The tech commentariat is panicking again. They look at Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, see him questioning the unchecked roll-out of digital surveillance, facial recognition, and private-platform dominance, and cry "populist techlash." They warn that if Manchester doesn't roll out the red carpet for every Silicon Valley pitch deck, it will slip into economic irrelevance.
They are dead wrong.
The lazy consensus says that "techlash" is a retrograde, anti-progress emotion driven by Luddites who don’t understand APIs. In reality, the so-called techlash is the most economically rational position a civic leader can take in 2026. Treating tech companies with deep skepticism isn’t a populist tantrum; it’s basic fiduciary duty.
I have spent fifteen years auditing public-private technology partnerships. I have watched municipal governments blow tens of millions of dollars on "smart city" dashboards that do nothing but display data the city already owned, packaged back to them in a slick, subscription-based UI.
Burnham shouldn't capitulate to the tech lobbyists. He should double down. Here is why the pro-tech consensus is a trap, and why a critical, adversarial approach to tech procurement is the only way to build a functional city.
The "Smart City" is a Credentialist Scam
For a decade, IBM, Cisco, and various platform monopolies sold cities on a dream: plug your infrastructure into our proprietary black box, and we will optimize your traffic, your waste management, and your policing.
It was a brilliant sales pitch. It was also a lie.
Consider Toronto’s Sidewalk Labs project—Alphabet’s highly publicized attempt to build a neighborhood "from the internet up." It didn't fail because of "populism." It collapsed because the business model required the total surrender of public space to private data collection. The public realized that the yield on this data wasn't going back to the taxpayers; it was going to Alphabet's bottom line.
When a tech lobbyist tells Burnham that rejecting their platform will "stifle innovation," what they actually mean is: “We want to rent your public infrastructure back to you.”
The Lock-In Trap
Once a city integrates its transit ticketing, housing registers, or social care routing into a proprietary cloud infrastructure, the migration costs become astronomical. You no longer run a city; you manage a software vendor relationship where the vendor holds all the leverage.
If a vendor raises its API fees by 300%, what is Manchester going to do? Go back to paper ticketing overnight? Of course not. They pay the tax. That is not innovation. It is rent extraction.
Dismantling the "People Also Ask" Myth on Civic Tech
When you look at search trends around municipal technology, the questions asked by the public and well-meaning civil servants reveal just how deeply the tech industry’s marketing has penetrated our collective consciousness. Let’s dismantle these premises one by one.
"How can smart cities improve public trust?"
They can't. The premise of the question is broken. You do not build trust with citizens by installing more cameras, sensors, and algorithmic decision-making tools in their neighborhoods.
Trust is built on reliable services: buses that arrive on time, social housing that isn't moldy, and streets that are clean. When a local authority spends £5 million on a predictive policing algorithm while cutting funding for youth centers, the public doesn't feel "technologically advanced." They feel abandoned and policed.
"What is the economic cost of delaying tech adoption?"
The tech lobby wants you to think every day of delay costs millions in GDP. The reality? The cost of premature adoption of unproven, proprietary platforms is far higher.
Imagine a scenario where a transit authority signs a ten-year exclusive deal with an on-demand micro-mobility platform. Two years in, the VC funding dries up, the platform hikes ride prices by 400%, and then files for bankruptcy. The city is left with no transit coverage in underserved areas and zero infrastructure to show for it.
Delaying adoption to build open-source, interoperable, and publicly owned alternatives isn't "backwardness." It is risk mitigation.
The Illusion of the "Tech Ecosystem"
The standard defense of unchecked tech expansion in regional hubs like Manchester is the creation of jobs. "We need to attract tech giants to build an ecosystem," the argument goes.
But let's look at what actually happens when big tech sets up regional offices:
- Talent Poaching: They do not create a new tier of local developers. They poach the best engineers from local startups and mid-sized businesses by offering inflated salaries subsidized by venture capital or global monopoly profits.
- Economic Siphoning: The high-value IP and profits are instantly routed back to Delaware, Ireland, or California. The local economy gets a few high-priced coffee shops and a spike in rent, while the core wealth generated by local labor is exported.
- Monoculture: The local tech scene stops building products that solve local problems and starts building features that make them attractive acquisition targets for the giants.
A healthy tech sector in Manchester shouldn't look like a mini-Silicon Valley. It should look like a highly distributed network of small, profitable, sustainable software businesses building on open standards, not a monoculture feeding off the crumbs of US platform monopolies.
Stop Trying to "Collaborate" with Platforms (Do This Instead)
If Burnham wants to actually protect Manchester's future, he needs to throw out the old playbook of public-private partnerships. The power dynamic is too skewed. Instead, the GMCA (Greater Manchester Combined Authority) should implement three aggressive, protectionist policies:
1. Mandate Interoperability and Data Sovereignty
If a private transport provider (whether it's Uber, a scooter rental company, or a bus operator) wants to operate in Greater Manchester, they must feed their real-time transit and location data into a city-controlled, open-data repository.
No more proprietary APIs. If you use our roads, we own the anonymized aggregate data of how those roads are used. We do not buy our own data back from you.
2. Fund the "Public Stack"
Instead of paying licensing fees to Microsoft, Oracle, or Salesforce, Manchester should lead a coalition of global cities to fund and build the "Public Stack"—open-source, modular software built specifically for municipal administration.
Yes, building software is hard. Yes, the initial capital expenditure is high. But once you own the code, your marginal cost of deployment drops to zero. You are no longer subject to the whims of a SaaS sales rep trying to hit their quarterly quota.
3. Implement Strict Algorithmic Auditing
Any algorithm used by the state that impacts a citizen’s life—whether it determines social housing allocation, school placements, or automated traffic fines—must be entirely transparent.
The source code must be publicly viewable on GitHub. No "proprietary trade secrets" exceptions. If a company claims their AI is too secret to show the public, they are disqualified from bidding. Period.
The Downside of This Approach
Let's be completely transparent: this path is painful.
If you enforce these rules, some major tech players will throw a tantrum and pull out of Manchester. They will tell the press that Manchester is "closed for business." The financial press will run hand-wringing op-eds claiming Burnham is killing the city’s digital economy.
You will have to explain to voters why they can't use certain apps or why a highly anticipated pilot project was canceled. It requires political courage to take those hits. It is far easier to sign the contract, take the photo-op with the tech VP, and let the next administration deal with the vendor lock-in five years down the line.
But the alternative is worse. The alternative is becoming a tenant in your own city.
The techlash isn't a threat to Manchester's future. It is its only hope of remaining a self-governing, democratic space rather than a captive market for offshore capital.
Stop apologizing for wanting to control your own infrastructure. Turn the techlash into policy.
