SMARTER CITIES?

davemanchester (50)in #news • 6 years ago (edited)

A Manifesto for understanding the coming opportunities of interconnected Blockchain’s for supporting viable economies that are people focused.

The next big thing to come can be to empower the contributing individual, the collective community and its environs producing in larger conurbations a smarter city: not by imposition but by engagement.

There has been lots of technical talk & jargon going around about smart cities. Maybe, because there has been lots of funds for these types of visions, especially from the European Commission.

A digital dictatorship, a technological control system is planned, some of it underway in the form of the internet of things – spearheaded by industry products to monitor and automate the home (hive etc) and with drives funded by the EC under the collective banner of smart cities.

However, with many conferences for important people to attend, the results of the funded projects under the ‘smart city’ banner have proved as expensive as they are fruitless, other than adding funds to city councils, universities and corporate bodies and government quangos and agencies.

The aim is producing supposed benefits for citizens from the integration of information and communications technologies: well other than huge amounts of surveillance systems for watching the citizen: there is little evidence of any resulting integrated websites of any significant usefulness.

These smart city projections are for integration of remote monitoring sensors that provide data about all things in a city. It’s all big data centralising visions of grandeur. Again none of which is directly useful to citizens.

A smart city would provide lots of citizen focused applications and information services all in one digital easy to access location: wouldn’t they? Isn’t that the starting point? Something beneficial?

Due to the way that the public and private sectors operate there is demarcation barriers of activities and boundaries of actions. So cities do not provide integrated information services. constant googling to find everything of pertinent relevance for a city location has to involve repetitive constant googling.

Providing public access to all the city information integrated into one easy to use city focused website is a need. Yet they have had, and have spent millions upon millions, on a concept called the smart city – without any genuine focus upon the needs of the citizens - sounds somewhat dumb doesn’t it?

This smart city process has been ongoing for over a decade. Positive results are rarities. It seems like a circular activity due to bureaucratic ambition rather than anything of which is to be beneficial for ordinary people.

Smart cities what an unfortunate name tag.

What we have so far are only rhetorical soundbites: they claim it’s for the people, for the citizen, for the businesses in the cities.

What has been achieved is nothing other than a technology roadmap for the benefit of large participating corporations: BT, Siemans, Cisco, IBM and many others, and a talking shop and funding scheme for universities, and for ‘important conferences’ to attend. Big data, technological methodology is talked up into a groupthink mindset; dominating their thinking all inside their own box. Thinking and planning, which should we let them get on with it could be leading to technological totalitarianism: a disconnected elite group with aims at variance from public needs.

The result becoming dissonant thinking, a heartless technocracy introducing their concepts over human values. The exponents of this new technology of things say that the citizen and the community is primary, our elected officials deal with these issues without any real understanding: they (city councillors) are not technologists.

They are lobbied constantly by the corporate groups whilst the single voice of an individual is washed away.

Terms like smart transport, smart communications, smart security, smart this and smart that is the talk of the sustainable future city with interconnected technologies. This aim and its strategic policy levels are discussed behind closed doors. Maybe because real outcomes are disturbing levels of automation & robotics. It all adds up to running things with automation that we have never seen the like of before. Those involved the technocracy of the corporates and the political elites that assist them; the new technocracy class will benefit and the majority of people will be redundant. This move to automated smart cities and automated transport production and interconnected monitoring will produce the biggest rise in unemployment ever seen: it will become a dystopian future if we allow it.

Smart city ideology has not even produced integrated information services on a website for a person to have access to a complete inventory of city information. (This is the first aim of this project, to encourage such a thing by the citizens themselves.)

Concurrent with the smart city agenda the rise of a new set of websites has emerged in the last few years, this is termed; 'the sharing economy', which produces huge incomes for the ones who control such services whilst the people doing the sharing work have meagre incomes and are involved in a race to the bottom on cost competition.

We citizens need to get smart and organize ourselves in the community for the community specifically for communal activities with trust and collaborative and urban sustainability. The local economy and its communal wealth creation should stay as much as possible in the locality.

This must begin from the bottom up. The current drive is top down and who do you think that benefits, not us but them.

Large international corporations suck out the wealth from cities and regions, even countries and stockpile it centrally for themselves: Apple,Amazon, Google, to name but a few.

An 'Internet of Things' in which all things are connected by remote sensors for physical objects, from traffic lights to your buying habits online will be further consolidated into the overall network of big data collection to their central cloud and surveillance activities - this is their technocracy aim.

Of course they tell you it’s to assist speeding up and to harmonise all your digital needs. Of course it will be dominated by and for them, by some means and you the taxpayer will pay the for it. You will pay for it by watching their advertising, and giving your content and other efforts to them for free. They know this because collectively we are already doing this; giving them our data on facebook, YouTube, etc and working for them as Uber drivers, Airbnb renters, Task Rabbiting and a host of other low paid or no paid activities.

A smart city with dumb people enables them to slowly control everything.

The digital services will provide instant information to find or obtain every need, you will be enabled to buy but not control.

They don’t want you to think; by design they prefer you to sleepwalk through life buying things and watching TV and talking to friends about great technology devices and doing several very low paid jobs to earn, so to pay for thier monitoring devices.

We can sleep on or we can organise ourselves and generate a smarter future based around our activities and not theirs. Theirs is a globalist agenda interlinking by their smart means and for all cities; eventually.

Self reliance is the option that we have, using the digital systems based around the internet but with a very different aim. We need to wake up to what’s coming about; we need ‘Smart Cities’ focused for ordinary people not the current model for ‘Smart Cities’ serving an elite by watching and controlling us.

What is needed is smart people - smart citizens who, once enlightened to the emerging prospects coming in their name, can act. Who can participate in wresting powers back to themselves and getting those elected to really work for us and not for themselves.

Technology in the shape of blockchaining is the core of this promise combined with other convergent options.

We the public have been asleep - feeling impotent and powerless.

The recent political events of Brexit, Catalonia and the rise of characters like Trump, and the
rise of the right in Germany; show the restlessness of the people. Our collective dissatisfaction with authoritative top down decrees that just go ahead, no matter the considerations, the public opposition, or long term impacts of their actions.

With the status quo being a merry go round of eternal promises of the politicians – especially when out of office, and whom when elected to introduce change; the city and government authorities we elect simply carry out their own agenda’s ignoring the changes promised after every ‘democratic’ election. What do you think are their common drivers? Could it be the constant nagging, entertaining and steering by vested interest groups?

There is lots of ‘buzz’ about so called ‘smart cities’ – they the political, educational and corporate elites are planning it all for you – imposing it all - top down. Currently this subject is a huge conference agenda for talk and more talk. Their vision of interlinking services like transport and a whole host of other interconnected city things like CCTV is all to be integrated and controlled by them.

Well let them talk; we can act whilst they carry on.

A simple start; it begins by integrating together in one place – a website that brings together all the information needs for the smart citizen: into an overarching city portal.

There are methods, there are things that we can take on - or stop - by waking up to these issues; which are to be more fully outlined and discussed in this forthcoming series of posts.

Using emerging tools and ideas that are coming into play which will assist and empower the public: enabling a fairer better future; but only if the citizens themselves become smart. If we collectively utilise the emerging tools of technology that will put people first and centralising ambitions of corporations and the political class that serve them in their place.

The blockchain with its emerging applications is coming to set you free! And one that is planned is to address this very issue – a smart system for smart citizens focused upon their own smart city.