A Smart Card Will Monitor and Control Every Aspect of Your Life

Korea's High-Tech Utopia, Where Everything Is Observed

October 5, 2005

NY Times - IMAGINE public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.

These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large "ubiquitous city" being built in South Korea. 

A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.

Although there are other U-city efforts in South Korea, officials see New Songdo as one apart. "New Songdo will be the first to fully adapt the U-city concept, not only in Korea but in the world," said Mike An via an e-mail message. Mr. An is the chief project manager of the Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority, the government agency overseeing the project.

In the West, ubiquitous computing is a controversial idea that raises privacy concerns and the specter of a surveillance society. (They'll know whether I recycled my Coke bottle?!) But in Asia the concept is viewed as an opportunity to show off technological prowess and attract foreign investment.

"Korea has gathered the world's attention with its CDMA and mobile technologies," Mr. An wrote, referring to digital cellular standards. "Now we need to prepare ourselves for the next market," which he said was radio-frequency identification, or RFID, and for U-cities. South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication has earmarked $297 million to build an RFID research center in New Songdo.

Fulfilling this ambition, to a large degree, resides with John Kim, a 35-year-old Korean-American who leads New Songdo's U-city planning. Mr. Kim is vice president for strategy at New Songdo City Development, a joint venture of the Gale Company, an American developer, and POSCO E&C, a subsidiary of South Korea's giant steel company.

Mr. Kim, formerly a design leader at Yahoo, said the city's high-tech infrastructure will be a giant test bed for new technologies, and the city itself will exemplify a digital way of life, what he calls "U-life." 

"U-life will become its own brand, its own lifestyle," Mr. Kim said.

It all starts with a resident's smart-card house key.  

"The same key can be used to get on the subway, pay a parking meter, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle and so on. It'll be anonymous, won't be linked to your identity, and if lost you can quickly cancel the card and reset your door lock."

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Of course it will NOT be anonymous and it will link to your identity - how could it not?!]

Residents will enjoy "full videoconferencing calls between neighbors, video on demand and wireless access to their digital content and property from anywhere in Songdo," he said.

Whether it lives up to its billing as an exportable city of the future - its critics fear another planned-city disappointment like Brazil's capital, Brasília - New Songdo will most likely be a chance to study the large-scale use of RFID, smart cards and sensor-based devices even as Western societies lag in this next wave of computing.

"There are really no comparable comprehensive frameworks for ubiquitous computing," said Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., and a former Fulbright scholar in Seoul. "U-city is a uniquely Korean idea."

New Songdo, a free-enterprise zone where English will be the lingua franca, is often called the largest private real-estate development in the world. When completed in 2014, it is estimated that this $25 billion project will be home to 65,000 people and that 300,000 will work there. Amenities will include an aquarium, golf course, American-managed hospital and preparatory schools, a central park (like New York's), a system of canals (like Venice's) and pocket parks (like Savannah's), a self-described patchwork of elements gleaned from other cities.

People from Seoul and other crowded South Korean cities are already applying for apartments, and planners are counting on luring attractive businesses.

The technology infrastructure will be built and managed by Songdo U-Life, a partnership of New Songdo City Development and the South Korean network integrator LG CNS, which is recruiting foreign information-technology companies as partners.

"This is a profit-generating model, unlike other U-city projects," Mr. Kim said. "Songdo U-Life will charge building owners for facilities management and act as a gateway to services. Our partners will test market services that require, say, wireless data access everywhere or a common ID system, without having to build anything themselves."

More philosophically, "New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology," said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

If so, it is an experiment much easier to do in Asia than in the West.

"Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea," said Mr. Townsend, who consulted on Seoul's own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. "There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards."

Two things Mr. Kim insists on are that U-life will not be used to test "junk" and that the digital services will be designed around people's needs rather than around the technology. "We'll be doing marketing and ethnographic research, digging deeper," he said. As part of that research, Mr. Kim asked the Cal State students to submit ideas for U-life.

While New Songdo's publicity material states that it seeks to avoid the "stressful flaws that compromise" existing cities, Mr. Townsend says he doubts that it will be able to emulate the creative energy of, say, Seoul. "Will it really be a place where people want to experiment?" he asked.

South Korea perceives an economic imperative in the answer.

"Korea has a very strong I.T. industry, but our other economic sectors are not so good," said Geunho Lee, a senior research fellow at the Korea U-City Forum, a public-private group involved in supporting U-city projects across the country. "We need to test the business validity of these services in order to generate new value and economic growth."

The ability to do such vast market testing is enviable, said Dr. Fogg, of Stanford. "This is a competitive advantage for the Koreans," he said. "They will know before anyone else what flies."

"But I foresee that many services will fail," he added. "That's the nature of experimentation. They should be prepared for the frailties of human nature to emerge."

Songdo, Korea: The ubiquitous city

August 23, 2010



Gale International, holds a majority stake of 61%, Posco 30%, and the remaining 9% is owned by Morgan Stanley Real Estate. The plan was designed by the New York office of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). Infrastructure development, labor, and funding are also being provided by the city of Incheon.

Andrew Bartholomew - By 2015, developers hope to complete the largest private real estate development in the world’s history. Sogdo — a completely wired, highly sustainable, city-from-scratch in South Korea’s northwest corner — will likely have cost at least $40 billion by then to finish. Not only will the streets and buildings be designed in advance, none of the land itself even existed before it was created wth fill. As Britain’s The Independent explains, Songdo will be “a free economic zone with 80,000 apartments, 50 million square feet of office space and 10 million square feet of retail.”An international airport has been built on the other end of a 7.5-mile bridge. Underground high speed rail runs the 40 miles to Seoul. A 100-acre central park reminiscent of Manhattan’s and an array of satellite parks will provide green space. Korea’s three tallest buildings will dominate the skyline; one is already open for business. Construction has begun on a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. And fear not, developers have had no trouble selling the apartments that have already hit the market.

The twist on this particular Utopian undertaking is its emphasis on technology. By 2012, internet connections are expected to be fast enough in South Korea to download a full-length HD movie in 12 seconds, a couple hundred times faster than on a standard American connection. Developers hope to harness this by connecting everything — apartments, hospital rooms, parking garages, even trash cans — online. This feature defines what has until now been largely an abstract idea: the ubiquitous city.

Aside from the most obvious questions — no one in the West would dare cede this much privacy, massive design of this Utopian bent has a less than stellar history — I can’t help but marvel at the importance of the state in all of this. The need for investment in IT infrastructure, the construction of rail lines, the provision of free economic status. While India muddles through ( it’s awful impressive muddling, but still), China soars. Of course, in the process, China has had to move millions of people against their will, resist changes in the value of its currency, and generally clamp down against dissent in ways less than ideal. I also wonder how capable the state is of foreseeing the problems of the future; it seems hard to believe that Chinese authorities will stop the next real estate bubble before it’s too late. It will be telling to see how stable over the long run India can be relative to China.

For what it’s worth, though, Songdo has skirted these major issues. By building on new land, no one was unduly displaced. And by making technological connectedness the central defining feature of the city, the private businesses and citizens of Songdo will be given a near blank slate on which to draw their ideas. The demand for knowledge is more stable than any given industry. Whether such an emphasis on innovation can overcome the restrictive aspects of such mass design, I’m not sure.

World’s First ‘Smart City’ To Be Completed By 2015: ‘Songdo’ The Orwellian Control Grid

July 30, 2012

InfoWars - The world’s first ‘smart city’ is being built in Asia - and it promises to serve as an experiment for the high-tech tyranny that is surely to come about as a response to the collapse of this present era of human industrial civilization.Dubbed ‘Songdo’, the city will rest upon a wholly man made island in the Yellow sea and will incorporate just about every aspect of an Orwellian ‘super state’ imaginable.

Millions of wireless sensors and microchips will be embedded throughout the sprawling city-scape. ‘Smart appliances’ such as refrigerators that let you know when you’re running low on certain foods and bathroom mirrors that inform you of your physical health will be evident in every home.  

Songdo will also prominently feature ‘telepresence’ technology which translates to giant video screens everywhere. Telepresence is a ‘Skype’ like innovation developed by Cisco that allows folks to make convenient video calls to any one else with the same set up in their home or office.

Boasting other such innovations like street lights that automatically adjust to the number of people out on the street as well as an advanced ‘central hub’ that monitors almost every aspect of the city in real-time, Songdo is surely the first city of its kind with others like it such as the PlanIT Valley in Portugal just over the horizon.

The technology is neutral, the current value system is not: why Songdo will fail

The problem with Songdo is not so much with its innovation and high tech systems approach to properly maintaining a city of the twenty first century - but rather, it provides for those who are at present in control of the Earth and its resources an effective way to contain-  and dare I say, ‘enslave’- the whole of the human population.

Grass roots, sustainability organizations such as the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project propose similar designs for advanced city systems as a means to ‘update’ our current inefficient model of the urban environment.

What separates the aims of these two organizations in particular from the rise of Songdo-like city systems however is the fact that both groups advocate an adjustment of our human value systems first before migrating into an efficient new living-scape. Without having made these critical changes to the global, human social order, any new ‘smart city’ will only morph into a high-tech prison-grid controlled by extreme sociopaths.

Science fiction warns of high tech control grids.

Orwellian cities of the future are certainly not a new concept in the realm of science fiction. In every example of a functional (or is it ‘non-functional’) dystopic model, citizens are treated like cattle as their every move is both tracked and recorded. In a world wherein our value systems have been radically adjusted to the extents proposed by the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project, there is no real merit in any one person or group controlling others with high technology.

However, in places such as Songdo, it is mathematically certain - given the make up of our present warped psychology as a species - that a gross form of corruption will overtake the city and subject its millions of inhabitants beneath what will ultimately prove but a more advanced form of what was once Hitler’s Third Reich.

Songdo is scheduled to be completed by 2015. If proven a successful model for control, there is little doubt that the elites of many different cities will push to integrate the same technologies into their command-grid so as to gain a much firmer grip on their ‘unruly’ populaces.

Planned-Opolis: Infomercial for '1984'-Style City of the Future

January 6, 2011

Vigilant Citizen - Funded by corporations such as Bank of America, the City of London Corporation, PepsiCo UK, Time Warner, Royal Dutch Shell and Vodafone, Forum for the Future envisions scenarios for cities in 2040.

No, this is not a sarcastic video. It is a real, serious scenario. To sum up:

• Food and water is regulated and rationed by a “Global Food Council” which seizes total control over farming. Meat is a rare treat only to be enjoyed on special occasions


• The state decides what your job will be with “designated career announcements,” nobody has the choice to decide their own vocation


• Movement and behavior is controlled by a calorie credit card linked to a smart phone that rations the amount of travel the citizens of planned-opolis, are allowed to make. Private ownership of cars will be banned for non-elitists because, “the state knows they just aren’t practical anymore.”


• “It makes so much sense doesn’t it,” insists the smiley faced slave “Vee,” who enjoys the fact that she can “switch off brain and go to work,” adding, “With this many people around I’m glad there’s a mega-computer in charge.”


• Those who resist and still cling to some semblance of freedom in defiance of the state and the super-computers running the slave grid, there’s the “cry freedom ghetto,” prison camps for malcontents who are blocked from getting jobs, accessing high speed transport or the Internet

Other scenarios conceived by Forum for the Future are slightly different but they all have common threads: drastic reduction of rights, privileges and freedoms; constant reference to “an elite” having exclusive rights on cars and other luxuries; state controlling all aspects of life.

A New World Order is not a conspiracy theory, THEY are selling it to you as we speak.

Related:

• Songdo, South Korea: The city that could change the way we travel, January 03, 2013
• The New Media Surveillance
• Against the Smart City
• Promo Video for DHS-Backed ‘Spy Street Lights’ Pulled From You Tube
• Talking Surveillance Cameras Coming to U.S. Streets  Orwellian ‘Intellistreets’ Being Rolled Out in Major U.S. Cities with the Dept. of Energy Backing (Promoting the Concept as a Green Initiative Rather Than Its True Purpose of Electronic Surveillance -- We are Funding Our Own Enslavement)
• Federal Mandate Forcing Municipalities Across the U.S. to Replace Street Signs