Orit Halpern keynote at the Beyond Smart Cities Today conference, Sweden, June 2022
June 30, 2022
The Smartness Mandate: Theorizing our Nervous Present
The COVID 19 pandemic has seemingly naturalized the relationship between computation and human survival. Digital systems sustain our supply chains, labor, vaccine development, public health, and virtually every manner of social life. Nowhere has this link become more powerful then at the intersection of statistics, ecology, artificial intelligence and finance. This paper links a genealogy of neural nets and ubiquitous computing arising from histories of ecology, psychology, and finance to contemporary efforts to model and gamify markets, populations, and networks. I argue that the idea of a networked, population based, ecological cognition unifies neo-liberal governance and conceptions of cognition and intelligence through the figure of the neuron; what I label the “smartness mandate”. This imaginary has political and ethical implications for our present underpinning contemporary reactionary politics and increased volatility and precarity (for many) in the economy.
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For more information about the conference and more recorded keynotes, visit: https://beyondsmartcities.se/recorded-keynotes-2/