At a time when the private finance initiative in the UK is collapsing into a discredited mess – in the case of Carillion, so literally discredited that the company is bankrupt – across the Atlantic another public body, the city of Toronto, is trying to solve its short-term problems by handing responsibility for part of its infrastructure over to a giant private company. The lucky winner this time is Alphabet, the holding company of Google. Alphabet has many subsidiaries (though only Google makes substantial profits) and one of them, Sidewalk Labs, has signed an agreement in principle to develop 800 acres of prime waterfront land in Toronto as a hypermodern wired city where the roads and the buildings themselves will become as flexible and responsive to their users’ whims as if they were made of pure software.
Sensors and cameras everywhere will record the physical world – pollution levels, traffic flow, weather and so on – and of course the behaviour of its human inhabitants. Online we are already tracked everywhere by cookies and recording scripts, while our behaviour and emotions are constantly analysed for the benefit of advertisers. In the “smart city” of the future, this would be true of our physical existence, too. The combination of fixed physical sensors with the mobile ones we carry around with us all the time in the shape of our phones would yield an unimaginable richness of data. The result would be nearly as complete as the surveillance state that the Chinese are building in Xinjiang, but without the secret police.
It’s obvious what Alphabet/Google would get from such a deal. Much as it is presently a gatekeeper for almost all of the internet that is not on Facebook, and so able to extract rents from any company that wants to be seen there, it would become the gatekeeper for those parts of the physical world that it controlled. Anyone who wanted to do business in the shiny new parts of cities that Alphabet controlled and built would end up paying for the privilege.
The benefits on the other side of the bargain are less attractive. For the cities there is the promise of money now in exchange for power and income foregone in the future – a bargain like a payday loan – but the humiliating scramble of North American cities to house Amazon’s second headquarters shows that some at least will offer almost any incentive to be associated with high technology. Newark, New Jersey, has offered tax breaks worth $7bn to attract Amazon and even that may not be enough. The prestige gained now will be paid off for years in foregone revenues.
For the citizens, there’s nothing much in these deals. There is no guarantee that they will benefit from the further refinement and processing of the data they produce, and Google collects, any more than they do at present. Nor will many of them benefit from the new developments: how much have Londoners who do not work there benefited from Canary Wharf? Cities are at their best living expressions of a raucous and conflicted democracy. They are not mausoleums to ideologies of complete control, whether these are political or commercial. This point is wider than just Google or Amazon. Silicon Valley itself is a physical area as well as an ideology, and the phenomenal sums of money that have accumulated there have made life worse for those not at the top of the heap; housing becomes unaffordable, public transport and schooling are neglected; the city becomes a playground for the few and not the many.
