Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York City, then mused how nice it would be to start from scratch: a new city would be “a laboratory to experiment” with privacy and security issues. This would be a utopia free from “politics”, and “people with vested interest”, presumably meaning people who want to regulate Google.

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What you may not know that the Google fantasy of engineers directing society, free from that messy democracy business, is not a new one. The man credited (by utopian socialist HG Wells) with coining the word "technocracy", Professor Miles Walker, lamented in 1932 that “politicians are not engineering-minded, and that is why they make a failure of state management” Walker was part of a group of radical scientists and prominent public intellectuals, including molecular biologist JD Bernal and geneticist JBS Haldane, who called for a new colony of 100,000 scientists and engineers. This would be free from the “constraints and social errors” that non-engineers introduce - or non-engineers might wish to vote for.

This is not so dissimilar to what Google, and other “Smart City” advocates want. Google wishes to take on more management functions either directly or through proxies such as Uber (Google is the biggest investor in Uber).

The idea that "process people" know best, and a wise technological elite should run the show, circumvent democracy if needed, may seem like a paranoid fantasy. But governments, including the Obama administration, already allow Google to do this, ....