"The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable"

We've visited Jathan Sadowski a few times including an article he co-wrote with Professor Frank Pasquale, "The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of The Smart City" which we noted in December 2018 was "One of the more important—and surprisingly popular—pieces we linked to in the past year.."
From Real Life Magazine:

The Captured City

The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable

You can’t go about your day anymore without tripping over smart stuff — smart refrigerators, smart toothbrushes, smart locks, smart whatever. All this smartness usually amounts to equipping the previously dumb thing with sensors that collect data, software for algorithmic operation, and internet capabilities so it can constantly communicate with other things and be remotely controlled by its owners, makers, and hackers.

But what does it mean to apply “smart” to an entire city? From the beginning, the “smart” model of urbanism has been an ambiguously defined project. It promises to empower urban planning by turning the city into a nexus of real-time data on every aspect of how the city (and its inhabitants) function and optimize urban infrastructure by slapping sensors everywhere and connecting it all together into a centralized network. It promises to thrive under conditions of fiscal austerity and fierce competition by importing entrepreneurialism into city hall. Ultimately, it promises, as IBM’s CEO Ginny Rometty declared, to “force economic growth” and “force societal progress.”

The corporate interests behind “smart cities” — including first movers like IBM and Cisco, joined by latecomers like Sidewalk Labs — are not only trying to sell a variety of technological solutions and management services like the control rooms that have been installed in Rio de Janeiro to Jakarta. They are also selling the ideological backdrop that justifies them. This entails constructing a narrative — simultaneously aimed at convincing planners, politicians, and the public — about the crises that cities face, the changes that are necessary, and the benefits that will come by letting corporations take the reins.

The “smart city” is not an actually existing entity. It’s a 

misleading
euphemism for a corporately controlled urban future 

As I have argued previously, the “smart city” should be understood as a socio-technical imaginary: that is, as a vision and performance of a desirable future based on marshalling technology to change society that insists on a particular model of municipal development and governance. In this vision, cities are steered by data-driven decision protocols, monitored in real-time by centralized control rooms (the “urban dashboard” whose history Shannon Mattern details here), and transformed into lean, mean, urban growth machines (a.k.a. the “smart city as a service” described in this Frost & Sullivan white paper). You can’t blame their intended targets for going along with this narrative whether it’s the planners who need help managing complex systems more effectively, the politicians who are under pressure to keep performance high, or the public who want to live in a city that serves their needs. The smart city is, after all, designed to sound awesome.

But many of the promises and prototypes that support the smart-city imaginary are in fact imaginary. Often they exist only as marketing pitches.... 

....MUCH MORE
Another (shorter) article by Sadowski was "Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism" which was introduced with:
We've visited the author of this piece a couple other times and found him to be a very interesting guy.
Although titles like the one above might elicit a "Oh another one of those articles" reaction, Sadowski exhibits subject mastery that takes his stuff beyond pop exposition to pieces worthy of serious attention.