New from me: What the Google monopoly finding tells us about the Canadian platform debate

Posted on August 7, 2024 by bhaggart

Just published in The Globe and Mail. Yes, the headline (which I didn’t write) goes hard, but it’s not wrong. So much of our years-long Canadian platform-regulation debate has involved regulation proponents defending the basic premise that platform regulation (and internet regulation — the two are often conflated) itself is legitimate, and not a totalitarian plot to censor free speech and steal your freedoms.

As I note in the article, although many of these arguments are presented as if from a novel, free speech-focused cyberlibertarian perspective, in reality they’re little different from anti-regulation free market fundamentalism that’s as old as the hills. At the heart of almost all of the anti-platform-regulation critiques is the idea that the free market should be left to decide all, whether it’s the fate of Canada’s cultural industries (Bill C-11), Canadian news media (Bill C-18) or the Canadian social fabric (Bill C-63).

Which is why the formal, legal finding that Google is a search monopoly is so clarifying. Because when you have a monopoly, the question isn’t should we regulate, but how should we regulate?

For the past five-plus years, I’ve been trying to make the argument that platforms are consequential regulators: they aspire to set the rules by which other play. That’s what it means to be a platform. They’re not normal market players facing (potentially overreaching) government regulation. They are government rivals who want to displace government rule-setting with their own. The choice was never between government regulation and the free market. It’s between accountable, democratic government regulation and regulation by autocratic, unaccountable, profit-driven, self-interested foreign companies.

In retrospect, perhaps I should’ve simply gone straight to the truth that platforms are merely monopolists or aspiring monopolists. Monopolists, left unregulated, enjoy enormous leeway to abuse their customers in their own interest, subject only to how much their users need their services: the more essential they are, the harder it is for users to go without. Which allows them to set self-interested rules of the game for their users. IOW, they’re consequential regulators.

It is much easier to make the regulation argument for monopolies than it is for platforms even when they’re pretty much the same thing. That’s because we already have an accepted language to understand them, and a set of agreed-upon remedies. Monopolies lead to bad consumer outcomes, particularly higher prices or, equivalently, worse service. They’re evidence of a market failure. And market failures require government intervention to fix.

Which is what the federal government has been trying to do all along. Not perfectly, and I’ve never seen a government so incapable of explaining even its good decisions. But when the gang on the other side of the aisle is screaming, “Freedom!” and “Censorship!” and “Authoritarianism!,” credit is due for pushing forward in the appropriate direction.

If anything, the government has been too deferential to these companies, bending over backward to ensure that they don’t interfere too much with their internal workings. I addressed this issue with respect to the proposed online harms legislation.

It would be nice if the US court ruling would lead the more unequivocal opponents of the government’s regulatory agenda to reconsider their stance. Addressing market failures is something that anyone who understands economics should be able to get behind.

Imagine, the anti-regulation argument now neutered, a renewed, more productive conversation about what platform regulation should look like. As I suggest at the end of the article, it would be great if this debate recognized the public-utility nature of these companies. There’s a reason why people have stuck with Facebook even though corporate censorship has reduced them to using screenshots of media URLs to communicate with their friends. This is the kind of thing you do when you have no choice but to use a service.

I would love to see a debate that pits the government’s current minimalist approach versus a more maximalist, public utility view of platform regulation. Will it happen? Probably not at the moment, given the ideological bent of our current Official Opposition. But it’s a lovely Wednesday morning, and one can dream.

Enjoy this picture of Toronto.

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Everybody knew. Nobody did anything.

Posted on July 9, 2024 by bhaggart

“Everybody knew.”
 – Carole Sabiston, Andrea Robin Skinner’s stepmother

“Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.”
– Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble

“Our band could be your life.”
– Michael Azerrad

“But at the same time, as every decent person should, he deliberately took the side of the victim and wanted to meet others, his fellow-citizens, on the basis on the only certainties they all have in common, which are love, suffering and exile.”
– Albert Camus, The Plague

The revelations in the Sunday Toronto Star regarding the sexual abuse suffered by Andrea Robin Skinner at the hands of her stepfather, and the monstrous, sociopathic reaction of her mother, Canadian literary icon Alice Munro, were both horrifying and necessary to read. Horrifying for the damage that Munro and her husband inflicted on their children. Necessary because they’re a reminder that the impulse to privilege the perceived genius, the powerful and the famous at the expense of the young and the vulnerable continues to disfigure our society.

Skinner’s courageous account of her story has already sparked many conversations. I’ll leave it to others to work through whether we should separate the artist from the art (though I’d argue that art is never produced in a vacuum, and art’s relationship to the artist is part of the art, though not its entirety). Similarly, English lit professors can re-examine Munro’s work in light of what we now know of her (though my mind immediately went to how Louis CK’s abusive actions cast his standup in a completely different light). Ditto for the continued persistence of taboos against interfering in others’ marriages and in helping victims of sexual abuse (though I note that American comedian Paul Scheer’s recently published insightful, thoughtful (and funny) memoir Joyful Recollections of Trauma mirrors somewhat Skinner’s story of dealing with an abusive (in this case violent) stepfather and the resulting feeling of abandonment when the adults in his life failed to stand up for him (Seriously, it’s a fantastic read. Go buy it.)).

Alice Munro and her husband deserve all the posthumous scorn they’ll cop. As someone who hasn’t read Munro since high school, and whose well-read MA in English Lit partner always considered Munro’s work to be tedious and overrated, I’m not particularly invested in whether or not people stop reading her. What I do care about is how we as a society keep enabling these monsters (and to be clear, I’m talking about Munro as well as her husband) because they’re seen to be geniuses or famous or someone’s meal ticket.

This is the quote from the Star news story that I keep coming back to:

“Over the course of the nearly 50 years this secret has been kept, rumours of it emerged in various circles. ‘Everybody knew,’ recalls [Skinner’s stepmother] Carole [Sabiston]. She recounts being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, ‘Is it true?’ Her answer: ‘Yes, it’s true.’”

Not everybody knew, of course. Not my well-read partner. Not most Canadians. But if Sabiston is to be believed (and why wouldn’t you?), the Canadian literary establishment and at least one journalist were aware. And were silent.

We can ask why, but we know why. Genius and power excuse a lot of bad behaviour. The more important the person, the greater their impunity, and the less important the broken people they leave in their destructive wake. It’s sobering to think that, in this at least, there is little difference between convicted felon Donald Trump and Alice Munro: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” For Trump, “they” are the women he was assaulting. In Munro’s case, and the husband she covered for for decades, “they” are the members of the Canadian literary and journalism establishment, who all turned a blind eye to Munro and her husband’s cruel behaviour rather than ask uncomfortable questions of a scion of their establishment. It’s fraternity house rules: Bros before children who’ve been raped.

Power and genius don’t just serve to enable obscenities on the level of Weinsteinesque sexual predation or Munro’s support of a pedophile (a pedophile who admitted to his crimes in writing and was eventually convicted for them). They also serve as a license for tawdry bullying, harassment and cruelty throughout society, all of which remain rampant and protected, taking a toll on their less-powerful targets. The crimes differ in degree, but the impulse they engender in those who choose to do nothing is exactly the same: protect the powerful, neglect the innocent.

Academia and bullying (and worse)

The impulse to protect the powerful, to go along to get along, is certainly rampant in academia, which is one of the reasons “Everybody knew” sticks in my craw. In my own circles, I and my partner, Natasha Tusikov, have attempted to call out blatant bad behaviour, including by at least one senior academic against a very junior colleague. The response was revelatory: emails from junior scholars thanking us for saying something, and public silence from senior scholars who I know didn’t approve of the way their/our colleague had acted. One scholar, unconnected to the incident and who I respect very much, told me that it was great that we’d said something but that they were also surprised that anyone had said anything. Because that’s just not done.

This wasn’t in the 1970s or 1990s or early 2000s. This was within the past six years.

And why the deference to assholery? A conformist desire to not rock the boat, definitely. Power explains a lot of it. In academia as elsewhere, senior people are gatekeepers. They control access to funding and employment. And if you want to get to where they are, you often have to play ball.

Add on top of that the mystique of the genius and its corollary, that great art or brilliant insights should excuse bad behaviour. In Munro’s case, both power and genius served to isolate her and her pedophile husband from criticism, thus further victimizing her daughter who simply wanted her story to be part of the official record of her mother’s life. And while the stakes aren’t nearly (at least usually) as harrowing in academia as they are here, academia suffers from the same dynamic.

If you’ve read this far, you know all this. And you know that this is the part of the opinion piece where the writer calls on senior scholars to do better, to stand up for their junior colleagues, to call out bad behaviour.

It certainly would be nice if they would, and there are definitely decent senior scholars out there (#notallseniorscholars). But do you think, at this late date, that many of them will step up? I’d be happy to be proven wrong, and I’m sure a few more will stand up for their junior colleagues. But let’s be honest: most will probably continue to go along to get along.

Fortunately, the rest of us are far from powerless. In fact, I’d argue that junior and mid-career scholars, and those of us outside of academia’s star-making circle, are more powerful than we believe. It is possible to create something better, although it involves some sacrifice and changing our ideas about what academia is and what academic success looks like.

Step 1: Reject the cult of the genius

The first thing we need to do is to reject the cult of the genius. This is where so much cultural commentary gets tripped up. It’s true that we must grapple with the relationship between the artist and their art once it’s created. However, the much more interesting and relevant issue is around who gets to be an artist, or gets to be recognized as the artist, in the first place.

We tend to think that genius rises to the top, that true genius will be recognized and rewarded. But that’s not quite right. Genius involves talent, but it also involves luck: being born into the right society in the right way at the right time. Making the right connections. Looking the right way. Having the right skin colour. Selling yourself in the right way. Possessing acceptable opinions. Having a culturally acceptable personality. Working at the right university, in the right country, using acceptable theories. Being American, or America-adjacent, tends to help a lot.

What this also means, though, is that people – geniuses, even – who don’t fit the mould and who don’t have the same demographic luck will fall by the wayside. Institutions don’t just select for brilliance, but for acceptable brilliance. Only the right geniuses rise to the top.

That socially recognized genius has an element of chance to it means that while brilliance is individual, geniuses as a category – the people recognized by society as brilliant, with all the resulting accolades and privileges – are eminently replaceable. The recognition of one individual as a genius, as award-worthy, as a literary icon, is demand-driven. It’s not just a function of the supply of geniuses.

As Paul Simon observed in his song The Boy in the Bubble, society has a structural need for heroes. To switch industries for a moment, if Taylor Swift didn’t exist, a Taylor Swift-sized music icon would. They would have unique talents different from Swift’s, which their fans would endlessly scrutinize and celebrate. Someone different in form (different types of songs), but similar in function (a hero for the pop charts).

So too with Munro. Literary prizes would not have gone unawarded if Munro had never been born. If Munro had never written a word, we would be lauding some other genius for their (different) insights into the human condition, marvelling at their wondrous (though different) technique. The Canadian and world literary establishments needs a Munro, but not necessarily this Munro. Even now, there are other Munros out there.

The same goes for academia. There are few ideas so foundational that a single person must be placed at the centre of the conversation. And far too often, even ideas perceived to be revolutionary are themselves adapted, consciously or unconsciously, from younger academics or those from low-prestige universities or countries and then laundered through high-prestige institutions. We’re all working on the same problems based in the same raw material, after all.

(Lest we get too hung up on not working at the core of the empire, working from the margins has its own benefits, including an easier time generating novel perspectives. Like art, there are a million different ways to approach a problem.)

Understanding genius (as opposed to individual brilliance) as a title that is conferred on certain people and denied to others can be liberating. When we look for the brilliant person as opposed to the anointed chosen ones, it frees us to expand our horizons beyond the horrible and the power-hungry who seem to naturally be attracted to the power and prestige that comes from being not just a genius, but also a gatekeeper. When we understand acknowledged geniuses as something produced as much by the system as by their own talent, we no longer are stuck only with the establishment-endorsed figures as our role models. We are freed to create our own institutions, our own networks.

For the academics reading this, consider how many times you’ve come across an Ivy League academic who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I wrote about just this phenomenon in my critique of Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff’s world-conquering (and fatally flawed) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Five years on, academics are increasingly critical of her argument, but when it was published in 2019, criticizing Zuboff was not something academics did publicly (As far as I can tell Evgeny Morozov published the only other early harsh critique of Zuboff). Instead, I, a graduate of a university that isn’t in the storied ranks of the world’s pre-eminent universities but who was nonetheless taught by brilliant academics, received emails from senior scholars and others thanking me for my critique.

Brilliance is not the exclusive purview of the well-connected.

Look beyond the establishment. Look for the smart people who aren’t jerks. Work with them. Cite them.

Step 2: Create your own networks

And create things with them.

Of course, the biggest problem, in literary circles as in academia, is that all-too-often assholes and their enablers are themselves gatekeepers. This can be tough for prospective PhD students who are just entering the profession. But even here students have agency. Reinforcement of these cycles of assholery begins with the PhD student who acts transactionally to leverage the prestige of an asshole professor rather than work with someone else. (The situation is different, of course, when the student only discovers later that they’re working with a terrible person. Here, it’s incumbent on the department to step in and protect the student, including facilitating a transfer to another supervisor.)

The cycle is perpetuated when we, as scholars, continue to work with such people, for any number of reasons (they’re doing interesting work, they have money, we need them for the prestige they’ll bring to our own projects). Often, deciding not to work with a toxic, senior colleague can come at a cost of foregone projects or revenue. It can mean that you’re not invited to the cool kids’ lunch table.

But here’s the thing about academia, at least in the social sciences, and at least in Canada (and here I’m talking about tenured and tenure-track professors). Even as many university systems around the world become more metric-driven, the reality remains that professors have more leeway to define the parameters of their job than in just about any other profession on the planet. A professorship, within some very general limits, can be almost anything you want it to be. Are you interested in theory? Community engagement? Public policy? Seemingly esoteric questions? Do you want to work with people in another discipline, at another university? Do you want to write books? Journal articles? Opeds? Organize conferences? Focus on teaching and mentoring students? We have so much freedom to define what it means to be an academic.

Recognizing that the cult of the genius is kind of a fraud offers its own kind of freedom. Another form of freedom comes from realizing that the belief that we have to work with senior assholes to advance our work and career is a choice, not an imperative. For this lesson, look to the DIY movement in punk rock in the 1980s and 1990s. Shut out from mainstream success, bands invented alternative ways to create networks and a culture. They worked together to create the culture they wanted to see in the world. There’s no reason why academics can’t do the same.

Start by finding your own people, especially among those who are coming up with you. Build your networks horizontally, not vertically. Help others achieve their dreams as you pursue yours. When it comes to mid-career and senior scholars, work with the ones you like, and who like you. I’ve dumped on senior scholar a lot in this piece, but there are plenty of great ones out there. I’ve worked with plenty. Find yours. The key is not to suffer the jerks just because you think they can help you get ahead, or because it’s expected.

Define your career objectives in terms of what you can accomplish working with people you want to work with. If a senior asshole stands in your way, go somewhere else. The loss is theirs. Don’t be afraid to build something where you are. It might be something smaller and initially less prestigious than what a senior academic could offer you, but great things grow from small projects.

(The dynamics are different and much harder within departments, of course. These suggestions refer mostly to discipline-level relationships. In departments, it’s all the more important not to hire jerks, no matter how brilliant they may seem, because they’ll be with you for the rest of your working life. There’s enough brilliance out there that it’s not worth the grief.)

One benefit of doing it yourself (or, rather, choosing to work with decent people rather than with jerks that you hope can advance your career) is that it reduces the chances that your professional fate will become tied to a bully. It may limit you in the short run, but if you also work to build a network of like-minded non-jerky people, the long run can end up being pretty sweet, without incurring the cost of enabling others’ bad behaviour. And remember: nobody, not even assholes, lives forever.

Make things better

In The Plague, Albert Camus proposes a basic standard of human decency. Describing the motivations of his main character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, in fighting the titular plague: “as every decent person should, he deliberately took the side of the victim and wanted to meet others, his fellow-citizens, on the basis of the only certainties they all have in common, which are love, suffering and exile.”

Camus, I think, is imploring us to aspire to help the victim and not to spread the plague, whether it is an actual biological disease, or “violence and injustice.” We must, he says, fight “against this terror and its indefatigable weapon … while not being saints but refusing to give way to the pestilence, do [our] best to be doctors.”

Everyone around Andrea Robinson Skinner failed her, first her parents, then the wider community. They failed to keep the pestilence at bay. This type of failure is all too easy to identify in our own lives. How many times have we failed to stand up for the vulnerable among us, personally or professionally? How many times have we enabled, through inaction, the actions of tyrants big and small? These failures should not be rationalized away as the price of art or money or fame or scholarship. They are beyond justification.

Skinner’s story is awful. That she has made a good life for herself and reconciled with her siblings speaks to an ineffable strength that too many people must tragically call upon because of the malice of some and the failure of others. Upon hearing her story, we can rejoice in her resilience. But we should also take her story as a challenge, not just to call out such harms when we see them, but to act in such a way that we don’t empower monsters in the first place. Our medicine must be not only curative, but preventative.

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Some thoughts on sabbaticals

Posted on July 8, 2024 by bhaggart

I’m not sure there’s anything in academia with a greater air of mystery than the sabbatical. From outside the profession, it’s often seen as a year-long vacation and travel to exotic locales. Within, it’s treated as a chance to recharge and to finally get some real work done on our much-neglected research projects.

There’s a bit of truth in both positions. A sabbatical is a chance to recharge, and an opportunity to get things done, and I’d be lying if I said that professors don’t tend to carve out some actual vacation time in there as well. That said, this vacation time should be seen in the context of the usual academic workload, which doesn’t tend to conform to the typical 35 hour, Monday-to-Friday workweek. As someone once joked, academics work 80 hours a week, but they get to choose which 80 hours.

As it happens, I just finished my first full, honest-to-goodness sabbatical. I’d started a half-sabbatical (six months) in January 2020, but it was cut short in March when the world ended. With my 1.5 sabbaticals now under my belt, 12 years into this crazy career, I thought it might be helpful to share some sabbatical insights. My hope is that these will help demystify the sabbatical to non-academics and help early-career fellow scholars make the most of theirs when it comes around.

  • Leave the administrative stuff behind. I can’t stress this point enough. A sabbatical can be many things, but at heart it’s a chance for you to take care of your career, whether that’s through reading, research, physical recovery (I’ll get to that in a minute) or letting your mind wander in order to think of your next big project. It’s a chance to break out of the routines that can come to overwhelm our work, particularly our research. Don’t worry about your department’s politics; it’ll still be there when you get back.

    Full disclosure: This is very much a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do suggestion. In my case, late last Summer I ended up getting involved in a Brock University Working Group to deal with the threat of generative AI. Given my research, I didn’t feel I could turn away. And then in January, our Graduate Studies Faculty unilaterally and without consultation announced they were defunding one-year Master’s programs, effectively threatening my (and other) department’s ability to run our graduate programs at all. Here, I also felt I had to get involved, since there was a good chance my department wouldn’t be there when I got back.

That said, as a rule I think it’s a healthy one.

  • Don’t wait until the beginning of your sabbatical to wind up projects. When I took a paid leave to pursue a fellowship in Germany in 2018, I spent my first several months cleaning up a lot of smaller projects, things that were just winding down. It always takes longer to finish something than you think it will. As a result, it took me that much longer to work on the things that I had planned to work on: the fun stuff.

    This time, however, I made a concerted effort to start my sabbatical with as clean a slate as possible. It worked out pretty well. I didn’t get everything done that I’d planned, but that extra pre-sabbatical push contributed to my sense that the sabbatical was indeed a break from routine.

  • Everyone’s sabbatical needs are different. The answer to the question of what is a sabbatical for, what you should want out of it, depends on the person. It could be a chance to overhaul your research agenda: A senior scholar once told me that during his first sabbatical, he decided to focus on the area in which he became a foundational voice.

    Even if you don’t end up reinventing a field, a sabbatical is an opportune time for just such a reconsideration. But it’s not the only thing you can do during a sabbatical. You can use the time, unencumbered by administrative and teaching duties, to get some writing done, or really get that research done, or teach in another department.

    Or even physically recover. One giant lesson from the ongoing pandemic is that we need to be kinder to ourselves, and to others. This is a lesson that, for me, is continually reinforced by age. The early days of the pandemic were exhausting for everyone, triply so for those with children and those dealing with pre-existing conditions. And the lingering effects of the ongoing pandemic, to say nothing of political uncertainty and climate change that literally made it difficult to breathe the air last summer, and you have a recipe for physical and mental breakdown. You’re no good to anybody if you remain exhausted beyond all help, so take the opportunity to recuperate when it presents itself.

    For my sabbatical, I wanted to do three things. First, I wanted to develop a new research agenda. I’d just published The New Knowledge, so it was a good time to plan my next steps. I also wanted to coordinate a special issue devoted to the centenary of Susan Strange’s birth, and to lay the foundations for a digital governance institute. I knew that these things were within my capacity to do, and I was able to take steps toward completing all of them.

    That said, I also spent a couple of months laid up with a pinched neck nerve, which was exactly as much fun as it sounds. Did it keep me from completing some projects? Most definitely. But whether you’re on sabbatical or not, shit happens sometimes, and you have to just roll with it and not beat yourself up over it.

  • Go somewhere else, if you can. For both of my aborted 2020 sabbatical and my 2023-24 sabbatical, I arranged a research fellowship at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Beyond the excellent people and really positive atmosphere, I found that being in a different city (especially one as awesome as Berlin) and out of my usual environment really helped me focus on my research and writing. I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive, or worked as intensively, as I did in 2020 at the Institute.

    Sabbaticals are also an ideal time to meet with colleagues. In this sabbatical, we arranged a series of book talks in Canada and throughout Europe, and I also helped to organize a two-day event in London to celebrate the centenary of Susan Strange’s birth. These were all very rewarding, not just for their stated purposes, but because it allowed us to meet people we otherwise would likely never have met. If a sabbatical is about recharging, there’s nothing more invigorating or inspiring than just shooting the breeze with old and new colleagues. You never know where new ideas will come from: one of my favourite journal articles came out of a discussion over coffee in Berlin.

    Of course, not everyone can just up and go to another city, country or university. But if you can find a way to break your routine, or even just consciously set aside a good amount of time for your own work, the dividends can be significant. It’s the break that’s important.

  • Sabbaticals are the least-bad time for home renovations. There’s a reason why, in our department, the last three people to go on sabbatical, me included, used it as an opportunity to complete some large-scale home renovations. Even the smoothest-running renovations can be a huge pain in the neck. But if you’re going to be without a kitchen (and running water anywhere but your upstairs bathroom) for five months, better that it be during your sabbatical than when you’re also dealing with course prep and countless administrative issues.
  • Europe’s patio game is (mostly) on point. Because the pandemic is ongoing and we’d rather not mess with long covid, we’re still practicing covid precautions, which means almost no meals in restaurants. Fortunately, we found that even in February, many restaurants throughout Europe keep their patios open. For this, we can only thank Europe’s millions upon millions of smokers. We may have different goals – they’re poisoning their lungs while we’re trying to keep ours clean – but we’ll take our patio allies where we can get them. Thanks, Euro smokers!
  • You won’t get to everything. In the abstract, 12 months (assuming a full-year sabbatical) is a long time. But when you take out weekends, holidays, travel, family obligations, and unforeseen events, opportunities and emergencies, the time passes incredibly quickly. So you probably won’t get to everything on your list: my original plan was to look for fellowships not just in Germany, but also Australia and Brazil. Twelve months later and I can’t but wonder exactly when I thought I’d be able to take two additional international trips.

More generally, a year of unstructured work time (and it definitely is work – I think we took the equivalent of three weeks of vacation time over the past year, even as we were travelling) is both an incredible privilege and a great opportunity. If anyone has any questions about sabbaticals, or suggestions for getting the most out of yours, please leave a comment below.

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No Longer Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ MIDP, entry 12: The Master Plan: I Have Some Notes

Posted on September 11, 2023 by bhaggart

Last Friday, I attended a preview performance of The Master Plan, a play about the Sidewalk Labs-Waterfront Toronto Quayside debacle. The evening, which was hosted by Jim Balsillie, one of the higher-profile opponents of the Quayside project, served as a reunion of sorts for many of the (many) critics who opposed the project.

The gathering was long overdue: because Sidewalk Labs abandoned the project at the beginning of the pandemic, in May 2020, the activists who had spent three years of their lives fighting this deal never had the chance to celebrate in person.

It felt like a reunion. Since I’m based down the road in St. Catharines, and because I was primarily involved via this blog and other public writing on the project, it was a chance to meet for the first time many of the people whose names I recognized from news reports, blog posts and Twitter activism. It was a delight, the mood valedictory.

As for the main attraction, well, I have some notes.

The Master Plan does a lot of things very right. Its staging and use of video screens are excellent and fit the story perfectly. Mike Shara as Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff is a force of nature, his character perfectly written. That he didn’t have the opportunity to receive a final applause break during the play itself (his final “appearance” occurs off-stage) was a shame. The other actors do well in their (necessarily) less-flashy parts. The play adeptly covers two-plus years of craziness, and at 2.5 hours with one intermission, it never drags.

It’s also very funny. I laughed throughout, not least because of my intimate familiarity with every angle of the play. When they finally revealed The Master Plan (aka the Master Innovation and Development Plan), my laughter was definitely cathartic. One cannot emerge unscathed from devoting an entire a working month (Monday-Friday; I took a day off for my birthday) deciphering a document that was designed to be seen, not read. I imagine the rest of the audience, many of whom spent three full years being dismissed, ignored and lied to, felt much the same way.

While it was definitely a hit in the room, I don’t know how an audience unversed in the intricacies of Quayside bureaucratic infighting will take to it.

And, on reflection, I’m not sure how well it hangs together as a play. It gets the details right but the story wrong, both as a coherent work of fiction (on its own terms) and as an argument about what actually happened.

Waterfront Toronto’s lack of agency

Its biggest problem is that while playwright Michael Healey, working from Josh O’Kane’s book, Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, has a very good grasp on Doctoroff and Sidewalk Labs, his portrayal of Waterfront Toronto, in the characters of Kristina Verner and Meg Davis (fictionalized but based on real people), is surprisingly inert. In the context of the play, Sidewalk Labs is something that just happens to them. They have no agency. They simply react to the latest weird thing that Sidewalk Labs does, without really considering deeply own roles, and the ongoing role of the company they work for, in contributing to their own misery. Without that second half, the satire loses a lot of its bite.

All fault on Waterfront Toronto’s side is placed on the head of the bumbling, out-of-his-depth CEO Will Fleissig – resembling no one so much as Jack Lemmon’s take on Glengarry Glen Ross’s Shelley Levine – and to a lesser extent, members of the Waterfront Toronto board who won’t let our brave head bureaucrats talk to the public. (The play at times seems to posit that the biggest problem with Quayside was its comms plan.) They are presented as our heroes, the ones who just want to provide environmentally sustainable housing for Torontonians.

This pose, though, only works (in the play and in real life) if there was even the slightest chance that Google/Sidewalk Labs could deliver on its promises. But as I detailed in my month of blog posts on the MIDP, success was never on the table. This was never going to work, because Sidewalk Labs had no experience in building a neighbourhood and no workable plan for constructing anything on Quayside’s 12 acres. That they were, in the play’s words, “clowns” is made very clear throughout. In the beginning of the play, Doctoroff effectively says that the company had done nothing of consequence. In the end, the MIDP, their Master Plan, is revealed (correctly) to be a steaming pile of overreaching nonsense.

But Sidewalk Labs isn’t just something that happened to Waterfront Toronto, in the play or in real life. Sidewalk Labs, in the play, is a force of nature, the vampire that needs to be invited in to cause chaos. But it was Waterfront Toronto that set everything in motion, and was complicit in keeping things moving right up until the very end.

Waterfront Toronto, and its staff, drafted a flawed RFP. Waterfront Toronto continued to negotiate with Sidewalk Labs after it became manifestly clear that they were a bad actor incapable of playing straight with anyone.

Very little is made, for example, of the insinuation in the play that the only reason Sidewalk Labs was awarded the project over an infinitely more experienced and capable Siemens was because Sidewalk Labs was willing to pony up $50 million to undertake the initial planning. It reminds me of a perhaps apocryphal story about how the most convincing thing about the Ottawa Senators’ 1992 expansion bid was simply that it had $50 million to give to the NHL.

In the play, up to the very last minute, Waterfront Toronto is looking for loopholes that will allow Sidewalk Labs to stay on the project, despite literally no proof that Sidewalk Labs could be trusted on anything.

At the very least, there’s a lot one could unpack about the constant bad decisions that Waterfront Toronto itself made. Waterfront Toronto, including its staff, were active participants in their own misfortune. Unfortunately, its motivations, including that it’s facing a decision on its renewal as a corporation, are never seriously unpacked in the play.

Instead, the overall impression of Waterfront Toronto is of an entity concerned solely with doing the right thing, especially for the environment, which, as in Sidewalk Labs’ promotional materials, gets trotted out every now and then to burnish their bona fides.

The real enemies: Pesky activists and faceless bureaucrats

In making Waterfront Toronto the heroes, the play commits to a surprising choice of villains. Probably the most fascinating thing about the play is its rock-bottom opinion of the public, the activists who kept trying to bring some accountability to Waterfront Toronto, a highly unaccountable organization (being a tripartite quasi-governmental organization, residents and citizens have no direct way to influence its decisions) over an obviously bad deal.

The play has a very strong opinion about whether the public should be involved: basically, no, not at all. If Sidewalk Labs is a force of nature, the two main villains in Healey’s play are the public and City of Toronto bureaucrats.

It’s weird.

What makes it particularly strange is that the play’s argument, which surfaces mostly in the second half, is not supported by the play itself.

Anti-Quayside activists do not come off well at all in this play. Public opposition to Quayside is presented as a bunch of misinformation-driven NIMBYism.

The play illustrates this point with a Jon Stewart-esque takedown of the many media outlets and activists who used this quote from Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt: “We started talking about all of these things that we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge,” without reporting the rest of the quote: “For all sorts of good reasons, by the way, it doesn’t work that way.”

Schmidt, you see, was just joking! And paranoid, biased activists refused to recognize the joke. Paying attention only to the first part, they sowed misinformation and needless fear about Quayside, raising unfounded questions about Google’s and Sidewalk Labs’ bona fides.

Having DESTROYED these ignorant activists, the play gets back to the real heroes, the good folks at Waterfront Toronto who are pushing back against this misinformation to get the Sidewalk Labs deal across the finish line. For climate change. And stuff.

Remember that saying, Many a true word is spoken in jest? Healey’s play apparently doesn’t.  

As an audience member, to say nothing of someone who watched this nonsense unfold in real time, this supposed dunk was incredibly frustrating because it contradicts practically everything that happens in the play. Doctoroff spends literally every second of stage time running roughshod over Waterfront Toronto. In the play, Doctoroff’s final speech (brilliantly delivered) is nothing less than a plan to create a self-funded entity within the City of Toronto. He practically says, Here are the things we will do when someone gives us a city and puts us in charge.

Going into the project, they thought that Waterfront Toronto had more autonomy than it did, kind of like the Triborough Bridge Authority in New York, whose self-financing was the foundation for Robert Moses’ autocratic powers. Back in Toronto, as I detailed in my examination of the MIDP, Sidewalk Labs wanted to create several management entities with themselves at the centre. Even within the universe of the play, the assertion that Google thought it shouldn’t be put in charge of a city makes no sense whatsoever.

The activists – we – were right to be suspicious of Google. Their – our – analyses has been vindicated, both by reality and within the play.

To repeat: The activists were RIGHT. About Schmidt’s quote, and in their suspicion of the project.

(As was Mariana Valverde’s, one of the few academics to speak out publicly against the Quayside project, including in peer-reviewed and academic articles, raising among other things, relevant questions about the project’s governance structure. She deserves better than to have her work dismissed by O’Kane (p. 233) as a “University of Toronto law professor [she’s actually a criminologist] who was writing sharp-tongued screeds about how governance oversights could cause trouble at Quayside.”)

It’s kind of hard to follow the play’s logic. Toronto City Hall is being run by pedantic bureaucrats who won’t let Torontonians have nice things, the nice things here being Sidewalk Labs’ plans. They’re responsible for thwarting Waterfront Toronto, an organization run by unaccountable bureaucrats, that is doing business with a company, Sidewalk Labs, which has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted.

I might be a tool of Big Bureaucrat, but if I were a Toronto employee, I’d be very suspicious of the entire thing, too.

And yet the play ends with a condemnation of Toronto’s culture, city hall, and anti-Quayside activists as the faceless forces thwarting Sidewalk Labs’ desire to fight climate change. And not, say, with a condemnation of Waterfront Toronto for wasting three years of everyone’s time by getting into bed with a company that was obviously from day one not up to the task. Time that could have actually been spent addressing climate change. Would working with Sidewalk Labs really have helped move the needle on anything? Where would you look for evidence to prove that assertion?

(Stepping outside the play for a moment, the play quickly dismisses surveillance concerns as a nothingburger. But as we’ve seen with Google’s DeepMind, Google can easily bring supposedly independent entities in-house, changing the rules on how data is used. And if you think Google is just interested in data for advertising, let’s chat about a little something called AI. Plus, once you’re hooked into a company’s tech, it becomes hard to change horses. This type of power is not really on the play’s radar, though.)

Sidewalk Labs and the dream of success

Which brings us to another structural problem: the play begins, and ends, on a note that suggests that Sidewalk Labs could actually do all the things it says it wants to do. Healey creates a composite character to reflect the optimistic part of Sidewalk Labs’ mission: that they would solve homelessness, climate change and much else. Presented in a sympathetic light, this character, along with Verner’s and Davis’s paeans to fighting climate change, speak to the heart of the play’s argument, that the Quayside project was undone because of narrow-minded Toronto NIMBYism and the intransigent, faceless, overly powerful bureaucrats who run City Hall like low-rent Illuminati.

This conclusion is at least partially true to O’Kane’s source material, which ends on a note of cautious optimism about what could have been:

If implemented carefully, many of Sidewalk Labs’ individual ideas for Toronto could have changed countless lives for the better. Though few of its ideas were truly new, they had rarely been sold in such a lucrative-looking package, and could have set new standards around the world for energy-efficient buildings, home ownership models, garbage reduction and, eventually, maybe neighbourhoods destined for self-driving cars. Sidewalk hired dozens of employees who brushed aside all the drama the company courted and really tried to make these things happen. But Sidewalk bid for a project from a relatively unknown public agency in a city it didn’t know well that was asking for innovation it couldn’t really define. And Dan Doctoroff built a company that couldn’t stop sabotaging its own great ideas, repeatedly asking for more than anyone could offer it – against the advice of the agency he partnered with, the city he wanted to work in and even the people he courted for support. Sidewalk Labs wanted to win so badly that it just kept losing.

“If implemented carefully,” does a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph. It assumes that a company whose main calling card, as mentioned in the play, were street-based internet kiosks that delivered porn al fresco to New Yorkers, was actually capable of delivering everything that they promised. And they promised everything.

Putting aside the unsupportable hyperbole of “countless lives,” in the play as in life actually existing Sidewalk Labs – the inexperienced tech start-up that Waterfront Toronto foolishly got into bed with – never demonstrated the capacity to pull off any projects at the scale of the neighbourhood.

Literally everything they said and did indicated the opposite, in the play as in reality. Sidewalk Labs gave us no reason to believe that they could deliver on any of the things they promised. Like so much of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley, they were selling a form of technological solutionism that was more focused on creating markets for technology than actually addressing climate change. Then again, that’s just something that we egghead academics have been researching and writing screeds about for over a decade now.

As for Waterfront Toronto, at the end of the day they were saved from being tied to a company of “clowns” (to quote the play), not by any decisive move on their part, but by Sidewalk Labs walking away in May 2020. From the play’s Sidewalk Labs’ urban-development composite character:

I used to go to bed at night praying you wouldn’t notice we were clowns until there was a hole in the ground. We had unserious leadership – we were a fucking mess – yes. We were clowns. But we came here not knowing that NIMBYism is a way of life here. It’s bigger than ice hockey [NOTE: I’m pretty sure Americans just call it “hockey”]. You might have warned us.

I guess the question is: Why are we fucking around like this? [Then he mentions a whole slew of problems, including the climate crisis] So yes, late [in addressing these issues] and yes, clowns, but it would have been a start? Our thing wouldn’t have fixed anything, but it would have been a step?

Clown-delivered public policy

I mean, what do you do with a speech like that? Especially since a Waterfront Toronto employee reacts by giving him a hug, as if she, a representative of the company that kicked off this rolling disaster, can offer some form of commiseration.

Because the answer is, clowns by definition do not offer a start, or a step, on anything but clowning. Just having good intentions isn’t enough if you’re incompetent. When your play steps out of itself to criticize the very people who were pointing out that these people were clowns, you don’t really have a grasp on your subject. People have a right to object to stupid ideas, and the Quayside smart city was full of stupid ideas, from a poorly worded RFP to selecting Sidewalk Labs as a partner, richly deserving in public outrage.

Not nearly enough (by which I mean nothing) is made of the fact that Waterfront Toronto wasted three years of its time working with a company that could never have been a good partner, or vendor. Hoping that your partner agency doesn’t notice that you’re a clown isn’t a business strategy; it’s a con, a scam.

This wasn’t the public’s fault. It wasn’t the fault of culture. Or Bianca Wylie. Or Julie DiLorenzo. Or Doug Ford. Or faceless Toronto bureaucrats. Or any of the other enemies the play posits. Waterfront Toronto wasted everyone’s time.

Consider that, in the play, Waterfront Toronto was willing to concede a piece of public land to keep Sidewalk Labs, a company with no track record, and that had consistently tried to screw Waterfront Toronto over, involved in this project. After watching this play for 2.5 hours, how is the audience member supposed to react? Waterfront Toronto doing what they have to do to get the job done? With this company? A cynic might see these actions as those of a company that, even knowing that Sidewalk Labs could not be trusted, was willing to sacrifice the public interest for its own interest, to save face and preserve its mandate. In the scope of what we’d just been shown in the play, this reading is, at the very least, a fair and plausible one.

But as I said, the play treats Sidewalk Labs as something that happened to Waterfront Toronto, not something that Waterfront Toronto did, and continued to do, to itself and to Toronto.

To say that Sidewalk Labs, or Waterfront Toronto, had some good people working for them, who wanted to do good and be good, is beside the point. It is only as employees of the company or the organization that they are able to conduct their business. An urban developer who works for Google is a Google employee.

Trying to follow the logic

These kinds of thematic inconsistencies recur throughout the play. The attacks on City Hall felt less true to the events of the play and more like an unconnected gripe that’s been bugging the playwright for a while. I’ve no doubt that Toronto bureaucracy can be silly and inflexible. But would it have been better for the City and Waterfront Toronto to partner with Sidewalk Labs? After everything we learned about them, of which the play only scratched the surface? Or for Waterfront Toronto to have more independence? Is the lesson really that the public should have just trusted Waterfront Toronto to do the right thing? And given that they are even less accountable than City Hall civil servants, on what grounds do they deserve our trust? Because they want to do good in the world? You don’t think those awful City Hall bureaucrats believe the same of themselves?

In its dismissive treatment of the activists who raised their voices on Quayside, the play ends up championing Waterfront Toronto’s bureaucrats who, being part of a quasi-government authority, are even more isolated from public pressure than Toronto’s. And, frankly, in a play whose heroes are supposed to be so concerned about climate change, it’s a weird look to illustrate the unchecked power of your enemy – the Toronto bureaucratic Illuminati – by highlighting how difficult it is for Toronto homeowners to chop down trees whenever they feel like it.

But that’s the play in a nutshell: confused on themes, with a predetermined conclusion that doesn’t fit the evidence it presents. Data, intellectual property, technological solutionism and private power – the very heart of the challenges in regulating the smart city, and the heart of the opposition to Quayside – don’t really feature in this play. If you don’t think these are important, maybe it’s easier to see opposition to this type of project as simply garden-variety NIMBYism. But you may also not fully understand what you’re actually looking at.

In Doctoroff and Sidewalk Labs, The Master Plan has one half of a great satire. Widening its target to include not just the vampire, but the organization (Waterfront Toronto) that invited the vampire in would make for a more honest, and more compelling, story.

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New (co-written) from me: The Canadian government’s poor track record on public consultations undermines its ability to regulate new technologies

Posted on August 17, 2023 by bhaggart

Over at The Conversation, co-written with Natasha Tusikov. In which we express our ongoing frustration with what, at this point, can only be described as the federal government’s refusal to conduct meaningful public consultations on data-governance issues. The government’s just-announced decision to hold a dead-of-summer, month-long, invitation-only consultations (industry, academics, civil society) toward a voluntary code for generative AI is only the latest example of an antipathy to fulsome consultations that stretches back to 2018, affecting everything from the digital economy to online harms and now privacy, data governance and (how I dislike the term) artificial intelligence:

The lack of effective consultation is particularly egregious given the novelty and controversy surrounding generative AI, the technology that burst into public consciousness last year with the unveiling of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

Limited stakeholder consultations are not appropriate when there exists, as is the case with generative AI, a dramatic lack of consensus regarding its potential benefits and harms.

As Natasha and I have noted many times before, including in this piece in 2018, running a sound consultation isn’t rocket science: direct a public conversation about the issue, build a foundation of knowledge among the public and policymakers. Then you propose legislation and ask for feedback based on the information base you’d established in the initial consultation.

What shouldn’t you do? Hold a consultation at the very time when every sensible person is on vacation, treat a fuzzy issue that implicates interests across the society as a technical issue, and invite in the industries you want to regulate (or ask to sign off on a voluntary code), and which have caused this mess in the first place, to participate in setting the rules.

These are not the actions of a government that takes sound public policymaking seriously:

Government regulation is both legitimate and necessary to address issues like online harms, data protection and preserving Canadian culture. But the Canadian government’s deliberate hobbling of its consultation processes is hurting its regulatory agenda and its ability to give Canadians the regulatory framework we need.

The federal government needs to engage in substantive consultations to help Canadians understand and regulate artificial intelligence, and the digital sphere in general, in the public interest.

Check out the whole piece over at The Conversation. And enjoy this photo of a Lake Ontario laker.

Posted in artificial intelligence, data regulation | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on New (co-written) from me: The Canadian government’s poor track record on public consultations undermines its ability to regulate new technologies