Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Whats made Crowley a successful entrepreneur is that he builds things that he would want for himself. But the question remains whether Foursquare can stay true to its roots as it grows into a big company. I’d known Dennis for nearly ten years, watching as his student projects evolved into big business. This was the last time I’d see him face to face for some time, as his responsibilities were growing by the day. I began to wonder if the need to monetize Foursquare was starting to compete with the goal of titillating its users as the realities of taking investors’ money started to sink in. Their expectations were high. As Foursquare explored a fourth round of funding in early 2013, its chief backer, venture capitalist Fred Wilson boasted, “Foursquare has more data about real people and the places they go than anybody else.”

As my visit in 2011 drew to a close, Crowley had started talking about new features that were in the pipeline. “We’re planning... this idea of predictive recommendations,” he said. He explained how it would work. For instance, if I usually check in around 12:15 p.m., at 11:45 a.m., Foursquare could “ping me with a message telling me where I should go to lunch in the neighborhood that I haven’t been to before, but that I might like, based upon where other people have been.” It’s an experience that, even as a smart-city enthusiast, I’d never considered. I knew I should be excited about it, because I could always opt out, but it gave me the same uneasy feeling I get talking to corporate engineers when they promise to fix cities with big data. I’m not sure I want Foursquare to do that. But I’m sure that marketers and advertisers do.

In the first year after launch, Crowley used to describe Foursquare as a way to make cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. “Check-in. Find your friends. Unlock your city,” instructed the company’s website. In the beginning, it did that by exposing things out there in the urban lattice we couldn’t see directly—our friends, good food, and good times. There was an element of randomness and discovery, like browsing through the stacks at a bookstore. But as data mining and recommendations move to the forefront, Foursquare runs the risk of becoming a quixotic attempt to compute serendipity and spontaneity. The city of Foursquare might look like a lattice, but is it becoming an elaborate tree traced by hidden algorithms? Instead of urging us to explore on our own, will it guide us down a predetermined path based on what we might buy?

The DIY City

For most people the computer age began with the IBM PC, which went on sale in 1981. True geeks, however, date the opening shots of the personal-computer revolution to the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975. The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power. At the time, Intel’s Intellec-8 computer cost $2,400 in its base configuration (and as much as $10,000 with all the add-ons needed to develop software for it). The Altair used the same Intel 8080 microprocessor and sold as a kit for less than $400. But you had to put the thing together yourself. Hobbyists quickly formed groups like Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club to trade tips, hacks, and parts for these DIY computers. Homebrew was a training camp for innovators like Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who would overthrow IBM’s dominance of the computer industry. (According to Wozniak, the Apple I and Apple II were demo’d at Homebrew meetings repeatedly during their development.) 13 Never before had so much computing power been put in the hands of so many.

Grassroots smart-city technologies—mobile apps, community wireless networks, and open-source microcontrollers among them—are following a similar trajectory as the PC: from utopian idea to geek’s plaything to mass market. They are being carried along by new communities of civic hackers that share the ideals of the earlier generation of desktop hackers: radically expanding access to technology, open and collaborative design, and the idea that computers can be used for positive change. In 1972, another Silicon Valley hacker group calling itself the People’s Computer Company published its first newsletter, with a call to arms emblazoned on the front page. “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people,” it read, and “used to control people instead of to free them. Time to change all that—we need a ... People’s Computer Company.”14 As we have seen, it is a claim that’s just as valid a description of smart-city technology today. And the antidote, once again administered by self-organizing hackers, may be just as potent.

But how does a vague idea about how to use a new technology become a counterculture movement? Sometimes all it needs is a name. John Geraci, another ITP alumnus, is an urban hacker with a knack for naming. In a 2004 class I taught there, on “Wireless Public Spaces,” he created Neighbornode, a mash-up of wireless hot spots and community media. Each hot spot hosted a unique local bulletin board that could only be used if you were within range of its signal. But messages could be forwarded by individuals from node to node, in a postmodern game of Telephone. Popular posts could migrate across the city the way a heavily retweeted post on Twitter does today. Neighbornode was cheap and easy, built on open-source software and a $75 Linksys wireless router. As he told the New York Times , “If you can install Microsoft Word on your computer, you can set up a community hot spot.”

Four years later, John drew inspiration for a new project from a lonely venture capitalist, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. One of the social web’s most successful investors, Wilson was also a fan of Shake Shack, restauranteur Danny Meyers’s burger stand in Madison Square Park. A sort of spiritual hub for New York’s tech start-up scene, the stand was also popular with lots of others, a node in the densely overlapping lattice of Manhattan’s Flatiron district. By noon each day, a long line of hungry people stretched an hour’s wait along the park’s curving pathways.

As one of Twitter’s earliest investors, Wilson was always on the lookout for new social hacks to show off the service’s usefulness. In 2008 he created a Twitter account called (§>shakeshack, which people could follow to organize group lunches. More importantly, it was a way to cut the Shake Shack line. As he explained on his popular blog, “only one person has to stand in line and anyone can join as long as they are up for a group lunch with fun people and lively discussion.” People soon started sending in reports on the Shake Shack’s line to the account. When, less than a week later, local coder Whitney McNamara cobbled together ninety-two lines of Perl code that reposted all of the inbound reports into @shakeshack’s timeline, it became one of the first “Twitter bots”—a real-time, crowdsourced ticker of the line’s current length.

The Shake Shack Twitterbot showed Geraci that the local Web was quickly moving beyond blogs. After graduation, Geraci had cofounded the first “hyperlocal” news site, outside.in, with author Stephen Johnson. Outside.in brought a geographic sensibility to the blogosphere, aggregating thousands of blogs by neighborhood to create a new kind of virtual newspaper. But the idea of an urban web you could only use from your home or office never seemed quite right. Liberated from the desktop by mobile devices, it could be used to solve real-world problems. Geraci realized that this model had far greater possibilities than just speeding a venture capitalist to his burger.

On October 28,2008, Geraci launched the DIYcity.org website to convene and challenge the growing band of geeks who wanted to hack their own smart cities. “Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet,” he wrote. “What is needed right now is a new type of city,” he continued, perhaps unwittingly echoing the call to arms of the People’s Computer Company some four decades earlier, “a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution—a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all—a DIY City.” He outlined his vision of an online community where “people from all over the world think about, talk about, and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web technologies.”