In 2017 Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts announced that the Apple Store was no more. The company's ambitions for its bricks and mortar interface with the public was to now match its wider dream of global domination. ‘We actually don't call them stores anymore’, she said. ‘We call them town squares, because they’re gathering places for the 500 million people who visit us every year. Places where everyone's welcome, and where all of Apple comes together.’ At one level the idea behind this shift is quite simple – creating attractive places where people congregate will mean that they are more likely to spend money. But there is something else going on. Apple has form in setting itself up in erstwhile public spaces – old post offices, fire stations, libraries – colonising them and blurring the boundary between the commercial city and the public city.

Rebranding their stores as town squares is the next obvious step, one that more than hints at the reality of how close Big Tech is to the heart of our cities. It's just a short step from town squares to town halls, a distance that is getting closer as more and more of our city life is being seized by the digital advance. Why should we be worried by this? If Big Tech and City Hall can work together to improve our cities, then what's the issue?

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and their like aren't interested in making cities better places; they’re interested in data, revenue and share prices. Cities, to them, aren't homes and communities, workplaces and schools; they are merely hosts to large numbers of customers and consumers.

The new digital revolution seeks to gather our data and monetise it, shaping our attention and organising our lives, assembling information and guiding what we see and experience. Big Tech are gatekeepers to knowledge and information. But they are not neutral channels: they fashion what we see and when, what we buy and experience. They shape choices and markets, and because of their dominance in their respective fields there is little alternative – around 90 per cent of all internet searches are on Google, whilst Amazon represents around a third of all retail sales in the US, a proportion that increased significantly during the 2020 pandemic with the shift to online retailing.