Hayek in the cloud

Abstract

Smart cities theory and policy emphasizes the new—new cities, new technologies, and new possibilities of efficiency, innovation, and optimization. While some of the technological details of smart cities are indeed new, the underlying philosophy involves economic and policy traditions built in the mid-20th century—which were in turn premised on 19th-century epistemological revolutions. In this paper, we suggest that today’s Silicon Valley smart-city disruptions are the culmination of the social and political philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, fused with World War II cybernetics and the evolutionary methodological syntheses of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Today’s cosmopolitan world urban system, with its dynamic hierarchies of entrepreneurial informational innovation and promises of politically neutral managerial efficiency, encodes the automated software updates of a dominant but unstable operating system of social and cultural conservatism that consolidated the self-perceptions of Western civilization. Yet the evolution of conservatism—especially American conservatism—has produced an ignorance of its own history and contradictions. The planetary urbanization of Hayek’s smart-cities triumph, therefore, promises a transhumanist future of apocalyptic beauty in a robotic siege of the very foundations of cultural conservatism.