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What makes a city smart? The Smart City in a Digital World takes on this question by describing, challenging, and offering democratic alternatives to the view that the answer begins and ends with technology. In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, corporations converged on cities around the world to sell technology, harvest valuable data, and deepen the private governance of urban life. They partnered with governments to promise what on the surface look like unalloyed benefits to city dwellers: safer streets, cleaner air, more efficient transportation, instant communication for all, and algorithms that take governance out of the hands of flawed human beings. Another story lies beneath that surface. Technology-driven smart cities deepen surveillance, shift urban governance to private companies, shrink democracy, create a hacker's paradise, and hasten the coming of catastrophic climate change.The Smart City insists that people make cities smart, that human governance still matters, and that genuinely intelligent cities start with a vibrant democracy, a commitment to public space, and to citizen control over technology. To make this happen, we need to understand the technologies, the organizations, and the mythologies that power the global smart cities movement, as well as the growing resistance to the technology-driven city. Drawing on case studies from around the world that document the redevelopment of old cities and the creation of entirely new ones, The Smart City provides an essential guide to the future of urban life in a digital world.

This book examines the convergence of Cloud Computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things to forge the Next Internet. Ubiquitous computing enables universal communication, concentration of power, privacy erosion, environmental degradation, and massive automation and this title explores solving these issues to create a democratic digital world.

Cloud computing and big data are arguably the most significant forces in information technology today. In the wake of revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) activities, many of which occur "in the cloud", this book offers both enlightenment and a critical view. Vincent Mosco explores where the cloud originated, what it means, and how important it is for business, government and citizens. He describes the intense competition among cloud companies like Amazon and Google, the spread of the cloud to government agencies like the controversial NSA, and the astounding growth of entire cloud cities in China. Is the cloud the long-promised information utility that will solve many of the world's economic and social problems? Or is it just marketing hype? To the Cloud provides the first thorough analysis of the potential and the problems of a technology that may very well disrupt the world

Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world.The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture--specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics--we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes"--that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances--the telephone, the radio, and television, among others--Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center--our icons of communication, information, and trade--and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.