In the Nineties, back when I was a young mathematics student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Pioneer Square was a musical wonderland. Grunge was still raw and alive. Venues like The Crocodile and The Off Ramp were packed wall to wall, the air thick with distortion, sweat, and something like civic joy. Back then, you could walk from Pioneer Square after a night of beer and music, all the way up through Belltown and up Queen Anne Hill — dodging taxis, talking with strangers, feeling part of a city that, for all its rain, felt electric.
Today, that walk would be a grim one.
Seattle, in its current state, feels like the ghost of a promise. Once a beacon of West Coast progressivism, the city now presents an uncanny blend of technological optimism and visible collapse. Sidewalks are cracked not just with concrete fatigue but with a deeper erosion — of order, of public trust, of any shared vision of the good. The city’s physical and social realities don’t conform to the logic of technology, the “smart” city. They fray, drift, and rot.
Despite smart streetlights, adaptive traffic signals, transit dashboards, and a digital infrastructure any city would envy, the basic civic experience has unravelled. What was once a sidewalk for music-goers and late-night wanderers is now a corridor of despair. There are countless lost souls — sprawled akimbo on street corners, some barely alive. Fentanyl, heroin, meth — these aren’t fringe substances anymore. They’re routine. They’re currency.
During Covid, entire swaths of the city — Capitol Hill, once a nightlife hub lined with Thai restaurants and quirky bars — became unpoliced zones. Tent encampments proliferated. The smell of trash and urine wasn’t the worst of it. There was menace in the air. The sense that no one was steering.
According to the Brookings Institution, as of last year, over 57% of Seattle’s homeless population lives without shelter at all — on the street, in the rain, under the viaducts and overpasses once meant to connect a thriving metropolis. Seattle has become a paradox: optimised yet abandoned.
It is one of the most wired cities in North America — and among the most visibly unraveling. Seattle’s Vision Zero initiative aims to reduce traffic deaths by “mitigating human error” through sensor-based traffic management and enhanced vehicle automation. But even the rhetoric tells a story: errors are human, and therefore the city must adapt by removing the human from the loop. We don’t ask what it means to move joyfully through a city — we ask how to reduce pedestrian friction.
And yet: what I remember most about Seattle — the real Seattle — isn’t its throughput. It’s walking. Jogging. Window shopping. Biking around Green Lake. Wandering without a plan.
Seattle brims with smart infrastructure. The traffic lights on historic Aurora Avenue, once the main highway south before Interstate 5, are now powered by LED arrays and synced in adaptive cycles. The streets pulse with data. Public dashboards monitor everything from traffic to rainfall. But walk those same streets and it becomes clear: the life has drained out of the space between the data points.
Downtown businesses are fleeing. Families and entrepreneurs alike are moving to outlying cities — places that, while less optimised, feel safer, more liveable. The technocratic dream was supposed to bring us progress. Instead it has brought exodus.
In the early 20th century, James Conant — chemist, educator, president of Harvard — set out to reinvent the American elite. No longer would admission to the Ivy League depend on family name or inherited wealth. It would depend on merit, on aptitude, measured by new tools like the SAT. Intelligence, particularly in science and mathematics, would form the new aristocracy. The mind, quantified and tested, became the key to power.
Conant didn’t invent technocracy, but he did institutionalise it. He gave it the Harvard stamp. A few decades later, his legacy sat in a helicopter over Vietnam.
That man was Robert McNamara — Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson and a perfect product of the meritocratic experiment. He had risen fast: from Harvard Business School to the presidency of Ford Motor Company, and then to the Pentagon. There, he approached war as a systems problem. He counted bodies, sorties, munitions. He believed in management, in metrics, in IQ. There were plenty of bodies. On paper, the war was being won.
But McNamara didn’t understand the war he was in. The Viet Cong weren’t trying to win by his rules. He had analysis when the moment required judgment. He saw the data, but not the terrain.
That was the problem.
Technocracy as a cultural force has older roots still. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon imagined a new kind of city — The New Atlantis — governed not by kings or priests, but by scientists. It would be the first the Smart City. Observation would replace tradition. Experiment would guide governance. It was a dream of order born in an age of chaos.
That dream found its early triumphs in astronomy, engineering, and navigation. Copernicus corrected the calendar and moved the sun to the center of the cosmos. Galileo was forced to recant, but his muttered “E pur si muove”— and yet it moves — still resonates. Newton reduced the heavens to a set of equations. Enlightenment thinkers believed that what reason could uncover, humanity could master.
But reason’s boundaries were not well understood. The French Revolution, inspired by rationalist zeal, led not to harmony but to the guillotine. Voltaire, in tearing down superstition, failed to see that rationality can become its own idol. By the 19th century, governments turned to technocrats — not to build utopias, but to manage complexity. Cities were filthy, chaotic, overrun. Actuarial tables, engineering reports, and bureaucratic reforms promised stability. The New Atlantis did not come all at once, but in pipes, sewers, bridges, blueprints, and statistics.
Thorstein Veblen saw it clearly. In The Engineers and the Price System, he argued that the new ruling class would not be barons or clergy, but engineers — people who understood systems, but not people. Their rise was quiet but decisive.
By the 20th century, the old aristocracy clung to power through habit and inertia. But the modern world belonged to the men who built and measured. Lenin dreamed of electrified cities and industrial planning. The Romanovs were shot in a basement. The 20th century belonged to the algorithmic mind.
“The 20th century belonged to the algorithmic mind.”
Conant’s American meritocracy — rooted in IQ and STEM aptitude — produced not just McNamara, but Gates, Jobs, and later Brin, Page, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk. Visionaries, certainly. Builders of systems. But also, inheritors of a blind spot: phronesis — or what Aristotle called practical wisdom. It is the kind of intelligence that knows how to act well when rules run out. It cannot be taught in a classroom, measured on a test, or programmed into a machine. It asks, not “How do we make this faster?” but “What do we want this for?”
And it is precisely this quality that modern technocrats so often lack. Nowhere is this absence more painfully visible than in the contemporary American city. It’s not just Seattle. Nationwide, homelessness reached a record 653,104 people in 2023 — a 12.1% year-over-year increase — despite decades of data-driven housing initiatives. As the obsession with “smart” rises, that number should surely be falling.
It is not. Portland, too, is cursed with the technocrats’ imperatives. Long hailed as a poster child for progressive urbanism, it embraced smart-city logic before the term even became fashionable. Portland championed the “20-minute neighbourhood”, built out light rail, restricted urban sprawl through its urban growth boundary, and launched the Smart City PDX initiative with a focus on using data to achieve equity and sustainability. It was a city that planned to do everything right.
And yet, the results on the ground tell a different story.
Property crime in Portland has surged in recent years. Car thefts, vandalism, and break-ins remain common. In 2024, a dysentery outbreak swept through its homeless population — an ancient illness made modern again by a failure to provide basic sanitation. As of early 2025, Multnomah County reported nearly 15,000 individuals experiencing homelessness, with approximately 6,800 living unsheltered. You can walk past smart kiosks and traffic sensors and still see people collapsed on the sidewalks, too sick or high or hungry to move.
Downtown, the storefronts are papered up, the foot traffic sparse. Some neighbourhoods feel over-planned and under-inhabited — built for lifestyle indexes, not people. Surveillance cameras proliferate. So do tents.
Portland built the infrastructure of a successful city but failed to create the conditions for human flourishing. Like its northern sibling Seattle, it pulses with data but suffers from a chronic deficit of the practical wisdom to recognise that not all problems yield to better modelling. There are no dashboards for despair. No API call that fixes trust, presence, or care.
Portland didn’t fail because it lacked intelligence. So far, it’s failed because it forgot to ask what the intelligence was for. The dream of a “New Atlantis” — a city run by science and data — turns dystopian not because of its technology, but because of its values. If citizens are assumed to be liabilities rather than moral agents, then urban design becomes an exercise in containment, not liberation.
Nowhere has this been more clearly illustrated than in Toronto, where the technocrat’s dream was given its most literal expression.
In 2017, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — at the time chairing Alphabet — partnered with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to launch a project that would, in Schmidt’s words, “reimagine cities from the internet up”. The initiative, called Sidewalk Toronto, aimed to transform 12 acres of prime waterfront real estate — Quayside — into the world’s smartest urban district. And Toronto was a natural host: it was tech-forward, globally minded, and home to AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of deep learning.
The plan was staggering in scope. Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation arm, promised dynamic streets that could adapt use hour-by-hour, underground freight tunnels with smart containers, thermal grids to reduce energy waste, and advanced stormwater recycling. Buildings would be modular and sustainable. Trash collection, traffic management, and power distribution would all be automated and optimised. It was the Swiss Army knife of smart city design.
And it came with a catch: ubiquitous surveillance.
Sensors and cameras would track every motion. The streets, sidewalks, and buildings would collect behavioural data in real time — what residents did, where they went, how long they stayed. Sidewalk Labs pitched this as a feature, not a flaw. But for Torontonians, the cost to privacy was a line too far. The idea that a walk along a formerly public waterfront now meant contributing to Google’s behavioural dataset struck many as a kind of spatial betrayal. This wasn’t a city anymore — it was a lab.
The backlash was swift. Privacy advocates denounced the plan as a prototype for surveillance capitalism. Civic groups revolted. By 2020, the Quayside project was dead — its ambition undone not by technical limitations, but by a failure of democratic imagination.
When I think of Sidewalk Labs, I think of the slow unraveling of once-great cities like Seattle and Portland — both of which still earn high marks as “smart cities” — I can’t help but feel there’s a pattern here. The thread tying them together is not incompetence, nor malice. It’s faith — an unshakeable faith in data and algorithms to solve human problems.
I was surprised — nearly shocked — to discover in Copenhagen, Denmark, that the entire city centre bans cars outright. You don’t realise how much ambient dread traffic adds to a city until it’s gone. What remains in Copenhagen is something close to urban joy: the city centre is vibrant with window shoppers, bar hoppers, backpackers, cyclists, joggers — and the flâneur. The quiet observer. The slow wanderer. The person with no destination except experience.
The city feels human-scaled, walkable, safe — not because of some cutting-edge surveillance grid, but because it was designed for people, not machines. The air is cleaner. The noise is lower. And the public trust is palpable.
The Nyhavn waterway runs deep into the city centre, and in winter, ice floes bob along the frigid surface. I was stunned to see there were no guardrails. One could, quite easily, fall — or jump — into the near-freezing water, where hypothermia would set in within minutes. In Seattle or Portland, I can only imagine the solution: perhaps a 10-foot electrified fence with smart alarms, motion detection, and a dedicated app.
The contrast says something profound about trust and control, and about the limits of the technocratic imagination.
Cities, like guerrilla wars, aren’t systems to be solved. They’re organisms to be tended. The freedom of a city lies not in throughput or traffic speed. It lies in the quiet spaces where people can walk, linger, flirt, debate, discover, get lost. The technocrat’s fixation on efficiency makes those spaces harder to find. It narrows the meaning of movement to utility. It forgets that walking isn’t always about getting somewhere—and that a bike lane isn’t safe when it runs alongside vehicles optimized to move faster, regardless.
What Harvard president James Conant envisioned in the mid-20th century was an educational system that produced high-IQ graduates rather than the spoiled children of rich families. That’s commendable. But the unintended consequence of redefining excellence as technocratic competence is that, alongside laudable advances in math and science, we also get the narrowed worldview that so often accompanies this type of leadership. There’s nothing wrong with Silicon Valley’s vision of the world per se — it’s just incomplete. Nowhere are the limits of the technocratic mindset more visible than in the current state of our great cities — especially our “smart” ones. A truly smart city isn’t one that tracks you, manages your behaviour, or protects you from yourself. A smart city is one that allows you to be free become who you wish to be.
