Smart city rhetoric promises a utopia of efficiency, equality, and well-being, but the everyday application of these tools—namely predictive analytics, sensors, and data dashboards—are often frantically applied to prevent that which is unwanted: crime, harm, disaster, opacity, and inequality. To achieve “smartness,” though, appears to only be imaginanble through an increasingly invasive level of civic surveillance. This visual study examines the smart city as a toxic site for (1) city dwellers, especially those on the margins; (2) city administrators, who must administer complex social issues through data; and (3) the broader urban fabric the built environment becomes increasingly sensor-laden and amenable to data extraction.The starting point for this study is Los Angeles, and contains a small slice of images taken / collected during the past four years of ethnographic research and community organizing in LA County (alongside local and international travel to other cities). In combining these images I look to describe how data driven, wifi connected technology, and related global political-economic processes (eg "gig labor") have isomorphic effects on divergent landscapes.
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