Schneier on Security

gordo • March 6, 2017 3:30 PM

The Problem With ‘Smart Cities’
Silicon Valley’s platforms send wealth away from communities. Is there a local alternative?
By Elias Crim • The American Conservative • January 12, 2017

The builders of contemporary master-planned cities—the Middle East’s Dubai, Asia’s Songdo, or India’s Gurgaon—are smart in some sense. To be sure, these places draw on top talent in their architects, planners, and environmental consultants. They in turn create luxury districts where technology enables a gleaming and growing mix of oligopoly, exploitation, and surveillance.

[…]

A key aspect of the “smart cities” movement is the promise of personal technology to create new economic opportunities. But the fact is that no sharing actually goes on in most of what’s called the sharing economy—companies such as Uber, AirBnB, Lyft and TaskRabbit extract value from contract employees, not in the service of some dewy-eyed mutualistic scheme, but rather for the benefit of perfectly conventional Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The latter process is sometimes called “Uberization.”

[…]

If you happen to be a millennial or know one, then you’re probably familiar with the issues around digital work. But this economic threat to our democracy—the Internet as an inequality machine—is bigger than one generation. It’s in the process of overturning the traditional rights of workers going back to the 19th century. And it’s quickly scooping in oceans of our personal data—a form of personal property—in order to leverage that asset into creating even more value for the few owners of the digital platforms now driving a large proportion of our lives (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.).

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-problem-with-smart-cities/

_{[Note on Metropolis link at above-linked page: Link-page (http://metropolis1927.com/) will try to download Metropolis trailer (trailer.mov) automatically.]}

gordo • March 6, 2017 7:54 PM

The Sharing Economy
Disruption’s Tragic Flaw
The case of Uber shows why European companies should not follow the example of their American competitors too closely. It pays to take the needs of customers and contractors into account.
23.03.2015, von SHOSHANA ZUBOFF

In my view, what we see in Uber and similar cases is a tragic flaw: disruption without discipline. Disruption without the institutionalization required for systemic coherence, which is essential for trust. Half mutation, half repetition…half advocacy, half contempt…half future, half past. Uber’s is opportunistic disruption that does not rise to Schumpeter’s standard for moving capitalism’s evolutionary dial. (par. 3)

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-on-the-sharing-economy-13500770-p4.html

The Changing Content Of Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
Published on July 2, 2015 Helge Tennø

This article is not my thinking. The entire post is sections of transcript from Zuboff’s talk at the Fundación de la innovación, Bankinter in 2008. …

[Video of talk [58:11] is a scroll-or-so down the page. Below is a snippet from a section of transcript (the whole talk is worth hearing):]

CREATIVE RESPONSE

16.05: “A lot of people talk about creative destruction. But creative destruction is easy, we don’t have to do anything for creative destruction, history does that for us. The much bigger and more important part of Schumpeter’s theory of capitalist development and model of economic revolution has to do with the creative response. That’s what we do as human agents. The creative response is when we recombine new and existing resources in wholly new ways to better meet societies need. And this is what he felt was the watershed between epics, between eras, between chapters of capitalism.”

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/changing-content-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-helge-tenn%C3%B8

From the official page for the above talk:

Fundación Innovación Bankinter
[Bankinter Innovation Foundation]
Alternative for the crisis
04 Dec 2008 | Ponente: Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff begins her talk by explaining that the current crisis that we face is not a sudden fall, but rather a slow closing to an economic cycle. While other talks have focused on scale and scope she pledges to focus on the content of the issue. Zuboff uses examples such as Apple’s iPod and iTunes, the American auto industry, and revolutions in Healthcare to demonstrate how business must realign itself to the needs of the individual. The efficient-standard-low cost model no longer applies as unique consumers look to have their demand met in a different manner. She concludes that by organizing assets around the individual, and countering the shift with a creative response, a new type of commerce that attracts cash and better serves the individual will surface. [58:11]

https://www.fundacionbankinter.org/ko/web/bankinter/ficha-video/-/detalle/65562/b08d2b92-14ee-4ecb-8931-95ecdde2fd5c/alternativas-ante-la-crisis/21795

IoT deployment and so on.