The Socratic City II

This is the second essay in a three-part series on wise cities. The first essay is here.

Narrow Knowledge

It is said the Mughal emperor Akbar loved departing the palace in disguise and roaming the city incognito. In some stories, he’s shooed away by the locals. In others he’s fooled. According to legend this is how he met his friend and foil, Birbal, whom he dispatches on various foolish missions.

These urban escapades humanize the king, but does it make him a flaneur?

Flaneur: noun,plural fla·neurs [flah-n?r]. French, a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way; an idler or loafer.

Unfortunately, an emperor can never be an idler or a loafer, for he’s always concerned about what’s happening in his empire. Power never seeks uncontrolled knowledge. James C. Scott says it well in “Seeing like a State:”

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.

It is these needs of the state that prompt the census, the survey and the registry. Huge bureaucracies emerge to ‘process’ all this information. The original computer. There’s no way to understand vast systems of human organization - states, markets and cities included - without understanding that they have always been computers. Here’s a relevant quote from from Farrell and Shalizi’s insightful article:

what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

Today’s smart city and its profusion of sensors and server farms have a long lineage. The smart city is the city imagined as a vast computer, and as this review says:

Discussions that were once about values and beliefs – about what a society wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror – have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics.

Is that a good thing? Could be worse, I suppose, but could be better as well.

The Compuscope

Once we acknowledge states and markets and cities are computers, we are forced to ask the question:

Can computing serve the cause of freedom instead of control? Can its systems of knowledge help us flourish?

The easy answer: yes. A complex answer: yes, but. The wicked answer: don’t know. The last bit is the second half of the Socratic ‘I know that I don’t know’ in a collective avatar. It helps us avoid our own cliche of ‘collective wisdom.’ Yes, communities are best positioned to understand the worlds they inhabit, but it’s all too easy to settle into forms of knowledge and control that require a narrowing of vision.

If we look back at the history of technology over the last five hundred years, the two big themes are:?media?and?machines. Books are media, steam engines are machines. From passing notes to your friends in class to books that have lasted millennia, writing shapes what it is to be human. The printed text changed how our conception of ourselves. Books were one of the first mass produced modern commodities. Before widespread literacy, manuscripts were read in the presence of others, often a teacher or a priest. In contrast, we read the printed word in solitude, hearing our voice again and again. How much did that experience influence the idea of an interior landscape?

The technology of print makes possible a private sphere invisible to others and - ideally - protected from the prying eyes of the state. And the ability to make marks on paper and use those marks for tabulating and summarizing statistics makes possible the paraphernalia of being human in the nation state era: citizenship, population, policy etc (see the Scott quote above). Telescopes were first used for commercial and military purposes (e.g., to spot ships on the horizon before others could and raise prices for luxury goods accordingly) but Galileo pointed that device at the heavens and lent credence to an entirely new way of understanding the universe. As artifacts that can sense, decide and act, computers have been used for commercial and military purposes but can be pointed elsewhere:?to expand the scope and limits of human (and non-human!) experience and consciousness, but in order to do so, we need the parallel evolution of artistic forms, like the novel was for print culture.

Will computing have as much impact as printed text, if not writing itself? Maybe more, for it marries media and mechanism: you can use computers to represent the world and to manipulate it?

Seeing Beyond the State

Talking about artistic forms, isn’t the detective story the quintessential representation of the city in art? 221 Baker street is almost as real as Trafalgar Square. There’s simplicity to the detective story: someone’s committed a crime, rupturing the moral universe and it’s up to the detective to repair the harm. If science fiction paints a future in which we fly to the heavens, the detective story uses reason and evidence to bend the arc of the universe towards justice. It is also science fiction!

But what happens when the crime is monstrous and defies heroic action? Or when the powers themselves are responsible for the crime? Like in the Holocaust: how can any amount of patient detective work and legal action make amends? The real detective work in the post-WWII era was done by the Soviet Union and the United States, first by defeating the Nazis and then establishing post-war regimes predicated on progress and the use of science and technology to amass wealth and power. That post-WWII narrative of state driven progress explains the power of the police procedural, the dominant detective form on TV, which shows how the organs of the state are fundamentally ‘right.’ My favorite show growing up was the (then) West German show,?‘Der Alte,’ - the Old Fox?as it was called in English, which has been running continuously for 45 years!

The detective story “sees the city like the state”

The detective story works as long as the investigated crimes are against individual people and the state is fundamentally 'good,' so that its functionaries - policemen, proscutors and judges - are legitimate agents of justice. But what happens when the crime isn't even recognized as one? How is it possible to spew trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and not see it as a crime? Which detective will apprehend the criminal in this case??

We need a new genre that marries the world of science fiction, and the world of the whodunit: for we are simultaneously living in the future and needing to solve the crimes of the present. That genre has to take advantage of the new computing technologies we have on hand and yet tell a human (and more than human) story.

Our sensome is a fledgling attempt at that yet-to-be creative genre.