Tech's influence on cities feels about right as it is. It has improved things, and not just at the margins: Uber's ultimate feat could be the end of private car ownership among urbanites. It is the next stage, the total infusion of cities with reason and order, that promises trouble — or rather a tedious lack of it. To itemise what could be lost is to list the advantages of cities. Serendipitous encounters. The anonymity conferred by crowds. The creative properties of chaos. (We await the Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway of Palo Alto.) These are hard to create but all too easy to design out of existence by people whose idea of the good life is a frictionless passage from home to mode of transit to work pod to reserved street seating.