New York City is launching a flurry of “smart city” initiatives, ballyhooed by the Adams administration as the nation's shining key to unlocking “green growth” and progress towards carbon emissions goals. In the article “How New York Smart City Projects are Leading the Way,” Olivia Laiamericas describes the city’s innovation incubators, pilot programs, and smart hubs as “vital to protect[ing] the city from worsening effects of climate change,” reflecting the techno-solutionist narrative rampant in New York’s decision-making circles. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul has scrapped the long-awaited congestion pricing plan, a policy that would have also reduced emissions through the less shiny approach of regulation and public transit.

This contradiction sheds light on the larger fallacy in New York’s smart city technology initiatives that rely on outsourced funds and private partnerships. Celebrating growth in “green” industries while ignoring that this expansion relies on further exploiting countries already ravaged by western colonial-capitalist dominion. For instance, Israeli funding supports two major smart initiatives: the New York Smart Cities Partnership and Pilot: New York City. Israel, a nation currently committing genocide on Palestinians and a global leader of military technology, is an active collaborator on New York’s smart city. New York’s interest in genuine climate progress is conditional—prioritized only if it supports the economic, social, and political dominance of wealthy, elite classes.

The climate crisis is so dire that we are self-terminating ourselves through the termination of the planet’s resources. We can no longer afford capitalism, including the anti-austerity compromises that attempt reform within a capitalist framework. Insufficient and reactionary arguments of the centrist-left entertain the politics of buying time. Collective liberation will not be funded by the rulers of today’s economy.

Instead, we must organize towards a city that truly transcends capitalism, reclaiming technology as a tool for collective liberation. The political left often dismisses the idea of connecting collective liberation with technology. Make no mistake—technology alone will not save us, and the transition must be driven by communities themselves in a civic manner, supported by the government in a public-civic partnership.

A nuanced understanding of technology’s role in radical transition is missing from the mainstream urbanists, technologist, and leftist discourses. While New York’s smart initiatives currently favor the haves over the have-nots, technology does not have to be just another neoliberal tool. Technology can help us transition away from destructive capitalist cycles in two main ways.

Firstly, technology can help New York City’s regulatory and institutional structures better respond to complexity, volatility, and the increasingly unprecedented nature of a post-tipping point climate. Current permitting, contracting, legislation, and governance processes have deep structural lock-in that prevents meaningful innovation and reflection of community needs. For example, how can we support place management organizations with real-time compliance that reduces risk but encourages community-led innovation? How can agile regulatory frameworks open up public interest governance in context-specific and adaptable ways? Technology can help New York value contributions to cross-generational ecosystems and communities in dynamic ways that are excluded in today’s model. We don’t need more cutting edge breakthroughs in EV batteries—we need more practical ways to impact rulemaking and open up shared models for care infrastructure and co-governance. We need to use technology to help us build our regulatory sensemaking capacity—the Boring Revolution.

Secondly, technology can serve as a tool for enabling collective action that resists and counters the existing capitalist framework. Currently, public spaces like Grand Army Plaza and digital spaces like Whatsapp chats are increasingly surveilled by law enforcement and big tech companies. This jeopardizes our right to occupy public space for demonstration. Decentralized digital spaces can help us organize resilient, people-led institutions and communities to reclaim both digital and physical public spaces as a civic right. For example, the decentralized web can help labor unions mobilize workers for strikes, crucial for establishing labor as a counterforce to corporations. Open, distributed, and non-commercial technologies are an essential civic infrastructure for community-led movements resisting exclusionary cities.

Holding space for the contradictions and dual nature of technology, I am both deeply critical and optimistic of its potential for New York City. The role of the city is not to maximize efficiency—it is to unlock the capacity for what it means to be human—intertwined patterns of living, cultural production and expression, and embodying our societal values. Let us decenter the efficiency-dominated narrative around technology, and allow it to help us unlock the multitudes that New York holds for us.

Mourning New York City’s Smart City Tech (neoliberal fallacy); Celebrating its Potential (tool for collective liberation)