Google's dream city isn't a new idea

How long...

.. until Google get tired of it and just abandon it as it did with several other projects?

And the inhabitants will be paid in Google Scrip

Only redeemable in the Google Store

Dan Doctoroff

If only he had a PhD.

A techno utopia is where ...

neckbeards get to snog hot blondes

So after 2000+ years, bl**dy Aristotle is still inspiring people to build the perfect society... a la 'The Republic'. Great in theory, but Alexander the Great was interested in doing it in practise and look what he did! God knows what Alphabet would do.

As for the Dutch East Indian Company, better comparison would be the British East Indian company, which conquered most of India and administrated it for longer than the British Raj.

Thank goodness they'll loose interest when the next shiny idea comes past.

Oath of Fealty (1981)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_%28novel%29

" The arcology dwellers have evolved a different culture, sacrificing privacy - there are cameras even in the private apartments - in exchange for security. The residents are fiercely loyal to the arcology and its management, and the loyalty runs both ways"

Please make your way to your designated Ark.

"Walker was part of a group of radical scientists and prominent public intellectuals, including molecular biologist JD Bernal and geneticist JBS Haldane, who called for a new colony of 100,000 scientists and engineers. This would be free from the “constraints and social errors” that non-engineers introduce - or non-engineers might wish to vote for."

And they would have lived full, rich and happy lives until being wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

Been tried, doesn't work

Covered in detail within James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". It ends up with unliveable cities like Brasilia, surrounded by zones in which the humans actually get to be humans.

Technocrats, bureaucrats, they're all people.

We need to remove people from the equation of the day-to-day running of cities.

It's always people that fuck things up.

Seriously though, a well planned, intelligently set up city should pretty much run itself.

The day we sack all the politicians, will be a good day indeed.

"A top Google executive says he’d love to build a city from scratch - without the messy humans getting in the way."

Disney tried this years ago - the EPCOT Centre

Yo Ho Ho and *HeEURGh*

I expected the first synthetic cities to be sea based as it would be easier to sort out the legal issues (although seeing the amount of **** they stirred up just with those empty barges..).

Lots of fun engineering problems there. It's hard to rezone city chunks as the city grows, but with a floating segmented city..

"Sire, quadrant 43 voted for Trump.."

Bah!

EPCOT v 1.

Celebration.

More to come no doubt. Disney can be scary when it puts on its thinking cap.

Google doing a Le Corbusier - what could possibly go wrong?

See also Ville Contemporaine, Ville Radieuse, Athens Charter. Interesting and useful theoretical exercises for Urban Planners*, but if you believe this sort of thing will work as planned...

^{*Don't mess with Urban Planners. They can be world class assholes.}

Good. The sooner google fucks off and leaves San Francisco to revert to the chaotic, artistic, crazy social experiment it was before google and the rest of the tech industry drove rents up to such an extreme all the artists and wingnuts couldn't afford to live there, the better.

Engineers v Politicians

It is very fashionable these days to blame politicians for all the ills of the world (I go in for a bit of pol bashing myself now and then) - but for supposedly intelligent people to propose that simply banishing politicians is the answer (or even part of the answer) just shows that they are even less suited than the pols to dealing with the inevitable problems thrown up when 7+ billion carbon based life forms with free will, emotions, fears and abstract thinking are all trying to get from her to there (eventually).

Absolutist obedience to the scientists and engineers is just as bad as blaming politicians that we elected because they told us what we wanted to hear.

Too much blind faith it will blind us - though sometimes it's a blessing.

No People No City

Cities are convenient places where more and more people gather to live until it becomes a lot bigger than a town, it is the people that make it a city, the huge variation of wants and needs,skills, races etc that gives a city an identity.

If you build the city first and then try to populate with selected people, you get

Milton Keynes!

Bring back the Berlin wall!

No, I don't mean that literally.

During the Cold War, we had the Communist "Control Economy" to point at as an object lesson in how not to run an economy or a society. Without it, the victorious Capitalist system has become more and more of a Control Economy, in which only the CEOs of huge companies are allowed to say how things should be done and ordinary people just have to do as they are told.

The reason why The Free Market and Democracy, and indeed Evolution by Natural Selection, work is that many minds are better than one.

That's basically what Walt Disney planned with EPCOT (Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow). And we all know where that went.

Grand companies with grand ideas for Utopia

It always seems to work So well.

"Pullman is the only city in the world built scientifically and artistically in every part, and from a central idea within one man," Duane Doty

Really, really didn't end well.