 And when I thought about this theme, I really had only one person on my mind who I wanted to bring in and have talked to us, which is Professor Susan Crawford. Susan is a dear friend. She's someone who has sort of emerged in the last 12 years or so as one of the most important thinkers about not just how we run the internet, and she's had real experience with that, spending a lot of time on the board of directors of ICANN, but also what we can do with the internet. So she's someone who's been thinking not just about the sort of the hard architectural issues, the questions of how we maintain net neutrality, although in that case she literally is the person who has written the book that is probably the best introduction to understanding why the U.S. is in such a strange and such a poor position as far as our access to the internet, a book called Captive Audience, which if you haven't read, you really do need to get on your bookshelf. It's absolutely required reading for anyone who thinks about the political and civic significance of the internet. She's someone who's incredibly passionate about the open internet and celebrating it. She's the founder of One Web Day, which has been a holiday to celebrate the web as we know it, this open participatory civic space. But she's now moving in her work to thinking really more broadly about what happens when we do have this open internet, what can we do with it? And working with Steven Goldsmith, she has a book coming out this fall called Responsive City, and she's really thinking about the ways in which a city that is wired, a city that is filled with sensors, a city that is filled with people who can ask questions and who can share all that information, really change what it means to be a citizen. I find her inspiring every time I hear her talk. I'm so thrilled that she's able to be here and lead off this conference for us. Please welcome to the stage Susan Crawford. Well, I'm delighted to be here and to see so many friends this morning. And the idea of having a path to impact is incredibly attractive to me. That's, I think, what we're all trying to find. As I've been working so much on the terrible internet access picture for America, I'm seeking optimism. And I think one way to get there is to look at all the other communities that require open fiber in their towns. And they are journalists, people who care about the civic life of cities, and government. We all need this. So for the last year or so, working with Steve Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis, and former deputy mayor for operations of New York City with Mike Bloomberg. I have been working on a book coming out in September called The Responsive City. And here's the draft cover. Looking at all these ones and zeros on the cover and preparing for this talk made me think of a conversation I had last month with an anthropologist, Norwegian anthropologist who had spent years working in Malaysia with very isolated tribes in the 70s. And she's very disturbed about a turn in her field, in the field of anthropology, towards what people are calling post-humanism. The idea that the human is no longer at the center of discourse for anthropology, that instead we need to be thinking about the feelings of trees. And the feelings of every other element, putting humans as just a relative point of data when it comes to anthropology, not the center. And then she leaned forward and she said it's all tied to this idea of smart. And here is a gift for you, how she thinks of smart. It is simplistic, mechanistic, ahistorical, reductive and tautological. So all the stories about smart cities and smart ways of instrumenting cities to her seem fundamentally post-humanist, somehow mechanical and simplistic. This also rang true for me when I heard Dan Hill speak late last year in Amsterdam, who talked about what he calls the urban intelligence industrial complex. A group of companies that are working towards a vision of instrumenting cities, gathering data and then selling products that are based on that data. I think the post-humanist critique is right and something we really need to focus on when we talk about technology. I think smart, the criticism of smart is way overblown. And we wrote Responsive City, the Responsive City, to celebrate and capture what cities can do working with these other communities, the open fiber community, the open data community, the civic activism world, and journalists to make their cities better places for human beings to live. Because when we forget that humans are the reasons for cities, we operate at our peril. We couldn't actually measure what's wonderful about a city, the energy and the diversity and the joy that you get walking through a great park like Central Park here in New York City or Boston on this sparkling day. To have a physicist's view of the city to believe that everything could be measured and somehow tinkered with is clearly short-sighted and uninspiring. But there is something, there's a lot that cities can do using data to enrich the lives of the people who live there. Cities are capable of great things, of great changes using a little bit of technology plus open fiber to make lives better. And luckily for those who are really worried about the overblown vision of smart where everything has a digital point and we're all nudged in ways we're not aware of to change our lives. Cities are also incapable of controlling large swaths of urban life. So in working on the response of city, I met many civic leaders working inside the walls of city hall who see this balance between human beings and the instrumental use of infrastructure and all the things that make possible human lives in cities. Here's Brenna Berman, she's terrific, she's the CIO of Sacrago. And she is working on ways of using data to target just the inspections that city workers do to make sure that they're using leading indicators about the state of the world historically to focus their efforts. It's a very rigorous, very thoughtful set of work that Chicago's carrying out very slowly with a lot of testing, a lot of computer scientists involved. Behind her is the grid for windy grid they call it, sort of mapping in a human readable form of data. So you can see the city, they're also launching just this week sensors that are very carefully not collecting personalized information but aggregate information about the environment of the city. Air quality, pollution, right? CO2, NO2 sound, levels of sound, noise in other words, and temperature. And instrumenting the city in that way and then having the data come directly into the city's open data platform where it's available for use by researchers and by the city itself for changing its policies. If there's pollution here, why is it there? Can we tinker with that? Can we move with that? With fiber in place and sensors picking up this environmental data, there's a lot that the city can do. So there's Brenna balancing these human and instrumental interests. This is Mike Flowers of New York City who based on his experience in Iraq was able to understand the functioning of New York City government. It's tribal, it's incredibly complex, and there are wars, right? He saw that inside the New York City government and as a very self-empowered civil servant went around persuading people to share data with him so that he could help them make their operations better. And the responsive city tells the story of Mike Flowers and how he did this as an example of how data and technology can actually empower civil servants to have more dignity and autonomy in their jobs, which then helps citizens have more dignity and autonomy in their daily lives. Here's Bill Oates. When he walked into City Hall in Boston in 2006, as its very first cabinet-level CIO, he heard typewriters, 2006, right? So Bill takes this on and makes sure that there's adequate infrastructure inside the city of Boston's environment, but also works closely, very closely in cahoots with Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, focusing always on finding ways to use technology and applications that will help citizens, very much citizen-centered governance, inspired by the mayor, Mayor Menino, who his leadership was absolutely essential. The 20 years that he'd been here as mayor made a huge difference to this team. It's all about people in the end, but it's not just people inside City Hall. It's also people outside City Hall. Here's Dan O'Neill, the indefatigable leader of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, who has worked, he's done many things in Chicago, but he's worked with nonprofits in the city to gather information about deteriorating buildings and get that data right into the city's open data portal through 311, and then have the city streamline its operation so it focuses on what those nonprofits are worried about and actually acts on them, that feedback loop of response between citizen and the people inside City Hall. A wonderful woman, Caroline Shannon, who has moved to the largest favela in Rio and with her husband Pedro de Cristo, is building what they call the digital agorah, a space with very good connectivity for people to work on civic issues together and to organize and to make sure that the city hears about their concerns, but a space, nonetheless, where people can be physically activist together. And here is the terrific Kathy Pettit of the Urban Institute. These are all heroes in my mind. I can't help smiling. They're terrific. She is working with nonprofits across the United States through the Urban Institute to help them build the capacity to use data to have an impact on policy. So you see this terrific feedback loop being driven by these individuals. So they're great. They're balancing concerns about sensitivity and privacy and autonomy and dignity with the need for the city to just do a better job because the city in America and around the world is at a very primitive stage of using all of this information. There are such barriers to adopting technology inside city halls still and enormous blockades in the form of procurement rules, you know, human resources requirements, they get in the way of this kind of agile development. It'll be very slow for cities to actually act on a lot of this input. So the fear about smart, the reductive, mechanic, a historical, tautological world is overblown in part because we have a long way to go before we can actually help change city government into becoming a richer place. So let's balance all of this. We don't want to value efficiency over compassion in the use of technology. We also, though, don't want to devalue efficiency. There's a lot we could be doing better, making the systems of the city run better for all of our lives. And here's the theoretical nugget, the one thing I want you to take away from this talk, which is that you can use data visibly to enhance and amplify the touchpoints of government and journalism on citizens. When you see something, when you see a visualization of what the city is doing, what a journalist is doing to report on the city, all made possible by use of data and fiber in a city, democracy is strengthened because weak and authoritarian governments operate because there's a very thin strand of relationship between the two of them. You give me money, I provide you services, and that's it. And where a government is uncertain and authoritarian, it will act through coercion and threat rather than through its citizens. So paradoxically, this visibility of government actually strengthens the ability of democracy to serve all of our interests. And that's why I'm moving into this new area because I think that without this kind of visibility, we won't have the enhanced trust in government that we'll need in order to accomplish great things for citizens. Because none of us acting on our own can provide a post office or build a road or provide fire service or policemen or schools. All of these are public goods, and we need to make sure that we have the trust, visible trust available for those actions to be taken. There are wonderful tensions in this field that are not gonna go away. We have decades to work through this. I hope it happens more quickly, but look at all this. We have all the centralizing push of urban data networks, data policies. But they make possible very fine-grain neighborhood work, both levels at once. This is very much a both and discourse. Same point about leadership, without Manino in place. The neighborhood-based efforts using technology are more difficult. You need a strong leader in order to keep the decentralized action going. Deep personalization is possible through these networks. We can maybe have our own vision of what the city is. But at the same time, we need broad civic concern in order to address the grand challenges ahead of all cities around the world. Sustainability and resiliency. Also, urban life thrives on inefficiency. New York is very inefficient. Stockholm's jealous because things run too neatly there. They wish they had the grit of New York. But if you have greater civic efficiency, the city becomes more livable, a better place to live. So we'll constantly be balancing these tensions. There is no one right answer. There's a tremendous amount of work to do, particularly on the policy side. We need to connect local organizing, all the civic energy of a place like Transparent Chennai, measuring and mapping affordances in slums, and then trying to get the government to act on that data. Right now that feedback loop is less available than it should be. We need to figure out how, if the math tells us that treating different areas will be fine, the outcomes will be good, how does that fit with our notion of justice and ethics? Lots of differential treatment questions coming up. And privacy and security, and privacy and security level, endless conversations about this, and we need people to dig into the policy in these areas. And the risk of meaningless engagement is huge. That you ask citizens to engage and then you don't respond, and then it's worse than if you'd never ask them in the first place. So lots of tough policy questions that the responsive city attempts to deal with. And here's my vision. Here's why I think all these things fit together. Civic media, municipal fiber people, and local government leaders. Because it's all about the layers of infrastructure that make the responsive city, not the authoritarian city, but the responsive city possible. At the bottom, you're always going to need open fiber, so that everybody has the unlimited capacity bandwidth they need to participate in the city and in their own lives. You need open sensors, like the city of Chicago, the sensors that are reporting data that people know about and that's made public. Open data platforms also, obviously essential. A new element for me that I'm now beginning to understand is the importance of shared screens. Not your just your own handheld device, but large screens that allow people to look at the same picture. Because the emotional heat of policy conversations go down. The heat of conversations diminish when you're looking at the same picture together. So screens everywhere are part of this new vision of the responsive city. And published algorithms. If we were inspecting data, finding leading indicators, trying to predict how the city gets better, we should know what those algorithms are. So there you go. That's the layered vision that puts together what's possible for journalists who are going to be collecting all of this data and reporting on it. Being part of our knowledge of what the city is doing. Plus the fiber people building networks, which are going to be essential. Plus the local government leaders acting on this to make lives better. Three suggestions when you're worried about the smart city or you're hopeful about the smart city. Always think that always ask yourself the question compared to what a city can do a better job knowing more about what it knows. People who want access to the internet can do better having fiber everywhere. How is this a delta? How is this an improvement? We should always ask ourselves. And I think we should be optimistic. There's lots of room for thoughtfulness here. The policy questions have not yet been cited. A lot of them haven't even been asked yet. So we need to build a pipeline of people who are trained both at MIT and at policy schools or at mixtures of the two so that they can engage in local government and be part or part of the citizen activist world and be able to serve this world with activity and passion. The responsive city ultimately is not post humanist. It is completely human. The human is at the center of our discourse as it should be whenever we talk about technology because after all technology is culture. Thank you very much. Susan, thank you so much. And thanks for that provocation. For people who've been following Susan's work for as long as I have, it's really interesting to see that something that came directly out of your older work, the importance of having open fiber of having broadband within communities now turns out to be the backbone of this very, very ambitious vision. But I'm going to reveal myself as one of the smart city skeptics here. In part because I'm a city skeptic. As you know, I live way, way out in rural western mass. But my skepticism about the smart city is really rooted in sort of Adam Greenfield's new book, Beyond the Smart City, or Against the Smart City. And he, I think, would ask the question, who gets to respond? So you gave us a bunch of heroes. They are really amazingly creative people within city government. And outside. A few outside. How do people within communities respond? How do they use this data? How do they build on top of it? How does this become actually about the people that are at the center of your vision rather than just the people within the government? We are just at such a primitive stage in the development of this world. We don't even realize yet that there's no distinction between the electronic world and the offline world. They're the same. It's just a flow of information. We should be living on many layers at once, but because our infrastructure is so pathetic, we think of this as a special thing to be online. It's weird. So as this improves, new kinds of literacy emerge. Ways of dealing with visualizations and understanding them. Ways of interacting. If all of this or much of this information is open and many different kinds of people can chew through it and see pictures that relate to it, that makes possible engagement on a scale we've never seen before. And for slices of your time, slices of your attention. Right now, you'd have to go to a town meeting to participate, and it would take many evenings and you might get bored or wander away. Here, if this vision of what you'd like your city to be is actually apparent or something you can just touch as you watch by, you can give it five minutes. And participate. So I think actually the amplification of engagement is much greater given this ectronic layer than it has been in the past. And actually we're going to see some student work a little bit later today, Action Path from Airheart Grave, which works very much around this idea of trying to get people to respond in real time. You're sort of in the early stages of really exploring this new vision. Give me a sense of what you're hoping will come out of a situation like Chicago where you've got these very capable sensors coming up within an open data architecture. Things go wonderfully well over the next five years. What do you dream happens in the city of Chicago with that sensor net? Five years. Well, the city and its citizens with any luck begin to understand pathways through the city differently. They sort of start seeing the city differently as more is revealed to people in the city than had been in the past. Things like where energy is, hot spots to ignore or go towards. It's just that the city of Chicago is a wonderful place. Now it has even more vibrancy with another layer of information that people become so used to, it almost disappears. It becomes just another part of the city visible to them. That's my image, just more of the same. More of what makes Chicago great and energetic and diverse and interesting, plus a visual layer that's available at any time to citizens. What keeps me for feeling like I'm constantly under surveillance in Chicago? If we feel like we're suddenly seeing these patterns of energy, we're seeing the past that I want to take, and if this is open data, I assume that's also open data to marketers. I also assume that that's open data to anybody who wants to try to figure out how to target me as a high energy guy deciding to engage with a higher energy city. How does that avoid turning into the panopticon, which I know is not your vision of a successful responsive city in this case? This is where the role of policy is so important, and why the way that Chicago is doing this carries so much hope, because they're very deliberately not tracking individual people and not looking for identifiers that would tie a phone to a person. They're looking to just see levels of activity, and each new sensor will be looked at rigorously through a public process to say, do we want this one? Do we want to add it? What's it going to be collecting? And because, I realize this is a lot to ask, but because the information is public, people will see immediately if they're troubled about either collection or aggregation of the data. So my rosy vision is that the information is going to be collected. The city can be very deliberate about depersonalizing that information to make sure that it's not actually tracking a single person in Chicago to its credit is taking that step very intentionally right now. So in just a moment, I'm going to open this up to questions from the audience. And in fact, I'm going to give my typical academic institution what a question looks like speech. But before that, I wanted to ask a particularly pointed and maybe targeted question, which is, Susan, isn't this basically just the back door to your socialist utopian dream of fiber backbones holding together American cities, having not been able to vanquish Comcast and Time Warner in front facing mortal combat. Are you now sort of going around the back and essentially saying, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to destroy your duopoly. All I really want are nice open data and sensors. Is this not sort of the back route to the fight that you've been fighting for about 10 years? I love this. Well, actually, I'm winning because around the country, thank you, around the country many mayors are looking at opening up their own wholesale fiber networks, not actually entering into the market themselves, competing and providing services, but providing passive infrastructure so that other companies can build on top and provide competitive services. It's the Stockholm model. We're going to see a lot of developments along those lines coming up. So having won that battle and everybody in America is on my side because we're sick of very high prices and the sense that connectivity is a luxury, that's the essential problem in America that it feels like a luxury. Now you need to think about why. Why are we doing this? And I always think about humans. That's our point. That's why we do anything, right? And so humans want to be in each other's presence. They want connection and having served briefly in government, I can see the possibilities of real infrastructure provided by government that helps people's lives. And so putting all these things together, I think we're actually at a nice tipping point in America for these issues to work together. There are enormous synergies and journalists are also assisted. So I don't see it as a backdoor. I see it as a natural evolution of taking a technocratic concern, why is it so expensive, and making sure that the human story is always at the middle of it. So I'm going to open up the conversation here. I know that there's a lot of questions on the vision of the responsive city, Susan's work on a variety of different subjects because we are within an academic institution and because there are a number of people who have the word PhD after their name, I always feel like it's necessary to just remind people that we're doing open questions. A question is an interrogative statement. It ends sometimes with a raised voice. And one way you can know if you are asking a question is if there is in fact something Susan could respond to after you were speaking. If you find yourself giving a speech and saying, I guess that's not a question, you have failed. And keep in mind that I am the person who is going to be running around with the mic asking the questions. I am large, I am grumpy, and I take this issue very seriously. So if you have a question that is actually a question, please put up your hand. And I would love to have you ask that question to Susan if I have not now intimidated you all into silence. Anybody, please. Wonderful. Wonderful. Great. And if you would do me the favor of just introducing yourself before you ask the question. David Matthos and Sky Truth, I'm curious about, so what about places that don't perform well, so that somehow the sensor network shows that this place has low energy or it's bad? Obviously that becomes a place that you target additional efforts, but doesn't that kind of confirm, these places are good, but I always kind of knew that part of the city was bad, so I'm not going to have anything to do with that. Well, it depends what you mean by bad. If a section of the city is getting inadequate resources from the city, the city can then target it, right? That's one thing to do. If pollution is bad, it can act on it. If it's low energy, there isn't enough foot traffic, maybe the citizens learn about that. It's amazing what people do when information is visualized to them. We only make progress when we see something, just thinking about it. So I have this idea that people in Amsterdam talk to me about this a lot, that making neighborhoods more visible to themselves could, in itself, be a tremendous assist to cities. So we've got a question over here from Alberto Ibarguan. Yeah. Unlike Ethan, I really do want to believe you, and I am an urban, I am a fan of urban, and I agree that Chicago appears to be doing things right. But it could so easily not do it. What do we do to protect against, say, coming back to the first mayor daily, who might very well have wanted to have the name and background information on all those protesters in 1968, or anybody else? How can you protect against feeling like we're encouraging Big Brother? This is where the pipeline is so important, because training the next generation of students who then see it as part of their lives to go and serve in government, and understand that they can have tremendous impact, particularly in the city. Federal-level work is wonderful, I also recommend it, but there's something about working in a city that allows you to see the impact of your work that's extremely exciting. Getting more people into local government who understand this balance, who are sensitive to the risks, and great potential, human potential technology is the only answer. Making this a kind of a voting issue, you need to get leadership in office that understands technology and doesn't see it as alien, and then getting people inside to serve who are open to and ready to act on all of these questions. We're getting there. I believe my students are part of that cadre, I'm pushing them out, go do it. There are lots of people here who train people who are interested in being in that pipeline, so that for me is the only answer, is training. Good, so we're warming up, I've got at least three hands up, and we're going to work our way through them. Carolina Rossini, public knowledge. So Susan, you said at the end that technology is culture, right? And unfortunately, here in the US, the culture is very permeable to surveillance. I'm sorry to touch on the same, but we are in that moment, right? A couple of months ago, I was in Boston, and the taxi driver driving around MIT said and there was where the police officer was killed. And now I realized yesterday that now the park is named after him. So the culture in the US is permeable to that. So are you seeing the limit very clear there or not yet? And if we think that a lot of laws are actually secretive, how much the individuals can actually impact on setting that limit? Great. Well, again, these things don't happen by magic. There isn't some exterior spaceship that lands on a city and makes it tilt towards only acting in surveillance. This is all about policy. This is about who's there making the decisions about what's going to happen and how the information flows are going to work. Information is going to be collected. We can't stop it. It's a tsunami, right? And it's too attractive to too many people. We can't get in the way, but what we can do is be really careful about who gets access to it. Our forensic abilities to track abuses inside government and go after them, say, oh, yeah, you can't do that because that's destroying the trust that people have in government. So looking backwards forensically, being careful about the policies that shape the amalgamation of data, that's the answer. Because we have this problem in America. We sort of seem to think that our terrible internet access situation happened by itself. It didn't happen by itself. It happened because of policy decisions along the line. So we're permeable to surveillance, but we're also permeable to democracy and the ability to make decisions based on deep ethical and human concerns. We can do that. We're capable of it. Hi. Ellery Biddle from Global Voices. Hi. I wondered if you could just talk about, there must be political barriers to this, right? Like I think of Chicago also as this very cronyistic place of this sort of scary power field, and so I wonder what, these are all brilliant, amazing ideas to think about, but then I also think of that as a place where people have very set political agendas that might not always allow this kind of stuff to happen the way that you want it to. Right. Well, that's another version. That's a terrific question. It's what Alberto said a minute ago. How do you keep the tilt from going the other direction? Again, civic involvement. Waiting for people who care about these kinds of issues and can hang on to it. Politics are everywhere. Making things visible actually helps. You see corruption, right? You see influence in ways with data that would be impossible in an analog world. And finding leading indicators is part of what the data job does. So just as people say, oh, the internet is a terrible problem for the police because they can't see everything, that's actually not true. They're seeing much more, right? Here, too, politics are a problem for setting up the right kinds of policies in these areas, but we can see what's happening. And that's what gives me optimism. And that gives me the sense of responsiveness that builds trust and, in another feedback loop, builds engagement by people in government when only 20% of people vote, we have an enormous problem. Because that's that very thin strand of relationship, that sort of lack of awareness of the role of government in your lives. Get more people involved, have them, seeing what the government is up to around them. And you've got a richer ecosystem that doesn't allow for just coercive power. Hi. Hi, Kelly Vareya, Longview. My question is actually pretty similar to David's question. I wanted you to elaborate a little bit on your theory of change, I guess. Because I think when I listen to his question, asking about can you, basically, a lot of these places, you can actually see, like, physically see in the physical world, you can see manifestations of the problems themselves. And I know that's definitely true for me. I live in a neighborhood that has the worst indicators in Manhattan. And I feel like if we had this additional data, it just makes me wonder, like, what else we would be able to gain from that? Because I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who visits the neighborhood and anyone who lives there that this neighborhood has problems. Right. Terrific question. The gain from it is the comparative visualization. So problems here, another area of same geographic qualifications, but treated differently. Or outcomes are different. What you're looking for are outcomes, this is sort of the technocratic way to talk about this, where are things falling apart. And being able to see that another area of the city is getting a disproportionate share of city resources, getting less attention, getting less funding, that helps. That builds, so you're not just complaining about how bad things are in your area, but you're saying, and look at these other places, we'd like to be treated like them. And we want to see change that makes that possible, a level playing field. Data helps that because people respond to visualizations of data in ways that they don't respond to just pictures of buildings. It's a layer of factual persuasion that isn't available with anecdotes. It moves mountains sometimes, just showing a picture of reality using aggregated data changes people's minds in ways of telling a story right now using a picture of a building wouldn't. Benjy De La Pena from the Knight Foundation, so hi. Two-part question. The first one being, who decides what we respond to? So the thing with data visualization and big data sets is it's not neutral. There's an editing process. You decide what we respond to. And there's a historical basis to responding to the wrong data, right? So the most measured thing in cities is vehicular traffic. And so we do everything to try to expand vehicular traffic, which urbanists know it's just about the worst thing. And historically, redlining was data driven. And the algorithms that the RAND Corporation put in place in early New York in the 1970s to make fire control more efficient led to the fires of the Bronx. So who decides what we respond to? And then second-part question, which you just said, about the 20% voting, particularly in local elections, I think 20% is actually high. How will all of this get more people to actually get involved? Let me start with the second part of the question first. I think the suggestion is, we have to test this rigorously, the suggestion is when you have a feeling of agency that you can affect what happens in your local neighborhood, that your city government is helping you affect what happens in your neighborhood, you become more engaged. It's all driven by agency and trust. If you think that there's this far away city government that has no effect on your life and there's no point in your voting, you're not going to vote. So we can improve on the status quo of low voting rates, I think, if you increase the sense of agency autonomy, dignity, involvement, and impact. And you can use data to measure and depict that in ways that you can't use pictures in the analog world. That's the theory. I'm actually saying one about this. I think that, especially here in Boston, where the mayor managed to touch so many people, both by shaking hands and by using technology, there's a feeling of enhanced trust, which we will see lead to higher levels of citizen engagement in voting. And in other ways, it's not just voting, it's also going to a neighborhood watch meeting or showing up and picking stuff off the street, all kinds of ways of getting engaged. On the first point, it keeps being the same answer for me. Who decides? That's where policy comes in. What if we have a city that understands that transportation is infrastructure making possible human lives and not the thing around which we organize the city? You'll get different desirable outcomes and then people manage the city towards those outcomes. What's interesting is in America, we went towards the auto 40 years ago and ripped up infrastructure that had been devoted to carrying people around. Now we're putting it all back in. So we've learned and the impact of design and urbanists on cities is growing all the time. So policy is always the answer to who decides and visualization for me is part of the answer to who engages. Hi, I'm Rebecca McKinnon with the New America Foundation, etc. Hi Susan, sorry to keep carping on this question. But your your antidote to the big brother problem is policy. Civic engagement, political engagement. So what is your advice to citizens of Bangkok, of Kiev, of Istanbul, of Riyadh, who are very much hoping that their city governments don't implement these systems anytime soon? I think there, the answer has to be the same. It comes from activism, protest, which gradually changes structures of government over time. The protest gets stopped thanks to the surveillance before you can even engage. You find as new America is helping people find ways to get around the blocking of the protest, other methods of communicating that make it possible. Look, these are extraordinarily difficult problems. And the internet and the availability of open internet access is actually an instrument of democracy so that people can find each other and work towards collective solutions to very difficult problems. I think from an American standpoint, the best thing we can do is try to make sure that communication isn't as open as possible. But that's a sovereign country. What they're gonna do to decide their own policies is up to their rules. We can only operate on our own. I know that's not enough of an answer, but I think you push openness as much as possible. And then look for those increasing returns to everybody that come from open internet access. Hi, Susan. Catherine Dignasio from the Center for Civic Media. So I wanna ask a question about the, so you showed the critique of the smart city. Sure. And sort of equating that with posthumanism. And so in my mind, the posthumanist turn has actually been more about trying to be inclusive of all of the agencies that are operating in the city. And in a sense, the caricature of the smart city is about the total human centeredness of the city, it's about the domination of the city by humans. So I've seen the posthumanist turn as being turning us towards environmental issues, turning us towards these deeper understandings of things like climate change, where we can understand agencies beyond the scope of human timescales and things like that. So I'm wondering why, why is that part necessary, I guess? I got you, and these are contested terms, they go back and forth. So I was just trying to get everybody's attention with posthumanism, like what's that and why is she talking about that? Because the I worry, I deeply worry about a sort of physicist's view of New York City, that we measure everything and therefore we understand the city. And that seems to me to be so alienating and sort of discouraging, like, forget it, I don't want to have anything to do with that. And then I look at these other stories of what can be helped and encouraged, and I'm trying to push towards that. So it's really a very simple look from me that actually, when it comes to cities, humans really should be at the center. And not treating them as censors, because that's not a great idea. But using what we know to help their lives be better. Better sense of well-being, health is huge here, better resiliency in the city, so it's going to survive the next disaster. Better sustainability, so people understand what their energy practices are and how they might change them. So for me, the good parts of that vision outweigh the risks of the use of the collection of data. And that's the only story I'm trying to tell here. So one of the things that I most admire about really engaged scholars who are not just writing and trying to make policy statements but are actually trying to change the world, is their willingness to think in public. And so I'm really grateful for Susan both for giving us this provocation, but also really setting the tone for the sort of conversation that we want to have in an event like this. So Susan, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. It's a great honor. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.