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A review by dansquire
How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables by Joe Shaw, Rob Kitchin, Mark Graham, Shannon Mattern
3.0
This is an interesting but flawed book – I found parts of it fascinating, and parts quite mundane. If you're interested in speculation about the future of technology, where it might take us and how it might cause unintentional problems, there's a lot of good stuff in here, but you do have to be selective.
To start with, each chapter is written by a different academic, which yields a wide range of opinions and perspectives. There are some terribly written chapters, and some brilliant ones. There are also a fair amount of proofing errors, which you just have to forgive.
The chapters each look at how a city might be run by a different well-known company. They range from academic case studies (Google Fiber) to pure fantasy fiction (Vodafone), and everything in between. I work in the tech industry, and I recognised most of the technologies discussed in the book – some academics have an astute and incisive angle, while others have pretty simplistic takes. A tranche of the chapters fall under the category of 'data-driven decisions can have bad consequences', without really exploring the issues in any detail, and these are the least interesting. Because the authors are academics, there is also a tendency in lots of the fictional chapters to focus on exposition at the expense of character or character, plot or emotion.
Some don't engage with the issues at all, but are fun to read. The Disney chapter imagines an AI assistant which speaks like a fairy godmother. The Starbucks chapter imagines a city where public servants always get your name wrong, and have a range of silly names for the sizes of everything. The best-written chapter is the Spotify chapter, which is actually quite sad and stands up as a good short story in its own right. The more interesting stories take a balanced view, exploring the potential risks but also looking at the potential benefits of applying technology to the public sphere.
I thought there were five stand-out chapters in the collection. These ones really engaged with the premise of the book – how might aspects of business models function if applied to civic life? If you only read 5 sections, I think it should be these:
To start with, each chapter is written by a different academic, which yields a wide range of opinions and perspectives. There are some terribly written chapters, and some brilliant ones. There are also a fair amount of proofing errors, which you just have to forgive.
The chapters each look at how a city might be run by a different well-known company. They range from academic case studies (Google Fiber) to pure fantasy fiction (Vodafone), and everything in between. I work in the tech industry, and I recognised most of the technologies discussed in the book – some academics have an astute and incisive angle, while others have pretty simplistic takes. A tranche of the chapters fall under the category of 'data-driven decisions can have bad consequences', without really exploring the issues in any detail, and these are the least interesting. Because the authors are academics, there is also a tendency in lots of the fictional chapters to focus on exposition at the expense of character or character, plot or emotion.
Some don't engage with the issues at all, but are fun to read. The Disney chapter imagines an AI assistant which speaks like a fairy godmother. The Starbucks chapter imagines a city where public servants always get your name wrong, and have a range of silly names for the sizes of everything. The best-written chapter is the Spotify chapter, which is actually quite sad and stands up as a good short story in its own right. The more interesting stories take a balanced view, exploring the potential risks but also looking at the potential benefits of applying technology to the public sphere.
I thought there were five stand-out chapters in the collection. These ones really engaged with the premise of the book – how might aspects of business models function if applied to civic life? If you only read 5 sections, I think it should be these:
- Ethereum: Looking at smart contracts based on blockchain, and how these might improve trust and efficiency in public life, but also introduce new fronts for unintentional exclusion.
- SnapChat: What if real-world policing and justice was run like a social media platform? Where users are expected to self-police, reports crimes that have to fit a narrow set of parameters, and the police are reactive rather than proactive in preventing abuse?
- Sony PlayStation: How might gamification encourage engagement with community goals? And what might be the adverse effects of nudge psychology, when people want the achievements without the work?
- Uber: why privatisation of services is a seductive proposition, but actually over-simplifies and damages those very services.
- WhatsApp: (probably the best of the bunch) what happens when you replace trusted news journalism with free-for-all information sharing? How do you protect people from abuse when there is no accountability in the news?