Google legitimated the ‘for-profit city’ as surveillance capitalism’s key urban ambition.

Evidence

Cisco has 120 “smart cities” globally, some of which have embraced Cisco Kinetic, which as Jahangir Mohammed, the company’s vice president and general manager of IoT, explains in a blog post, “is a cloud-based platform that helps customers extract, compute, and move data from connected things to IoT applications to deliver better outcomes.… Cisco Kinetic gets the right data to the right applications at the right time… while executing policies to enforce data ownership, privacy, security and even data sovereignty laws.” But, as is so often the case, the most audacious effort to transform the urban commons into the surveillance capitalist’s equivalent of Paradiso’s 250-acre marsh comes from Google, which has introduced and legitimated the concept of the “for-profit city.” Just as MacKay had counseled and Weiser proselytized, the computer would be operational everywhere and detectable nowhere, always beyond the edge of individual awareness. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 712

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters on MacKay’s and Weiser’s visions of ubiquitous computing — this is their payoff in the commercial domain. — connects to: Google’s mapping games served as test beds for expanding surveillance capitalism into physical space — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 472; Google institutionalized surveillance capitalism by simply declaring its right to take experience as data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1078; Google’s founders envisioned being handed a city to control and license its technology — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 724 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Google’s founders envisioned being handed a city to control and license its technology #expands (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 724
• Google institutionalized surveillance capitalism by simply declaring its right to take experience as data #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1078
• Google’s founders frame total surveillance as the logical path to a perfected society #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1274