32 | New Scientist | 8 February 2020
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IN STARBUCKS CITY, you can apply
to have a pothole filled, just like in
any other city. Just specify the size
of your hole (Maltesa, Sharpe or
Labradoro) and be sure to check
whether your neighbourhood
requires your asphalt to be
ethically sourced.
In recent years, it has become a
truism among policy-makers that
cities should be optimised in the
way corporations are. Turning a
city into a “smart city” is an alluring
prospect. It pushes inefficient
government bureaucracy out
of the way and replaces it with
streamlined corporate
governance. But to what end?
Two new works of speculative
fiction take that question very
literally, and their vision of the
efficiency endgame shares more
DNA with horror than with science
fiction, albeit cut with farce.
Because what do we mean by
optimising? Whose priorities are
reflected in that word? How to
Run a City Like Amazon, and Other
Fables imagines life if a whole city
were run by one of 38 megacorps
even now insinuating their
way into our lives. One of theco-editors, Mark Graham, an
internet geographer at the
University of Oxford, asked some
academics to write speculative
stories or essays about living
according to corporate leadership
principles espoused by companies
from Apple to Pornhub.
The underlying question here
is what could possibly go wrong?
It is posed, one imagines, with a
certain degree of glee.“We are beyond the point where
we can use human frailty as an
excuse,” writes Sarah Barns in
one stand-out story, “So You
Want to Live in a Pivot City?”.
She examines a takeover of a
city’s carbon economy in the style
of Alphabet’s urban innovation
arm, Sidewalk Labs.
The way you spend your day is
no longer your business, and every
choice is measured. Meanwhile, inSwipe left or right for everything Turning our cities into the corporate machines
envisioned by two new works of speculative fiction offers unexpected horror and
humour. Sally Adee explores some fraught urban futures“ Imagine life if a whole
city were run by one
of the megacorps even
now insinuating their
way into our lives”Books
How to Run a City
Like Amazon, and
Other Fables
Edited by Mark Graham,
Rob Kitchin, Shannon
Mattern and Joe Shaw
Meatspace PressQualityLand
Marc-Uwe Kling
OrionSally also
recommends...Podcast
Personal Best
Andrew Norton
and Rob Norman
CBC
This is a self-improvement
show for people who
don’t like self-improvement.
As Norman says: “These
little things that we want to
change, and that annoy us,
actually make us interesting,
nuanced creatures.”Tinder City, you swipe left or right
for everyone and everything, from
sex to teachers and civil servants.
Some pieces are derivative, but
among the predictable notes of
Black Mirror and Inception lurk
strange poetry and unexpected
horror: in the city run by Acxiom
(one of the world’s biggest data
brokers), you get the treatment you
deserve – according to your data.
What kind of humans would
be able to survive there? Marc-Uwe
Kling’s satirical novel QualityLand
nurtures that question into full
bloom. In QualityLand, every
citizen is named after parental
careers. Also, everyone rates
everyone on every interaction,
from work to sex. Enter Melissa
Sex-Worker, icily determined to
improve her lot. She is aggressively
pursuing a higher score because
a higher social credit, as in China,
creates a more frictionless life.
We are already in the pupal state
of such a world. Some people on
Instagram get real-life fillers and
surgery to replicate the most
engaged-with facial contours,
conferred by the app’s Facetune
filter. The denizens of LinkedIn
(a network of muscular, joyless
efficiency) publicise morning
routines meant to turn them into
perfect entrepreneurs: “4.30: get
up. Bulletproof coffee. 5 am: gym
while I learn a new language”.
Meanwhile, in QualityLand,
robots with bugs get scrapped
because fixing them is against the
law. But one guy keeps old robots:
left to their own devices, the bugs
evolve into distinct personalities.
You just watch: in our lifetime,
robots will be the only ones smart
enough to help us rise above the
drive to automate, optimise and
homogenise us into robots. ❚QI YANG/GETTY IMAGESTurning a city “smart”
is an alluring prospect,
for someThe science fiction column
Sally Adee is a technology
and science writer based
in London. Follow her on
Twitter @sally_adee