krieger, 1994). Masses may be consenting to be dividualized, but only a few wrote those terms and enforce them (Rothkopf, 2009).
Through Mirowski’s detailed analysis of the cause and context of the financial crisis, we can see how these ‘smart’ initiatives plug into the ideologies and tactics of neoliberal political economy: “Technocratic elites could intently maintain the fiction that ‘the people’ had their say, while reconfiguring government functions in a neoliberal direction. These elite saboteurs would bring about the neoliberal market society far more completely and efficaciously than waiting for the fickle public to come around to their beliefs” [27]. The distinction between control and consent is important to several recent initiatives toward the creation of smart cities. Pervasive interlinking of surveillance/sensor arrays, computational processing, and virtual databases into the physical structure of cities is only legitimate if citizens can, both politically and in individual encounters, can be said to have “consented” to it. But when that consent is remote or indirect, its force, validity, and scope should be vitiated. Internet “terms of service” are the ideal-type of desiccated, hollow, pro forma “consent” that is better termed obeisance, acquiescence, or learned helplessness. Thus the overall pattern of relationships in the smart city results in a seamless “spectrum of control,” with meritorious or merely creepy technologies directly imbricated with deeply disturbing ones.

The idea of a “spectrum of control” is more than a turn of phrase [28]. It serves as a symbolic visualization of an interpretation of a text — here, the text is the city, considered simultaneously as a kind of aesthetic object and software program. As Charles Taylor has stated, in canonical work on interpretive social science, interpretation “is an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study” that is in “some way confused, incomplete, cloudy, seeming contradictory — in one way or another, unclear” [29]. Just as skilled commentators can interpret literature, judicial opinions, and works of art, we should take the city’s increasingly technologized systems of governance as expressive texts in need of interpretation.

Both the rhetoric of the “smart city,” and the actual city itself, are texts and text-analogues. They are cloudy and confused now because so much theoretical effort has gone into separating out wheat and chaff, to minimize “coercion” and maximize opportunities for “consent.” This well-meaning, but ultimately futile, normative agenda contributes to confusion and contradiction because the IoT and all-pervasive surveillance are building less a smart city than a cyborg city (Gandy, 2005) — urban places where the stakes of access to certain prosthetic extensions of the self are ever rising. In such cyborg cities concepts like consent vs. coercion, control vs. autonomy do not exist as binaries — but rather they exist on a continuum. Shoehorning the daily experience of the smart city dweller into such binary choices will only further falsify the lived experience of urbanites. Economic pressure toward a “full disclosure future” [30] makes opting out a luxury good (Angwin, 2014).

By theorizing in terms of a spectrum of control we can draw connections between technologies that were before thought of as discrete and independent. The innocuous is enfolded with the menacing. Any significant technology of the smart city becomes a tool to be repurposed for later, often-unforeseeable goals. Claude Lévi-Strauss has compared human thought processes to the work of the handyman, or bricoleur, who fixes problems as best he can with whatever tools or materials are lying at hand (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). A similar process of bricolage will embed technologies of the smart city into solutions proposed for problems large and small — and will, in turn, help define what is viewed as a problem properly solved by the polity....MUCH MORE