You Are Entitled to What the Data Says You Deserve”

2019 Kitchin, Rob. “You Are Entitled to What the Data Says You Deserve.” How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Ed. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw (Np: Meatspace Press, 2019), 13-100 [21-32].

The author describes the story as “a thought experiment that imagines a future where a city administration uses a data broker, based on a company like ACXIOM, and their services to make decisions regarding the provision of services.” One  result is to exacerbate existing inequalities. All the stories in the book are responses to a recent book, A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Government (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman, that proposes, in the editors’ interpretation, that cities should act more like Amazon in dealing with their citizens. The Irish author is a Professor in the Department of Geography in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute.