Welcome!

Week 1 –

The Dystopian Novel That Explains What’s Wrong With Real Smart Cities

1. LEE GARDNER  JULY 18, 2019

This week’s article is a interview type talking about Tim Maughan’s book Infinite Detail. The book is a “fictional dystopia” and reflects on urban technology. Several questions are posed during this interview and bring to light subjects, I feel, are not wide spread in the lay world – privacy for convenience, smart cities, and data mining, a couple among the many.

The author, Tim Maughan, is not a fan of the smart city setup because they are ready packaged solutions. Issues in every city are different and the same packaged smart city cannot take on each unique situation. The everyday citizen is being watched out in public by surveillance systems, both privately and government owned.

As technology grows and becomes more commonplace, the masses are being blinded with how much they are actually being monitored. Data mining is the most obvious one – disguised as helping the consumer out, by mining their information to find new inquiries. If it helps the average person with their purchases, they are okay with the invasion.

But one point brought up in the article was the Alexa, where people were interviewed who listened in on the program, which meant listening in on the personal lives of people who bought the product. The point is they overheard domestic abuse, but could nothing about it because they were there to mine your data. They do not care about the person themselves, but the products they can sell you.