The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

Building Confidence in the Future

November 18, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The future was on my mind a lot this week, probably because several stories were arguing for its importance and vulnerability.

Some of it was the mid-term election, which the press kept reminding us was about choosing our political future, as if we’d be able to get it right or wrong in one fell swoop. Now with the hype behind us, it looks like all we’ve done is kick the can down the road.

Then there was the centenary of “the Great War,” and all the future-talk back then. “Making the world safe for democracy” was what Woodrow Wilson promised as he navigated us from continental isolation to European battlefield that first time, going back again 20 years later, and on to Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. It’s what keeps us in the tribal mess of Afghanistan today–maybe safer, but not quite safe.

What am I voting for, fighting for, working for if not for what I hope? Is it to be safer tomorrow? To make one thing better? To change even more about the world than that? So far this week, 2018 seemed an ill-suited time to build much confidence in the future.

But then came the future as apocalypse. A place that its Gold Rush settlers had called “Paradise” was incinerated, burning many of those who were living there today beyond recognition. The future for the survivors who remained was also stripped bare: of homes, belongings, neighbors, pets, of familiarity and routine.

Still, a less blackened way to think about the future came from what happened next. It was not a government rescue or a swell of self-reliance, because most of the survivors live on fixed or limited incomes, with little fat to fall back on. Instead it was how quickly people in nearby towns moved beyond “the transmission of thoughts and prayers” to an outpouring of generosity.

In another irony for Paradise, just when their hopes for the future seemed obliterated a new community gathered around those who remained–even as more wild fires continued to bloom in the east. This short video clip captures some of the outpouring this week, dressed (either improbably or not) as a Sexy Panda food truck.

Regular people recognized themselves in their neighbors’ tragedy and spontaneously gathered to start building their future together, not by offering “pies in the sky” from afar but in a Walmart parking lot where displaced families had fled and are still living out of their cars. FEMA, the National Guard, and “the local authorities” may think they know better, but a future that’s worth having is usually created when one capable person cares for another.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

much societal effort goes into withering us away from [our] fullest, most powerful selves. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organizing, as if by instinct when the situation demands it. Thus disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.

As if by instinct, some of that improvisational euphoria was visible in Walmart’s parking lot this week. The helpers felt empowered by their involvement while the survivors found the ability to tap into their own reserves of autonomy and generosity, telling me and everyone else who was listening that “We will make it.”

Over the summer, National Public Radio launched an occasional series where it asked listeners to identify songs that were “the most uplifting in their experience.” This week, NPR profiled one of them, Simon & Garfunkel’s “American Anthem,” and recorded listener reactions while the song played in the background. When I caught the Morning Edition segment over coffee, I was overtaken by the wistfulness in its college-boy lyrics and ethereal delivery and by how others still felt it too.

Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America…

Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’ve all come to look for America

All come to look for America

For me, the song transports because you can feel the movement of the bus in its rhythms and catch glimpses of the country not as a whole but in its particulars: Pittsburg, Saginaw, the New Jersey Turnpike.

As a people, we are also more interested in where we’re headed than in where we’ve been. So I wasn’t surprised when one listener said: “For me, getting to know America is more about the questions that we ask than the sort of sureness that we might reach in our own experience,” or that another added: “I think all of us are still searching for America and hoping to find it and define it and give it meaning. And we all do that in our own way.” In this gem of a song, “looking for America” is looking for the future and wanting (so very, very hard) to believe in what we will find.

In Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World, Robert Kaplan was also “looking for America” when he set out on his road trip across the country a couple of years ago. He tells us he found it near the border between Nebraska and South Dakota when he visited Mt. Rushmore. This is what he saw there:

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt: the four greatest presidents at the time of the 150^thanniversary of American independence in 1926, when [Gutzon] Borglum [the sculptor] began his work here. The granite insures that the work will stand undiminished for at least a thousand years. After I have driven across the continent into the wilderness, Mount Rushmore offers me revelations in person that all the photographs of it cannot. For Mount Rushmore overwhelms precisely because of where it is located, not on the Capitol Mall but atop a mountain in the West, part of the original Louisiana Purchase, bearing the promise of the continent that was the upshot of pioneer optimism. An optimism that, in turn, was driven by democracy and the breaking down of European elite systems that these four presidents did so much to originate and secure. The culmination of the American story—one that Washington and Jefferson began—has more to do with the West than the East.

These carvings, despite their inhuman size, are strangely not oppressive or totemic. They do not intimidate or call to mind some tyrannical force. There is light and not darkness in the eyes of these presidents. Each is looking into the future, it seems…The result…is a myth of light that puts into some tragic perspective…the darkness rained [by white settlers and soldiers] on the native inhabitants and their way of life in these same hills. (the italics here are mine)

For Kaplan, it is in the tension and contradiction between America’s loftiest ideals and its worst inclinations that hope in the future lies. In another irony, he finds the confidence that can ultimately win out in a popular gathering place a few miles away.

[I]n the adjacent tourist trap of Keystone, South Dakota, many of the waiters and waitresses are from places as diverse as Ukraine, India, Nepal and so on. They are trying to make it and stay in America—yes, still the land of opportunity. Whereas at the [Mount Rushmore] viewing terrace there was whispering and outright silence, here the tourists—who include immigrants from Asia and Latin America—are all chattering away, exchanging notes and competing with one another to tell just how far and through how many states they traveled in order to get here. The license plates in the parking lots are from every part of the country. Keystone, snaking and ramshackle, is like a vast hostelry at an ancient pilgrimage site. The great and nearby monument has shown them what they all have in common.

I see the arc of my journey here. It has purpose. There is nothing eccentric about driving slowly for weeks on end, from one side of the continent to the other. Keystone reveals to me exactly what I am doing, since what I am looking for actually exists.

At a time when we are criticizing many of our monuments, this may seem a odd moment for Kaplan to celebrate one of them. But at their best, a country’s monuments can be symbols not of oppression or hypocrisy but of aspiration. They can say: despite its contradictions, America is still trying to grapple with its complicated legacy and to discover a hope-filled future where the frontier still stretches out in front of it.

The Walmart parking lot near Paradise, California this week.

Like the new and recent Americans who were celebrating their commonality in Keystone South Dakota, there are always opportunities to ground our hopes.

Without the talking heads in the media, the “thought leaders” in universities and think tanks, or (really) any of the elites awakening us to what seems “right” or “necessary” to them, we can declare our hopes by driving to wherever someone whose humanity we recognize needs us right now.

As John Berger, one of my heroes, has said: “hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today.” It is a way to escape the daily distractions that anesthetize us, to battle our cynicism or despair, and to claim the practical, close-to-the-ground confidence in the future that drives all good work.

This post was adapted from my November 18, 2018 newsletter.

Confronting the Future of Work Together

October 21, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Some of us believe that entrepreneurs can lead us to a better future through their drive and innovation. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and, at least until recently, Elon Musk fill these bubbles of belief. We’ve also come to believe that these masters of business and the organizations they lead can bring us into the warmer glow of what’s good for us—and much of the rest of the world believes in this kind of progress too. Amazon brings us the near perfect shopping experience, Google a world of information at our fingertips, Uber a ride whenever we want one, Instagram pictures that capture what everyone is seeing, the Gates Foundation the end of disease as we know it…

In the process, we’ve also become a little (if not a lot) more individualist and entrepreneurial ourselves, with some of that mindset coming from the American frontier. We’re more likely to want to “go it alone” today, criticize those who lack the initiative to solve their own problems, be suspicious of the government’s helping hand, and turn away from the hard work of building communities that can problem-solve together. In the meantime, Silicon Valley billionaires will attend to the social ills we are no longer able to address through the political process with their insight and genius.

In this entrepreneurial age, has politics become little more than a self-serving proposition that gives us tax breaks and deregulation or is it still a viable way to pursue “what all of us want and need” in order to thrive in a democratic society?

Should we meet our daily challenges by emulating our tech titans while allowing them to improve our lives in the ways they see fit, or should we instead be strengthening our communities and solving a different set of problems that we all share together?

In many ways, the quality of our lives and our work in the future depends on the answer to these questions, and I’ve been reading two books this week that approach them from different angles, one that came out last year (“Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World” by Robert D. Kaplan ) and the other a few weeks ago (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas). I recommend both of them.

There are too many pleasures in Kaplan’s “Earning the Rockies” to do justice to them here, but he makes a couple of observations that provide a useful frame for looking into our future as Americans. As a boy, Kaplan traveled across the continent with his dad and gained an appreciation for the sheer volume of this land and how it formed the American people that has driven his commentary ever since. In 2015, he took that road trip again, and these observations follow what he saw between the East (where he got in his car) and the West (when his trip was done):

Frontiers [like America’s] test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative…[A]long this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self evidence.’ In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own, in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.

[A]ll across America I rarely hear anyone discussing politics per se, even as CNN and Fox News blare on monitors above the racks of whisky bottles at the local bar…An essay on the online magazine Politico captured the same mood that I found on the same day in April, 2015 that the United States initiated an historic nuclear accord with Iran, the reporter could not find a single person at an Indianapolis mall who knew about it or cared much…This is all in marked contrast to Massachusetts where I live, cluttered with fine restaurants where New Yorkers who own second homes regularly discuss national and foreign issues….Americans [between the coasts] don’t want another 9/11 and they don’t want another Iraq War. It may be no more complex than that. Their Jacksonian tradition means they expect the government to keep them safe and hunt down and kill anyone who threatens their safety…Inside these extremes, don’t bother them with details.

Moreover, practical individualism that’s more concerned about living day to day than in making a pie-in-the-sky world is not just in the vast fly-over parts of America, but also well-represented on the coasts and (at least according to this map) in as much as half of Florida.

What do Kaplan’s heartland Americans think of entrepreneurs with their visions of social responsibility who also have the practical airs of frontier-conquering individualism?

What do the coastal elites who are farther from that frontier and more inclined towards ideologies for changing the world think about these technocrats, their companies and their solutions to our problems?

What should any of us think about these Silicon Valley pathfinders and their insistence on using their wealth and awesome technologies to “do good” for all of our sakes–even though we’ve never asked them to?

Who should be making our brave new world, us or them?

These tech chieftans and their increasingly dominant companies all live in their own self-serving bubbles according to Giridharadas in “Winners Take All.” (The quotes below are from an interview he gave about it last summer and an online book review that appeared in Knowdedge@Wharton this week).

Giridharadas first delivered his critique a couple of years ago when he spoke as a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a regular gathering of the America’s intellectual elite. He argued that these technology companies believe that all the world’s problems can be solved by their entrepreneurial brand of “corporate social responsibility,” and that their zeal for their brands and for those they want to help can be a “win-win” for both. In other words, what’s good for Facebook (Google, Amazon, Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, etc.) is also good for everyone else. The problem, said Giridharadas in his interview, is that while these companies are always taking credit for the efficiencies and other benefits they have brought, they take no responsibility whatsoever for the harms:

Mark Zuckerberg talks all the time about changing the world. He seldom calls Facebook a company — he calls it a “community.” They do these things like trying to figure out how to fly drones over Africa and beam free internet to people. And in various other ways, they talk about themselves as building the new commons of the 20th century. What all that does is create this moral glow. And under the haze created by that glow, they’re able to create a probable monopoly that has harmed the most sacred thing in America, which is our electoral process, while gutting the other most sacred thing in America, our free press.

Other harms pit our interests against theirs, even when we don’t fully realize it. Unlike a democratic government that is charged with serving every citizen’s interest, “these platform monopolists allow everyone to be part of their platform but reap the majority of benefits for themselves, and make major decisions without input from those it will affect.” According to Giridharadas, the tech giants are essentially “Leviathan princes” who treat their users like so many “medieval peasants.”

In their exercise of corporate social responsibility, there is also a mismatch between the solutions that the tech entrepreneurs can and want to bring and the problems we have that need to be solved. “Tending to the public welfare is not an efficiency problem,” Giridharadas says in his interview. “The work of governing a society is tending to everybody. It’s figuring out universal rules and norms and programs that express the value of the whole and take care of the common welfare.” By contrast, the tech industry sees the world more narrowly. For example, the fake news controversy lead Facebook not to a comprehensive solution for providing reliable informtion but to what Giridharadas calls “the Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-that-Caused-It” quandary.

Notwithstanding these realities, ambitious corporate philanthropy provides the tech giants with useful cover—a rationale for us “liking” them however much they are also causing us harm. Giridharadas describes their two-step like this:

What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. “Changing the world” had become the wingman of rigging the system…[L]ook at Andrew Carnegie’s essay “Wealth”. We’re now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving.

Ironically, the heroic model of the benevolent entrepreneur is sustained by our comfort with elites “who always seem to know better” on the right and left coasts of America and with rugged individualists who have managed to make the most money in America’s heartland. These leaders and their companies combine utopian visions based on business efficiency with the aura of success that comes with creating opportunities on the technological frontier. Unfortunately, their approach to social change also tends to undermine the political debate that is necessary for the many problems they are not attempting to solve.

In Giridharadas’ mind, there is no question that these social responsibility initiatives “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.” We get not only the Bezos, Musk or Gates vision of social progress but also the further sidelining of public institutions like Congress, and our state and local governments. A far better way to create the lives and work that we want in the future is by reinvigorating our politics.

* * *

Robert Kaplan took another hard look at the land that has sustained America’s spirit until now. Anand Giridharadas challenged the tech elites that are intent on solving our problems in ways that serve their own interests. One sees an opportunity, the other an obstacle to the future that they want. I don’t know exactly how the many threads exposed by these two books will come together and help us to confront the daunting array of challenges we are facing today, including environmental change, job loss through automation, and the failure to understand the harms from new technologies (like social media platforms, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering) before they start harming us. Still, I think at least two of their ideas will be critical in the days ahead.

The first is our need to be skeptical of the bubbles that limit every elites’ perspective, becoming more knowledgeable as individuals and citizens about the problems we face and their possible solutions. It is resisting the temptation to give over that basic responsibility to people or companies that keep telling us they are smarter, wiser or more successful than we are and that all we have to do is to trust them given all of the wonderful things they are doing for us. We need to identify our shared dreams and figure out how to realize them instead of giving that job to somebody else.

The second idea involves harnessing America’s frontier spirit one more time. There is something about us “as a people” that is motivated by the pursuit of practical, one-foot-in-front-of–the-other objectives (instead of ideological ones) and that trusts in our ability to claim the future that we want. Given Kaplan’s insights and Giridharadas’ concerns, we need political problem-solving on the technological frontier in the same way that we once came together to tame the American West. It’s where rugged individualism joins forces with other Americans who are confronting similar challenges.

I hope that you’ll get an opportunity to dig into these books, that you enjoy them as much as I am, and that you’ll let me know what you think about them when you do.

This post was adapted from my October 21, 2018 newsletter.