Tech Bros Still Can’t Build Cities But Maybe It Doesn’t Matter?

Ten years after I worked on the team at Google that failed to build a city, we can learn a lot from what ultimately happened with that project.

When I moved to the U.S. in 2015 the team I joined at Google was part of a “secret” team codenamed Javelin. Javelin’s purpose was to take ideas from Larry Page and turn them into startups with viable business models. Within a few months of me joining the team, it was disbanded and folded into other parts of the company. During the short time it existed, it tried a bunch of new ideas– but the dominant idea was to build a “city of the future.” The team I was on spun out a company to focus on city-building, called Sidewalk Labs.

The thinking at the time was that people who know how to code and create tech products could make better cities than what we currently have. Tech founders, with massive amounts of capital behind them, would be able to reduce commute times, remove those ugly electricity poles that go from building to building–and in their words, “manufacture serendipity”. Real heady stuff.

For my first few months living in the U.S. it was a fascinating insight into Silicon Valley culture and the hubris created by effectively unlimited private capital. The New York Times story announcing Sidewalk Labs was titled “Bold Aims to Improve City Living.” The guys running the show were successful coders and tech founders, yet they’d never built a house or worked an infrastructure project through a city planning process.

10 years have passed, and no tech bro has built a city, or even come close.

But they keep trying. There’s a current effort north of San Francisco to buy up thousands of acres and build a whole new city. It has backing from the usual suspects: Marc Andreesson, the Stripe brothers, Michael Moritz, etc.

Bloomberg reported this week about a company called Praxis, backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, that’s setting out to build a tech utopia. From the story:

“a self-described “sovereign network” funded by Silicon Valley investors, is looking for at least 10,000 acres (40.5 square kilometers) somewhere in the world to build its first city.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dryden Brown said he’ll visit Nuuk in Greenland, Buenos Aires, Rome, Athens, Auckland, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Kyiv, and the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo”

This brought me back to one of memories from my time at Javelin when I was tasked with searching online for vast masses of land in Texas; where, the thinking was, there was both free land and a more libertarian government willing to go along with it.

Mother Jones also has a story this week about how Christian TheoBros are trying to build a tech utopia in Appalachia. From Mother Jones:

“the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America: “Thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.”

And lastly, several groups representing “startup cities”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, per a report from Wired. According to interviews and presentations viewed by Wired, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

A few questions come to mind. I’ll try to answer them based on my experience.

Why do they keep trying?

The timeline typically goes like this: someone with money (or without money, but with contacts) thinks they can build cities better as technocrats. They get plenty of other people excited about this, lots of strategy and design documents are made, money is spent, locals are pissed off, and typically a few years later the project wraps up without much fanfare.

There’s enough rich people around to go along with an idea that has a potentially big pay day at the end of the road. The amount of capital willing to be spent to fuel these ideas, that to some people sound great on paper, tends to give overly confident people the green light to give it a shot. And as Catherine Bracy explained in her recent book about venture capital, the prevalent Silicon Valley funding model rewards the kind of people who take big risks and operate with massive overconfidence.

Are they ever going to build a city?

Questionable. One of my tasks was to go through every one of Larry Page’s public comments, compile ideas he shared in them, and add them to a tracker, as part of an effort to develop business ideas. Another was to write the press release/launch messaging for what was going to be a city inside a balloon, about a mile wide, that would allow people to live inside and have full control of the environment (weather, etc).

With Sidewalk Labs, they eventually had to land the idea somewhere. Ultimately they ended up trying to redevelop a big plot of land in Toronto, but after years of criticism from locals, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on consultants and planning ideas, Google bailed and the company wound up. Josh O’Kane wrote a well researched book about the effort: “Sideways, the city Google couldn’t buy” about the ins and outs of how it all happened.

I’d be very surprised if the tech bros ever actually built anything substantial, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the big ideas, story-telling, and limitless capital are what got them inside the federal government, allowing them to siphon off private contracts. Just today, the Federal government announced a major contract to allow all Federal workers using Google’s email offering.

Who cares?

Well, the guys with these ideas have effectively taken over the federal government. Not only does this allow them to funnel what was done by public servants to their private companies, it also let’s them seek to overhaul decades of incremental change in how cities are built.

One name that was bandied about quite a bit during that time was a guy called Balaji Srinivasan. He was apparently a friend of the guy who ran the Javelin team (Adrian Aoun, startup founder and investor). Balaji has continued to be a key figure in the contrarian Silicon Valley echo chamber. Gil Duran has done a good job to share some of his perspectives out to a wider audience. Balaji seems to have the ear of a number of prominent Silicon Valley money men, and his contrarian (and I believe dangerous) ideas are what gets air space and funding. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. “Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,”. From Gil’s post, a direct quote from Balaji: “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore).

At Javelin, when we workshopped the idea of having people live inside what was effectively a big balloon, I asked colleagues what the rules would be for letting homeless people in or not and what the minimum wage would be. The first reply was that questions about stuff like this had not occurred to them, but after some deliberation, the response was ‘well we should probably try to do this in somewhere like Saudi Arabia at first’. Cool.

The dream they are looking for is an absence of rules. Much of these efforts originate from an effort or movement called Seastanding, the idea that you could build anything you want on international waters with no one to stop you. It wasn’t a coincidence that one of the precursors to the Google city project was an earlier secret project at Google known as the Google barge.

Ten years post Javelin, the same players and patterns resurface. The reason it’s interesting now is the people with these ideas, and a proven track record of failure, are now effectively running the federal government. Despite the repeated failures, the same personalities—armed with capital, influence, and unlimited confidence—keep returning to the “smart city” dream. They don’t need to build their own city anymore, they get to advance their ideas directly through the U.S. government.

To end on a note of hope, once Sidewalk Labs landed somewhere–in this case, Toronto–locals quickly figured out what was happening, and made moves to cause enough friction for long enough that Google decided to give up on it. That’s a lesson for all of us in this as we watch people with Balaji-like world views wreak havoc on democracy and institutions in the U.S: If the tech bros come through your neighborhood with grand visions, don’t just hand over your future to them. If you push back for long enough, you will win. They only win when we stay home and let them overpower us.

WHAT I’M READING

Bloomberg reported this week on what’s happening to publishers now that Google is providing AI summaries in their search results. The article ends with a real punch in the face for anyone that’s not Google:

“It’s been painful for them to watch Google’s AI Overviews parrot travel tips they once offered — especially when the chatbot borrows their Canadian slang. “I do feel betrayed by Google,” Bouskill said, as Corbeil interjected: “Betrayed, that’s the word.” To rebuild their livelihood, the couple has pivoted their efforts to YouTube, another Google-owned property.

Monopolies FTW, I guess.

Jonah Peretti, of Buzzfeed fame, wrote an anti AI manifesto. It’s worth a read, mainly because it’s surprising to hear it from him. He was the guy who at the beginning of the AI buzz cycle promoted AI use in content creation and got a nice (yet short lived) stock price bump.

Today the City of San Francisco announced they will let driverless cars drive down the main street in the city, Market Street. The new mayor described the news as “a major step in San Francisco’s downtown revitalization efforts”. Replacing homeless people with robots isn’t the good look you think it is, Mayor Lurie.

Remember “Silicon Valley” the TV show that took a satirical look at how Silicon Valley operates? One memorable scene was a young engineer just hanging out on the roof of the tech HQ for months, he was being paid to just hangout and not go to work elsewhere. Turns out Google is apparently doing the same thing. Even more surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), one of the Microsoft AI VPs is calling on engineers to act collectively and pushback against tech corporations who do this:

Every week one of you reaches out to me in despair to ask me how to escape your notice periods and noncompetes. Also asking me for a job because your manager has explained this is the way to get promoted, but I digress. Please don’t reach out to me. Rather reach out to each other.

Tech workers are apparently struggling greatly with mental health as they watch their executives kowtow to an authoritarian President. I’ve been there, trust me. And can tell you, there’s no better time to reach out to local union organizers.

Video game workers organizing with SAG-AFTRA are on strike. Workers want AI protections, transparency, and fair wages.

The Director of ICE wants mass deportations in the U.S. to work like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.

Alex Shultz has an interesting story in Cal Matters about the first nuclear plant in the U.S. to use AI. What could go wrong?

A Kenyan court will hear a $1.6 billion lawsuit that alleges Facebook helped incite genocide in Ethiopia. The case could be a model for those looking to hold platforms responsible for online hate and abuse with real world consequences.