Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the benefits that smart cities purport to provide cohere poorly with a number of our shared phenomenological intuitions about the relationships(s) between authentic experience and technologised society. While many of these intuitions are, strictly speaking, pseudo-problems, they deserve our attention. These issues will only grow more pressing as our ‘dumb cities’, already so opaque to experience, give way to hyper-technologised ‘smart cities’. However, it is possible to design our way out of these pseudo-problems. Assuming we accept my argument that the distinction between authenticity and the device paradigm is premised upon a certain kind of category error, there is no categorical or definitional reason why it is not possible for urbanised, technologised spaces to feel authentic, whether by virtue of their aesthetic properties, or because they facilitate ‘authentic’ behaviour. Indeed, I argue that ‘inauthenticity’ is an aesthetic rather than an ontological category (much like ‘ugliness’, or ‘boring-ness’), with feelings of inauthenticity serving as evidence of a basic failure of design. Redressing these failures of design requires that we adopt a novel approach to the design and use of technical objects. Consequently, in the concluding analysis of the chapter I outline how the feeling of authenticity can be invoked in the smart city and, consequently, how these failures of design can be avoided.
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Notes
- 1.
In this work Borgmann refers to cities as being either ‘real’ or ‘hyperreal’. However, I agree with Andrew Light’s view that the “real-hyperreal distinction does not do any work that the device paradigm does not; instead, the old distinction should be have applied more straightforwardly” (Light 2005, p. 128). Consequently, I take Borgmann’s urban hyperreal to be equivalent to the device paradigm.
- 2.
Readers familiar with Heidegger will immediately see the parallels between Borgmann’s implicature and Heidegger’s ruminations on the hydroelectric plant (1977, p. 16).
- 3.
- 4.
“[Whereas] animals are positively endowed with qualities, it is tekhnē that forms the lot of humans, and tekhnē is prosthetic; that is, it is entirely artifice. The qualities of animals make up a sort of nature, in any case a positive gift of the gods: a predestination. The gift made to humanity is not positive: it is there to compensate” (Stiegler, 1998, p. 193).
- 5.
“For beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains/to annihilate us” (Rilke, 2014, p. 3).
- 6.
A good Heideggerian would certainly disagree with my assumptions here. Contra my claim that that “the authentic” denotes a class of experiences, said Heideggerian might instead insist that Borgmann’s five features are accidental attributes of authentic Dinge rather than additively constituting authenticity (c.f. Heidegger, 2008). Unfortunately, given the profound differences between my ontological assumptions and those of our hypothetical Heideggerian, I fear that this disagreement is intractable.
- 7.
The implication here—that authenticity is not only desirable because we like it, but because it serves a public good in the sense of better facilitating citizen participation—is an idea that requires further unpacking. Unfortunately, I cannot do justice to in this chapter. However, I am very aware of this lacuna, and I intend to deal with it more substantively in a forthcoming paper.
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Wittingslow, R.M. (2021). Authenticity and the ‘Authentic City’. In: Nagenborg, M., Stone, T., González Woge, M., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Technology and the City. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52313-8_13
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