David Burney On New York and the 21st-Century City-State

Burney channels Kenichi Ohmae’s The end of the nation state, and brings it up to the awful, sludge-filled poltical scene of the present day.

INTERVIEW: DAVID BURNEY & NANCY LEVINSON

An Interview with David Burney: On New York and the 21st-Century City-State

Nancy Levinson: As an urban designer who has worked for years in the public sector in New York City — and as a Brit who is now a U.S. citizen — what is your assessment of the current political scene? What are the key challenges for cities in these tumultuous times? 

David Burney: There’s a growing consensus that this is one of the most dysfunctional eras ever in American politics, and I’d have to agree. The federal government seems paralyzed not only by the impasse between Democrats and Republicans but still more by the internal politics of the GOP. The anti-government ideologues have hijacked the legislative process to the point where it’s hard to expect leadership from Washington — and certainly not on much-needed investment in the country’s declining infrastructure. At the state level it doesn’t seem much better. So increasingly it’s been our cities that have taken the lead on critical issues, from gun control to immigration reform to economic stimulus to climate change. 

Given the migration of people into cities worldwide, this trend is sure to continue. We might even be in a de facto transition to a society dominated by economically and politically powerful cities — a contemporary version of the great city-states that arose in the 13th century and ruled Europe until the consolidation of modern nation-states a few centuries later. 

Here in the United States, the federal government remains strong, but its authority is being eroded by the polarization of the political parties, and also by an extremely unproductive debate about taxation. It’s an old story: we hate paying taxes but we value the services that taxes support. But the real issue goes deeper — it’s no exaggeration to say that civilization depends on the proposition that we all do much better when we work not just individually but also collectively, and that we need to balance personal freedom with common interest. In other words, if we all contribute to the common good — the commonwealth — then it will be there for us when we need it, whether in the extreme case of post-disaster assistance or the more everyday matters of affordable housing and healthcare and reliable civic infrastructure. 



New York City [Image: Penn State University]

This idea of common good is the basis of the modern concept of progressive taxation, in which each citizen contributes according to his or her ability, and our elected leaders determine the best collective use for the revenue. What’s more, it is the most technologically and culturally advanced societies that adhere most strongly to this concept of collective revenue and spending. Think about Scandinavia and what’s come to be called the Nordic model, in which high government investment in education, health care and social services has helped to produce national stability and prosperity for decades. 

Of course, the United States of America continues to resist this model. Maybe this is because America is still, after all, a relatively young country, born in reaction to the oppressive constraints of its European colonizer-ruler — which accounts, I think, for the libertarian tendencies that inform the U.S. Constitution and persist in the national psyche.Live Free Or DieDon’t Tread On Me: These slogans date back to the Revolutionary War, and they’re still rallying cries! The original Tea Party was an act of resistance to a British tax in 1773. But the disparity between the U.S. and Europe is also a legacy of World War II: the devastation of Europe was so profound that recovery could only be financed and executed by strong national governments, entrusted with the power to borrow huge sums and marshal the necessary resources. In the postwar decades, European nations invested in major housing programs, in single-payer healthcare systems, in social security plans that protected the poor. 

The U.S. has never confronted the need for such massive reconstruction. The closest parallel remains the Great Depression, which produced the New Deal programs of the 1930s, which in turn inspired the Great Society of the ’60s; and today those legacies — the monumental public works of the WPA, the protections of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, et al. — are being steadily dismantled in the wake of the Reagan Revolution and the 21st-century Tea Party. From a European perspective, and from my personal perspective as a Brit who has lived in New York for three decades, this trend seems absurdly retrograde. But I do think that we have now arrived — as we realize with increasing urgency — at a moment when our politics must change if the U.S. is to retain its status as a democratic role model and if we are to solve the problems that confront us in the 21st Century. 

Source: places.designobserver.com

The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas. … An infringement upon one right can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.

Internet Surveillance and Free Speech: the United Nations Makes the Connection | Electronic Frontier Foundation (via infoneer-pulse)

Big Yellow Duck
I am now being censored in China, I guess.

Big Yellow Duck

I am now being censored in China, I guess.

ajfaultlines:

theatlantic:

Europe’s Record Youth Unemployment: The Scariest Graph in the World Just Got Scarier
[Image: James Plunket]

So that’s happening. 

Greece is adding an additional 1% of unemployed youth per month, will reach 80% in 2014 at this rate. When will this precipitate civil disorder?

ajfaultlines:

theatlantic:

Europe’s Record Youth Unemployment: The Scariest Graph in the World Just Got Scarier

[Image: James Plunket]

So that’s happening. 

Greece is adding an additional 1% of unemployed youth per month, will reach 80% in 2014 at this rate. When will this precipitate civil disorder?

Source: theatlantic

Data is something we create, but it’s also something we imagine.

Kate Crawford on “Why Big Data is Not Truth”

Via NYT

(via modernandmaterialthings)

Source: modernandmaterialthings

There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan | Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antenna of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Source: jockohomo

No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.

Bill Joy

What’s The Next Breakthrough In Productivity Tools?

Chris Dixon makes the observation that new user interface paradigms lead to new notions of ‘productivity app’, by which he seems to mean so-called ‘office apps’.

He wrote:

Microsoft is running ads making fun of the iPad for being a “consumption” device. Here’s what Steve Jobs had to say back in 2010 about creation (“productivity”) on the iPad:

We are just scratching the surface on the kinds of apps for the iPad…I think there are lots of kinds of content that can be created on the iPad. When I am going to write that 35-page analyst report, I am going to want my Bluetooth keyboard. That’s 1 percent of the time. The software will get more powerful. I think your vision would have to be pretty short to think these can’t grow into machines that can do more things, like editing video, graphic arts, productivity. You can imagine all of these content creation possibilities on these kind of things. Time takes care of lots of these things.

If you go back and look at the history of productivity apps you’ll see that each major user interface shift led to new classes of productivity apps. Back in the 70s and 80s, when computers had text-based interfaces, word processor applications like Wordperfect and spreadsheet applications like Lotus 1-2-3 were invented. In the 80s and 90s, when graphical interfaces became popular, presentation apps like Powerpoint and photo editing apps like Photoshop were invented. If the historical pattern repeats, productivity apps that are “native” to the tablet will be invented.

Chris doesn’t make any predictions, but I will make one. Gestural displays are already having an aesthetic/kinesthetic impact, with tools like Clear showing the way.

But I think the biggest breakthrough will come from apps that allow groups to co-curate better than how we do it now. The activity stream is now the dominant social motif of social tools, but we are being streamed to death in a dozen siloed apps. 

There is an opportunity to place social in the OS on our proximal devices. Imagine if iOS 8 (9?) arrived with a social stream baked in (they should have bought Twitter when it was cheap), and that applications could use to push and pull messages into. We could have a single context for all our streaming information, and we could share with people rather than with apps. Google could play along with Android, and we’d see the next generation of apps sharing a model of sociality, just like apps do today for the file system and the web.

Source: cdixon.org

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

Anaïs Nin

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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. (More.)

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