“The Col and the Blackouts”

2019 Foley, Jessica. “The Col and the Blackouts.” How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Ed. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw (Np: Meatspace Press, 2019), 1196-1244 [312-22].

In the story, a city council is taken over by Mobile Network Operator, based on Vodaphone, and a section is cut off from any access to the internet. That section develops its own culture and language. 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 female author is Assistant Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology.