The City as Cyborg: A History of Civic Technology... by Mjumbe Poe

Speaker 1: Come on, no.

Speaker 2: Good afternoon. So, um welcome. Welcome, welcome. Um right, and good evening. Welcome to the twenty fifty-six Cyborg City Conference. Uh throughout this conference our various speakers will be exploring the idea of the cyborg city, uh what it is and what it may mean for our future. So for those that aren't familiar with this idea, here's the 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 At least centuries, but it was primarily a philosophical matter of discussion until the early 2030s, say

Speaker 2: , when urbanist scholars started working with life scientists. And started to develop a rigorous classification system for various types of human environments. 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 city if the city is alive, then is it a cyborg? With respect to this topic in particular, the cyborg city, 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?

Speaker 2: So to begin to answer these questions, I believe we can turn to the period in history from which we saw two coincident phenomena. One is the rise in various technologies that mediated the relationship between between cities and their residents, or what was then called civic technology. The second phenomenon is our own increasing comfort 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. It's kind of a mouthful

Speaker 2: 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. But I want to start a little bit before the beginning of the century. because there this this period of the 90s um is the immediate precursor and there are some important uh very important questions that come up during this period that set the stage uh for the cyborg city. So in this period in the 90s, actually shortly before the 90s, the World Wide Web is invented, but the first web browser is

Speaker 2: Implemented in the 90s. Microsoft's Internet Explorer emerges as the browser of choice among people developing for the web after a period known as the Browser Wars, which was not actually an armed struggle. Uh portals are seen as the future of the web. My personal website at this time I was I was a teenager. major, but my personal website is on GeoCities and my search engine of choice is Hotbot because I'm a cool kid, which is CodeSpeak4Nerd. 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.

Speaker 2: So it's difficult to pinpoint the exact time that our consciousness becomes entwined with our computers. But this was a period that saw our empathy for the machines we used become mainstream. And it may just be that uh 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 gonna go forward to the beginning of the 21st century. And as we enter the 21st century, college students on little

Speaker 2: IVs 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 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 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

Speaker 2: it operates in cycles of varying lengths So the earliest organizations that would become known explicitly as civic technology organizations 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. 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.

Speaker 2: Electoral political campaigns in the United States 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 pages about pages And look almost as good as my GeoCities site. So this next period, between about 2006 and 2010, this next period has a couple of very significant significant uh events in it. And you know, I'm not going to be able to get to all of the significant events in any of these periods because it it turns out that a lot happens in the course of

Speaker 2: uh three decades. Uh but we're gonna start with talking about Kenya. So in 2007, Kenya's going through a contentious and in some cases dangerous general election with scattered reports of violent intimidation of voters of voters 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 what's going on. They call this system Ushahidi. So during this period, a number of other technologies based around crowdsourcing emerge.

Speaker 2: And though these are not the first examples of this crowdsourcing method, and if you recall, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are two examples from the previous time period that use the same methods. But the practice was not explicitly identified and named until this period, specifically in uh Wired magazine, in a Wired magazine article in 2000. So the surge in technological progress has a detrimental effect on several industries, one of which 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 Every Block. Which aims to provide hyperlocal or micro-local news.

Speaker 2: So an interesting and spontaneous type of crowdsource transparency also emerges in In this period as well. A tragic one, in fact. Early in the morning on New Year's Day of 2009 at the Fruitville Bard Station in Oakland, California, 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. This and later events would not have been able to be captured and disseminated in quite the same way.

Speaker 2: were it not for other developments during this period. Specifically the release of uh the iPhone and the Android operating system And the resultant explosions and the popularity of portable devices capable of making those recordings, as well as the launch of video sharing services such as YouTube. and their subsequent uh excuse me their subsequent um acquisition by Google. Also, most governments now 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. So in the next period between around 2011 and 2015, uh

Speaker 2: and bleeding into the following or the five years following this, uh, is a big time for governments getting into this game. Code for America, an organization that originally works 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. 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 a Over on your right, that is a much younger and sprightly version of me. In the UK, the Government Digital Service is founded with the mandate to transform the way that the UK government delivers services to their residents, employing a digital by default strategy.

Speaker 2: And this work inspires and informs a lot of other work that then happens in the United States in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and San Diego and how they start to rebuild their own websites. 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 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, Sandra Blunt, Samuel DuBos, and Freddie Gray.

Speaker 2: 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. The period from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty. Oh, well Didn't expect that. Wrong order. The period from 2016 to 2020. In this period 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.

Speaker 2: which local in which local and federal government uh issue subpoenas to gain access to defendants encrypted phone data. And these these conversations um go on to inform uh a host of other trials and um court findings uh around the nature of the relationship between individuals and their data. We also begin to see um very early diagnosed cases Cases of what is known as vicarious trauma, a phenomenon previously most commonly associated with professional counselors We see this case in the general public.

Speaker 2: These cases come as a result of the constant and immersion and immersive 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 the in response to the the uh the data um the data privacy concerns uh in the immediately previous periods. Instead of relying on large organizations such as Google in Facebook to manage both uh people's data and their services atop, it becomes popular to um Procure private servers to host your own data. In addition, we see services such as Google

Speaker 2: opening up uh their platforms to both work with the data that they host as well as the uh private hosted data um in order to uh in order to um keep the customers uh that they that they have at up to that point um 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 The National Conference of Mayors endorses a tour of duty initiative. Sounds good

Speaker 2: In this initiative, uh technologists are encouraged to give one to two years of service To various local city governments working on their staff as part of the civil service. It's working again. This program This program leads to a a um a large increase in the number of Technology professionals working in government and a

Speaker 2: rapid improvement in the provision of government digital services. Uh at the twenty twenty six Django Con We are privileged to see 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 and resonate deeply with the uh the crowd of technologists and early adopters who

Speaker 2: are uh who are embracing their own cyborg nature well ahead of the um the general public who will not for uh another decade or So these questions are uh around the notion of where we will be in ten years. Um He says, in 1995, you are a desktop app, which again resonates strongly with Cyborg Aware. uh technologists. In 2005, you are a website. In 2015, you are a rich mobile app. In 2025, you are a biosensitive application.

Speaker 2: 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 Django. So in conclusion, the idea of civic technology is the most 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 our relationship with our cities. uh and that that is a positive value

Speaker 2: that that is an important thing that that is something that can make our lives in our cities better um moreover as time goes on The notion of civic technology as a term is going to fall out of favor 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. Um and over time we have learned much uh learns to be much more aware of the context of the inventions

Speaker 2: that we uh put out into the world, the inventions that we create, the technology that we create, and we are better off for it. And that is all That's it.

Speaker 3: Thank you so much for that very interesting um presentation. For to to to break the fourth wall for a moment and bring us back into 2016, what should um those of us who are wanting to prepare for our lives as technologists whose primary concern is mediating that relationship with our cities be be doing to encourage that relationship and make that a constructive relationship. Does that make sense? Is that is that a question?

Speaker 2: Well it's it's it is a question. It's a large one. Um I think I think the I think the thing the most important thing is to just be aware again be aware of the context in which you're creating. In preparing for this talk, I did a series of of conversations um around uh politics and um um education and 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 years 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

Speaker 2: is the most important thing. I think we can all do. Are we in 2016 or 2056? I like it there.

Speaker 4: Um Uh how do you feel about the the trade-offs between um the increased awareness and uh specificity of public health data due to the large number of implants compared to the um evolution of vario evolution of various um Hacking attacks upon those implanted devices.

Speaker 2: It it comes with the territory Every new technology comes with its own set of um of of of dangers of perils. This was no different in 2006 than it is in 2056, except for the fact that there are people who are choosing to get embedded devices now and it is a little bit um you know there that that does bring some unease for some people. However, you know, most of the younger folks that I've I've run into these days are prepared to live with that possibility and prepare to protest against it as well

Speaker 2: because of the numerous benefits that it creates for themselves and for them society. We always have dangers and we protect protect against them as best we can.