"Smart city"

"Smart city"  (City,  Mass surveillance,  Smart technology)
Founder(s)	World Economic Forum
Interest of	• Michael Bloomberg • National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence
A prison-city with an algorithm as warden

The "Smart city", a vision of a high technology [see: technocracy] urban area, has been heavily promoted by the WEF. Supporters highlight the potential for a much greater efficiency due to the use of AI and therefore lower resource use per capita and consequent greater sustainability [see: UN sustainable development goal 9.Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure and goal 11.Sustainable Cities and Communities]

"The Privacyless, Freedomless Smart City of 2030 the Elite Are Engineering" a video by Truthstream Media from January 2017

“A smart city program aims to create “an effective urban management system, creating safe and comfortable living conditions for citizens.”

Sobyanin’s “Smart City – 2030” project for Moscow provides an extreme example of what this initiative hopes to accomplish. The ambitious reimagining of the Russian capital is already being carried out by the city’s Department of Information Technologies.

Among other perks, Moscow residents will be issued “genetic passports” that can be used to administer gene therapies. “Wearable and implanted medical digital devices” will collect information about an individual’s lifestyle and calculate payments to health insurance companies.

By the end of the decade, Russia's capital will harness “digital technologies” to ensure “sustainable growth in the quality of life of Muscovites,” according to the project’s official website.”
Unlimited Hangout (12 July 2022) 

Concerns

Aman Jabbi, a B.Sc. in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and MS in Chemistry from BITS in India, an MS in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University and studied Computer Science at Stanford University. Presentation Facial Recognition. Digital Identity or Digital Dictatorship? shows that in fact the most amount of cameras are in the western cities, and increasingly they are used to track and trace us and what does it mean for us. He tries to answer the question if facial recognition is the trojan horse of digital dictatorship Yuval Harari was talking about on WEF 2020 meeting at 58m 42s

"FACIAL RECOGNITION. Digital Identity or Digital Dictatorship?" presentation by Aman Jabbi,

Zero Trust, smart contracts and identity as a service

"Zero trust is a cybersecurity protocol where by default we are going from a world of implicit allow to default deny". This is being implemented in new smart contracts which have identity as a service in the core of it..

Geofencing

Geofencing is "going to limit how far can we walk and that is related to 15 minute cities and 20 minute neighbourhoods that they are building right now" That 15 minute cities/20 minute neighborhoods are a growing number of urban development where all necessary amenities are supposed to be within 15/20 walking distance:

• Food retailers and supermarkets
• Education, including early years, primary school and nearby secondary schools
• Health services, such as a pharmacy, GP and dentist
• Financial services, such as post office or bank
• Employment and jobs either within the neighbourhood or nearby
• Public open space, such as parks and recreation grounds
• Entertainment, such as leisure, culture and entertainment facilities.
• Public transport, including access to a regular bus, tram or train service
• Walking and cycling infrastructure
• Walkable access to a local centre
• Designed for low speeds, reduced traffic, and limited car parking.

A barless prison

The zero trust protocol and 15 minute city / 20 minute neigbourhood facilitate mass surveillance and restriction of the population's freedom of travel. Facial recognition and ubiquitous CCTV is just one way that the population of smart cities could be constantly tracked. If inhabitants attempt to travel beyond their prescribed area may find "smart" devices such as public transport (or doors!) uncooperative, so goods or services might only be available within their prescribed area, which becomes a "barless prison".

It is to stop too much traveling and to lower carbon footprint to help fight with climate change because travelling is causing CO₂ 'pollution'.

Wikipedia entry for 15 minute city as a first reference leads to "C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group". We can read there that: "The climate crisis and global COVID-19 pandemic combined to accelerate consideration and implementation of the 15-minute city.[9] In July 2020, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group published a framework for cities to "Build Back Better" using the 15-minute concept" (Build Back Better is alternative name for the Great Reset) "that represents one twelfth of the world's population and one quarter of the global economy". Carbon taxes which can be levied on all activities that require energy are planned to be integral part of C40 cities that are "focused on fighting climate change and driving urban action that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks".

Geofencing Real-life example: Oxford

Problem: Gridlocked traffic

Reaction: Irritation of the city inhabitants

Solution: Smart city

“'It is famous as the home of Britain’s oldest university and students on bicycles — but Oxford is known to its residents for its gridlocked traffic. Now the council is fighting back with plans to divide the city into six districts from next August with strict rules on how often motorists can drive outside their neighbourhood.'

Duncan Enright, the Oxfordshire county councillor leading the policy, said: “Oxford is a medieval city with roads that I can’t even believe were that brilliant during the days of horse and cart. The traffic problems in Oxford are not new, and we are determined to do something about it." Its 150,000 residents will be allowed to use their cars as much as they like within their district'

- Nicholas Hellen Transport Editor of The Times in the article partly hidden behind the paywall”
Nicholas Hellen (23 October 2022) 

Banning cars aka "carfree city"

A carfree city see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfree_city

Smart streetlights / lampposts

Another example of geofencing in action is the utilisation of smart lights and poles :

• they will have speakers to give instruction to people
• noise sensors
• facial recognition cameras (cctv with video analytics and surveillance)
• digital sinage to instruct people how to behave
• pollution sensors - "that is how they are selling it"
• solar panels
• all wirelessly connected to each other and to internet which is a part of internet of things
• Canadian government allegedly will also install on them puke guns (puke rays) known as LED incapacitator
• some of those lamps/ poles will have drone charging stations. why? because drones will be the new aerial police

Facial recognition and microphone public surveillance

Full article: Facial recognition

The microphones and cameras are to record inhabitants for the purposes of control and social credit score. Allegedly to improve services and safety. Will enable points being awarded and fines for things like walking on a red light, buying beef or lamb, using gasoline car etc.

“"Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations. The systems are raising a number of privacy and security concerns.

The systems use cables or WiFi to pair audio conversations with camera images in order to produce synchronous recordings. Audio and video can be monitored in real-time, but are also stored onboard in blackbox-like devices, generally for 30 days, for later retrieval. Four to six cameras with mics are generally installed throughout a bus, including one near the driver and one on the exterior of the bus.

Cities that have installed the systems or have taken steps to procure them include San Francisco, California; Eugene, Oregon; Traverse City, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore Maryland; Hartford, Connecticut; and Athens, Georgia.

San Francisco transit authorities recently approved a $5.9 million contract to install an audio surveillance system on 357 buses and vintage trolley cars, paid for in full with a grant from DHS. The contract includes the option to expand the equipment to an additional 600 vehicles.

Concord, New Hampshire also used part of a $1.2 million economic stimulus grant to install its new video/audio surveillance system on buses, according to the Daily.

Transit officials say the systems will help improve the safety of passengers and drivers and resolve complaints from riders. But privacy and security expert Ashkan Soltani told the Daily that the audio could easily be coupled with facial recognition systems or audio recognition technology to identify passengers caught on the recordings."”
Wired (10 December 2012) 

Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is closely connected to the concept of the smart city, with which a high number of jobs will be cut due to robotization, big example is the replacement of the police by aerial drone policing

Stakeholders and Public Private Partnership

The whole program ties in with how Greta Thunberg, as a representative of "civil society", was given lots of attention at the 2019 and 2020 WEF summits, at which she stated that "our house is on fire", calling for "urgent action, stressing the need for 'real zero' emissions."

Several "stakeholders" have pronounced to the WEF how they envisaged a Great Reset:

• Microsoft's Brad Smith stated "As people return to work, we can continue to expect digital technology and data to fundamentally to be the infrastructure for this decade and for the Great Reset." He further stated that (an unspecified) 'we' need to sustain people's ('their') trust. "This means protecting their privacy, their security, and ensuring that new technologies, especially artificial intelligence are deployed responsibly around the world."

• Kristalina Georgieva from the IMF stated that "The digital economy is the big winner of this crisis," and suggested "public and private investments for low-carbon industries, bizarrely stating - this from the institution that has done most to deepen world inequality -that she wants a "fairer"society.

• UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated "We build must equal, inclusive, sustainable societies, that are more resilient in the face of pandemics and climate change".

• Ajay Singh from MasterCard wanted to "bring the private sector to the party", but where one needed enormous trust between the private and public sector for this to actually work".

• Saadia Zahidi, Head of the New Economy and Society at the World Economic Forum opined “Businesses have an opportunity to affect change in not just their own workforces, the communities that they represent, but through their advertising, through their products, they have the power to change society”. He also envisages "a completely different approach to the content and delivery of education," an "education 4.0"

• Geraldine Matchett, CFO at Royal DSM, sees the crisis as a great equalizer between the sexes in terms of constraints. She wants to reinvent the workplace, "where the 9-5 or 9-10" [sic] depending on the kind of job, "is gone".

An article in The Hill from June 2020 mentions:

On 4 February 2022, Neil Clark tweeted:

Yup. We’re in the next phase of the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’. Moving away from the ‘Covid phase’ to the Economic Collapse/Rationing/Net Zero stage. End goal:

‘In the future you will own nothing and you will be happy’.

"Owning nothing" does of course not translate to communism; the idea is that people are required to rent, lease or pay other forms of interest on everything, from cars to house hold utilities from a superclass who owns everything.

Martin Armstrong suggests (see his quote below) that "The Great Reset" is just another word for monetary reform. The IMF agrees: We must seize this new Bretton Woods moment. - (Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director Washington, DC, October 15, 2020)

Monetary reforms are a systemic (mathematical) necessity in a our current monetary system due to the exponential growth of debts and money supply over time. Armstrong and others (Bernd Senf) agree that approximately every 70 years a major monetary reform must happen. The history of financial "resets" shows an astounding high count of incidences where old money is declared invalid and a new type of money decreed.

In this view, Klaus Schwab is not a visionary; his "job" is simply to announce the inevitable with a lot of gibberish decorating the cold hard fact, that exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run. The SDS may have learned about these money mechanics by observing the buildup phase to the great depression in 1929 and hundreds of collapses of currencies over the past centuries.

Lockdowns, sanctions and most importantly the "green agenda" (CO²-punishments) all serve to drive down economic activity, which might be a precondition for a soft landing as opposed to a crash scenario like in 1929. Interestingly, sanctions (leading to very high oil prices), lockdowns and CO²-taxes seem to continue, even after the "cause" they were purportedly introduced for ceases to exist. Putin, as "WEF global leader", may therefore "support" the drive towards a "reset" with his Invasion of Ukraine.

Own words and connection to Great Reset

The project aims to connect lower carbon footprint and "key global governmental and business leaders" in "a historical moment to shape the system for the post-corona era". It envisages a "stakeholder capitalism" solution, where the big corporations become "trustees of society".

Noticeably left out of all these plans is any democratic participation, where people genuinely can decide over their own futures on a local level. The democratic process in the Great Reset is reduced to engagement with global governmental leaders and "stakeholders", i.e. self-appointed community leaders from NGOs, more often than not with positions dovetailing with the big corporations.

The forum launch also strongly hints at a reduction in material living standards for average citizens (but maybe not so much the owners of corporations or Prince Charles), especially in developed countries; "a change of lifestyles" to a green (see:Environmentalism) economy including pushing through a "rapid growth in digital" (see:Digital identity and Fourth Industrial Revolution) - as opposed to physical goods and services, like travel. The launch mentions "employment opportunities" and "opportunities for all" to "close the gaps in equality", but does not mention living standards.

Prince Charles in a speech during the event and on Twitter commented the following:

“As we move from rescue to recovery, therefore, we have a unique, but rapidly shrinking, window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path. It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again. We must use all the levers we have at our disposal, knowing that each and every one of us has a vital role to play.”
Charles Mountbatten-Windsor (Jun 3, 2020) 

“#TheGreatReset initiative is designed to ensure businesses and communities ‘build back better’ by putting sustainable business practices at the heart of their operations as they begin to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.”
Charles Mountbatten-Windsor (Jun 3, 2020) 

The Great Reset concept is heavily promoted by WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab, who envisages a "comprehensive approach" to shape the future, integrating "all organizations and people with innovative ideas". Who these people and organizations are and what sort of ideas will be prominent, can be discerned from the speakers at the launch of the initiative: Kristalina Georgieva from the IMF, Brad Smith from Microsoft, Bernard Looney from British Petroleum and Prince Charles of Britain. And the strategic partners which will help formulate the action plan, consist of a hundred of the most ruthless companies in the world.

Klaus Schwab, along with his co author Thierry Malleret, published a book entitled "COVID-19: The Great Reset" in July 2020. "It's not enough to change a few policies or address short-term issues, what we need is a change of mindset, of lifestyles, of business models," said Schwab.

As opposed to rebuilding current cities some smart cities are built from scratch

*'The Neom', Saudi Arabia

"Five years into its development, bringing Neom out of the realm of science fiction is proving a formidable challenge, even for a near-absolute ruler with access to a $620 billion sovereign wealth fund. According to more than 25 current and former employees interviewed for this story, as well as 2,700 pages of internal documents, the project has been plagued by setbacks, many stemming from the difficulty of implementing MBS’s grandiose, ever-changing ideas—and of telling a prince who’s overseen the imprisonment of many of his own family members that his desires can’t be met.

Efforts to relocate the indigenous residents of the Neom site, who’ve lived there for generations, have been turbulent, devolving on one occasion into a gun battle. Dozens of key staff have quit, complaining of a toxic work environment and a culture of wild overspending with few results. And along the way, Neom has become something of a full-employment guarantee for international architects, futurists, and even Hollywood production designers, each taking a cut of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum riches in exchange for work that some strongly suspect will never be used. Few are willing to speak on the record, citing nondisclosure agreements or fear of retribution; at least one former employee who criticized the project was jailed in Saudi Arabia. (He’s since been released.)"

Often updated news on smart cities

https://www.technocracy.news/category/sustainable-cities/

Predictive programming for smart cities=

One example of predictive programming for smart city elements is the TV series Colony (2016–2018) created by Ryan J. Condal, Carlton Cuse as noticed by Jay Dyer It is a world where the people are prisoners in their own cities, because they cannot freely travel to nearby cities, are forcibly separated from family members. The right to a phone call is blatantly disregarded for the arrested. People are experiencing extraordinary rendition (state kidnapping) in broad daylight by heavily militarised police (human) that is getting helped by the aerial police (drones).

There are also typical lifestyle/dietary changes required by climate change: no beef, pork, lamb for the population. Only the police have access to that immensely sought-after commodities given in this dystopian world as a reward for collaboration. Wine is so expensive the main character tries to trade it for an insulin (which is now not available in enough quantities to save resources, possibly a systematic eugenics feature of the health system)

*'The Colony' 2016-2018

Another typical technocratic society is depicted by the movie Tron (1982) made by cooperation of Disney and Pentagon Document:Tron (1982) – The Ultimate Predictive PROGRAMming

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.