<nettime> Becoming Infrastructure, Grabbing Power

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I'm sure many of you have noted the co-incidence of Google's closing
down its smart city project in Toronto [1] and Andrew Cumo announcing
a major partnership with Google to reinvent the state of New York
post-Covid [2].

Naomi Klein wrote a piece for the Intercept [3] in which she basically
interpreted this through the lens of disaster capitalism, where the
crisis enables to implement long-existing plans that would previously
have been too controversial.

And, indeed, she dug out a few recent op-eds by Eric Schmidt who,
already prior to the crisis, demanded a vast new government spending
in research on AI (in order to compete against China and all the
learning they do via mass surveillance), and now, during the crisis,
makes a full move to position Silicon Valley as the savior of America.

In the WSJ, he now wrote [4]

“The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in
terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health,
the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your
life would be like in America without Amazon.” He added that people
should “be a little bit grateful that these companies got the
capital, did the investment, built the tools that we’re using now,
and have really helped us out.”

As much as I like Klein's analysis, I'm sure there much more going on
than simple disaster capitalism, in particular when the most ardent
capitalist are calling for Chinese-style state involvement.





[1]
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-cancels-project-1.5559370
[2]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/06/cuomo-questions-why-school-buildings-still-exist-says-new-york-will-work-with-bill-gates-reimagine-education/
[3]
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
[4]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-real-digital-infrastructure-at-last-11585313825



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