The City as Cyborg: A History of Civic Technology in The First Quarter of The 21st Century
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:29
Good evening. Welcome to the 2056 Cyborg City Conference. Throughout this conference, our various speakers will be exploring the idea of the cyborg city, what it is,
00:41
and what it may mean for our future. So for those that aren't familiar with this idea, here's the briefest of backgrounds. As we now know, cities are alive. People have been talking about cities as living things for centuries, but at least centuries.
01:02
But it was primarily a philosophical matter of discussion until the early 2030s, saying, when urbanist scholars started working with life scientists and started to develop a rigorous classification system for various types of human environments.
01:22
This was the beginning of biological urbanism. Since then, there have been progressively fewer questions about whether cities are alive. But over the last few years, we've begun to ask, well, if the city is alive, then is it a cyborg? With respect to this topic in particular, the cyborg city,
01:42
I'm interested in if the city is a cyborg, how did it become so? And for that matter, what even makes us ask the question, where does our interest in the city as a cyborg come from? So to begin to answer these questions, I believe we can turn to the period in history from which we saw two coincident phenomena.
02:03
One is the rise in various technologies that mediated the relationship between cities and their residents, or what was then called civic technology. The second phenomenon is our own increasing comfort
02:21
with the idea that our use of networked information technology was becoming as central to who we are as human beings as language or as society. This is a phenomenon that some have referred to as cyborgification.
02:40
It's kind of a mouthful for me, but that is the going term these days. So this period roughly encompasses the first quarter of this century, the 21st century. So in this talk, I'm going to give a brief overview of this time in roughly half decade intervals.
03:00
But I want to start a little bit before the beginning of the century, because this period of the 90s is the immediate precursor, and there are some very important questions that come up during this period that set the stage for the cyborg city.
03:22
So in this period, in the 90s, actually shortly before the 90s, the World Wide Web is invented, but the first web browser is implemented in the 90s. Microsoft's Internet Explorer emerges as the browser of choice among people developing for the web
03:40
after a period known as the browser wars, which was not actually an armed struggle. Portals are seen as the future of the web. My personal website at this time, I was a teenager, but my personal website is on GeoCities, and my search engine of choice is HotBot
04:02
because I'm a cool kid, which is code speak for nerd. Google is born, but has not yet become the cultural giant that it will. The same is true of the first generation of children that will not know a world without the internet. So it's difficult to pinpoint the exact time
04:29
that our consciousness becomes entwined with our computers, but this was a period that saw our empathy for the machines we used become mainstream.
04:41
And it may just be that it was a natural progression of history, but the marketing of Apple products in the second Steve Jobs era may have also had a fair bit to do with that. So that era started here. So we're going to go forward to the beginning
05:02
of the 21st century. And as we enter the 21st century, college students on little ivies around the country are feeling special because their school is one of the few that can use the exclusive new social network called Facebook. They eagerly share their class schedules with each other.
05:20
No one's mother is yet on Facebook. Collaborative editing becomes a thing. Wikipedia and, a few years later, OpenStreetMap are what will become two of the larger platforms that popularize this phenomenon. They are both, at least in part, a response to the lack of free and open sources
05:41
of their respective data, an ideological motivation much like that of the early open source software proponents. If you realize nothing else about history, realize that it operates in cycles of varying lengths. So the earliest organizations that would become known explicitly as civic technology organizations
06:02
begin to sprout up in this period between around 2000 and 2005. They have names like Open Plans and My Society. And they don't really know what they're doing because no one's done it before. But they do it with gusto.
06:22
The first civic applications also start to be released. None of them have pictures. And all of them have white backgrounds, black text, and blue hyperlinks, as if any other colors are too frivolous to manage. Electoral political campaigns in the United States
06:41
begin to experiment with engaging potential voters, particularly on the younger end of the spectrum, through electronic means. However, incumbent governments show little interest in doing the same. Many governments begin to have a presence on the web, though their sites function as little more than glorified about pages and look almost as good as my GeoCities site.
07:08
So this next period, between about 2006 and 2010, this next period has a couple of very significant events in it. And I'm not going to be able to get to all of the significant events in any of these periods
07:22
because it turns out that a lot happens in the course of three decades. But we're going to start with talking about Kenya. So in 2007, Kenya is going through a contentious and, in some cases, dangerous general election with scattered reports of violent intimidation of voters.
07:41
In what is emerging as the civic hacking community around the world, this story becomes one of a small group of Kenyan developers creating a system that uses the crowd, so to speak, the masses of voting public, as a primary source of information about intimidation and violence at polling places for the purpose of creating greater transparency around
08:00
what's going on. They call this system Ushahidi. So during this period, a number of other technologies based around crowdsourcing emerge. And though these are not the first examples of this crowdsourcing method, and if you recall, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are two examples
08:20
from the previous time period that use the same methods. But the practice was not explicitly identified and named until this period, specifically in Wired Magazine article in 2006. So the surge in technological progress has a detrimental effect on several industries, one of which
08:41
is the printed news media. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation takes to funding projects that rethink news media for the changing times. One of those early projects that they fund is Everyblock, which aims to provide hyper-local or micro-local news.
09:04
So an interesting and spontaneous type of crowdsourced transparency also emerges in this period as well, a tragic one, in fact. Early in the morning on New Year's Day of 2009 at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, California,
09:21
Oscar Grant is shot and killed by a BART police officer while handcuffed and laying face down on the platform. This event is independently video recorded by several bystanders, uploaded to YouTube, and also shared with what are at this point the traditional media outlets.
09:41
This and later events would not have been able to be captured and disseminated in quite the same way were it not for other developments during this period, specifically the release of the iPhone and the Android operating systems and the resultant explosions and the popularity
10:02
of portable devices capable of making those recordings, as well as the launch of video sharing services such as YouTube and their subsequent acquisition by Google. Also, most governments now have a presence on the web,
10:23
though their sites function as little more than glorified about pages and look almost as good as my GeoCities site. So in the next period between around 2011 and 2015 and bleeding into the five years following this
10:44
is a big time for governments getting into this game. Code for America, an organization that originally worked with local governments to bring bleeding edge technology practice to bear on government projects, is founded in 2010 but starts actually serving cities with their fellowship program in 2011.
11:00
Later this year, Code for America also launches their brigade program to establish pockets of technologists. And actually, this is the first class of the fellows. If you see over on your right, that is a much younger and sprightly version of me. In the UK, the government digital service
11:21
is founded with the mandate to transform the way that the UK government delivers services to their residents, employing a digital by default strategy. And this work inspires and informs a lot of other work that then happens in the United States and cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and San Diego and how they start to rebuild their own websites.
11:42
This period also sees some important conversations around privacy and security. Edward Snowden leaks a whole host of files obtained from the NSA, which helps to spark an ongoing conversation that will continue
12:00
throughout the decade. Also during this period, we see more killings of African-Americans, particularly those unarmed at the hands of law enforcement professionals, including a partial list of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Jonathan Farrell,
12:22
Sandra Blind, Samuel Dubose, and Freddie Gray. And these events spark the Black Lives Matter movement, which heavily leverages platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in a way that similar or other movements have not up to this point.
12:48
The period from 2016 to 2020, oh, well, didn't expect that. Wrong order. The period from 2016 to 2020, in this period,
13:02
we see several events, many of which I will not have time to get into. But some of those events include a string of cases in which local and federal government issue subpoenas to gain access to defendants' encrypted phone data. And these conversations go on to inform
13:24
a host of other trials and court findings around the nature of the relationship between individuals and their data. We also begin to see very early diagnosed cases of what
13:46
is known as vicarious trauma, a phenomenon previously most commonly associated with professional counselors. We see this case in the general public. These cases come as a result of the constant and immersive
14:02
exposure to tragedy and injustice around the world. So in the following period, in the period from 2021 to about 2025, we see a rise in private cloud services in response to the data privacy concerns in the immediately
14:24
previous periods. Instead of relying on large organizations such as Google and Facebook to manage both people's data and their services atop, it becomes popular to procure private servers to host your own data.
14:43
In addition, we see services such as Google opening up their platforms to both work with the data that they host as well as the private hosted data in order to keep the customers that they have up
15:07
to that point, the customer base that they've up to that point built. Also during this period, following the lead of the federal organization 18F, the National Conference of Mayors
15:28
endorses a tour of duty initiative. Sounds good. In this initiative, technologists are
15:43
encouraged to give one to two years of service to various local city governments working on their staff as part of the civil service. Is working again with this program?
16:09
This program leads to a large increase in the number of technology professionals
16:22
working in government and a rapid improvement in the provision of government digital services. At the 2026 DjangoCon, we are privileged to see
16:45
a talk from a grizzled and experienced Andrew Godwin where he gives us his latest invention and at the conclusion of his talk, asks us the following questions, questions which resonate well
17:06
and resonate deeply with the crowd of technologists and early adopters who are embracing their own cyborg nature well ahead of the general public who will not
17:22
for another decade or so. These questions are around the notion of where we will be in 10 years. He says, in 1995, you are a desktop app, which again,
17:42
resonates strongly with cyborg aware technologists. In 2005, you are a website. In 2015, you are a rich mobile app. In 2025, you are a biosensitive application.
18:01
Where will we be in 2035? From 2056, we have the perspective to be able to answer that question, but this was an interesting and intriguing question when Godwin posed it at the 2026 DjangoCon. So in conclusion, the idea of civic technology is the most,
18:26
it is not civic technology itself, any particular application that came out of this period of the first quarter of the 21st century that is most interesting about civic technology. It's the idea of civic tech itself, the idea that technology can and should mediate
18:41
our relationship with our cities and that that is a positive value, that that is an important thing, that that is something that can make our lives in our cities better. Moreover, as time goes on, the notion of civic technology as a term is going to fall out of favor
19:02
or has fallen out of favor as all digital technology in some way becomes civic. To say civic technology is like saying a civic road or a civic bridge. The important technology that we're building these days is civic technology. Other technology is what it is.
19:25
And over time, we have learned to be much more aware of the context of the inventions that we put out into the world, the inventions that we create, the technology that we create,
19:41
and we are better off for it. And that is all. That's it.
20:03
Thank you so much for that very interesting presentation. To break the fourth wall for a moment and bring us back into 2016, what should those of us who are wanting to prepare for our lives as technologists whose primary concern is mediating that relationship with our cities
20:22
be doing to encourage that relationship and make that a constructive relationship? Does that make sense? Is that a question? Well, it is a question. It's a large one. I think the most important thing is to just be aware of the context in which you're creating.
20:42
In preparing for this talk, I did a series of conversations around politics, and education, and so on and so forth, because I didn't want to just be thinking about, okay, where is technology going to be going in the next 10, 15, 25, 40 years?
21:04
It's important to think more, where is society going to be going and what kind of technology do we need in order to bring that about? So be aware of context is the most important thing I think we can all do.
21:26
Are we in 2016 or 2056? 2056, obviously. Awesome, I like it there. How do you feel about the trade-offs between the increased awareness
21:41
and specificity of public health data due to the large number of implants compared to the evolution of various, hacking attacks upon those implanted devices?
22:04
It comes with the territory. Every new technology comes with its own set of dangers, of perils. This was no different in 2006 than it is in 2056,
22:23
except for the fact that there are people who are choosing to get embedded devices and it is a little bit, that does bring some unease for some people. However, most of the younger folks
22:40
that I've run into these days are prepared to live with that possibility and prepared to protect against it as well because of the numerous benefits that it creates for themselves and for society. We always have dangers
23:01
and we protect against them as best we can.