The Smartness Mandate This book describes the decades long genealogy and governing logic of what we call the smartness mandate. While smart devices and infrastructures such as smart electrical grids smart cities and smart phones proliferated in the 1990s and early 2000s the smartness mandate which aims to link these individual instances of smart technologies into a coherent project of governance was first explicitly articulated in the early 2000s Smartness and populations Demo or die. Excursus : smart electrical grids Derivation optimization and smartness. Excursus : smart extraction ; Excursus : smartness finance and racial capitalism Resilience. Excursus : possible futures of the smart forest.