- Good evening … and welcome to the 2056 Cyborg City conference. Throughout this conference our various speakers will be exploring the idea of the Cyborg City -- what it is and what it may mean for the future.
- For those that aren’t familiar with this idea, here is the briefest of backgrounds: as we now know, cities are alive. People had been talking about cities as living things for centuries, at least, but it was primarily a philosophical matter of discussion until the early 2030s, when urbanist scholars began collaborating with willing life scientists and (click) began to develop a rigorous classification system for various human environments. This was the beginning of Biological Urbanism.
- Since then, there have been progressively fewer questions about whether cities were alive. But over the last few years we’ve begun to ask: well, if the city is alive, then is it a cyborg?
- With respect to this topic, I am particularly interested in: if the city is a cyborg, how did it become so? And for that matter, what even makes us ask the question. Where does our interest in the city being a cyborg come from? (click)
- To begin to answer these questions, I believe we can turn to the period in history from which we saw two coincident phenomena: (click)
- First, the rise of various technologies that mediated the relationship between cities, or neighborhoods, or any other macrobiological community, and their residents -- or, what was then called civic technology, and (click)
- Second, our own increasing comfort with the idea that our use of networked information technology was becoming as central to who we were as human beings as language, or society -- a phenomenon that some have referred to as cyborgification. This period roughly encompasses the first quarter of this century.
- I’ll give a brief overview of this time in roughly half-decade intervals. I want to start a little before the beginning of the century with the 90s. This immediate precursor to our era in question sets a very important stage for everything that happens later. (click)
- In 1989 the World Wide Web was invented and the first Web browser is implemented in 1990.
- Microsoft’s Internet Explorer emerges as the browser of choice among people developing for the Web, after a period known as the “Browser Wars”, which is not actually an armed struggle.
- Portals are seen as the future of the Web.
- I am a teenager at the time. My personal website is on Geocities and my search engine of choice is HotBot because I'm a cool kid which is code speak for nerd. (click)
- Google is born, but has not yet become the cultural giant that it will. The same is true of the first generation of children that will not know a world without the internet.
- It is difficult to pinpoint the time when our consciousness began to become intertwined with our computers, but this was a period that saw our empathy for the machines we used become mainstream. (click) Perhaps it was just a natural progression of history, but the marketing of Apple products in the 2nd Steve Jobs era may have also had a lot to do with it. That era started here. (click)
- As we enter the 21st century, college students on Little Ivies are feeling special because their school is one of the few that can use the exclusive new social network called Facebook. They eagerly share their class schedules with each other. No one's mother is on Facebook. (click)
- Collaborative editing becomes a thing. Wikipedia and, a few years later, OpenStreetMap are what will become two of the larger platforms that popularize this phenomenon. They are both, at least in part, a response to the lack of free and open sources of their respective data, an ideological motivation much like that of the early Open Source software proponents. If you realize nothing else about history, realize that it operates in cycles of varying lengths. (click)
- The earliest of the organization's that would become known explicitly as Civic Technology organizations begin to sprout up, with names like OpenPlans, and mySociety. They don't know what they're doing, because no one has done it before, but they do it with gusto.
- The first civic applications also start to be released. None of them have pictures and all of them have white backgrounds, black text, and blue hyperlinks, as if any other colors are too frivolous to manage. (click)
- Electoral political campaigns in the United States begin to experiment with engaging potential voters, particularly on the younger end of the spectrum, through electronic means. However, incumbent governments show little interest in doing the same. Many governments begin to have a presence on the web, though their sites function as little more than glorified about pages and look almost as good as my Geocities site.
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This next period has a couple of very significant years.
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Let’s talk about Kenya first. (click) In 2007, Kenya is going through a contentious and in some cases dangerous general election, with scattered reports of violent intimidation of voters. In what is emerging as the “civic hacking” community around the world, this story becomes one of a small group of Kenyan developers creating a system that uses the crowd, so to speak -- the masses of voting public -- as a primary source of information about intimidation and violence at polling places for the purpose of creating greater transparency around what’s going on. (click) They call this system Ushahidi.
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During this period, a number of other technologies based around crowdsourcing emerge, for example, (click) SeeClickFix, which allows city residents to report non-emergency issues that would be traditionally reported through services such as 311. (click) Though these are not the first examples of this method (and if you’ll recall, wikipedia and OSM are two examples from the previous period that use the same methods), but the practice was not explicitly identified and named until this period.
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The surge in technological progress has a detrimental effect on several industries, one of which is printed news media. (click) The John S. and James Knight Foundation takes to funding projects that rethink news media for the changing times. One of the early projects that they fund is EveryBlock, which aims to provide hyperlocal, or microlocal, news.
(pause and actually consider the gravity of the next section before speaking)
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An interesting and spontaneous type of crowd sourced transparency emerges in this period as well. (click) Early in the morning on New Years Day, 2009 at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, CA, Oscar Grant is shot and killed by a BART police officer while handcuffed, face-down, on the platform. This event is independently video recorded by several bystanders, uploaded to YouTube, and also shared with what are at this point the traditional media outlets.
(pause)
This and later events would not have been able to be captured and disseminated in quite the same way were it not for other developments during this period -- specifically (click) the release of the iPhone (click) and Android operating systems and the resultant explosion in popularity of portable devices capable of making those recordings, as well as (click) the launch of video sharing services such as Youtube, and (click) their subsequent acquisition by Google.
(pause)
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Also, most governments now have a presence on the web, though their sites function as little more than glorified about pages and look almost as good as my Geocities site.
- This period and bleeding into the next is a big time for governments getting into the game. (click)
- Code for America, an organization that originally works with local governments to bring bleeding edge technology practice to bear government projects is founded in 2010, but starts actually serving cities in 2011 (click) with the launch of their fellowship program. This is the first class of fellows. If you look over to your right you'll see a much younger and bushy-tailed me. (click) Later this year Code for America also launches their Brigade program to establish pockets of technologists across the country engaged with civic technology. (click)
- In the UK, the Government Digital Service is founded with the mandate to transform the way that the UK government delivers services to their residents, employing a “digital-by-default” strategy. Their work inspires and informs the transformation of a number of mostly local efforts in the US, with cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and San Diego building GDS-like teams of their own. (click)
- Snowden leaks a whole host of files obtained from the NSA, which helps to spark an ongoing conversation that will continue through the decade. (click)
- More killings of African Americans, particularly those unarmed and at the hands of law enforcement professionals, including a partial list of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, and Freddie Gray, sparks the #BlackLivesMatter movement which heavily leverages platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for their action.
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(click)
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In the aftermath of a grizzly mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA, a string of cases in which local and federal governments issue subpoenas to gain access to defendants' encrypted phone data begin to raise big questions about peoples’ relationship to their devices. As always-on, always-present trusted tools, should access to the contents recorded by them be subject to subpoena? (click)
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We also began to see early diagnosed cases of vicarious trauma, a phenomenon previously most commonly associated with professional counselors, in the general public. These cases come as a result of the constant and immersive exposure to tragedy and injustice around the world through social media. (click)
- Following the lead of federal organization 18F, the National Conference of Mayors endorses a tour of duty initiative. These programs introduce policy shifts in multiple cities that provide incentives for local talent, particularly in the technology sector, to work for their governments for short stints of one to two years.
- Governments begin to focus on how they customize their experience with citizens, realizing potential that had been building over the last decade or two, and many follow the long lead that nations like Estonia have given to create unified citizen records. (click)
- A number of private clouds providers have a surge in business. Instead of relying on large organizations such as Google or Facebook to manage both their data and the services atop, it becomes popular to use services that operate on an individual’s data that they can host themselves. A few new authentication protocols are developed to make it easier to leverage these platforms. (click)
- Government regulations begin to come down the pike to curb discrimination in peer-to-peer online marketplaces after dozens of reports revealing bias across sharing economy services. If you’ve ever wondered the provenance of Sharing Economy Non-Discrimination Act, it comes from this time. It was first introduced to Congress in 2021, and wouldn’t finally be passed until 14 years later. Of course, to this day, there are critics of these ordinances, decrying their unenforceability, as it is so difficult to prove intent, and often there is none explicitly.
- At this point we as humans are gaining a firm understanding that, first, the devices we use know more about us than we do in our own heads, and second, that technology we've created over the last few decades isn't something that's nice to have, but instead is vital to our way of life. It is not something in addition to the city; it is part and parcel of it.
- It is also shortly after this time that the term “civic technology” falls out of favor, with many feeling that it is redundant. Networked information technology becomes simply another infrastructural component of the city. We to have public roads and public schools, etc, but we often leave off the "public" in talking about these things because public infrastructure becomes the default. Likewise, as networked information technology becomes more central to our world, private and recreational technology is noteworthy; "civic" technology is assumed.
- This is where the Open Source Software infrastructure and maintenance subsidies start to crop up. As it is no longer reasonable to hope that the technological infrastructure that runs our society will figure out how to maintain itself, the federal government in the US begins to divert tax dollars explicitly for that purpose. (click)
- At the 2026 DjangoCon, a grizzled Andrew Godwin delivers an impassioned presentation on his newest invention. At the conclusion of his talk, he asks where we will see ourselves in 10 years time -- what is the next major movement in networked information application development? His language resonates deeply with the crowd of technologists and early adopters, who have moved further on their journey to acknowledging the inherent way that their tech has become a part of them than the general population will for another decade: in 1995 we were desktop applications. In 2005 we were websites. In 2015 we were rich mobile web applications. And in 2025 … Who, he asks, will we be in 2035? From our perspective of 2056 we have the luxury of knowing that answer, but we still often forget that we are living in the middle of history.
- There are a few things that are important to take away from this:
- It’s not any particular piece of technology that is important in civic tech, nor is it all of the technology in aggregate. Instead, the idea of Civic Tech -- that technology can and should mediate our relationships with our cities -- as a positive value is one of the most important outgrowths of the early 21st century.
- In thinking about what you should do as a technologist today, consider that it’s not sufficient to think about what tech will look like in the future and project that onto cities. Instead, bear in mind that technology is part of the system of a city and evolves in concert with the social needs around it. Think about what that social context is and how it will change. Be aware of the context of your inventions; nothing is without values.
- History is messy and cyclic, and so is the future. One day we may be able to give a history of the Cyborg City. However, "we often forget that we are in the middle of history". Our idea of the Cyborg City and what is relevant in it changes from year to year. So, it may be decades before we can do the idea justice, much like we had to wait decades to give an adequate history of Civic Tech.
Thank you.