Facebook Launches New 'Smart City' Experiment: Zuckerburgh

At a press conference announcing the creation of a new smart city concept called Zuckerburgh, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the project's completely novel approach to city governance.

"What makes Zuckerburgh so smart, and why I'm so excited about it, is its use of technology," said Zuckerberg at the press conference. According to Zuckerberg, the development process of Zuckerburgh is grounded in Facebook's original intentions as a social media platform. "The infrastructure of Zuckerburgh is its social network, and the social network of Zuckerburgh is its infrastructure," said Zuckerberg.

As a primary demonstration of its potential to disrupt democracy, Zuckerburgh will generate revenue using a government financing innovation Facebook engineers have dubbed "data increment financing," based on less technologically advanced forms of value capture popular in less technologically advanced cities. "Basically as more data comes online, the value of all the data we're already collecting will increase," explained Zuckerberg. "We'll acquire that incremental increase in the value of the data and invest it back into civic spaces and quality of life investments in the social network—like faster advertisement delivery and a more targeted process for connecting landlords with desirable tenants."

For the pilot stage of the project, a Stanford email address will be necessary to sign up for Zuckerburgh. Eventually registration will be opened to a broader audience of universities and then to the broader public. "Eventually it's possible even your mom and her friends could be residents of Zuckerburgh," said Zuckerberg.