Reflections on Technology, Media & Culture
smart city
What comes next?
It’s a banal truism: events follow one another in sequence, inexorably. You brush teeth, you wash face, you pour cereal, you eat cereal, you rinse bowl, you attend online meeting, you get dressed … Such sequences often follow patterns. In some cases, a researcher might want to detect those patterns: to predict what comes next, … Continue reading
Shock and plunder
In her recent book on surveillance capitalism Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital corporations exploit our data, and us, just they claim that their products meet our needs and help us realise our dreams. “our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of … Continue reading
Bulk data collection and privacy
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that when crossing a busy road he instinctively looked away from oncoming traffic for fear of having his image captured on a dashcam. People are more easily recognised face-on than in profile. That short observation from his book Permanent Record delineates some salient themes in the so-called smart city: risk, … Continue reading
The smart of the deal
I’m interested in the technologies, claims and challenges of the smart city: its structures, platforms, processes, security and surveillance systems, involving big data flows and encryption, as well as the city’s opportunists, underworlds, hacks and how cities get interfered with. While futurists, urbanists, academics and cultural commentators probe the city’s covert and overt sign systems, … Continue reading
Hacking the city of the future
What happens when hackers get hacked? The headquarters of the US National Security Agency (NSA) is located between the cities of Washington and Baltimore. Amongst its many operations the NSA develops hacking tools for spying on other countries. But some of these tools leaked out, and earlier this year were turned on the city of … Continue reading
