Magilla Optimized

An anthropomorphic western lowland gorilla. An entrepreneur lacking a viable business model. An undisclosed but typical urban area. Opportunistic economics and an undeserved consumer segment. Combine these elements and you get the plot of a 1960’s Hana-Barbara cartoon, The Magilla Gorilla Show -but it could also be the use-case marketing plan for big tech’s smart cities initiative.

Melvin Peebles is a business owner with a serious asset depreciation problem. Every day he looses ROI on an inventory item he can’t seem to move. Magilla, his most exotic asset must be constantly fed, housed and cared for. He drastically reduces pricing, hoping to finally stop the draining bleed on his business’s finances.

Still, only a continual line of bad actors are interested in Magilla and it is typically for nefarious purposes. Bank robbers use him as the driver of the get-a-way car. A marketing firm hires him as its influencer mascot. Laboratory scientists experiment on him with their top secret anti-gravity technology and the army recruits him to train its troops in “gorilla warfare”. And after Magilla’s incompetence and clunky nature disrupts his buyer’s plans, he is deemed defective, returned to Peeble’s Pet Shop and they are fully refunded. Back once again in the front window, he remains gentle, uneducated and assumes his role with a passive dignity, undefeated but aware of his situation. “Oh well”, he says, “maybe next week”.

Despite his lack of marketability, a little girl named Ogee desperately wants to buy Magilla, but she has no money. She wants him for his intended purpose, a pet to care for and love. An authentic human connection. She sees use value while Peebles sees exchange value.

Magilla is the original TaskRabbit. He is a gig worker. He is the uber driver, exploited by the corporate algorithms he himself provides the data for. He is the disruption, the problem to be quantified, computed and contained. How does society account for and deal with the peskiness of his low economic worth and performative non-compliance? The problem is that he’s always in beta. Enter the Smart City, with data collection, analytical computation, dashboard mitigation controls and sketchy or non existent privacy ethics.

We can just cyber Magilla and his city right up. We can optimize him and his built environment, make him the gorilla of the future by strapping all kinds of sensors on him and his infrastructure. How about a biometric feed that continually monitors his heart rate and muscle strength? Or maybe an exoskeleton to make movement on load intensive tasks less frictionless and more efficient. Urine and waste is monitored for disease prevention. Face recognition cameras to decide where he is at all times, and load sensors for traffic light cycles, trash removal and allocation of water resources. Think of the life he will live! He’ll be more efficient, stronger, sustainable, cost effective and above all, manageable. A disruption no more, he will command his worth. What’s more, it fits with the neoliberal vision of the unfettered “free economic zone”. It supports the “shareholder value” movement and the centralizing focus of wealth from smart-from-the-start, top-down urban imaginaries of the future.

Multinational financiers and transnational technology corporations have very little interest in use value. To them, the world is now a place to create a feverish race for urban competition and blur the lines of ownership, sovereignty and political agency to gain a new type of capitalism or to use a more accurate term, technocolonialism, only the Stack are the new empires and financially troubled urbanized areas the colonies. Give us your gorillas, they say. We will make them shine and something to be proud of. Forget the chaos and jumble of housing, mobility, food and resource allocation, we’ll make those disruptions disappear. All we want in return is the unremitting surrender of your data.

Still, Ogee doesn’t have any data to give. She doesn’t have a market value either. She isn’t at all affected by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Rather, she creates value through her everyday interactions with the urban, unpredictable, nuanced, and outside the bounds of computational functionalism and deterministic technology. She is messy and aloof. Ogee desires and has the right to what the computational cloud can’t give her and in turn, what the cloud will never be able to compute. A sense of place and someone or something to care for and call her own. Agency in the evolution of the spatio-temporal and its cultural legacy. An existence based on self discovery and serendipity in the place she calls home. Her city.