“Nomad Cities” on the Urban Tech Podcast

Urban Tech’s John Thomey was kind enough to invite me on his podcast to remote workers’ “nomad cities,” climate migration, CREtech, climate tech, and so much more. Here’s a (machine transcribed) excerpt:

And I say this as somebody who studied air travel and airports the logic of like of a security theater post nine 11 is now going to become healthier. And I worry about the trade-offs of this. I’m really glad to see that a handful of cities have pushed back on this Somerville, mass, Portland, Maine, others.

Cities banning facial surveillance, facial recognition by at least government agencies is a good first step. Still, I hope that we’ve learned enough that we’re going to push back on like this creeping surveillance into the hands of the big tech stacks w Amazon ring has done with what they’re trying to do with sidewalk their product on this.

So I don’t know. I think that’s something we need to think long and hard about; at what point do we curtail this stuff and put these rights in place?

And then the second part, I think we need to be thinking a lot about is going back to remote work too, is like the biggest thing I worry about is that now that we’ve seen that large employers and large organizations have realized they don’t need offices, are they going to realize they don’t need employees?

Like we’ve seen this trend towards having project-based or zero-hour employees where you don’t have fixed schedules, will they do this to professional knowledge workers? Or like you just get hired on Upwork or some of these other platforms where you don’t have full-time employment anymore. You’re bidding against everybody else for the same kind of work.

To what extent will we see organizations hold themselves out? And again, how do we have protections in place? How do we empower workers to do that? I hope that we’re not all just like squabbling around doing that. So, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about some of the dark sides of this stuff because I feel like remote work has been praised as the future of everything.

Even as we acknowledge it like everybody is burnt out and the style is not working right now. So how do we return to that balance post-pandemic? And I don’t know that it’s part of a nascent project I’m working on about thinking through what could like a neo-guild look like? What kind of this bottom-up organizations look like where workers can band together and have more agency over their workflows or rely on each other if their employers are going to be permanently behind a Zoom screen?

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