A chunk of the Programmable City team attended the Web Summit in Dublin last week.  I was fortunate to be asked to MC the Machine Stage for Tuesday afternoon (on smart cities/smart cars), and also presented a paper, participated in a panel discussion, and chaired a private panel session, all on smart cities.  As well reported in the media, it was an enormous event attended by 22,000 people, with 600 speakers across nine stages, and hundreds of stands, many of which changed daily to accommodate them all.  No doubt a huge amount of business was conducted, personal networks extended, and thousands of pages of copy for newspapers, magazines and websites filed.

To me what was interesting about the event were the silences as much as what was presented and displayed.  There were loads of very interesting apps and technologies demoed, many of which will have real world impact.  That said, there was also a lot of hype, hubris, hope, self-promotion, buzzwords (to my ear ‘disruption’, ‘smart’, ‘platform’, ‘internet of things’ and ‘use case’ were used a lot), Californian ideology (radical individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, and tech utopianism), and heads in the sand.  In contrast, there was an absence of critical reflection about the following three broad concerns. Continue reading →