Digital technologies and the (local) Circular Economy
“People making data, people making things, people making places, and people making networks.” (Adam Greenfield, 2016)
[This text follows up themes explored in the Brighton Digital Festival event How can digital be a tool for the circular economy? The event is on November 1, 2021 at the Ironworks, Brighton, from 7pm to 9pm]
The circular economy, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, gives all of us the tools to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss together, while addressing important social needs. It gives us the power to grow prosperity, jobs, and resilience while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and pollution. Obviously it’s good to work towards a world where we’re working within a cycle of making, using, re-using, recycling, and sustaining our lives and the environment. That is the baseline objective of the circular economy discussion.
But how about linking such questions to our own lives as digital creators, curators and consumers, including the places we live in and how we work? What kind of digital culture or online infrastructure can we use to make a local economy that works for all of us?
Our digital spaces aren’t local or democratic — yet
In the week Facebook has re-branded itself as ‘Meta,’ we should not need reminding that 99% of our digital access, whether hardware, connectivity, social space or mobile, is controlled by mega-corporations based in the cloud — an invisible, un-taxed, ungoverned, legal null space. That’s a formidable, impermeable barrier which might seem like it prevents most of us achieving any kind of sense of agency, or freedom to express ourselves or create new lives and businesses.
Looking back to the early years of the Internet, online communities, newsgroups and quite a mixed bunch of idealists were core to the evolution of an idealistic, altruistic politics of the Web. The Web was seen as a democratizing force for good. Everyone had a voice. Ever since the days of The WELL (the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), there have been discussions about digital spaces as a kind of cultural commons.
Today, when we try to imagine what kind of technology might contribute to our local circular economy, that might mean publicly-funded digital platforms used for social care, public-sector technology infrastructure that supports secure online voting, or use of data-driven technologies to monitor and make more efficient use of scare energy resources, for example. It’s true to say, too, that Facebook Groups play an important and often positive part in local communities and in the culture and heritage sectors.
Writing back in 2011, however, Douglas Rushkoff found the business of digital infrastructure had already gone too far. Rushkoff voiced his fears in his seminal short essay, The Next Net: “The fiber optic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create.”
When Rushkoff wrote that, he was carrying the flag for left-leaning activist networkers, creatives, and those who wanted to stay outside (and inside) the information spotlight for all kinds of reasons, most of them good ones. When Rushkoff wrote The Next Net, in New York and other big cities like Berlin, people had been experimenting with making their own connectivity, often using cast-off routers, creaking modems, line-of-sight links and even illicit cable connections tapping into big pipes. MESH networks started as guerrilla creations linking people using untraceable boxes and power use. These days MESH setups are big business and something quite different, but back in those early days they were a symbol of resistance for some.
Unorthodox connectivity survives
That spirit of unorthodox connectivity still survives in many places. Recently, in the backstreets of Hastings, colleagues at MSL Projects and I worked with network engineer Iain McInnes of local company, TechnologyBox. Together with Iain, we tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to take over control of our local — supposedly publicly-owned — town WiFi network. Iain likes climbing up walls, down ducts and through tunnels, laying Internet cables in places people have long forgotten existed. He gets inspiration for his guerrilla network building from the absolutely key canonical text on the subject: Networks of New York, by Ingrid Burrington.
Burrington’s book is all about tracing and recognizing decades of historic ducting, cables, pipes, and underground and overhead routes that have spread across New York like a hidden spider’s web for a hundred years or more. Burrington suggests much of the urban Internet infrastructure in our cities and towns lies dormant, waiting to be re-used again. In a community digital context, which is really about do-it-yourself action, this could mean shaving thousands of pounds off the cost of building not-for-profit net across town streets.
The principle barrier to building networks anywhere is money. Ten years ago there was seven times more funding for a typical local council than there is now. There’s little local funding for conventional websites, and no money to maintain them, so a new approach is needed to extract value from what has already been digitized across the town environment — which, in most places, is not very much.
Smart cities, but dumb towns?
Shiny new digital infrastructure is being switched on in most places in the UK, right now. The buzz is about Smart Cities, powered by 5G connectivity. Critics of the Smart City movement suggest such projects are driven by technology companies trying to gain monopoly status as software platform suppliers to urban authorities and civilians at home. Alongside that, governments, particularly the UK, appear to be piling in to fund almost anything tagged as Internet of Things, powered by AI, or managed automatically from the cloud by algorithmic gnomes. But cultures and communities aren’t passive; they also kick back against the rise of machines and urban life dictated by commerce.
In America in the post-war years, journalist and social and neighbourhood activist Jane Jacobs was a key influence on subsequent city culture ideologues such as Canadian urbanist Richard Florida. In Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs voiced new theories about how to encourage socially-centered communities, rather than spawning hives for workers and those servicing them. In developing awareness of concepts like social capital, and making clear the looser connection with finance, Jacobs might have opened the door to much later socially-inspired network thinking like the City Camp movement after 2010 (http://citycamp.com/ ), and the continuing, but mostly technologically-driven discussions about Smart Cities (http://www.publicsectorexecutive.com/Public-Sector-News/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-smart-city-concept).
According to critics such as Rick Robinson and Professor Adam Longfield, Smart City agendas are top-down initiatives driven by technology advances and government ideology, rather than grass-roots circular economy movements derived from local needs. Robinson is head of technology at logistics and planning consultancy Amey. He sees the need for urban communities to build on fundamentally sustainable resources, whether people with skills, energy sources, or heritage, and he criticizes Smart City activity that is subsidy or grant-driven, arguing it is often “short-termist,” and lacks sustainability. (https://theurbantechnologist.com/2015/02/15/6-inconvenient-truths-about-smart-cities/).
Urbanist and design educator Adam Greenfield has been looking at how design thinking from the Web development sector might be adopted as a way to continuously develop and refine sustainable community networks. In Practices of the Minimum Viable Utopia (2016) he writes the following:
“Might there not be room for a lean development approach to highly-technologised urban environments? Rather than the single, top-down strategy espoused by the corporate architects of the smart city, this would be an experimental, participatory, iterative and, above all, multiple approach to the making of urban place — one that sensitively leverages advanced technology, but is not driven by it. This presents us with an entirely different conception of the role data and data-driven tools might play in and for the city.”
Greenfield declares the Smart City movement to be “an intellectually bankrupt vision,” and counters with his own template for urban prototyping, characterized by four movements: “People making data, people making things, people making places, and people making networks.”
The political and economic context
From my own experience as an arts manager, producer, funder, and stakeholder in programs nationally, I have found that building local partnerships and collaborations that can demonstrate business viability to local councils or Local Enterprise Partnerships is more of a challenge than actually building the platform, programme or defining the technology to be used. The task becomes about about helping local authority staff to understand the shift from a one-off investment, like building a town website, to thinking about how data networks, digital skills, and people-focused needs can become a sustainable, resilient, and positive local development strategy for all. That emphasis on sustainable, long term skills gain, and accessible network growth for all, must surely be what the local circular economy is about.
At a local level, anecdotal feedback suggests better civic support would materialise if national agencies get truly behind local initiatives. As former Arts Council England chair Peter Bazalgette, the Warwick Commission for the Arts, and Hasan Bakhshi at NESTA all point out, the arts and culture sector is dwarfed by the fast-growing creative industries, and links between the two are more and more important as public sector funds for culture shrink. So national level funders are positive about localist approaches to cultural economies. Arts Council England’s most recent ten year strategy, Let’s Create (2020) is even more enthusiastic about decentralisation.
Not all national initiatives work successfully, locally, though. In 2017 Arts Council England launched their Improving Places report, which highlighted Business Improvement District (BID) networks, potential new local sources of funding for arts, creativity, and tourism. These aren’t quite the opportunity they might seem; they work by encouraging local businesses to pay a levy on their turnover to fund civic improvements including culture and heritage projects. Where towns are prosperous, local Business Improvement Districts are successful, but in places like Hastings, BID incomes remain low, so this isn’t necessarily going to act as a catalyst for circular economies. The regional post-pandemic business environment has little margin for sponsorship, understandably.
Conclusion: to be a smart town, we need tactical infrastructure
For place-based digital networks to sustain and grow, brokering partnerships is more of a challenge than raising funds or mediating server space and content programs — a challenge that Professor Gillian Youngs acknowledges in her important Internet of Place research, initially published as part of the Brighton FUSE project.
In Hastings, trying to take over our town WiFi, we encountered problems which are not unexpected: barriers between local authority and community sector; private sector suspicion of third sector motives, community resistance to change. Getting legal agreements about property and land into place is complicated; town WiFi development is not like a conventional urban development scheme, with a unifying vision and a single outcome, maybe like a civic centre.
David Berry’s Tactical Infrastructure theories (2016) suggest emerging heritage, culture and community networks need to carefully consider if their ethical, cultural, and digital preservation needs match the audience data and business strategies that major broadband providers offer, echoing Douglas Rushkoff’s note of caution about who really owns the Web.
So think on this: if you are hatching a new digital community, social or arts idea and want to build it and run it locally, or if you need unorthodox server setups with the flexibility to carry out complex R&D, you might be asking for much more than your high-street broadband provider allows.
This, then, might be what we need: tactical use of stand-alone local server space and experimental sensor nets served via a local-scale network. This might still allow Adam Greenfield’s vision of “people making data, people making things, people making places, and people making networks.” That reads to me like a digital circular economy.
