"Did the ‘techlash’ kill Alphabet’s city of the future?" (GOOG)
Was there a tech backlash?
There has been a lot of blather and spiel—"Here at the firm of Blather & Spiel we believe..."— with opinion pieces in the Financial Times, NYT, The Week, The Economist and dozens of other outlets (including ours) arguing against one or another aspect of tech but that has resulted more in elegant posing (including ours) than in any action against "tech".
Smart speaker sales are still soaring, people are still sending Google as much personal information as they can via Chrome and search and gmail and will send more with Waymo and other aspects of the info-extraction biz that it seems techlash is not all it's cracked up to be.
From Fortune:
Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs had a vision of an eco-friendly, tech-heavy tomorrow-land on Toronto's waterfront, but it's been drastically scaled back.
Jesse Shapins’s blue and orange polka-dotted Stan Smiths squish the refuse-speckled muck of Toronto’s harbor.
So
far, the area consists of nothing much. A “poutinerie” food truck idles
in an unpaved parking lot. Long-abandoned soybean storage silos loom
nearby. A few run-down charter boats line a slip where a flotilla of
mallards honk at passersby.
As he explains the interlocking technologies that may someday
converge here, Shapins rotates his hands as though manipulating a
Rubik’s cube. Sidewalk’s “urban design and digital integration director”
(yes, it’s ungainly) outlines a mini-city of eco-friendly laminated
timber, some dozen buildings soaring up to 35 stories. These mixed-use
structures will be replete with solar arrays and rainwater-draining
“blue roofs.” Underground, conduits to an efficient thermal grid will
supply heat, and A.I.-powered pneumatic tubes will sort recycling.
The
neighborhood Shapins describes will be a marvel—if it ever gets built.
Sidewalk won a bid to propose plans for the area three years ago,
pitching Quayside as a tech-centric model for urban reinvention. Since
then, however, the project has been mired in controversy, amid an outcry
over data mining and objections to the civic encroachment of a powerful
corporation. While polling has found that only 17% of residents oppose
the project, that minority has voiced its views loudly. Chief among the
dissenters is Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of BlackBerry maker
Research in Motion, who says the deal “was mismanaged” from the start.
One local leader compares Quayside to Guadalcanal, a similarly tiny
tract of land where a particularly bloody World War II battle was
fought.
Bureaucratic combat continues. “Anytime you do something
bold and ambitious it’s going to have both ups and downs,” says Toronto
Mayor John Tory, who backs the plan. Waterfront Toronto, the nonprofit
development corporation that manages the minuscule patch of land, says
it will decide by May 20 whether to proceed. But while Waterfront
Toronto appears likely to approve Sidewalk’s plans, the Quayside vision
has been drastically scaled back—offering a lesson in the perils of
public-private partnership. As more of
the world’s population migrates to cities, the planet’s environmental
crises are concentrating there too. Already cities are the world’s
biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, while generating immense amounts
of trash and consuming copious quantities of water and energy. “Cities
need to be more efficient in the way they interact with the
environment,” says Sasson Darwish, an RBC Capital Markets managing
director and “smart city” financier. “The way you can do that is through
data.”
Data, of course, is Alphabet’s business. And for
Toronto—whose population is increasing at a faster clip than any other
big city north of the Rio Grande—Sidewalk seemed like an ideal partner.
When Waterfront Toronto welcomed Sidewalk in 2017, Eric Schmidt, then
Alphabet’s executive chairman, joked that the company’s founders were
excited about “all the things you could do if someone would just give us
a city and put us in charge.”
Torontonians had concerns.
Sidewalk’s arrival coincided with a mounting “techlash,” as consumers
grew distrustful of Big Tech’s data gathering. And its plans for
Quayside depend on sensors embedded throughout the environment—gathering
data on where people go, how they live, and more.
Early on,
opponents blasted Sidewalk as a thinly disguised attempt to gobble up
data on citizens’ real-world habits, extending Google’s dominance from
Internet to omnipresence. Sidewalk remained adamant it would anonymize
Quayside data, where possible, and never use it to support Google’s
advertising machinery. For some, those assurances fell flat. And
Sidewalk’s proposal to establish an independent “data trust,” which
could have put that data up for grabs by third parties, alarmed privacy
advocates even further.
Dan Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s CEO, says ads play no part in its business
model: “Zero—not one bit.” Still, Alphabet expects the unit to earn an
“adequate financial return,” says the former CEO of Bloomberg, the news
and financial-data company, and former New York City deputy mayor.
Sidewalk plans to invest in real estate. It anticipates earning fees for
advising developers. And the firm will invest in, sell, and manage new
smart-city tech. (It already has a stake in such products as an
energy-efficient alternative to traditional electric wiring.) ....
