a professor who's an expert on the impact on the internet and now before i introduce afghani morozov i'd like to say how this one and a half hours is going to work we're going to be on time because he has to leave at 1 30 so i would like to have a q a after his presentation so we're going to have some 40 minutes for your q a so be ready to ask questions uh uh we'll try again to do our best and can find the time limit uh i work at la stamp on my name is anna mazzera last is an important italian newspaper the reason why i've been asked to moderate this presentation actually there are a number of reasons why i've been asked once is that um the translator of his litter's book uh mr fousey couldn't be with him and the second reason why i have been chosen is that i've asked i've written a barcode together with the um las corsa uh for uh the letterta publishing and i'd like to thank the uh publisher um mr later who's sitting here in the first row for giving us the present the possibility to uh write a guide on the rights of the internet that we've drafted at the lower chamber and the italian parliament that has also been presented at the internet governance forum in brazil i'm quoting this publication because i believe it is relevant i believe that the rights on the internet are an important subject matter and um they are very close to the heart of attorney moritz any morals of it doesn't like he's being defined as uh um skeptic versus the internet but he has a full egg battle against the techno optimists indeed uh if you can see the world as divided into ten techno skepticists and techno optimists and the technologists believe that uh it is a good tool to democratize what is a he believe that we have to forgo our rights the art about the privacy member parliamentary whom i'd like to thank he's also much published by duterte he's the strongest chain champion worldwide on the fight for the safeguarding of privacy rights he has studied personal rights in the digital era and i'm very sorry he can couldn't be with us because i believe that they could have a very interesting discussion with our guests i'd like to introduce professor morozov as you know he's a very young scholar he's 32 he comes from belarus he has studied and taught in the us he speaks some italian as well and as a matter of fact we're going to give him the floor in english and without further ado i'd like to give him the floor and we hope that he shall take some of the kind of questions with ron thank you very much over to you afghani good morning i've learned some italian over the past two years but unfortunately i cannot speak as fast as i can in english let me walk you through my presentation which will be somewhat uh linear but i hope it will all make sense uh in the end so i will start very briefly by giving you a history of the smart city as a term because i think it's very important for us to understand the genealogy uh and the corporate genealogy uh of that term where it comes from and what function it serves currently then it will subject that uh term as it currently exists uh to a critique uh which will not be very extensive uh then i will talk a little bit about the role that technology companies and the technology sector more broadly place in um supporting uh contemporary capitalism which has run into quite a lot of problems so we'll also give you a brief theory of how silicon valley fits into capitalism of today where it stands vis-a-vis institutions like wall street where it stands with institutions like governments and i will conclude by giving you an overview of what an alternative uh digital smart data intensive city might look like that will not be tied to a couple of corporate players and that will not default to an extremely in a liberal set of premises about who owns data whether data should be treated as a commodity and whether we should be relying on the likes of uber airbnb or google to run our cities so that's uh quite an intensive plan that we have for today and i hope we will not get lost along the path if you do get lost signal to me and i will try to situate you where we are in the narrative so to go to part one of what i have promised the genealogy of the smart city i think you have to understand uh two things about its origins uh first of all uh there are two uh sources that are very important for understanding where a lot of this linguistic uh innovation comes from in the last 30 years right you one of them is the discourse around technology and the second one is the discourse around cities so if you look at the discourse around technology that's a very complex historical issue but nonetheless you would probably notice that we are drowning in concepts and terms that seem to be thrown at us almost every year big data sharing economy internet of things smart city there is seems to be you know algorithmic regulation uh open government open data you can probably continue that list almost indefinitely right there is something very odd happening in terms of how this mini narratives pop up right they appear almost out of nowhere and they usually try to zero in on a particular trend or phenomenon or problem to which somebody in the technology sector usually has a solution to sell right so uh there is always a matching set of solutions going with big data if there is too much data there is a fantastic new cloud-based database to help you handle it if there is a problem with you know the sharing economy uh there is a company or platform like uber and airbnb eager to come in step in and resolve it there is an entire almost uh you know intellectual industrial complex uh that is responsible for uh producing and solidifying uh and circulating those buzzwords much of it happens in north america but increasingly it's spreading to europe right so there is you know an industry of books pamphlets essays conferences and so forth which produces nothing but buzzwords which then find themselves into brochures of major corporations and through brochures they find themselves into budgets of various public institutions who are now expected to surround themselves with the latest solution on offer thus uh you know to zero in on some of the uh parts of this intellectual industrial complex you know in the case of the smart city we have so-called smart city expos right which are big conferences where technology vendors uh get together what they do is that they usually sponsor and fly in the city administrators elected politicians to come and visit those smart city expos usually held in fantastic cities like barcelona um in the meantime there is some kind of a conference component going on and a bunch of intellectuals discuss issues about the future of the world while in the back rooms there are lots of deals struck between those companies and the public administrations right so this is more or less how the smart city discourse propagates right i mean there are many other institutions i'm just giving you some anecdotal evidence to situate you into its uh genealogy so this is the uh sort of technological origins of that buzzword the smart city there is also of course the urban origin of it right and as i mentioned there are two big sources of this buzzwords these days one of them is silicon valley and technology the other one is the cities and any of you who has worked on urbanism uh wouldn't fail to notice that uh you have as many urban growers walking around talking about creative cities or you know sustainable cities or how mayors will rule the world as you have technological growers who go around telling us how google uber are the future of the economy so a similar thing has been happening as i've said in this domain of urbanity where there is this constant pressure now on cities uh to not just be creative or to be sustainable or to be green but also to compete with each other right and you have a similar uh industrial sort of intellectual industrial complex in this case made up mostly of consulting firms uh that have taken upon the job of ranking cities against each other uh trying to understand which of them are more creative which of them are less creative and as any good consulting company uh knows uh the next thing you need to do after producing a ranking is to come up with a solution how a city can improve their standing and ranking so uh what we have seen happen in the case of sort of urban cases is that you have virtually all of the big consulting firms from you know deloitte to mckinsey set up urban institutes and city institutes within themselves and now work almost exclusively with city administrations and helping them improve themselves right so um given this context and i'm simplifying a lot you can see that a concept like the smart city uh finds itself on rather fertile territory right so on the one hand you have uh technology firms like cisco like hp like microsoft which for various reasons need to find new markets uh for their products right so in the case of ibm which i think is the easiest case to understand you have a company that has spent more than a decade building this thing called watson right which is an artificial intelligence engine which was supposed to be key to the future of ibm and help them do things that no one else can do i mean so far it has just won a computer game on television and it seems to be its greatest achievement but ibm needs to justify all the billions that have been poured into developing watson so what does ibm do they come up with a new buzzword called cognitive computing and they say that cognitive computing is key to virtually everything and it's especially key to the cities so they build up smart city practice and now they're supposed to convince citizens that basically one way to become smart as to find a way to deploy watson to make their buses run on time or to basically acquire the local administration to see why your garbage was not picked up so you can actually send the message in and someday all the tower in some cities in canada you can send a message to a city administration and watson somehow will step into the process uh understand your query and inform you why your garbage is still where it is as if that will uh somehow help you uh survive that mess um so uh again that's just the context right so the context i think here is by now should be quite well understood by 2008 2009 we have an invasion of smart city rhetoric and brochures that are being presented to syria's as uh more or less salvation to whatever problem ails them and those problems can be quite extensive ranging from their uh desire to save on energy costs so you can introduce all sorts of sensors and all sorts of machine learning techniques in order to understand where energy is wasted to uh saving other types of resources water so forth uh garbage collection i know the the ultimate dream is to have which already has been employed in cities like boston uh is to have trash cans which can notify the trash collection company when the trash cans are full so that the bus will optimize its route to pick them up i mean you have such sort of nice uh and uh somewhat trivial uh deployments uh of such technologies which of course cost a lot of money and then you know the sky is the limit and the uh sort of exact nature of the technological firm and the products that it's selling will define the pitch and the actual product right so in the case of ibm the idea of the smart city will always be tied to this vision of cognitive computing in the case of a company like cisco which primarily makes routers and connectivity devices it will always be tied to the idea of connectivity so they would like to build real-time devices and real-time systems that will tell a city how many tourists are in its parks right so you can actually better do crowd management so you can actually better distribute resources again you know the perennial hope is that we'll be able to manage garbage better so you can put more trash cans in certain zones of the park with the tourists congregate right it's the small tiny little logistical uh improvements to how the city operates right and then there are variations which i think again are mostly trivial but they uh get hold of the consumer imagination quite quickly so the cities of copenhagen and amsterdam for example have been experimenting with a system of smart street lights right where uh when it's raining uh your street light traffic light knows that it's raining and it knows that you're on a bicycle so the waiting time for you given that it's raining on a bicycle will be shorter than to the person in the car right uh then again you think about it and you say well it's great right what's there not to like if i'm the bicyclist finally i'll be able to spend less time getting getting wet uh in the in the rain time right so such small organizational improvements you can think of them um quite i think easily and there will be many more given that everything can now be interconnected uh and thanks to that interconnection all sorts of savings and new efficiencies can be generated right so um that i think is the uh state of the smart series so far as of today by and large it's a corporate driven effort to impose all sorts of rationalization and efficiency producing technologies on cities which come of course with a lot of costs which are not just costs that are monetary there are also costs that are political and democratic because um clearly there is uh there are a lot of other commitments that have to be made seriously have to sign deals which often are multi-year deals so you'll have to commit yourself to a product from cisco not just for a year for two years but for 10 or 20 years right given that uh it's getting increasingly harder for public institutions to opt out of corporate contracts that they sign and that will become even harder if europe signs up to all of the trade races like ttip tisa and many others it will actually not be that easy for new administration elected in a radical city for example to basically say we don't want to be dealing with cisco anymore we want to manage our water garbage on our own right because then a company like cisco under the new conditions in this new trade treaties will actually be able to go and sue the city and claim damages and thus make even more money right by providing no services whatsoever um then there are many other commitments right there is the problem that most of the technologies that they sell are proprietary technologies right which have customer lock-in there is no way for you to move from one vendor to another as i have described the situation to you with the smart city expose as sort of meeting places between the industry and governments what open happens there is that there are very shady tender processes very often there are no tender processes and citizens find themselves uh committed to a platform that they cannot modify they have no ability to look inside it they have no idea to understand what algorithms power it they have no idea to understand what kind of biases might already be built into the algorithms right and again when we're thinking about trivial things like understanding whether it's raining while you're on a bicycle uh the exact workings of that um algorithm probably wouldn't matter but you know last year i was doing a documentary about uh data for al jazeera and we went to see one of the offices of ibm in new york and i had to sit there with one of their senior engineers and of course his pr handler and they were explaining to me all of the good things that will come as ibm technology saturates our cities and one of the uh projects and ideas that they pitched me was that finally thanks to sensors which now are quite advanced and you're not just looking at weather you can also be looking at you know facial expressions so you can actually be more or less understanding you know heat maps you can be understanding uh how we feel you can make a prediction about our emotional state or the emotional state of people in a certain area and they were telling me that well finally we would actually be able to understand how happy or unhappy people in a certain place feel and of course if you're pitching it to city administrators i mean what's there not to like right and the immediate question i asked them was well okay suppose you sell it to a city like baltimore in the united states which happens to be a place where a lot of black radical young people tend to riot quite often because of police brutality right uh what if the police identifies that in a certain area of the city there are quite a lot of unhappy people getting together in the public square uh what's gonna happen then uh and it's a question that the ibm's pr handler immediately suppressed but i think you can understand the implications right that ultimately as you move to a world of predictive analytics where a lot of this data will be harvested and harnessed in order to make assessments not just about how to allocate trivial resources like garbage trucks which might not be trivial in some italian cities but uh as you also allocate things like police forces right and as you make decisions about whom to lock up whom to uh grab preemptively how are you gonna deal with the problem like refugees right which also now increasingly is a new pitch to a lot of these technology companies ibm has speeched one of its uh predictive policing technologies to german authorities precisely to deal with the refugees and they claim that they can recognize a refugee who might be threatening to the public order just by analyzing uh and comparing their biometrics and their face right i mean you have to understand we aren't just talking about trivial distribution of resources because once you put these sensors and once you put this technologies out there into the public sphere so to say they can be harnessed for all sorts of purposes right and of course we are kind of intuitively understand it with our phones when fbi and law enforcement agencies come and demand to open them up but think about universalizing it that infrastructure and putting it virtually everywhere in the built environment and in the cities where we are right it has huge implications and the kinds of algorithms you built into the system to make predictions you don't want just to leave their design to the likes of ibm right and there is no way to currently introduce much transparency into how they are designed and how they function right so there are all sorts of problems with this corporate solutions right and i don't want to brag about that too far all i want to say is that at this point the smart city represents a program that is primarily driven by corporations that does not necessarily favor the interests of the citizens that is uh conducted in a manner that is virtually untransparent and that at its heart has two big rationales one rationale is to uh do more with less right which is i think uh you know it's it's a famous you can attribute it to many people of people like buckminster fuller is often credited with that kind of engineering more or you can do more with less but you know i think if margaret thatcher had to invent that slogan as a slogan for austerity agenda she would also be quite happy with do more with less because ultimately this is what technology allows you to do it allows you to do more with less right and i think that we have to understand that rationale and the second rationale which i mentioned is just policing right and one of the more advanced installations of the smart city technologists is a city like rio de janeiro where you can actually go and see these giant operation rooms where you have data pulled in from all sorts of monitors to police units where decisions are made uh about how to deploy and redeploy police throughout the city right so let's just stop there you understood what i have to say about the corporate driven smart city let's just move on to the second part which i promised you which is how the technology sector as a whole fits into contemporary capitalism because unless you fail to understand that we will miss the real problems facing the cities for fighting this kind of buzzword driven uh trivia coming from corporations right and i think this is the mistake made by a lot of other critics of the smart city all right there are a lot of well not a lot but there are two or three books that now critically engage with the smart city as an idea and basically most of them leave their discussion at the level of reading the brochures of these technology firms of course if you just read the brochures of ibm and cisco you will find that you know as any brochure it's primarily marketing speak and it has no critical substance and it's not meant to have that critical substance because no administrators tracking deals with those companies actually read those brochures right those brochures are just distributed for legitimation purposes they have no actual critical substance to them but i don't think that it's correct to stop our critique of the smart city at just level of reading the brochures because there are clearly a lot of effects that the deployment of technologies not just by the likes of cisco hp and ibm but also by the likes of uber airbnb google and many others not to mention drones and 3d printers will have on how we live in cities how we organize production how we organize uh our common activities and this is the part that i think is important for us to understand because unless we understand where the real threats to the city come from aside from these corporate deals we will never be able to articulate an alternative agenda right so for the rest of my talk i would like to uh get you to a point where you can understand where i think the real threats come from regardless of whether they are called the smart city right now or not they clearly have to do with silicon valley and they clearly have to do with technology and also try to outline what are some of the ways to fight back so um let me step back a little bit from the cities and talk about uh what's happening uh with uh technology and capitalism as a whole so uh since we had the festival of the economy i think actually i would be justified to take this little detour so uh my my overall theory of how silicon valley and its offer fits into contemporary capitalism is as follows so if you look at um the ways in which capitalism has traditionally dealt with this crisis right how it has dealt with some of its most vulnerable moments right it has always found a way to more or less extend its life by making all sorts of compromises and finding allies in places which you would not necessarily think about as its natural allies right if you look at the uh emergence of the welfare state right across europe but also in america with great society uh there was clearly it was not you know if you listen to a lot of commentary in america for example you would think that the welfare state is some kind of an invention by uh the the communists in the soviet union to destroy capitalism right which of course it's not from the very beginning if you go and read the fundamental tax rate and you know the beverage report and many other tax written by the architects of the wealth of state in britain but also in sweden germany and elsewhere you will see that the welfare state from the very beginning was established as a way to strengthen capitalism from its internal crisis and its turbulence right so you actually wanted to have a way to socialize things like insurance education and health care in order to have a workforce that would continuously return to work despite whatever crisis and hits that might have hit the economy right it was also matched with a keynesian economic agenda of focusing on stimulating aggregate demand and as a result uh you had 30 or 40 years of quite spectacular growth in both europe and america which is a period which ended by the early 1970s right then capitalism had run into another crisis the roots of which of course are numerous and probably uh well known to to many of you which have to do with the regulation of finance and the regulation of capital flows has to do with the oil crisis that was happening in uh in the middle east uh it has to do with the war in vietnam and they need to finance it the growing student movement and so forth i'm not going to give you a history of uh sort of capitalism condensed here but i think we understand that something happened in the early 70s and the solution to that crisis right if you follow the rhetoric of in the work of people like wolverine street or colleen crouch is that uh governments eventually sooner or later turn to that right so they found an ally in the finance and banking industry whose activities were deregulated but since it was deregulated first if you follow for example worldwide strix argument it was mostly by having governments uh borrow more and more money to pay for the things that they could no longer afford themselves or it was by having citizens borrow more and more to buy houses to buy cars to buy all the things that they came to expect from a well-functioning economy but could no longer afford because the real incomes were stagnating right so i mean this is the overall i think background which does make sense which to use the uh terms of uh world bank streak again allowed capitalism to buy time right so he talks about buying time so there were many mechanisms of buying time right and that was one of those mechanisms colin crouch on the other hand talks about privatized keynesianism right and what he means by that is that ultimately it was primarily through the uh vital availability of private credit private debt that all of us could suddenly get regardless of whether we actually were eligible for it right which ultimately then led to the financial crisis and the housing crisis that capitalism continued functioning right and continued expanding and gave us all an illusion that things were working fine right what i would like to argue and again i'm skipping over a lot of conceptual and historical territory is that by 2008 2009 it was obvious that a capitalism had hit a new crisis and b that the traditional ways of dealing with it which a first verse the alpha state which itself got traditionally kind of withered away and shrunk and that when no longer capable of offering that way out and it was exactly two technology firms in silicon valley that capitalism now looks in order to save itself so in a sense the argument i'm making more broadly which at this point is very connected to cities but stands also on its own is that ultimately it is silicon valley and technology firms which offer any hope not just of salvation to our leaders and elites but also at least give them some rhetorical chance of justifying what it is that they do because they are the only industry capable of indicating and sign posting any kind of possible bright future that does not end in complete misery people losing their jobs everything becoming privatized and us losing benefits like health care and education you will not count on any other industry banks oil firms production firms construction firms to come up with any positive narrative that can justify capitalism at this point it's extremely hard the only industry that is capable of projecting that nicer future and reconciling all the problems and all the internal crises is the technology firms right and that's the broader background and i'll explain to you what exactly i mean in the next five minutes and then i'll move again back to the cities because city as a unit forms an important part in this project of salvation um so how will that salvation come about so this is where we really need to understand what is the offer that silicon valley and technology firms make at this point if you look at a company like google or facebook right and those are two firms which all of you probably use in your daily life if not facebook but at least google right how does google work right we all know how it works you go you type in a search or you use its email and suddenly the results appear and what's even better nobody has to pay for it right right so you got your search needs satisfied for free you get their communication needs satisfied for free i mean what happened there wasn't capitalism supposed to work differently we were supposed to be paying for everything and you know we were told that privatization will result in us having to pay for more and more things more and more goods we'll have to be paying more and more money out of our own pockets well of course we know what's happening there and it's that you have the advertising industry subsidize the provision of many of those goods and services right how because google also collects the data about you in the process of offering those services and that data then can be profitably sold or you know an auction can be organized around that data so that an advertiser will subsidize what it is that you are doing with a company in a service like google or facebook clearly if you think back 15 or 20 years ago the way in which we paid to satisfy our information communication needs was paid for very differently right we did have institutions like libraries universities post offices which did not rely on advertising to pay for themselves right they relied on taxes and they relied on stamps for example they relied on subsidies in order to offer services to cities right when you went to the post office the post office didn't tell you well we'll let you mail that letter for free if you let us open it read it and then insert an advertising inside it and then forward it on i mean that was a possible model through which you could have offered a service like that right and in retrospect as our real incomes are stagnating and many of us are losing jobs and they can no longer afford to pay for many of the things we could pay for in the past i think that compromise would actually look much more appealing today than it did 20 years ago why because we have less money to spend on such things right so that's just a little aside what i would like to argue is that essentially that model of having advertising subsidize more and more goods and services through data collection lies at the heart of a much broader and wider expansion of silicon valley is the provision of many other services if you have followed the news closely you might have noticed that last month there was a big scandal in the united kingdom when it was discovered that the country's national health service right basically the country's primary welfare institution that everybody in britain is proud of even the conservatives has been given the data of patients four or five million people to google right why because google has promised that its artificial intelligence unit called deepmind would be able to analyze that data and would be able to derive all sorts of interesting insights from it about how and what kind of people are likely to develop kidney disease right the reason why a company like google is capable of making such predictions is because they managed to basically suck in so much data that they have developed advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence capacities that are not available to anybody else including the national health service and probably even including most of the other government or even private institutions out there right i mean i talk about this as data extractivism which is an interesting term which i think is self-explanatory but what i think you have to understand is that it's not as if when you transact with google they offer you an email service or a search service and you give them your data and then the data goes to advertising and then nothing else happens the data does not just go to advertisers it also stays with google which allows google to become more and more powerful and develop more and more ways and means of analyzing uh data and thus becoming a powerful player in industries where they had no presence before so they can suddenly become extremely powerful in healthcare they can suddenly become very powerful in self-driving cars i mean how do self-driving cars come about they come about primarily because google has managed to solve two problems one was the problem of keeping track of real-time traffic and second one was making sure that you can actually map out all the cities and understand where everything is right crucial to that mission you look for example at the traffic data was being able to pull the data real time from as many sensors as possible and where the sensors come from they come from your phones because your android phones are generating data then that feeds into google and allows it to develop uh you know technologies for self-driving cars for you know self autonomous parking uh this is how it's done it's this data residue that is generated in the context of using services which we take for granted and think are mostly trivial that turns these companies more or less into sole providers of goods uh that have to do with automation and advanced data analytics and machine learning which basically means that you know we can still imagine a future where advertising will exist for the next 5 50 100 years i think it's a future that i personally find extremely dubious because you know the moment china slows down the ability of google to generate as much money from ads goes down as well the moment the global economy slows down the advertising market also becomes extremely volatile the moment somebody invents an app to block ads in your browser which has already happened and a lot of people already using that market also shrinks to assume that that market somehow rests on extremely solid foundations i think is ridiculous right and if you assume that advertising market will not be forever then you have to start wondering what will happen once google is the only company capable of analyzing what it is that you know is happening with your health data and how you can actually provide uh insights around it and there is nobody else capable of doing that well it's quite simple to understand they start charging and they start charging for services which are they are the only company capable of providing right so that's just the context that i think will understand will help you understand that you know we are not moving to a world where everything is free we're moving to a world where a couple of companies will control the key resource in this new economy which is data and they will be in a position to dictate feudal like terms to the rest of us because there will be nobody else around to challenge them right so uh but that is just one of the ways i mean i can continue the google itself makes a fascinating case i mean if you look at how they manage to integrate all the different data points that you generate while using their platforms and their apps you'll be amazed i mean there is a there is a new app called google goals which you know tells you how they want to turn you into this extremely productive individual you know who works in silicon valley builds startups uh wakes up very early and jogs uh three times a day i mean it's called google goals which already should give you some uh sort of pause for reflection what does google goals does it analyzes your activity on all google services including google calendar right including google mail right and it tries to identify and you know how google calendar works now so when google calendar sees that you have a plain reservation that you've bought a plane ticket or that you have a meeting that you've discussed with somebody it automatically adds that meeting and it adds that plane residential and it adds that hotel booking to a calendar so you don't even need the secretary anymore because all of that is done automatically thanks to the data and artificial intelligence that these firms have built right so and this is already a lot of people using it you know my phone does it for me i don't even have to do anything you know all i have to do is just to consume and all my calendar will be filled in with uh appointments and commitments automatically what does google goals do you basically tell it at the beginning of the week well today this week i would like to spend an hour studying foreign languages i would like to spend two hours jogging and google goals then searches for little gaps in your calendar which is already filled in with uh commitments automatically and tells you well you know thursday afternoon four o'clock great time to study languages you know friday morning 7 00 a.m go jogging you have a free hour and then again that ties to the kind of broader uh dream and utopian vision of virtual assistants that google is building which you know a lot of people in europe of course sounds ridiculous but they do enjoy quite a lot of popularity in the states and i would argue that for cultural reasons i mean we all say i mean this is something i cannot discuss now but we clearly have to understand the strong cultural influence and cultural force that this technology companies and firms have over young people right i don't want to sound here like you know i'm an old man here complaining about the corruption of our young people but there is clearly a very strong soft power which you know is combined with technological power it also shapes behavior to a significant extent that i think we have to be aware of all i'm trying to say here is that there is clearly a new infrastructure for solving problems and making system more efficient and more effective that this new technology digital platforms provide i can give you many more examples but i would like to shift gears a little bit and show you the other way through which it's not just by deriving more efficiency from our health system or from our education system where companies like google also powerful players because now they're on all the email systems of most of the universities in the world also sucking in all the data about education by the way to a different kind of a helping hand that technology firms provide and this is where we need to understand that the proliferation of sensors and real-time ubiquitous connectivity also allows us to basically turn every single moment of our life and every single possession that we have either into a commercial activity of sorts or into some kind of a commodity that can be traded on the global market right and this is where companies like uber and airbnb uh do present themselves as temporary means of getting by in a financial and economic crisis that is getting worse and worse right what do i mean here basically you know the pitch that uber and airbnb make and if you go and listen and read their testimony and their public statements closely you will see that repeated in a statement after statement so i can only assume it's an organized campaign what they say is that we are with the middle classes who have been hit by the crisis and they've been hit by the crisis so harsh that they need to be able to make a supplementary income how would they make that well they can drive an uber car after they're done with the day job which of course nobody has but uber pretends that you know it's a supplementary job or you can put your apartment on airbnb and when you go out to have a holiday you can actually make some money by renting out your room or by renting out your apartment or you know suppose you have a power drill that you're not using you can put your power drill also in global circulation and somebody one of your neighbors can come and pay for it virtually everything that you have your free time your possessions now can be turned into something that can be traded and make money for you right previously it was very hard to pull off because of very high transaction costs and you like you know and this is what how they put it i was just i hope this person is not here i was just in germany at a conference in weimar and i was on a panel with two extremely neoliberal economists who were all trying to explain the sharing economy by basically saying that well you know now the transactions costs have lowered we can all become entrepreneurs we can all be selling ourselves to uber and airbnb and the reason why we didn't do it in the past is because the transaction costs were too high right to anybody who is not an economist trained in a certain tradition it would become obvious that if you have a stable nine-to-five job uh and you are paid the decent income there is no reason to uh drive an uber car between the hours of 11 and 3 a.m or you know leave your apartment for the weekend so that you can earn some money by staying with your parents uh people who have affluence provided to them through their day job probably do not need to be entrepreneurs which is a nice euphemism for hustling also in this case right so i think we have to be cognizant of the way in which these two processes on the one hand deriving more efficiency from the system by extracting as much data as possible in the case of firms like google and by essentially turning everything from your free time to your possessions into tradable commodities in the market does generate a certain robustness and a certain um how should i put it resilience in a system which is otherwise under immense pressure because it can no longer deliver jobs it can no longer deliver distant incomes and can no longer deliver much by way of uh you know sustainability right and um where would silicon valley feel into all of this you know they also have a cert solution now and you know it's just amazing how quickly they managed to completely sort of turn around even radical ideas and embrace their as their own who now is the greatest proponent of basic income in america it's silicon valley right it's them who now have become the greatest advocates of citizen income basic citizen income or however going to call it unconditional basic income and they are the ones funding experiments one of the big venture capital firms have just announced they are going to run a basic income experiment in oakland you know an idea that has traditionally you know let's forget the libertarian support for it but an idea that has traditionally been supported by extremely radical leftist forces in this country especially uh has now been embraced by venture capitalists now how did that happen well it happens for very good reasons a it makes perfect sense to a company like uber for example to be behind basic income why because it will be a very fantastic way for them to say that look our drivers are not here because they need a job they have basic income they're here because they love socializing and they're here because they love driving and they're here because they would like to make some supplementary income who's going to pay for basic income not us because we don't want to pay all the taxes we owe that's why we engage in all sorts of tax optimization schemes so let somebody else pay for basic income and will it rip its rhetorical benefits at the same time we will invent a new generation of firms that will deploy the sensors and the vigorous connectivity in order to find new ways to charge us for the use of resources that has previously been priced differently and this is a very important part if you want to understand what is driving internet of things right you might think well it's all these people who want to understand when the garbage cans are full right it's incorrect what is driving the internet of things are giant german conglomerates like siemens and bosch right why do they do it because they have understood that if they can build systems which have sensors in them and if they can incorporate them with technologies like bitcoin and its underlying technology like blockchain they can actually start charging people peer use for everything you know if you go to london and use the uh metro there you you're familiar with the oyster card where you have to go and basically swap your cart and then whatever you're going to pay you have no idea what you're going to pay because it's just impossible to have a cognitive map of all the charges that you're going to accrue as you enter in one point exiting another point you take the bus then you have to change this is the paradigm of mirror juice right those of you who are unfortunate enough to live with mirrored other utilities you would know what it is even though with mirrored utilities at least there is some transparency this new breed of startups that are now emerging partly funded and sponsored by these giant technology firms like bosch and siemens they want to promote this pay as you go model where your sofa once you see it on the sofa in some public space of your private space is going to charge you for how long you start on the sofa right and once you can incorporate some kind of emotional analysis into it you can also charge you for how much you have actually enjoyed this offer no no but i mean like you might be laughing but this is the paradigm right and apply to public space that would be the paradigm of how you're going to pay for public benches which the city drowning in austerity would no longer be able to provide right and i think that under this paradigm something like basic income makes a lot of sense to silicon valley because ultimately you give people a bunch of money to pay for all the benches and all this offers for which they're going to have to pay now that you have a ways to basically detect and charge them for mirror use okay so we have to understand that this is the sort of very bizarre newer kind of feudal welfare state into which we are heading where on the one hand you have companies like google overtaking fields like education healthcare to some extent transportation not to mention telecommunications services where we search for information and exchange information as well a lot of that will be subsidized in the near term by the advertising industry as i've said right all of that is done to extract as much data as quick as possible to develop advanced tools of artificial intelligence as i have already said right which also by the way means that at this point global advertising industry functions as something like privatized manhattan project for artificial intelligence right we don't have an ambitious project to fund artificial intelligence and make it work for the people right so we have advertisers step in and subsidize google's efforts to develop a giant ai system which only they were able to use in a much more advanced manner than ibm's cognitive computing nonsense to basically help us optimize the services like healthcare which governments would no longer be able to finance and run to the same extent as they could and uh google will promise to do it much better and this is also very important to understand and the key tweak in this new systems that market themselves as free and kind of wealthy enhancing even don't they in private hands the key idea there is basically regulating the individual right i mean that i would argue is the slogan of the new uh deregulated neoliberal capitalism in which we live it's deregulate the industry over regulate the individual right because that's the only way to compensate for the consequences of leading of living the industry is unregulated so you lead the you leave the energy industry do what they want you leave the financial industry do what they want you leave the pharmaceutical industry do what they want clearly you know by now it's very hard you know the food industry do what they want by now you clearly see that it's not the free market utopia that we were promised at the beginning you have climate change you have obesity you have you know all sorts of financial problems you know people being given their responsible loans and so forth right but since regulating those firms is no longer an option and the system needs to cope with the crisis the only solution out there on the table is to focus on the only unit of the system then you can still regulate which at this point is the individual and it's the citizen right so you would like to nudge the citizen to consume less electricity even though energy companies can do whatever they want you like to nudge the individual to eat healthy food even though big food and big pharma will continue advertising the way they want you would like to nudge the individual to spend and borrow responsibly even though the financial industry will be coming up with all sorts of financial products which are dubious and completely unregulated and you will be nudging the individual because you cannot be doing anything else to any other actor of the system right and what's the best way to nudge the individual to deploy the rhetoric of in the vocabulary of behavioral economics well you do it by monitoring the citizen understanding what their weaknesses are what their rationalities are where they come from and then in real time trying to steer their behavior so every time you know you're reaching for some unhealthy food your phone buzzes off and tells you well you know if you do that your insurance payments will go up by ten percent uh you know probably you'll think twice again if you know quite a lot about your health and if you know quite a lot about all the other regulatory apparatuses like insurance which regulate your behavior you can generate nudges that are highly personalized so you can actually regulate the individual quite nicely right and i would argue that putting sensors everywhere generating data from every single source understanding everything that we do and collecting data about our personal behavior does allow you more or less to engineer the kind of behavior at the end at the output of the system through the users which will more or less help you hide and conceal the problems as they exist right and it will help you deal and place continue and buy time again to use the words of worldwide streak for quite a bit of time right so once you incorporate everything i've said and i'm almost finished and you try to put it at the level of the city which by the way all of those sensors technological systems will be incorporated and already incorporated once you pour it to uh you know the city level where all of the infrastructures for rolling out all those pay-as-you-go systems will be because this is where our infrastructure is i mean if you look at what has been happening with public infrastructure over the last 10 or 15 years all across the globe what has been happening cities has been selling it off because they're broke whom are they selling it off they're selling it off to financial investors big real estate firms and a lot of them are banks you know it's not just consulting firms that have formed this municipal units it's also big investment banks which now all of them have some kind of municipal practice and it's in their dna to extract as much rent from those resources that they now own as possible which explains to you which now you have to pay more and more tolls for using things that have previously been free right or you paid for with your taxes so you have this merger between an agenda of privatization and austerity and trying to basically put more and more infrastructure into private hands because public institutions are no longer capable of running them and financing them and you have this technological infrastructure being put in place which will make it extremely efficient and it will allow you also to personalize the prices you are charging and do a lot of other things right all of that is to say that cds will be the primary battleground for all of these fights right it will be in cities where people will be hit with this for the and they already hit i mean if you sort of abstract from all the technological things i've said if you look at the protests that have been sweeping cities all over the globe you know you can look at the protests against the spiking transportation fairs in the in sao paulo for example in 2013 you can see at the protest in istanbul around gezi park you can see a lot of the protests that have been happening in cities all across the globe not to mention of course huge wave of protests in spain which brought not just new city administrations and power in barcelona madrid and zaragoza but also is about to bring podemos probably as force number two into uh you know national politics uh all of them have urban origins right because it's at the level of the city that capitalism now more or less exploits because nothing is produced anymore in our cities as you might know so it's pointless to be exploiting anyone and anything in the factory because the factories are empty right so the source of exploitation has moved uh to a very different milieu right so instead of being exploited at the level of production the exploitation moves to the level of realization of value right so this is why we have to pay more and more in rent we have to pay more and more in services we have to pay in more in utilities and we will have to pay more and more for all of this data intensive services which will be presented to us as the foundation of some kind of new privatized welfare state right so the battles will be there let me just uh in the three minutes and then we'll open up for questions lay out what i think will be key to those battles it's obvious that without data that these companies can suck in and extract for free nothing like that would be remotely possible of course they will continue building sensors they will continue building intelligence systems and so forth but it's still data that allows them to offer this kinds of services make predictions build this advanced ai and so forth right which to me indicates that we have to completely strategically rethink data as a political entity right um carl pollani had this very interesting analysis of fictitious commodities right back in his great transformation book where he basically said that uh labor and land are not commodities as such they emerge due to social relations that are not made or in the case of land natural ones they're not made to be sold but they become commodities they are made into commodities right through trans market transformation so as such you know he preferred to treat the mass fictitious commodities that have been made into commodities and that explains why um as capitalism solidifies there are also protests and what he called the double movement aimed at sort of saving them from the commodity status i would argue that we need to apply the same paradigm to data more or less ultimately data emerges not because there is google or ibm or facebook or cisco out there with sensors to capture it we generate data as we engage in social relations you know when i go to catch a bus i do generate data about me going to catch a bus when i get on a bus i also generate data when i go see a doctor i generate data i generate data as a product of being me right as a program of engaging with the world out there the problem is that i do not have the infrastructure neither as an individual nor as a unit of a political community to harvest harness and act upon that data that which means that it all ends up in the hands of a giant technology firms which then package my data with the data of my neighbors and then with the data of my fellow citizens and build extremely sophisticated products which then send sell back to me right with my taxpayers money which i paid to my city administrations paying to them to buy the data that i myself have generated right i mean this is not some hypothetical example i can give you a very specific example in america already you have cities portland for example in america has recently struck a deal with a technology company that produces sensors that bicyclists use to monitor where they go right so you use a sensor in your you know some kind of tracking technology which allows you to show where most of the biking paths are in the city which are the biking paths are most popular with bicyclists right so the city of portland paid twenty thousand dollars not a lot but still paid to buy that data from a company that basically takes data that the city itself should already be aggregating a long time ago and should actually be having as a right and not as a commodity purchase from a third party which just happens to be making and manufacturing sensors the same thing happened with uber but the city of boston was about to regulate uber and they said well look guys we would like to regulate you and uber said well you know we actually have something to offer you we have data about all the traffic jams and about all the traffic congestion in boston would you like us to share it with you for free city of boston said yes and of course no regulation followed right which explains to you that in many tricky areas data also emerges as a powerful bargaining tool right which allows those technology companies to extract a lot of additional benefits and a lot of additional data because you can come to a city like barcelona and say hey great we'll give you data about traffic can you give us data about you know energy costs or energy generation in your city and if you're a city that really needs data about traffic you'll give it up right all of it is to say that the only way for us to be able to move out and get out of this path towards increased financialization and privatization of our lives by means of technology is to politicize data and to treat it not as a commodity but to treat it as a public good that should primarily accrue not just to us as individuals as private property but should accrue to us as people living in a community whether it's in the neighborhood or in the city i'm not talking about your private data about whom you email and what you sent i'm not talking about your health data i'm talking about data that is generated in the context of using public services using public infrastructure and using kind of you know public social relations that all of us still have you know before we get completely sucked into using tools like google goals which will tell us you know when we need to jog and when we need to do what and does all the social ties disintegrate completely so i will stop here again we deviated somewhat from the idea of the smart city in part because as i hope i have convinced you this is not the main issue the main issue in our series is something else and we have to tackle it rather than just be fighting this uh sort of empty marketing brochures pick the technology companies throughout us thank you very much so thank you very much i'd like to throw the floor open but i'd like to ask questions myself and i hope that my questions are the same as the one that you'd like to ask we've been presenting with a very alarming scenario very stimulating indeed as questions or what is happening at the time well thank you that uh thank god you haven't talked about it to facebook uh at least for once so we've been spared that because usually whenever internet is quoted facebook goes with it now we've talked about smart city we've talked about other cities the technology companies and not the uh not facebook um facebook seems to be the only platform that sees us as very present as italian citizens i might say that many questions came to mind to listen to your presentation once the first one is what is the solution that is uh put forward that we can either obtain or opt out of this but you know for going or what we've been doing so far it is a pretty difficult i believe that even mars uses all these technologies so you are already knocked in situation or have you chosen otherwise have you opt out of all these uh services in italy uh we think about access to the web as a main objective when we're only dealing with problems uh word that we don't have enough bandwidth where we don't grant access to all our citizens so apparently italy is still actually is yet a country that cannot equip itself with all the intelligent and smart technology that we've been hearing about so do you think that as italia's not being connected 100 do you think that we're lucky not being connected and what do you think about the battle for the neutrality of the web what do you think about the proposal that was put forward by scholars that have identified the problem of privacy as we become a community as soon as we accept um services that are giving that for free there are scholars saying that the only solution that the only possibility is for software to be given for free free software is often referred to as having a role in that so do you think that having free software non-property software could actually be a solution so as to let citizens free to make their decisions so these are a few questions but i'd like to start these uh with with these and then more questions will come from the floor facebook it's true that they're missing from some of the battles that are now being fought but they're also present in many others so in terms of investments and official intelligence facebook is uh quite ahead uh they are a very active player in artificial intelligence they're also very active player in uh sort of peripheral aspects of this new privatized welfare state that i have outlined especially in the developing world if you have followed any of the scandals regarding internet.org or free basics which is facebook's system of providing so-called internet free internet in the developing world that has generated a lot of resistance and india basically said no you know india said no to the offer of free internet from facebook because of course it wasn't free it was facebook i'll tell you it was facebook uh stepping in and basically saying that uh we would like to subsidize the provision of internet to poor people in india only that a handful of sites would be free including facebook of course and a couple of others for everything else they will have to pay and uh of course people in india especially a lot of the advocates who have been working on net neutrality have seen that it's going to completely um sort of this balance the the playing field because ultimately uh people with money will be able to see any websites that they want and poor people will be limited to just facebook so ultimately you're building uh a paradigm where for many people the only internet that exists will be facebook right which then means that all of the other services education health banking will have to go through facebook so people will be building apps to be on facebook which again for facebook makes a lot of sense but it tells you how this new welfare-like regime functions they'll be happy to offer you subsidized to even free services in exchange for the data that they will later suck out of you which fits very well with what i've said the other thing facebook does of course is virtual reality which is the ultimate solution to whatever problems you have in your life you know you can be living also in the basement without seeing any daylight but if you have fantastic virtual reality on your head i mean gee you can be in hawaii right i mean that's the that's the other um sort of way out uh from uh that facebook would like us to believe in that you know ultimately that's uh one of the ways to make our otherwise grim life somewhat uh pleasant uh on other questions uh with regards to uh solutions again i think i've been trying to map out a very intellectual and historically ambitious landscape and terrain which explains the problem if you really buy into my argument that you know there is a crisis in capitalism the silicon valley offers some kind of a temporary solution then you also have to work at that scale and you have to understand that as i am a big fan of many of those technologies but technologies for me are different from corporations owning those technologies you know you can have e-readers that will be produced and subsidized by libraries i mean what's there exactly at stake i mean yes it would be great if we could have that it would be great if you could have a lot of other devices and a lot of other systems and networks that will allow us to do what we want i mean just to give you an example in finland there is a law that when they stop you uh when you're speeding up right and so you are breaking the law because you're driving too fast and if you happen to be a billionaire your fine will be probably three million if you're a poor person your fine will be five euro fantastic you put sensors everywhere you connect everyone's tax data uh to the database all the billionaires will end up paying far more money great i mean what city in europe is gonna do that right that requires the political power and the political project to go along with that you can use this infrastructure for a lot of different ends but that requires first a political project that a wants to challenge the elites that wants to challenge the uh concentration of inequality among the rich that wants to challenge financial capital and so forth you cannot just do it by saying that we would like to build some kind of you know bottom-up decentralized technologies at a maker faire i mean as much as i would like to hear it like this is not going to work because what's lacking here also if you really buy into the argument that advertising industry at this point is the privatized manhattan project for artificial intelligence there is no way that you can actually fund an alternative without having an organized industrial policy not just in a single country but in an entire continent of europe europe does not have an industrial policy it has a protectionist policy protecting a couple of firms that happen to be national incumbents in most cases and that said there is no effort to think through how you can run things differently because there is no willingness to challenge the underlying logic which at this point you know it's not that we are trying to rethink how capitalism should function we are trying to rethink how we can actually uh deal with the consequences of the crisis a little bit better because we can no longer rely on cheap credit and banks for the people we can still rely on chip credit for you know for corporations uh that said the next question about net neutrality i mean it's an important fight again it has uh it has a certain american flavor to it which is what i don't like because net neutrality in a sense is a compromise that you're going to have private companies in charge of telecommunications which in america is the default assumption that nobody even is aware of because they cannot question the fact that something will not be owned by private companies and all you can do is just to regulate how they work so yes if you assume that all these companies will be private then yes we need some rules to discriminate them from to prevent them from discriminating one sets of traffic from another but why should communications be in private hands you know sorry i'm kind of i go beyond that i don't think that that's an assumption that should not be opened i mean switzerland i mean switzerland of all places having a referendum today not just on basic income but also on whether the national telecommunications firm should be brought in the public ownership i mean switzerland i mean net neutrality discourse cannot register such fine political economic issues because ultimately they already buy into the fact that you'll have big firms you'll have team you'll have whatever you know deutsche telecom you'll have o2 as big providers of infrastructure they will be in private hands they'll be heavily subsidized uh by governments in the european commission of course you'll never call it subsidies so you'll call them whatever innovation money and that will be there in perpetuity i don't buy the promise even though i share the need to tie the hands of these firms as they exist but i do not entirely abandon the political project of changing their status which i think in that neutrality debate is often gets lost um was this something else yeah so an open source again you have to understand that here um if you think about cities um so what are the traditional ways of pushing back in swedish right you know what the traditional ways you try to re-municipalize parts of the infrastructure that have been privatized and broader under private control so you're trying to re-nationalize the provision of water the provision of electricity the provision of gas the provision of all the other utilities which you think should be in public control right it works in some places it doesn't work in others you know in this country you have a referendum about water nothing happens afterwards you know in some countries it works in hamburg they managed to bring in uh some of the utilities under public control they try to do it in berlin it works the problem is that once you try to apply that toolkit to data and to technology it's not obvious how to do it you can do that kind of demonstration with the sensors that cisco hp installs in your city you cannot do that with google because google operates very differently they can be in your city and be key to the provision of many services without actually striking any deals with the city administration so there is nothing to be municipalized because they entered the cities through their phones and they entered the cities through many other devices and they generate the kind of data that then allows them to become even more powerful without ever stepping in to the city right which makes me think that you know you can and there are a lot of people you know it's actually fun you mentioned open source because the uh sort of uh response that is also very much like the corporations to the smart city problem is the open source city promoted by none other than carlo ratti an italian guy at mit um where of course all of the main political issues control and ownership of data uh whether data is a commodity and whether private property paradigm should uh spread to it you know whether we should actually keep this utilities in private hands republicans are completely eliminated and the idea is that somehow by turning from uh close source solutions to open source ones which you know i generally embrace and support we can resolve the issue but this is not you know android is an open source system like what does it matter right i mean again we have to abandon this uh fetish of thinking that somehow open source systems do not lead to consolidation of power i mean they do because there are other components to the system some of which have to do with data to which open source provides no solution whatsoever right you can of course come up with all sorts of licensing regimes you can come up with you know a new ownership paradigm for data we need that new paradigm uh for data but that's not what the current open source debate presupposes and would like to advance sure enough when we were talking about cities when we were talking about the fact that we are living our lives in the hands of corporations with property um with proprietary um software uh if it were open source then probably those data could also be uh managed by the local administrations is a mystery but not sufficient condition yes all of those platforms must be open source the problem is that no cities capable of tackling a company like google i mean new york can do it london can do it you can only do it as a network so if you have a network of cities that would like to tackle this problem in a modular fashion and they say you know i will work on this part of the infrastructure i will work on that part of infrastructure and then we'll pull out data together and we will try to actually find whether we can build or replicate part of this ai system they can but then you need politically aligned cities you cannot take a near liberal city like amsterdam and hook it up with barcelona and produce a common strategy to fight google because amsterdam is not interested okay so please ask a quick questions and give quick answers first question very quickly it is true that open source is a prerequisite but it's not sufficient and i would add that the whole chain must become open source google is not open source only a little part of the operating system that it recites on our mobile phones is open source but the whole chain must be open source to make data management really transparent okay thank you very much questions but then he has to leave as i said so i would like to know from you whether there is a social pressure to monitor individuals in other words are individuals led to monitor cities because of the pressure exerted on them or to monitor uh i mean good experience that they have to share such good experiences with people who do not have have the same experiences so is this the impact of monitoring on individuals and cities in your opinion so i have a question about developing countries so usually um usually developing countries like usually um developing countries have been able in history to learn from developed countries but in this case you talked about a few companies uh gathering a lot of data and keeping it to themselves and obviously using it to earn a lot of money so i was just wondering how will this develop in the how would this further develop in the future like so how will these developing countries be be able to use this data if at all or this concentration of data in this few companies will just like make the lag between developing countries and develop countries even bigger or it will help developing countries and how uh this is really the macro question fantastic presentation so i the capitalism is adjusting to this crisis temporarily by this extraction of the rest of our time and resources but that doesn't i mean for each firm can then make billions of dollars off that but that doesn't seem sustainable for the scale of it of course we still have growing debt no income no growth so uh just some more commentary on that this doesn't seem that there's a scalable solution at the macro level i'll try and ask you an ironic question according to you data account for the food of our society you say that it corporations are reinventing the welfare state do you agree we are in a university hall i work in a occupational training center and starting this year we decided to move all our data to google cloud so all our contents and everything have been moved to google cloud so i would like to ask you what you think about this find a very final question network data and international relations can the i.t multinationals be subject to regulators activity be chinese or indian regulators what can we expect i mean can we expect conflicts i know this is not much to do with the core of your presentation but it could be a inevitable consequence of what you said christina you're an interesting guy but you've become far too conspiratorial the welfare state in britain and elsewhere it was no obviously not designed simply to save capitalism it was a result of the demand of trade unions working class above all especially those who worked actually in nationalized industries like steel and coal at the same time you're you tend to see things as a conspiracy to keep capitalism going when actually as you know at least as well as i do democracies are a site as you said with your example on on switzerland a site for a push and pool a struggle between forces between democratic and and other forces and above all you haven't provided perhaps you do elsewhere any kind of convincing explanation of what happens afterwards of what the mechanism is for for example nationalizing google or nationalizing the data how do you get from what you see as a and i think in part rightly a bad situation into something which is a good situation and how does the good situation work uh i'll try to fit all of this into a five-minute answer some of these questions i think were more important than others because they highlighted some of the gaps and what i've said so maybe i'll focus on those first so international dimension i think it's very important to to think through not list because behind both the liberalization of the data flow regime and the promotion of the smart cities there is clearly a geopolitical agenda with a lot of technology firms uh relying on governments to push through their trade to push through their commercial interests if you look for example at the website of the u.s department of commerce and their section to europe specifically they will actually list two things that i think are key out of city for their priorities for their work in europe one of them is trade leaders like gtip which include provisions like free flow of data which you know for the elites now uh corresponds to a kind of nice euphemism for free flow of capital right which uh aims at completely eroding whatever data protection regime has been erected in europe to precisely slow down and eliminate free flow of data uh and secondly smart cities you know that actually says quite openly there the smart cities makes part of u.s commercial agenda in europe and not just of the us one right so you have if you look at the place like india which brings us to developing countries you know modi their prime minister has announced that first he would like to build a hundred smart cities and five years which of course was a little bit too ambitious even for him so then he scaled it out to 20 but after he scaled it down to 20 that nonetheless brought delegations from all over u.s china uh even russian companies went there and especially germany with simmons bosch and a few others interested in pitching their own solutions so you are now also seeing some interesting commercial uh conflicts that that might be happening uh in this uh in this domain but there is clearly uh a geopolitical component to it which i think we need to understand much more thoroughly than i have tried to to do on the questions of uh alternatives but also how sustainable that moral list is to questions and also the conspiratorial nature of some what i'm saying i don't think it's actually conspiratorial i mean all of the uh proponents of the welfare state i mean you go and read their writings from keynes to uh uh beverage none of them actually like the term welfare state because they think it sounds too socialist and they clearly would like to identify i mean it clearly there are demands and there are demands that have been in place because of the crisis and the great depression to build a different kind of capitalism that does not mean that the people building it were not interested in a particular adjustment of how capitalism functions and the reason why i said there was a way to fix capitalism is because it was still not a way to build communism which is how a lot of the major mainstream commentary in for example the us presents the welfare state so in this sense i don't think it's actually very conspiratorial what i'm saying it seems quite mainstream uh on the question of alternates i don't believe in nationalization of these firms because i don't think that you can actually have a robust national government uh now in europe interested in pursuing it it's not uh and also i don't think that the right way to tackle google is by building another company like google but with the european flag on top of it i think it has to be done in a much more decentralized manner it has to be done in a way where there is data that is pulled together by public institutions cities municipalities universities libraries you name it with all sorts of other players including other cities including other institutions invited to build services and apps on top of it to resolve their own information needs so if i'm a community of people who would like to offer our own bus service to go somewhere yes i would like to have access to the data about transportation needs of my citizens living in that neighborhood but you need to have intermediary institutions aggregate aggregating that data so that additional services can be built on top of them right and actually don't think that even google believes that uh something like search will still be with us in the near future because in the future information will find you and not the other way around because there is so much data about you that is already well known that once you match it with a location uh data will actually find you on demand and this is how all of the new services like google now actually function with regards to the sustainability of this model in this regime i don't think it's actually sustainable because all of the other elements of the system remain in place the banks the anger against the elites it's my alarm telling me that i need to go uh and uh the crisis is not solved it's not solved in terms of the ecological dimension it's not solved in terms of the financial dimension and it's not solved in terms of the anti-elitist dimension and on top of that now you have a new kind of right-wing parties emerging which actually hate globalization they hate global trade and many of them like the party in poland are interested in providing social benefits or are they actually interested in completely defeating uh ttip and all the cities not because they would like to protect the nhs or they would like to protect any of the benefits because they would like to destroy them themselves on national terms and not on the international once imposed by corporations you have the left that's completely missing the boat on these issues and it's a very uh to me a very problematic and turmoil inducing situation the additional resource which i should have discussed in much more at much more lengths is the new forms of policing which are also made possible with this technologies i'm not just talking about drones i'm also talking about the pervasion of facial recognition technologies and other ways to regulate those spaces and to basically to control for excessive outbursts of anger in protests which are bound to hit the streets and the situation gets worse and that will be an additional resource of coping so yes it might sound uh somewhat dark but i sort of follow the news is this the topic of a new book or are you going to write on something else no no the book is finished should be out next year what's the title can we know that's no title yet the dark ages i think i should do it thank you very much thanks sure you