1 Smart Cities and Knowledge Commons Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, and Brett M. Frischmann introduction and overview Why wonder about “smart” technologies and systems? The rhetoric of intelligence is seductive. With the rise of the Internet over the last twenty-five years, massive networked information systems are injecting ever more “intelligence” into the devices that surround us and even, it seems, into every aspect of our lives. If the evidence from broad acceptance of “smart” televisions and “smart” phones is to be credited, on a broad scale people like their “smart” lives. Adding “intelligence” via the Internet of Things, big data, sensors, algorithms, artificial intelligence, automa- tion, and related technologies seems to minimize burdens, maximize productivity, and make us perfectly happy as both citizens and consumers. Smart technology promises to help us and, in the hands of public authorities, to help the government. It seems to anticipate our needs and desires; it seems to make government flexible, responsible, and error-free. To invert a line from a classic rock song, sometimes you get what you want but can’t always get what you need. What’s convenient or productive for one person may be harmful for society as a whole. “Smart” technology raises important questions and potential conflicts about individual and collective good that may make us rethink whether “smart” things are so good for the individual, after all. The smart city, the subject of this book, puts those conflicts in stark relief. City life, and the study of city life, is all about the place of individual welfare in a complex social setting. We’ll remove the quotation marks from “smart” from here on, recognizing that the word is a metaphor and that it conceals as much as it reveals. What it conceals is the fact that devices and social systems are rarely structured to optimize efficiency, productivity, or happiness. They aren’t smart, even if it’s possible to call a device, rather than a living being, smart or dumb. They have functions and meanings; they enable human beings to do certain things and to do them more or less easily or expensively. But optimizing their functions and clarifying their meanings isn’t the 6 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938532.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press