Unenforceable Heritage, Socialist Star Trek And The Surveillance State
... and what they have to do with a design guide for small businesses
My professors at Erasmus called it “command economy”, where attempts were made from government to direct all trade and human interaction. As opposed to a “market” economy, where trade and human interaction are led by the sum of millions of individual decisions.
Neither has happened in full. Ever. Or have they?
Some degree of control is always desirable. Too much can be toxic. Voluntarily agreed rules that provide checks and balances are better than Top-Down rules that control without accountability.
Why am I telling you this? Partly because news came that Apple has announced that they will include code in the new iPhone operating system that can track images and alert the authorities for potential criminal activity.
That is scary for many reasons. First and foremost, because despite their claims that errors have been limited to one in a trillion, there is no such thing as 100% accuracy in these systems. And many things can go wrong.
Second, but no less important, because if the technology to invade users’ photos is in place, it can be used as surveillance to control people’s private lives and alert the authorities for potentially undesired behavior.
Building strong communities requires bringing people together around common values and principles. Technology can be a tool for that purpose but it will not do the job for us.
In the early 2000s, following a success story from Rio de Janeiro, every city wanted to be a Smart(TM) City. That, in layman’s terms, meant that they made a huge investment in sensors and cameras that would digitalize government. The “Smart” moniker was invented by one of the companies selling sensors and control systems.
Appropriately, Chilean communist president Salvador Allende in the 70s had a precursor of the total control “sit-room” that monitors for total compliance. It was called Project Cybersyn, sold to the Chilean government by one Stafford Beer, who had developed an “electronic nervous system” that allowed the entire economy to be controlled from a room where all the data would be compiled.
Decades after Cybersyn was shut down and the Operations Room was destroyed after the military seized the government in 1973, and bearing no relation to that fact, I had the opportunity of traveling to Spain to tour its Smart Cities in an effort led by Telefonica and the Spanish government to export their tech to Latin American Cities.
I wasn’t so sure it would work.
In that trip I got to see beautiful little towns and bustling medium-sized cities where insane giant rooms with 20 ft. dashboards, tens of individual, dual-screened terminals and tier 3 data centers attempted to control everything in town, from crime to traffic, using a complex array of cameras and sensors dotted around town. Those little towns must have paid millions to Telefónica to install the control rooms and to secure the licenses for the software, and were vying to become the next Smart(TM) city.
To no avail, sadly. As soon as you leave the control center you can see that the gap between the technology in those rooms and the culture on the street is too large.
Spain has some of the best quality of life in the World. Cities and towns are human, tree lined and walkable. For context, Spain is where the city of Algar, with a population of 1,400, is asking UNESCO to grant world heritage status to the outdoor chat. This strange, heritage-worthy custom, dubbed “the opposite of social media”, is basically going out before dinner to chat with neighbors on the sidewalks.
Outside the control rooms, hundreds of neighbors, shop owners and visitors meet on makeshift benches, bars and tables set up on sidewalks and alleys, after siesta and before dinner, to chat, have a quick drink among friends and be loud and happy.
Streets are lined with shops that sell food, services, apparel, hats and thousands of other goods. The attempt to control that from a room chock full of technology, by the same people who would rather be enjoying a few chupitos outside is futile, IMO.
Smart(TM) Cities bet on the use of IT to improve governance. Any shortfalls will be blamed on the technological side and not on the gap between what the technology intends to achieve and what the people want.
Technology will always take on in higher echelons of society. It will be expensive and experimental at first and then it will find new ways to make access more massive. Think of smartphones and TVs.
Mass adoption doesn’t come from a good idea alone but from a set of conditions that make it inevitable.
Inevitability comes when systems are organic, open, and allow free agents to react and make their own decisions. You may force the adoption of an unnatural system, as Allende and many others tried, from Cambodia to Cuba, but the outcome will always be implosive and violent.
To achieve higher levels of adoption for any technology, it must solve issues that many people see as problematic, in an organic, easy to interact with and easier to adopt package. Like Facebook solving distance and communication for billions of people with a tool even the most technologically averse can easily use.
What does this have to do with anything?
Not much, I just wanted you to read all the way down here, where I can shamelessly plug my product. You see, small businesses have always been catalyst for strong communities. They are low tech, community building tools. Most strong towns we know started at the intersection of trade routes and built towns around makeshift marketplaces. Then they became marketplaces for ideas and are ultimately labor markets.
Small, independent, local businesses don’t need much high tech to catalyze community. They just need to get their design right, invest in their block, neighborhood and community as much as in their trade.
Back to the shameless plug. My book dissects the design elements to help small business owners create successful storefronts. It’s available in my Gumroad store at successfulstorefronts.carrd.co
The impact that a good small storefront can make in a neighborhood is massive, and that will happen if things are done well, regardless of the degree of “command” that the economy is under or the technology used to try to control them.
Besides the shameless plug, I enjoyed learning more about smart cities, the precedents of the current Smart CityTM craze and about the logic behind it.
Hope you did too.
The image below looks like a Star Trek control room. It is the “Operations Room” from project Cybersyn, part of the Chilean CHECO system of economic simulations. From that modern dashboard, president Allende thought he could direct and control how chileans traded, what they bought, when, and where, and who they bought from. The next picture of shortages and food lines is the outcome of that idea.
Ideas have consequences.