Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism: The smart city and the society of control

Critique 1: the SC versus informality

Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett and Adam Greenfield claim that the SC is not compatible with informality, which is arguably a defining feature of the urban. Sassen (2011, 2012, 2013) argues that the SC has an anti-urban character and the technologies that drive its development have not been sufficiently urbanised. She appreciates the SC’s initial ‘experimental’ phase but fears that the ‘sensored’ would soon become the ‘censored’, and smart technology would be used to command users rather than engage them in dialogue. What we need instead, according to Sassen, is to urbanise technology and put it at the service of users. The sociologist pushes for ‘horizontalising the vertical’, an urban variant of WikiLeaks, and calls for open-source urbanism, where the city is made from the bottom-up, at a ground level, and from a myriad of little interventions.

Sassen argues that diverse social groups – she used the example of neighbourhoods, children and homeless people – possess embedded local knowledge that is different from and deeper than the centralised knowledge of governments, experts or elites. ‘[C]onnecting all these diverse actors with their specific forms of knowledge to open-access networks, or wikis, that circulate these bits of information’, she urges, ‘might entail a re-making of the urban’ (Sassen, 2013). For the sociologist, incompleteness is an essential trait of the urban: ‘Can we urbanise open-source technology itself, and might the complexity of urban settings help us do so?’ (Sassen, 2012).

Together with Richard Sennett, Sassen argues that while cities are by definition open systems, the SC is a closed system. Sennett (2012) articulates the urban in terms of informality, advocating that ‘technology might aid informal social relations rather than repress informality in the name of coherent control’. Sennett contrasts the closed, linear, static and predictable against the open, evolutionary, non-linear and unpredictable: while the former was the domain of control and domination, the latter would be the one of freedom and informality.

A critique by urbanist Adam Greenfield (2013) is similar. Although he carefully unravels many contradictions of the SC as a corporate-led discourse and shows an empty core beneath pompously inflated narratives, his foremost concern is its apparently ‘modernist’ subjection of urban life to a top-down Plan. Greenfield interprets the SC as a return to the tabula rasa urbanism of Plan Voisin or Brasilia, which he dismisses from a formulaic humanist, anti-modernist position. Forgoing whether such critique is legitimate or not, Greenfield’s point, as well as those of Sassen and Sennett, misses the constitutive function of openness, non-linearity and bottom-up structure found in the SC.

Critique 2: the SC and corporatisation

A second line of critique highlights a tendency of the SC to subject the urban to interests of multinational corporations. Critics pointed out this hegemonic character of the SC, which was established as the only game in town. Ola Söderström et al. (2014) interpret the SC as a powerful narrative and an obligatory passage point through which cities were obliged to pass on their way to modernisation. The way how ills and solutions are framed in this narrative is conducive to the corporate expertise of global IT companies, who construe urban politics as a technical issue and circumvent planning with software-based data processing.

In a similar vein Robert Kitchin (2014) formulates a critique against the marketisation of public services, the creation of technological lock-ins and corporate path dependency and the standardisation of solutions that ignore local specificities. He takes issue with the role of Big Data in the SC. While their use implies technological solutionism and the reframing of social questions as technical questions, Big Data are necessarily selective. ⁹ Robert Hollands (2008) challenges yet another aspect of corporatisation, namely the instrumentalisation of SC policies as comparative assets in inter-urban competition for capital and highly skilled labour (similarly and in parallel to urban policies of creativity, culture and design). Hollands argues that the SC implies simultaneously a financial shift concerning the role of private investments in urban development and an ideological shift towards aligning competitiveness and well-being.

Critique 3: the SC and social conflict

A third critique which scholars have advanced against the SC bears on the problem of social inequality and conflicts. Presenting the SC as an instrument of inter-urban competitiveness, Hollands (2008) shows how smart policies were scaled to the needs and desires of highly mobile professional labour, yet detrimental to less affluent residents. While these policies fuel gentrification and the remaking of cities for symbolic consumption, a sizeable secondary labour force is required to maintain everyday operations of the SC and service its ‘primary’ managers. This service labour, Hollands contends, was left out of the SC equation.

Scrutinising techno-optimism, Alberto Vanolo (2014) asks how agency figures in the SC. He observes that policy objectives are naturalised as univocal because cities are assumed to be unitary actors. Such an assumption foregrounds the imperative of inter-urban competition and associated practices of indexing, benchmarking and evaluating while simultaneously downplaying issues related to intra-urban political conflicts. Vanolo also shows that the SC produces divisions between sealed-off technological enclaves and excluded peripheries but does not jump to the conclusion, as does Hollands, that the problem could be solved by including these peripheries into the SC circuits.

I believe that a challenge for this critique, and a strategy for how it may be advanced, is to distinguish more precisely the SC from other forms of post-Fordist urban entrepreneurialism. The issues of social costs of competitiveness, splintering urbanism and invisible service classes have been raised also against the practices of image-led regeneration, city branding and cultural boosterism. ¹⁵ What makes then the SC a specific form of entrepreneurial urban governance?

Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism

Vanolo (2014: 887) suggests that the specificity of the SC lies in its subjectification of citizens as active and goal-oriented and, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, proposes the concept of smartmentality. ¹⁶ While a distinction from entrepreneurial models geared towards spectacular architecture has been hereby established, a question remains as to the difference of the SC from urban policies of creativity: these too have a production of active subjects that work on themselves as a central governmental objective. ¹⁷ Vanolo helpfully points out the affiliation of the SC with techno-science, which contrasts with creative policies’ predilection for the arts.

Following Jennifer Gabrys (2014), I further argue that the specificity of techno-scientific governmentality of the SC lies in the fact that it is enacted environmentally. Developing Foucault’s (2008: 260–261) remark on environmentality, Gabrys argues that in the SC, ‘urban citizens become sensing nodes … or citizen sensors … [Environmentality is] a modality of citizenship that emerges through interaction with computational sensing technologies used for environmental monitoring and feedback’ (p. 32). Thus, the citizen is simultaneously dissolved into an automated behavioural sensor and transgressed as an environmental vector, as in Songdo’s predicate that ubiquitous screens and interfaces would mediate between automatised adjustments and systemic efficiency, or IBM’s thesis of equivalence between subconscious awareness, aggregate demand and infrastructural data.

Bringing together Vanolo’s and Gabrys’ concepts of smartmentality and environmentality, the SC can be conceptualised as an instance of governmentality through environmental-behavioural control. The concepts of environment and behaviour have been central to the intellectual history of cybernetics and its non-disciplinary, interactive model of control. In the remainder of this article, I will first discuss how control was conceptualised by second-order cybernetics, substituting in the 1970s chaotic self-organisation for the post-war focus on homoeostasis and equilibrium. Then, I will introduce Deleuze’s concept of the society of control and trace its recent developments and reformulations in light of the progressive cybernetisation of everyday life. I will finally argue that environmental-behavioural control has superseded planning as a governmental strategy.

Cybernetics and control

Among the SC critics, Gabrys is alone in making a reference to cybernetics. She argues in passing that cybernetic governance doesn’t neatly translate into environmentality: ‘the very responsiveness that enables citizens to gather data does not extend to enabling them to meaningfully act upon the data gathered, since this would require changing the urban “system” in which they have become effective operators’ (Gabrys, 2014: 43). In contrast to Foucault’s investigation of neoliberal governmentality as a novel and paradoxical form of politics of doing away with politics, Gabrys portrays cybernetics as oblivious to politics in theory and in practice. While I subscribe to this criticism, Gabrys criticises cybernetics in the old terms of homoeostasis and negative feedback and disregards that these might no longer be the primary objectives of cybernetic governance.

The early cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, developed during the Second World War and its aftermath, is not as central to an understanding of how the SC operates today as the second wave of cybernetics that developed from the 1970s onwards. The field was reformulated then by thinkers such as Heinz von Foerster, Stafford Beer, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, among many others. Drawing an analogy from servomechanisms, early cybernetics was interested how negative feedback could act as a tool of homoeostatic self-regulation of systems. Order, harmony, symbiosis and balance were seen as inherent and desirable tendencies of systems. In contrast, the cybernetics of the 1970s brought into focus the problem of positive feedback and the theories of chaos and complexity. This second-order cybernetics highlighted the non-linear character of systemic change and the question of emergent properties. Where the ‘old’ cybernetics observed probabilistic interaction within closed systems of human–machine interaction, ¹⁸ the new cybernetics argued that there is no outside to these systems, that the observer is always included in them, that systems are their own environment and that their evolutionary trajectories are inherently open and unpredictable. As von Foerster put it in 1972, ‘observations are … relative to the observer’s point of view … [and] affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer’s hope of prediction’ (cited in Wolfe, 1995: 49).

Assuming that while post-war cybernetics, which imagined systems in homoeostatic terms, was conducive to the politico-economic realities of the disciplinary society, scientific management and the military–industrial complex, in second-order cybernetics such ‘total loops … must always turn into “strange” loops of the sort imaged by M. C. Escher’s Mobius strip’ (Wolfe, 1995: 50), many welcomed the latter as liberating, emancipatory and politically progressive. As Fred Turner (2006) elegantly documents, countercultural movements embraced cybernetics during the years around 1970. But, even those who saw themselves as part of a political – rather than cultural – Left believed that second-order cybernetics offered an untrammelled road towards progressive politics and ethics. Cary Wolfe (1995), a leading theorist of post-humanism, argued this in the midst of the 1990s:

[A]lthough second-order systems theory does make a claim to universal descriptive veracity, that claim is mounted upon its ability to theorise the inability to see the social or natural system as a totality from any particular observer’s point of view. It is difficult, therefore, to see how second-order cybernetics could justly be described as in principle a theoretical instrument of globalised ‘technocratic management’ when it foregrounds the very contingency, complexity, and unpredictability that such programs of technocratic control would want to repress, ignore, or deny. (p. 60) ¹⁹

Yet, this is precisely the paradox to be grasped: that the very notions of contingency, complexity and unpredictability have become instruments of control within intellectual and governance models informed by second-order cybernetics. In 1969, the MIT’s Jay Forrester (1999) argued, in the ambitiously titled book Urban Dynamics, that urban areas in a state of equilibrium are in fact stagnant areas:

If the city is to survive as a healthy economic unit and as a satisfactory place to live, it must be managed under and ensemble of policies that induce constant renewal at a rate that matches the relentless march of deterioration. (p. 122)

While Forrester saw equilibrium as a sign of stagnation, the very dynamics of renewal and deterioration became for him a new ‘equilibrium’. ²⁰

If Forrester imagined urban systems in terms of a non-equilibrial equilibrium, C.S. Holling (1973) questioned the concept of equilibrium in ecology. Resilience, Holling argued in the early 1970s, is the capacity of systems to absorb change and disturbance. Systems persist because they are unstable. In parallel to Holling, the new ecology of chaos replaced the notion of equilibrium with a focus on differential growth, natural disturbance and systemic perturbations. ²¹ Unlike negative feedback and stable states advocated in first order cybernetics, the new sciences of chaos and complexity embraced positive feedbacks and non-linear self-organisation. In a characteristic cybernetic manner, wherein distinctions between the chemical, the physical and the social are collapsed, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) envisioned the future in terms of dissipative processes. The chemist and the philosopher argued that the change of dissipative systems arises spontaneously and that any apparent order is underlaid by ontologically primary processes of chaos.

These were only few examples of how second-order cybernetics conceived the world; the work of Niklas Luhmann in sociology, Gordon Pask in architecture and many others could also be discussed. It is decisive, however, that the turn from equilibrium to chaos was hardly a turn away from the problem of control. On the contrary, the discourse of complexity and self-organisation is the discourse of urgent control. If second-order cybernetics grounded its sweeping claims in vague truisms (‘humanity as a whole is today in a transition period’ (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 19)), these truisms in turn legitimised sweeping imperatives how entities, themselves only vaguely defined, must change and adapt (‘there is a need for new relations between man and nature and between man and man’ (p. 312)).

I argue, pace Wolfe, that second-order cybernetics legitimised a new regime of control, in which power relations reproduce through proliferating indeterminacy, non-linearity and complexity, rather than by curbing these into determinate, linear and unidirectional forms. David Chandler (2014) contends that resilience – and, it could be added, non-equilibrial thinking as such – became the new art of governing complexity, where ‘the unknowability of complex life itself comes to constitute the rationality of its governance’ and

policy failure is … ‘not a failure of policy’ but a learning opportunity with regard to the systemic process of unintended consequences and side-effects in a complex world, where failure enables policy-makers to learn from the revelation of these concrete and emergent interconnections. (pp. 57–58)

Policy failure is here construed as a reflexive adaptation to systemic complexity, and as distinct from governance failure, understood as a failure to adapt and remove institutional barriers to effective learning. From such a perspective, politics and planning guided by democratic principles of equality and justice, as well as the very processes of articulating political subjectivities and deliberating on long-term planning strategies, are substituted with procedural governance qua perpetual adaptation, optimisation and control.

Cybernetics and the society of control

In a common parlance, control refers to disciplining effects enacted vertically through the state’s legislative, executive and judiciary powers, reproduced in the daily operations of economic and labour relations, or upheld via the force of customs, traditions and other social norms. It presupposes a liberal subject, who is either socialised (a ‘good control’) or whose freedoms are restricted (a ‘bad control’). Associating control with communicative feedback loops between men and machines, early cybernetics transcended such liberal/conservative/totalitarian conceptions but also articulated the human–machine continuum in the name of anti-totalitarian humanism. ²² Early cybernetics retained a role for an external operator in charge of human–machine communication within closed systems. Second-order cybernetics questioned this privileged position; it opened systems by containing the operator, redefining it into an observer along the way. Systems were interpreted as horizontally self-organising networks and the operator-observer as only one of their many nodes. Paradoxically, second-order cybernetics revived the concept of a liberal subject but did so in an inverted form of a network node whose freedom is commensurate with the intensity of communicative activity with other network nodes.

In contrast to such views, Deleuze (1990, 1992) suggested that ostensibly horizontal, networked communication is the new instrument of control: ‘We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. … In a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long’ (Deleuze, 1990). The philosopher argued that unlike disciplinary society, wherein individuals are enclosed in hierarchically structured institutions (school, factory, bureaucracy) and moulded into discrete identities, the society of control is organised in networks that connect and modulate ‘dividuals’ (through perpetual training, corporate meritocracy or instant communication): ‘the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network’ (Deleuze, 1992: 6).

Much more unequivocally than in his (and Guattari’s) well-known works from the 1970s, Deleuze reasserted around 1990 that political philosophy must bear on the analysis of capitalism. Perhaps the concept of a control society was then formulated as a prefigurative response to Deleuze’s Anglo American reception, whereby the notions of flows, smooth spaces and deterritorialisations were reworked in a late capitalism-friendly ways, as well as being an answer to critiques that addressed this same contention to Deleuze. ²³ The philosopher addressed, albeit in a cursory way, the many challenges for political practice in the society of control: the question of subjectivity and subjectification (‘[m]any young people strangely boast of being “motivated”’ (Deleuze, 1992: 7)), collective organisation (‘tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines … will [trade unions] be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?’ (p. 7)) and urbanisation (‘control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos’ (p. 7)).

Alexander Galloway (2006, 2014b) expounds on connections between Deleuze’s reading of control and cybernetics. Contrasting with panopticon as a figure of disciplinary society, the society of control can be likened to ‘a reverse panopticon in which a multiplicity of watchers all collaborate to convene upon a singular point’ (Galloway, 2014b: 69). ²⁴ Like a cybernetic positive feedback, in the society of control, power sustains itself by modulating and differentiating attentions, desires and opinions rather than by moulding bodies into homogeneous forms. Control is exerted by inducing action rather than restricting it, or, more precisely, by ‘curating’ a networked terrain within which action is nurtured. As Galloway puts it, in the society of control ‘mobility is fostered inside certain strictures of motion, where openings appear rather than disappear, where subjects (or for that matter objects) are liberated as long as they adhere to a variety of prescribed comportments’ (p. 106). ²⁵

If for Marx ‘the nature of censorship is entirely negative’ (cited in Morawski, 1974: 159), control can be characterised as a positive censorship. ²⁶ In the society of control, it is impossible to think, not because communication is disallowed but precisely because there is no outside to infinitely differentiating communication, as in Baudrillard’s quip on cybernetics as an ‘automatic run-through of all the possibilities’ (cited in Merrin, 2015: 15). Critics who see in cybernetic control a homogenising force are therefore wrong: it does away with history, not difference. Cybernetic control perpetuates a difference without history: ‘feedback knows no outside or contradiction, only perpetual iteration’ (Pinto, 2014: 73). Control society, Galloway (2014b) argues, ‘has eviscerated history, not by banning dissent but by accelerating the opportunities and channels for critical thought to infinity and therefore making it impossible to think historically in the first place’ (p. 109).

The founding gesture of cybernetics was to disregard language as a vehicle of subjective meaning and consider it as a formal communicative operation (between humans and machines). In the society of control, reason and thought are likewise rearticulated as an information flow. The concept of public opinion is predicated upon the liberal ‘freedom of thought’ but also conveys a sense in which concrete reasoning is frozen in a momentous cross-section, only to be reconstituted abstractly as a flow of such frozen cross-sections of thought. Maurizio Lazzarato (2006) argues that public opinion is central to how power is enacted in the society of control:

If the cooperation between brains expresses itself first of all in the form of public opinion, that is, as judgements formed and held in common, it then develops as the creation of percepts and concepts that are also formed and held in common (collective perception and collective intelligence). (pp. 180–181)

Like biopolitical power and governmentality, control governs from a distance. But unlike and in addition to biopolitics, which is concerned with bodies, control – and Lazzarato introduces also the term noopolitics – is aimed at the incorporeal aspect of bodies, being effected ‘through the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs and through the forces (memory and attention) that make these flows circulate in the cooperation between brains’ (p. 185).

The parallel history of cybernetics and cognitive psychology is well-known, but if in the post-war years the brain was imagined to function like a computer (a computational metaphor), today society itself is conceived to function as a gigantic brain (a cognitive society). ²⁷ We can characterise as campaign the social action that has as its purpose the adjustment of public opinion by inciting a positive feedback: capturing attention, raising awareness, inciting feelings of desire and guilt, nudging towards a different lifestyle and changing behaviour. ²⁸ When social action in the control society becomes communicative, it has little to do with rational or agonistic collective decision-making and much more to do with cognitive, interactive and affective intensities of the ‘societal brain’.

In a close resemblance to Foucault’s now classic exposition of early neoliberalism, the French collective Tiqqun (2010) argues that ‘the cybernetic hypothesis … expresses … the politics of the “end of politics”’ (p. 7). The early politics of neoliberalism displaced the social with the economic and extended the homo economicus principle beyond the market. In the society of control, the social reappears as the politics of public opinion, that is, as a communicative capacity to modulate attention, desire, beliefs and behaviour through a perpetual noopolitical campaign. The social is reconstituted as ‘something which can be quantified, nudged, mined and probed’ (Davies, 2015: 54). This is not to pronounce society as the sum total of thoroughly commodified selves, but rather argue that the social, reconstituted now around the practices of noopolitics, becomes itself the locus of novel forms of valorisation through data.

Antoinette Rouvroy (2012) introduced the term data-behaviourism to characterise the mode of governance predicated upon the algorithmic knowledge of opinions, desires and behaviours gleaned from the vast amount of raw and perpetually generated real-time data. Data-behaviourism has a fundamentally pre-emptive and pragmatic orientation towards a future, blurring the very boundary between sociological knowledge and social action. It effects a probabilistic subject construed from infra-individual and supra-individual behavioural patterns, a ‘supra-individual, constantly reconfigurated “statistical body” made of the infra-individual digital traces of impersonal, disparate, heterogeneous and dividualised facets of daily life and interactions’ (p. 157).

The SC and the environmental-behavioural control

If public opinion is understood as an array of cognitive-affective behavioural flows (attention, desires and beliefs), then campaign is consistent with environmental effects of ubiquitous sensors and perpetual data flows between individuals’ outer and inner environments. I have interpreted a perpetual noopolitical campaign on public opinion as a governing mechanism of the society of control. Such a mechanism corresponds to second-order cybernetic principles that language is equivalent to communication and that society is a complex and chaotic but immanently self-organising and emergent system. The society of control has crystallised as an actualisation of the cybernetic hypothesis, whereby data-behaviourism precipitated a collapse of epistemology, ontology and politics.

Considering that the SC is a spatial embodiment of the society of control, we can observe a corresponding collapse of the concept of the urban, the process of urbanisation and the practice of urban politics. Being intellectually embedded in the cybernetic hypothesis of data-behaviourism, the SC has disquieting ramifications for the future of urban planning, implying its obsolescence and replacement with cybernetic control. In such a historical context, it is incorrect to believe, as Sassen, Sennett and Greenfield do, that the SC is yet another technocratically driven top-down attempt to discipline citizens. It is likewise ineffective to argue that it could be challenged by a simple inversion of this relation, via a bottom-up liberation of technologies in the name of people. It is also insufficient to challenge the SC’s corporatisation with liberal humanist values of inclusion, empowerment, sustainability and digital privacy, as Söderström et al., Kitchin and Hollands do. While the SC was criticised for enterpreneurialising public institutions and splintering infrastructures, these authors disregard the problem of subjectivity and citizenship in the SC.

To be politically effective, the challenge requires a critique that is neither mistakenly parallel to the SC (and would be retorted by ‘of course, that’s our agenda, too’) nor runs sideways to it (and would be retorted by ‘of course, we are working on it’). Such a critique is sketched in Vanolo’s and Gabrys’ theses that in the SC, subjectivity is articulated in behavioural terms and citizenship in environmental terms. I have developed these arguments by stressing that the substitution of planning by environmental-behavioural control has been grounded in the epistemology of second-order cybernetics and actualised in the society of control.

How would such environmental-behavioural control play out in the SC? Let us proceed with a thought experiment. A ‘smart’ urban transport network would be predicated on a continuous self-organisation and real-time monitoring of environmental behaviour of individual transport-nodes but also act algorithmically upon their long-term behavioural patterns. In the name of systemic efficiency and individual flexibility, a tram-node’s speed and route would respond to momentary behaviours of user-node swarms, while a user-node would react to environmental distributions of tram-nodes. Accumulation of these behaviours as data would generate the ‘knowledge’ of a transport system (and simultaneously foreground the centrality of transport to the city concept and marginalise its other components, such as housing or land ownership) and stipulate ever new rounds of evaluation, adjustment and improvement. These would be carried out in relation to tram-nodes (changing their number and size, laying new tracks, coordinating the tram-network with the car-network, bus-network, etc.) and user-nodes. Activating the latter’s desires (e.g. improving the social status of tram use by policing homeless people and installing wireless internet), opinions (‘trams are more ecological than cars’) and feelings of guilt (indicators of individual CO₂ spending) would be central to the continuous transformation of the transport network. While the cumulative behaviour of user-nodes would be thus controlled, the accumulation of user-nodes would itself provide further feedback (rating, sharing opinions, voicing the feelings of like and dislike), function environmentally by putting pressure on non-conformed citizens and occasionally initiate bottom-up campaigns (to increase the density of tram-network, to paint trams in bright, ‘positive’ colours, etc.), the success of which would be predicated upon positive feedback (in an everyday and cybernetic sense) received from other sensing nodes.

In the SC, the subject citizen is at once an infra-individual profile of desires, attitudes and preferences and a vector within their supra-individual articulation as a ‘swarm’. These two characters of the SC ‘dividuals’ are interlaced through real-time streaming of data and algorithmic automation. Their being unfolds as a ‘datafied’ behavioural node streaming itself into its sensing environment, which is constituted by multitude of other nodes (human and non-human). The locus of networked control in the SC is a mash of sensing nodes interconnected within a dense web of interactive communication. The cumulative character of data streaming effectuates positive feedback loops whereby certain behaviours are amplified while others are hindered. Whereas social change is construed as the accumulation of multifarious but infinitesimal behavioural adjustments, individual action is construed as a vector within the infinite virtuality of societal self-organisation. Such positive feedback loops can be described as environmentally enacted behavioural campaigns (of energy efficiency, labour flexibility, ecological resilience, emotional well-being, quality of life, etc.). These campaigns are effected by modulating, on one side, digital urban environments and, on the other, the attention, opinions and desires of differentiated urban publics. Control is enacted environmentally, via digital sensing nodes ubiquitously distributed in urban environments, and behaviourally, via human sensing nodes ‘distributed’ in brains.

Critique, history, politics, planning

Hence, the SC is an environment within which the citizens sensing nodes – who are at the same time part of the same environment – are ‘nudged’ to do one thing while prevented from doing something else; they are ‘[e]ffected through the reconfiguration of informational and physical architectures and/or environments within which certain things become impossible or unthinkable, and throwing alerts or stimuli producing reflex responses rather than interpretation and reflection’ (Rouvroy, 2012: 155). But who has the power to produce informational and physical configurations that determine what is (im)possible and (un)thinkable? If cities are ostensibly self-organising systems, who acts upon boundaries of their self-organisation? Who assumes the power to plan towards the end of planning by articulating the urban in terms of its complexity? Who are the ideologues, designers, technicians and managers of environmental-behavioural control, and who are its users and players? Who decides and defines what is smart?

This article does not provide answers to these questions but stresses that they are fundamental for challenging the consensual end of politics in the SC. I acknowledge with other critics that there is a fundamental disciplinary and disciplining power to the SC. Yet, in portraying it as a historically situated hegemonic project, it is equally decisive to understand its mode of existence, its ontological, epistemological and deontological claims, and the novel forms of subjectivities that it produces. In the SC, disciplinary power persists as a ‘background condition’ of control and articulates how the inner and outer environments of urban subjects are modulated. This article points out that the SC’s doing away with planning is itself an instance of planning, that its assumption that knowledge is equivalent to data is grounded in historically specific forms of knowledge – second-order cybernetics – that cannot be reduced to data, and that its vision of environmental-behavioural interactivity presupposes a fundamentally remodelled concept of citizenship.

The challenge is to articulate the historicity of the SC from outside of its intellectual perspective. In the SC there is no history, only modulation, perpetual differentiation and an always deferred immediate (but technologically mediated) future. ²⁹ A critique of the SC needs to consider that the very notion of a critique, by the fact that it presupposes negativity, is precluded within the SC’s ‘positive’ temporarily which is predicated on future solutions. The relevance of critique is questioned even by critics of cybernetic hypothesis: Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun (2014) argue that ‘its forms of analysis are not critique, but … mapping, and the vignette’ (p. 8). But doesn’t mapping run parallel to the SC and its paradigm of Big Data, and doesn’t vignette run sideways to it, leaving us with little more than narrative afterthoughts? ³⁰

Wasn’t Deleuze’s periodisation of the society of control an attempt to do more than just map and draw vignettes? Wasn’t it a silent acknowledgement from the great enemy of negativity that in facing the positivities of cybernetic hypothesis and the society of control, there might be nonetheless a political value to negativity and critique? Was his rather blunt historical periodisation an attempt to redeem history from the thralls of cybernetic control and infinite differentiation? Is there then a possibility for a critique in the sense in which Galloway (2014a) asks,

is thought as such dictated by the regularity of an inherited structure, or is thought only possible by virtue of an asymmetrical and autopositional posture vis-à-vis the object of contemplation? Having inherited the computer, are we obligated to think with it? (p. 126)

To articulate how critique, as an intellectual and political procedure, has been historically displaced by the cybernetic hypothesis and rendered ineffective within the control society and the SC, is perhaps also to reclaim it and thus preserve a space for politics and planning as capacities to collectively question, resist or withdraw at the same time. The other way of pursuing thought unaligned with cybernetics is to start writing speculative histories of the SC’s immediate futures, reading them as obsolete before they ever materialise, as ruins-in-reverse. ³¹ Such histories might contribute to challenging the contentious belief that planning equals self-organisation.