Abstract
This paper compares and contrasts three disruptive models of potential and actual new kinds of spatial planning. These include “seasteading”, “smart neighbourhoods” and “renewable spatial systems”. Each is labelled with distinctive discursive titles, respectively: “Attention Capitalism”; “Surveillance Capitalism” and “Sustainable Capitalism” denoting the different lineaments of each, although they all have their origins in the Silicon Valley techno-entrepreneurial milieu. In each case, while the path dependences of trajectories have diverged the progenitors were often erstwhile business partners at the outset. The paper is interested in qualitative methodology and proposes “pattern recognition” as a means to disclose the deep psychological, sociological, political and economic levels that inform the surface appearances and functions of the diverse spatial planning modes and designs that have been advanced or inferred from empirically observable initiator practice. “Dark Triad” analysis is entailed in actualising psychological deep structures. Each of the three models is discussed and the lineaments of their initiators’ ideas are disclosed. Each “school” has a designated mentor(s), respectively: academic B. J. Fogg and venture capitalist Peter Thiel for “Attention Capitalism”, “smart city” planner Dan Doctoroff for “Surveillance Capitalism” and “renewable energineer” and Elon Musk for “Sustainable Capitalism”, the eventual winner of this existential “dark versus light triad” urban planning contest.
Highlights
In this contribution, we turn our attention to the question of most appropriate conceptual models to drive contemporary spatial development planning at urban, regional and inter-state levels
It is referred to here as “Attention Capitalism” after [18,19,20] though it can be discerned in the early thought of Herbert Simon [21]: “ . . . in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes
Harris went on, after being invited to be an executive in Google as the in-house “design ethicist”, a post from which he resigned in frustration, to form the non-profit Centre for Humane Technology (CHT)
Summary
We turn our attention to the question of most appropriate conceptual models to drive contemporary spatial development planning at urban, regional and inter-state levels. While recognising the superiority of the latter over the former in terms of economic stability, state intervention in the economy and mitigation of welfare and wage disparities (including spatial development), it has to be acknowledged that some drift towards elements of the former institutional emphases, with some privatisation, liberalising of markets and weakening of aspects of managed welfare has occurred in the past two decades This contribution examines varieties of neoliberal/liberal market regimes that became hegemonic, not least with policy makers, through the “entrepreneurialism,” deregulation, “informatisation” and “financialisation” of socio-economic relations of the neoliberal era. The paper proceeds by, first, elaborating the three models in question, naming actors closely associated with them and their personality types and interests by reference to so-called “dark and light triad” analysis It explains a qualitative methodology we term “pattern recognition” interrogation of deep structures that inform both ideologies and recipes for action and change [14,16,17]. It begins as an extreme liberalist conviction that is usefully tested out by the analytical framework mobilised before veering towards a moderation of its original position
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