“The very parameters of global urbanism”: Easterling (2014), Extrastatecraft
- Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.
This book is basically a condensation of all Easterling’s work preceding it – which isn’t entirely surprising, but worth noting nonetheless. In the context of the task at hand at time of taking these notes, the main point to be made is that the “smart city” is basically just a rebadging of what Easterling identifies as “the zone” (note that her list of examples are all cities which have been described as being “smart”: KAEC in Saudi, Songdo, Cyberjaya, HITEC Hyderabad – p. 15); this means that we can get away from the notion that “smartness” is anything to do with any specific technology or policy (or suite thereof), and think of it instead as an iteration of the “spatial softwares” designed to produce a space in which extrastatectraft might be performed. In this way, we can see data as both the means and the end of control: urban space as an economic and ideological Taylorist panopticon.
The shared standards and ideas that control everything from technical objects to management styles also constitute an infrastructure. Far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point contact and access between us all – the rules governing the space of everyday life.
(p. 11; note that Easterling kinda undermines that “far from hidden” point later, modifying it to something closer to “hidden in plain sight” – its ubiquity makes it invisible, in other words. This is a continuation of Easterling’s multi-book riff on “spatial products”, which is a dominant feature of her magisterial Enduring Innocence (2005), but which in turn has its origins in Organisation Space (1999), both from MIT Press.)
Now not only buildings and business parks but also entire world cities are constructed according to a formula – and infrastructural technology […] Manifest in these stock specifications, infrastructure is then not the urban substructure but the urban structure itself – the very parameters of global urbanism.
(p. 12; “technology” being used here in the broader original sense of practices, rather than the more recent false specificity of devices)
Infrastructure space has become a medium of information. The information resides in invisible, powerful activities that determine how objects and content are organised and circulated. Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city.
(p. 13)
[Riffing on McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, and his observation that content is mere meat to distract “the watchdog of the mind”]: … the activity of the medium or infrastructural matrix – what it is doing rather than what it is saying – is sometimes difficult to detect.
(p. 13; triumph of surface over substance, marketing rhetorics, the prestidigitation of infrastructural magic – the latter being a riff from a talk I gave in Munich back in 2017, the video of which I’m trying to get the conference organisers to reinstate to Y*ut*be)
… dynamic systems of space, information, and power generate de facto forms of polity faster than even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them […] As a site of multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide, infrastructure space becomes a medium of what might be called extrastatecraft – a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes in partnership with statecraft.
(p. 15)
[The] dominant software for making urban space: the free zone […] typically provides premium utilities and a set of incentives – tax exemptions, foreign ownership of property, streamlined customs, cheap labour, and deregulation of labour or environmental laws – to entice business.
(p. 15)
Both urban space and telecommunications are technologies and mediums of information.
(p. 17; cf. Mattern, 2018, on the always-already “smart” city)
If law is the currency of governments, standards are the currency of international organisations and multinational enterprises. ISO (the International Organisation for Standardisation) is an extra-state parliament of this global standard-making activity [and] standards create a “soft law” of global exchanges.
(p. 18)
[ISO9000] promotes the ritualised incantations of something called “quality” […] management guidelines for a process or quality system that addresses everything from the environment to government itself […] that often resembles the hilarious, upbeat argot of self-help gurus. [It is] a perfect conduit of undeclared activities and intentions with potentially dangerous consequences.
(p. 19; consequences come from the “pre-cleared” status of anyone who has hustled their way to being accredited by ISO, after which point they’re assumed to be the proverbial safe pair of hands; bonus points for the scare-quoting of “quality”, which is one of the great enduring suitcase words, as poignantly illustrated by Pirsig’s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Political and economic data come cloaked in the rationality of science even though they may really present false logics or systems of belief.
(p. 20; against econometrics, and Easterling’s signature bugbear, the McKinsey consultant – a loathing which makes more sense as the years pass by)
Disposition is the character or propensity of an organisation that results from all its activity. It is the medium, not the message […] It is not the shape of the game piece but the way the game piece plays. It is not the text but the constantly updating software that manages the text. Npt the object form, but the active form […] Detecting and developing the active forms that shape disposition is an essential skill of the urbanist in infrastructure space…
(p. 21)
Examining the power of the stories, persuasions, or ideologies that accompany a technology also helps in detecting disposition […] Well-rehearsed theories, like those related to Capital or neoliberalism continue to send us to the same places to search for dangers while other concentrations of authoritarian power escape scrutiny […] shaping and managing the story is then also a crucial skill in infrastructure space.
(pp. 21-2; note that the skill with story that Easterling describes here is already well developed in the organisations that peddle the spatial products with which she is concerned; e.g. McKinsey give great story, and therein lies the problem, in that we have to learn to subvert and rewrite those stories)
Castle Precincts
Viaduct
Give me convenience
There’s something rather pernicious about this. It seems clear that despite the continual adoption of technologies that promise to save time or make things more convenient, we do not, in fact, feel as if we have more time at all. There are a number of factors that may explain this dynamic. As Neil Postman noted around the same time that Tierney was writing his book, the “winners” in the technological society are wont to tell the “losers” that “their lives will be conducted more efficiently,” which is to say more conveniently. “But discreetly,” he quickly adds, “they neglect to say from whose point of view the efficiency is warranted or what might be its costs.” Tierney himself admits that what he has to say is likely to be met “with a degree of self-preserving … denial” because he will argue that “a certain value is not freely chosen by individuals, but is demanded by various facets of the technological order of modernity.” Which is why, as Horgan put it, “we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.”
L M Sacasas is re-reading all the sociology-of-tech titles that were published in the final years of the previous century, and that we should maybe have read more thoroughly at the time. Can’t quite remember how I stumbled upon his blog sometime late last year, but I’m very glad I did.