Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russel claim in Hail the Maintainers that innova-
tion is the dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon
Valley, Wall Street and the Washington DC political elite. This pursuit of
innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists; it has also provoked
critics. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important:
“Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane
labor that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures,
simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of
technological innovations.” They emphasize a shift from means to ends,
including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that
technology can offer.
The roles of individuals, companies, city, government and the European
Union (EU) are becoming more fluid. It becomes clear that private over
the top players cannot regulate the negative effects of their success for the
local living ecosystem. It is also clear that individuals will not go back on
their connected powers. Agency must be shared. Cities and the EU need
more control over the data from their citizens, machines, and processes,
to facilitate sharing services. Individuals need control over the data from
their wearables, homes, cars and civic identities. Companies need to have
assurances that their investments are safe while providing scalability,
guaranteed up time, and sustainability.
New business models and new regulatory models therefore need to be
co-created with the different actors: the EU, non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGOs), City, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), indi-
viduals and large service providers. An important philosophical building
block in a larger policy framework and potential inspiration for scenarios
is to move the decision-making capabilities into a more relevant balance
between actions taken from IoT scenarios and current party politics. 10 In
accelerationist thinking, “quantification is not an evil to be eliminated,
but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic
modelling is—simply put—a necessity for making intelligible a complex
world. The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based
modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are
necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like
the modern economy.”
Creating a productive and vital scope with a variety of stakeholders in
an open and dynamic ecosystem requires taking a discussion beyond the
immediate deliverables and the concrete outcomes, enablers, applications
and services in order to accommodate new developments and trends.
These developments are tuned to new situations. These situations do not