A Course Correction for the World Wide Web

July 15, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pink shock and emerald green in the back yard

Emily was here for breakfast on Thursday and I had the morning’s news on public radio—the same stories staring at me from the front page of my newspaper—and she said with millennial weariness: Why are you listening to that?

It was a good question, and one I often answer for myself by turning it off because it’s mostly journalist shock, outrage or shame about whatever the newsmakers think is going on. Who needs their sense of urgency in those first moments when you’re still trying to figure out whether you’re fully conscious or even alive?

On the other hand, short ventures into my yard quickly provide more hopeful messages. It’s the early summer flush, fueled by plenty of rain, and everything is still emerald green. Summer is telling different stories than the radio, sees different horizons, including the one some kind of watermelon sprawl is trying to reach with its tentacles. These co-venturers aren’t fretting about the future, they’re claiming it by inches and feet, or celebrating it with explosions in the air.

While shock, outrage or shame can push you to do good work, it’s hope that sustains it by giving it directions, goals, and better horizons. Everything around the creeping reality of surveillance capitalism tiggers all those negative feelings and keeps me snapping at its purveyors with my canines because—well—because it deserves to be pierced and wounded.

But then what?

That’s where others who have shared these angry and disgusted reactions start showing me more hopeful responses in their own good work–the productive places where gut reaction sometimes enable you to go–and that my radio provides little if any of (ok, so now what?) on most mornings.

In the early days of the internet, the geeks and tinkerers in their basements and garages had utopian dreams for this new way of communicating with one another and sharing information. In the thirty-odd-years that have followed, many of those creative possibilities have been squandered. What we’ve gotten instead are dominant platforms that are fueled by their sale of our personal data. They have colonized and monetized the internet not to share its wealth but to hoard whatever they can take for themselves.

One would be right in thinking that many of the internet’s inventors are horrified by these developments, that some of them have expressed their shock, outrage and shame, and that a few have ridden these emotions into a drive to find better ways to utilize this world-changing technology. Perhaps first among them is Tim Berners-Lee.

Like some of my backyard’s denizens, he’s never lost sight of the horizons that he saw when he first poked his head above the ground. He also feels responsible for helping to set right what others have gotten so woefully wrong after he made his first breathtaking gift to us thirty years ago.

1. The Inventor of the Internet

At one point the joke was that Al Gore had invented the internet, but, in fact, it was Tim Berners-Lee. It’s been three decades since he gathered the critical components, linked them together, and called his creation “the world wide web.” Today however, he’s profoundly disconcerted by several of the directions that his creation has taken and he aims to do something about it.

In 1989, Berners-Lee didn’t sell his original web architecture and the protocols he assembled or attempt to get rich from them. He didn’t think anyone should own the internet, so no patents were ever gotten or royalties sought. The operating standards, developed by a consortium of companies he convened, were also made available to everyone, without cost, so the world wide web could be rapidly adopted. In 2014, the British Council asked prominent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders to chose the cultural moments that had shaped the world most profoundly in the previous 80 years, and they ranked the invention of the World Wide Web number one. This is how they described Berners-Lee’s invention:

The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.

Because he gave it away with every good intention, perhaps Berners-Lee has more reasons than anyone to be concerned about the poor use that others have made of it. Instead of remaining the de-centralized communication and information sharing platform he envisioned, the internet still isn’t available everywhere, has frequently been weaponized, and is increasingly controlled by a few dominant platforms for their own private gain. But he’s also convinced that these ill winds can be reversed.

He reads and shares an open letter every year on the anniversary of the internet’s creation. His March 2018 and March 2019 letters lay out his primary concerns today.

Last year, Berners-Lee renewed his commitment “to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space – for everyone. That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people [instead of against them].” After making proposals that aim to expand internet access for the poor (and for poor women and girls in particular), he discusses various ways that the web has failed to work “for us.”

What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared….the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponise the web at scale. In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data.

Additionally troubling is the fact that we’ve left these same companies to police themselves, something they can never do effectively given their incentives to maximize profits instead of social goods. “A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions,” he says.

Berners-Lee sees a similar misalignment of incentives between the tech giants and the users they have herded into their platforms.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people – and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. …Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.

As the late internet activist, John Perry Barlow, once said: “A good way to invent the future is to predict it.” It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve… but I want us to imagine that future and build it.

In March, 2018, most of us didn’t know what Berners-Lee had in mind when he talked about building.

This year’s letter mostly elaborated on last year’s themes. In addition to governments “translating laws and regulations for the digital age,” he calls on the tech companies to be a constructive part of the societal conversation (while never mentioning the positive role that their teams of Washington lobbyists might play). In other words, it’s more of a plea or attempt to shame them into action since their profits instead of their public interest remain their primary motivators. It is also unclear what he expects from government leaders and regulators as politics becomes more polarized, but he is plainly calling on the web’s theorizers, inventors and commentators and on its billions of users to pitch in and help.

Berners-Lee proposes a new Contract for the Web, a global collaboration that was launched in Lisbon last November. His Web Summit brought together those:

who agree we need to establish clear norms, laws and standards that underpin the web. Those who support it endorse its starting principles and together we are working out the specific commitments in each area. No one group should do this alone, and all input will be appreciated. Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.

It’s like the founding spiritual leader convening the increasingly divergent members of his flock before setting out on the next leg of the journey.

The web is for everyone, and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

In the meantime however, while a new Contract for the Web is clearly necessary, it is not where Berners-Lee is pinning all of his hopes.

The seed came from somewhere and now it’s (maybe) making watermelons

2. An App for an App

The way that the internet was created, any webpage should be accessible from any device that has a web browser, including a smart phone, a personal computer or even an internet-enabled refrigerator. That kind of free access is blocked, however, when the content or the services are locked inside an app and the app distributor (such as Google or Facebook) controls where and how users interact with “what’s inside.” As noted recently in the Guardian: “the rise of the app economy fundamentally bypasses the web, and all the principles associated with it, of openness, interoperability and ease of access.”

On the other hand, perhaps the web’s greatest strength has been the ability of almost anyone to build almost anything on top of it. Since Berners-Lee built the web’s foundation and its first couple of floors, he’s well-positioned to build an alternative that provides the openness, interoperability and ease of access that has been lost while also serving the public’s interest in principles like personal data privacy. At the same time that he has been sponsoring a global quest for new standards to govern the internet, Berner-Lee has also been building an alternative infrastructure on top of the internet’s common foundation.

One irony is that he’s building it with a new kind of app.

Last September, Berners-Lee announced a new, open-source web-based infrastructure called Solid that he has been working on quietly with colleagues at MIT for several years. “Open-source” means that once the rudimentary structures are made public, anyone can contribute to that infrastructure’s web-based applications. Making the original internet free and widely available lead to its rapid adoption and Berners-Lee is plainly hoping that “open source” will have the same impact on Solid. Shortly after his announcement, an article in Tech Crunch reported that open-source developers were already pouring into the Solid platform “in droves.” As Fast Company reported at the time: Berner-Lee’s objective for Solid, and the company behind it called Inrupt, was “to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it.” Like a second great awakening.

First and foremost, the Solid web infrastructure is intended to give people back control of their personal data on-line. Every data point that’s created in or added to a Solid software application exists in a Solid “pod,” which is an acronym for “personal on-line data store” that can be kept on Solid’s server or anywhere else that a user chooses. Berners-Lee previewed one of the first Solid apps for the Fast Company reporter after his new platform was announced:

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsAp.

The difference is that his (or your) personal information is secured within a Solid pod from others who might seek to make use of it in some way.

Inrupt is the start-up company that Berners-Lee and John Bruce launched to drive development of Solid, secure the necessary funding and transform Solid from a radical idea into a viable platform for businesses and individuals. According to Tech Crunch, Inrupt is already gearing up to work on a new digital assistant called Charlie that it describes as “a decentralized version of Alexa.”

What will success look like for Inrupt and Solid? A Wired magazine story last February described it this way:

Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting for the current generation of tech giants to switch to an open and decentralised model; Amazon and Facebook are unlikely to ever give up their user data caches. But they hope their alternative model will be adopted by an increasingly privacy-aware population of web users and the organisations that wish to cater to them. ‘In the web as we envision it, entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will emerge and thrive, including hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers,’ Bruce says. ‘Everyday web users will find incredible value in new kinds of apps that are impossible on today’s web.

In other words, if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web that we want.

+ + +

At this stage in his life (Berners-Lee is 64) and given his world-bending accomplishments, he could have retired to a beach or mountaintop somewhere to rest on his laurels, but he hasn’t. Instead, because he can, he heeds the call of his discomfort and is diving back in to champion his original vision. It’s the capability and commitment, hope and action that are the arc of all good work.

Telling him that Solid is a pipe-dream would be like telling my backyard encouragers to stop shouting, trumpeting and fruiting.

This post was adapted from my July 14, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Dissenting Voices Never Fall On Deaf Ears

June 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hong Kong could still swallow the dragon.

A cover story in the Wall Street Journal today was called “Hong Kong’s Flickering Hopes.” “Flickering” because to Gerard Baker, the Journal’s “editor at large,” it seems inevitable that Hong Kong’s rule of law and civic traditions—it’s utterly unique experiment in Asian democracy—will eventually be swallowed by the giant that surrounds it.

On the other hand, I think it’s far from inevitable.

Over the past month, millions of residents have taken to their City’s humid boulevards to protest an extradition proposal that would allow China’s resident proxies to arrest anyone in Hong Kong that it wants to, extradicting them to “justice” in the motherland—a “chilling effect” on critical thinking and democratic expression. But why I wonder isn’t the personal witness of millions of Hong Kong Chinese a ray of hope instead of a glimmer on the road to subjugation?

Hong Kong could still confound us because, despite having the hottest, wettest and least hospitable climate for masked protest I can imagine, millions of its citizens took to the streets to voice their dissent about this latest erosion of their rights to speak, assemble and disagree. Despite sweat and dehydration, pepper spray and water cannon, they have also managed to protest peacefully so that their resounding “No” conveyed a Confucian depth of confidence and resolve. Constructive instead of destructive.

On the other hand, and demonstrating even more of their British influence, the Hong Kong Chinese have talked and written their rationales for “No” everywhere that they could find a platform for doing so—patiently, painstakingly and exhaustingly—although the meat of their dissenting opinions has received little attention in the press. And finally, the City’s residents have sketched out futures that are not merely a return to the status quo that existed twenty years ago but instead are thoughtful re-workings of Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems.” Despite a divergence of details, their over-arching visions have one thing in common. All imagine a unified China that’s built around the pounding, life-giving heart of Hong Kong today.

Will (1) their acts of dissent; (2) the personal risks that have been taken by, and moral commitment of these dissenters; together with (3) their hopeful vision of a “different and better outcome” persuade the billions of non-Hong Kong Chinese to reconsider their acquiescence to “the Great Firewall,” the desirability of “good citizenship scores,” and the subjugation of a total surveillance state for something more like what these dissenters have in mind?

Could Hong Kong swallow the dragon?

One thing is absolutely certain: the steady, confident voices of Hong Kong’s Chinese dissenters are not falling on deaf ears. There are more than a billion of them, listening or trying to listen.

(In case you don’t recognize it, the image above is of Tankman, a sole protester confronting Chinese state power in Tianamen Square, 1989. The power of dissent. The power in a picture. Inviting us to imagine being that solitary Chinese man.)

Meanwhile, an old service station re-purposed as a coffee joint on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

1. Take a Sad Song and Make It Better

To all of you: I promise to get off this horse soon, I do, but there is a West Coast echo in this story of dissent too.

California, which is also the home of Silicon Valley, passed the toughest data privacy law in the US last year. (Its prohibitions and sanctions will go into effect at the beginning of 2020.) By giving individuals a way to protect themselves from the predations of surveillance capitalism, California’s leaders expressed their dissent from the silence and/or inability of our national representatives to do the same. Disappointingly, the same non-response has come from most other state governments too.

I’ve railed about data privacy repeatedly here because our personal information is being taken without our informed consent and used in ways that track us like animals (“These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom”). I’ve argued that exchanging our personal data for “free” social networks like Facebook’s and “free” search engines like Google’s eliminates sources of potential income in a changing economy (“Blockchain Goes To Work”). And I’ve at least begun to make the case that theft of our personal data undermines our personal autonomy (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”). There are important issues here, and outside of a few leading jurisdictions most policymakers have been neglecting them.

“Leading jurisdiction” is lawyer-speak for “being in the vanguard” or “a dissenter from the prevailing view.” These places have tired of everyone else’s silence on an issue of importance that demands attention. They have talked about the values that drove them to raise their voices, and have painted a picture that speaks to how the future will be better—or at least more manageable—than it is today with their new laws or regulations on the books. They’re holding up their end of the conversation by trying to get their fellow states and the rest of the nation engaged in it.

California lawmakers passed a data privacy bill in 2018 that, among other things, includes an expansive definition of what constitutes personal information, gives the state’s consumers the right to prohibit the sale of their data to third parties, and also allows them to “opt out” of sharing their personal data altogether. It’s common for a new law’s effective date to be a year or more later to allow all parties affected to prepare for its various impacts. As interesting as anything about California’s recent action in support of data privacy has been Congress’s re-action.

According to a news report today:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthey backed the idea of national legislation to safeguard consumer’s data privacy, adding a prominent GOP voice to the bi-partisan support in Congress for tackling how technology companies amass and use that information.

‘There needs to be national-level regulation, not state-by-state on what we’re going to do about privacy,’ Mr. McCarthey, a California Republican said in an interview…

A data privacy law passed last year in California helped spur action from both Mr McCarthey and a bipartisan group of lawmakers working on privacy legislation in the Senate.

As a result of California’s commitment and template for action, Congress is wrestling with its divisiveness and dysfunction to pass a federal data privacy law that will go into effect before California’s to avoid a patchwork of regulation. From one vantage point, it’s like how many clowns can get in the phone booth before the bell goes off. But from another, more serious perspective: where would Congress be today on data privacy if a leading jurisdiction like California had failed to act?

A similar dynamic is currently at play involving state laws (like California’s again) that are aimed at reducing the likely causes of climate change. The impact on state residents of actions like this are immediate and direct, but the impact doesn’t end there. According to two scholars who have studied public opinion around climate change, those who have not bothered to act are also reluctant to be left behind. This is from another recent post:

Egan and Mullin cite research that proves ‘the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion’ and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those ‘watching but not yet acting’ are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard states.

When a commitment is grounded in values and acted upon (by speaking up, passing a law, taking any kind of objective step) to help realize a better future for everyone, others in the room, state or nation are more likely to be mobilized to define their own positions, to move the conversation forward, and sometimes to reach a new consensus than would never have been possible if those in the vanguard hadn’t taken a stand for their beliefs. in the first place.

An apartment building by Herzog & de Meuron in Tribeca

2. Taking a Stand Is Like Playing Jenga

Kids love the game Jenga. Many adults do too.

To play, you begin with a vertical rectangle of interlocking wooden pieces that are slotted in to create a stable structure. In each successive turn, a player attempts to remove one of the slotted pieces without destabilizing the structure and causing the remaining pieces to crash into a heap on the floor.

I’m convinced that the sound explosion of crashing pieces is key to enjoyment of the game. When you lose (or win), you do so shatteringly. There is no question that what you did made a difference.

The Tribeca apartment building above looks like a Jenga tower after—in mid-game—removal of some of the pieces has caused others to move and jut out a bit from the sides.

To harness the metaphor: the original Jenga tower is where prevailing opinion always starts. The room/community/state/nation is for something or against something. Then, in each successive turn, dissenters (along with the other players) modify the prevailing view.

Dissenters, leading jurisdictions, those who can’t keep their convictions to themselves are the key pieces that get removed. Every time they “make their case,” other pieces in the Jenga tower are impacted. Sometimes you can actually see their affect, because certain pieces jut out a little or a lot, their minds visibly beginning to change. Other times the change is imperceptible, but some pieces in the pile have become less stable as their original certainty has been clouded by doubt. Eventually, as the monolith begins to teeter, the moment of truth arrives and one final player’s testimony makes the original certainties dissolve.

Anyone’s turn can shatter the stability or inertia of the prevailing view.

Everyone’s turn affects other pieces either perceptibly or imperceptibly.

Anyone’s dissent can make the original certainties come crashing to the floor.

Anyone’s action can cause the crash that finally allows a different, better future to be built.

Dissenting voices like these are never as lonely or futile as they seem.

And they never fall on deaf ears.

This post was adapted from my June 23, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Moving On in the Wake of Destruction

April 14, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Since writing about Barry Lopez’s new book last week and hearing a lot from you about that post, I couldn’t escape the cry from his heart that we’ll all need to learn more about how to survive as we face the accelerating destruction of the natural world. But then I look outside, where the spring is exploding with life after the rain this morning and it’s hard—no, nearly impossible—to imagine that what I’m seeing has already changed and that I’ll need to get ready for even more troubling changes. Lopez argues that we’ll all need to prepare for life in this increasingly wounded world by learning from people who are already surviving on destruction’s frontlines, even though these battlegrounds are hard for us to see or even comprehend “from our comfortable seats by the swimming pool.” Nevertheless, Lopez invites us to look through his eyes at these “throttled” landscapes and to respond as if they were what we’re seeing around us too.

We need writers like Lopez to help us see what’s coming—like “the before and after” he describes when he travels between a majestic nature reserve, all purples and greens in Western Australia, and the wasted iron-mining sites that border it on three sides. It requires an imaginative leap through his storytelling to mobilize us into living with greater reverence somewhere between these two extremes.

After showing us what we’ve destroyed and continue to destroy—the fragile beauty along with the pain of its loss for those who live there and remember it—Lopez urges on our struggle to strike a new balance before the trade-offs get even worse. It’s his wake-up call from the wilderness. And because first world privilege makes it difficult to accept survival under diminished circumstances, he brings us stories from indigenous communities like the Aboriginal Australians who have learned (over millennia) how to adapt in the aftermath of natural disaster, whether caused by man or by nature itself. When our wisdom is joined with their wisdom, it may be possible for us to imagine new ways of surviving in Earth’s depleted future.

Settling for less. Learning new ways of living from indigenous people. Neither are what we’re accustomed to, particularly when the nature that we see around us lulls us into a false sense of complacency. We need an unusually powerful voice like Lopez’s to counter that complacency before its consequences become even more dire.

Unfortunately, as actively as we’re destroying the planet, we also seem hell-bent on destroying one another.

Understanding a community’s ability to survive in the aftermath of attempts to destroy it also requires an almost impossible leap of the imagination. How can I bridge the gulf between the community I experience around me and those communities struggling to survive the daily “shock wave” of life in Syria and in the ancient communities of western Iraq, or those who have returned to some kind of normal after the “killing fields” of Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia? Do the deepening divisions between rich and poor, authoritarian and democratic in the Western world, and the frictions between ethnic communities in much of the rest of it, mean that we have to find ways to bridge this gulf in our imaginations too, before these breakdowns grow even worse? Are diminished returns–and a new kind of survival–the best that we can hope for when it comes to our communities as well?

There are voices today who are crying out from this wilderness too, inviting us:

-to look long and hard into communities around the world that have almost been destroyed so that within our own communities we will hesitate to rip apart what binds us together and become more protective of our fragile connections to one another;

-to consider how political leaders and media outlets can quickly devolve into cheerleaders for murder and even mass murder, enlisting willing executioners from the ranks of the susceptible and the under-employed;

-to learn how communities facing annihilation have not only “come back” but also learned how to co-exist with these same murderers because new political leaders and very old community-building programs have helped them to do so;

-to understand how survivors move beyond grief and despair and can find a level of acceptance (if not forgiveness and reconciliation) after what it happened to them; and ultimately

-to accept that accommodations like this may become our new normal too as the ties that bind our own communities together continue to weaken and fray.

Surviving community destruction has much in common with survival in the wake of environmental destruction. There are voices calling to us from this wilderness too, asking whether the future will be delivered by Enlightenment-based progress–that our global villages will always continue to improve–or that we must instead look to more traditional ways of living to learn how to take care of everyone in a community, refuse to leave anyone behind, and know how to recover when our ties with one another have been broken.

Their message seems timely given the march from destruction to rebuilding that is the seasonal story of winter to spring, brown and dry to lush and green, the death of Good Friday to the life after Easter.

It can be glimpsed in the fresco (above) by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, painted in a Mexico City prison while he was a political prisoner, its rich symbolism pointing towards his own deliverance.

It is also evident in Philip Gourevitch’s writing about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and even more so in how the minority Tutsi tribe that was nearly annihilated by the majority Hutus have built a new future among these same Hutus over the past 25 years.

From this tragedy, many Rwandans (like most survivors) have achieved a quality of being that Finnish people call sisu, a word that has no real equivalent in English. Sisu comes from taking action against the odds and finding courage when it’s difficult to do so. With sisu, you sense that you’re going beyond your capabilities and harnessing inner energy that has never been harnessed before. Something like sisu enables you to move on and not give in to resignation or despair despite the enormity of the challenge.

We’ll all need the endurance of sisu—and other kinds of perspective too—if we’re to survive the destructions of nature and diverse communities that seem inevitable today if we keep our present course.

1. Genocide and its Aftermath in Rwanda

In the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people (mostly Tutsis) were systematically murdered by bands of Hutu génocidaires in what Philip Gourevitch describes a “an unambiguous case” of state-sponsored mass murder. He wrote the book, “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” to document the tragedy 25 years ago, and he has been revisiting its consequences ever since.

In a Frontline interview, Gourevich described how the Rwandan government at the time used a pop music station (RTLM or Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines) to rally young Hutus with genocidal propaganda that eventually targeted the resented Tutsi minority with elimination. Over time, it’s directives became shockingly personal.

disc jockeys who would say, “So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street.” And [the genocidaires] would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was…a rallying tool that was used… to mobilize the population [into a murderous rage].

The genocide dissipated for several reasons, including an on-going civil war, the involvement of U.N. peacekeepers, and huge numbers of refugees fleeing to camps outside Rwanda. When Gourevich visited the following year:

the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who’d been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty—hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers—and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succored by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job.

But as he could report just 15 years later in a 2009 New Yorker essay:

Rwanda is [now] one of the safest and the most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic product has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry and a strong draw for foreign capital investment.

What accounted for Rwanda’s rise from the ashes? Clearly there were several factors, but one of them was that the Hutus and Tutsis who returned to their lives together had gained a kind of acceptance of their mutual tragedy, and, by doing so, unlocked extraordinary energies that might otherwise have remained buried in grief, despair, revenge or the fear of revenge.

One factor in this turn-around was that a new government vowed to protect all Rwandans and actively promoted local processes that aimed at reconciliation. Paul Kagame, a leader who governed his country with an authoritarian hand through much of this recovery period, was elected in 2003 and immediately repurposed a system of community courts that had previously acted without lawyers to resolve local conflicts called gacaca.

With gacaca, towns and villages would conduct communal, town-hall style trials to hold those who had participated in the genocide accountable and to mete out punishments. Gacaca both encouraged and rewarded confessions, but confessions also had to be verified by other community members. Because the Tutsi and Hutu had usually returned to their homes, people almost always knew one another, the identities of those who had suffered or been killed, and who was likely responsible for the atrocities.

Eventually more than 12,000 gacacas were convened and more than a million cases adjudicated with a remarkable degree of public participation and little violence. Gourevich notes that there “were surely false convictions of those who insisted on their innocence, and …a surprising number of acquittals of those who had probably been falsely accused in the first place. But in many cases…confession was its own reward…[with] sentence[s] for multiple murders reduced to little more than time served.” Gacaca justice, as imperfect as it was, produced a degree of catharsis in their communities and, by allowing these communities to work though the facts and consequences of a shared tragedy, to leave some of its pain, despair and desire for revenge behind. Fifteen years after the genocide, Gourevich:

didn’t see any great hope in the eyes of the people I visited… But as I travelled around Rwanda there was a greater sense of ease among people than I remembered. It wasn’t anything that you’d notice if you hadn’t been there before, because what I was feeling wasn’t so much the presence of strikingly positive energy but, rather, the absence of a mood of wary inwardness. The country was becoming less spooked. At times, it was simply a neutral place to be, like anywhere else. It was normal, which [in itself] was extraordinary.

One of the lessons involved finding this new normal. Gacca courts released the steam from a pressure cooker that could now be reused for rebuilding the country’s injured communities. A remarkable nation-wide recovery in a relatively short-time frame is partly explained by gacca justice. But it was the impact on individual survivors that teaches us the most, a cautionary story with only the faintest traces of hope. In documenting and characterizing what individual Rwandans have said about their recovery, Gourevich shows us how the texture of survival feels when we’ve allowed our communities to be torn apart and are left with no alternative but finding the slow way back.

2. The sisu of survivors

The Rwandans who spoke to Philip Gourevich tell us that community rebuilding from the point of destruction is incomprehensible, cynical, frustrating, taxing, re-traumatizing, but all the while, necessary. For the most part, members of this new community have been unwilling to forgive. Like other kinds of survival, the day in and day out of it is difficult, driven by a tenacious kind of coping instead of the promise of brighter days ahead. The passage of time always erodes pain, but it takes even longer to replace the emptiness with anything that approaches reconciliation.

Here is some of what Gourevich found. The quotes below are from a series of interviews that he gave earlier this month.

-On surviors being re-traumatized: the motto of the gacaca courts was “truth heals,” but the fact is that the truth also wounds all over again. “Every time I come to gacaca with an open mind I get even more upset.”

-On forgiveness: “Pretty much everyone I asked in Rwanda told me the same thing,” Gourevich says. “The most fundamental basis of forgiveness is an internal decision, by the forgiver, to forego revenge—literally to let go of the idea of getting even. I called this modest, a sort of bare minimum, but think about the scale and scope of offenses and injuries we’re talking about, and what it would mean for Rwandans not to forgive [even in this limited sense of the word], and you see it’s no small thing.”

-On the mix of incomprehensibility and necessity in doggedly seeking reconciliation even when you have no hope of finding it:

none of the survivors I spoke with thought that there was any better solution [than gacaca afforded]. Never mind reconciliation, Tutsis and Hutus had to coexist. Sagahutu expressed the sentiment most succinctly: ‘It’s our obligation, and it’s our only way to survive, and I do it every day, and I still can’t comprehend it.’ When I repeated Sagahutu’s formulation to other survivors and to members of Kagame’s Cabinet, it was always met with recognition: Yes, that’s it.

-on accepting the realities and trying to move on from them: There is a kind of “pragmatic civility.” “I know this person did it and am grateful that they’re not denying it anymore.” “We don’t have to be friends, but if we’re not a threat to one another [any longer] then other things can maybe happen.”

-and on how thoroughly Rwanda has attempted to rebuild its communities:

Rwanda’s relentlessness in pursuing genocidaires is unusual. After WWII, some Jews became Nazi hunters and kept at it for the rest of their lives, but they mostly focused on very senior figures. And I don’t know that I’ve ever come across stories or accounts of survivors of the Holocaust who say: I would like to go back, investigate and figure out who did this to my grandfather, who chased him out of his house, who put him on that train, who put him to death, and I want to haul them all into court. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out who those people were in some parts of Germany, but most Jews just said: the hell with it…And of course, now they don’t live where it happened anymore. That’s key. Rwanda is unique, as you say…the most litigated genocide. It’s also the only one where everybody [still] lives intermingled in that way.

In an effort to rebuild its communities, Rwanda has confronted the looming problem that was “both behind and ahead of them” after the genocide in 1994. It’s efforts to find a kind of acceptance about what happened to their country are sobering because sisu makes nearly everyone who embraces it into an adult.

When I listened to Barry Lopez in Philadelphia a week ago, I was struck by how often he described those in the developed West as children (waiting for political saviors, for progress to sweep us along, for technology to solve our problems) instead of as adults who need to rely on ourselves and on one another.

Children also don’t like to be confronted with their own destructiveness, preferring to pretend that they never made a mess of things and therefore that the mess doesn’t exist at all. It’s something like that with the destruction of both nature and our communities today. If I don’t see the evidence of this destruction when I look out my window, it’s not happening, I have not helped to cause it, and I’m hardly responsible for limiting any more of the damage.

Conjurers like Lopez and Gourevich are calling “from the edge” to tell us about the kinds of survival that we can still avoid if we face the on-going destruction and respond to it like adults instead of children.

They’re also telling us that more of humanity’s destructiveness probably lies ahead and something about what our own surviving will look like when that destruction is closer to our doors.

This post was adapted from my April 14, 2019 newsletter. You can subscribe—and receive my newsletter in your in-box every Sunday morning—by providing your email address in the right-hand column.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

April 7, 2019 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What is most exceptional about Barry Lopez is his perspective and how he manages to involve us in it.

The remarkable prologue to his new book “Horizons,” finds him in the last place we expect to find him. For an author who has brought us with him to the most remote corners on earth—the iron mines of Aboriginal Australia, the unfathomable expanses of Antarctica, an archeological site on Skraeling Island, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, Cape Foulweather’s “ghosted landscape”—Lopez is reclining on a beach chair at a Hawaiian resort, playing with his grandson in the shallow waves, swimming off shore to show him the sunken battleship Arizona, remembering an odd encounter with John Steinbeck when he too was young and thinking about writing, watching “the pool water shatter into translucent gems” after a tourist’s spontaneous, arcing dive. They’re the reveries of a summer day. And then this, as he looks out from the dreamlike circle of his life and family:

I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

Until now, Barry Lopez’ most acclaimed book was “Arctic Dreams.” It is part travelogue and part meditation on the fragility and resilience of a particular landscape, along with its wildlife and people. Since it came out in 1986, he has written hundreds of articles, along with fiction and essays, but “Horizons” is “Arctic Dream’s” non-fiction companion and successor. It took him more than 30 years to recast what he had to say back then in the face of the profound impacts humanity has had on the earth in those ensuing years.

Robert MacFarlane remarked recently about the strangeness of calling what Lopez does in both of these books non-fiction, thereby defining them by “their negative and restricting relation to fiction.” Lopez breaks open the possibilities of non-fiction for me in the ways that he does for MacFarlane: with often gorgeous prose that is “stylistic adventure,” “ethical address,” and “secular spirituality” where land, wildlife and the traditional knowledge of ancient people are “tutelary presences.” Lopez is the medium that gives them voice when we can’t hear them for ourselves.

In his own writing, MacFarlane lets us feel the land, its wildlife and people too, using “the particular words” that conjure their essences and interactions most evocatively in an age when we’re losing “the language” that we once used to talk about them and therefore “the descriptions” that helped us to connect more deeply to the world around us. Out of MacFarlane’s concern about the loss of these words and memories over the same 30 years, he sees Barry Lopez’ own “life journey” as one “from hope to doubt.”

What I found most fascinating about “Horizon” are the contours of Lopez’ doubt today and how he involves us in the only outcome that seems possible given the uncertainties.

How can you warn us on our lounge chairs without disabling, through a sense of hopelessness, those you are trying so hard to engage?

1. Thirty Years Ago – 1986

The Lopez of “Arctic Dreams,” and much of what he recalls about his observations since, come from his being a fieldworker, meaning that his approach to the places he has visited are those of “attention and interpretation.” This is what MacFarlane has to say about Lopez’ well-honed conjuring tricks in his review of “Horizon”:

In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, Lopez recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Lopez always seems to have believed that if he describes what he’s experienced well enough, his readers and listeners can experience it too, trusting them to draw their own conclusions and to decide on how they’ll respond. In other words, Lopez invites a state of mind where decision-making becomes possible.

The last time I wrote about Lopez here, he talked about one way that he’s thought about it.

I gave a talk once at the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, and I asked the man who was my host, what is it that Emerson and all of these people did on a Sunday afternoon at the Athenaeum? Did they talk about politics, or did they talk about science, or did they talk about sports? What was it that made these talks so much a part of cultural memory for us? And he said they just elevated — they brought the level of the conversation up. And I reflected on that and thought, well, that’s what I want [to do].

On his own page, Lopez describes the conversation partners he’s after in unusually intimate terms: my “family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues—to whom I feel most beholden.” They are “people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.” For them, as he elaborates in “Horizon”: “You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home, that what you’ve found are not your things but our things.” It’s deeply personal sharing–like you’d do around a campfire–while reimagining the possibilities that are ahead of you together.

As the younger man of “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez was concerned about the environmental destruction and loss of habitat that he saw on his travels but challenged those who feared extinction was inevitable, believing that we had enough courage to reverse our course, even if our actions might not bear fruit in our lifetimes. Some of it may have been trusting too much that the conversation he had elevated would spur all those others to follow through. As he writes in “Horizon”:

Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life [my role?] so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?

The long road that Lopez took to “Horizon” involved going back to many of the places he had visited over the years to see what he had missed and to discover how the hope of “Arctic Dreams” could evolve into something sharper, with greater urgency and far less certainty.

2. Today

Lopez talked about this 30-year journey at the Free Library here on Tuesday, and during the hour and a half that he filled with his stories, I tried to track the emotions underneath them and how they have changed his role as an observer, interpreter and catalyst for those who are listening.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday night

I didn’t think that I’d ever get the chance.

As recently as a year ago, I’d heard that Lopez was gravely ill with a particularly aggressive cancer so I never thought I’d see him read from his work or sit in the same room with him. In addition to being something of a miracle, his appearance here this week was also a statement about his own resilience, the personification of survival in the face of his body’s self-destructiveness. He never talked about his illness, but his message was more intertwined with his own survival now and you could feel it.

Lopez is a tough old bird who’s been a relentless wanderer, a describer of all the shades of purple that the light reveals in a remote canyon, a professional diver, a chronicler of “the shock wave” of the Middle East, and the pilgrim who made his Pashtun guides take him to the empty niches at Bamyan where monumental statues of the Buddha carved from the living rock 1600 years ago had been blasted into oblivion by the Taliban–why?–because their voids called out to him. Voids like this are far more fixed in his vision today than they were 30 years ago.

It’s why MacFarlane describes “Horizon” as “a deeply wounded book” about “the throttled Earth.” Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still includes his “family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues” but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided “heroic communities” of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

When you face your own death and the death of the world you have lovingly observed and interpreted, there is far greater urgency in your message. From MacFarlane again:

The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, [writes Lopez,] the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.’

At the Free Library, Lopez talked repeatedly about the centuries of practical wisdom that enable traditional societies to repair themselves, to “go on,” whatever knocks them down. Instead of our Western view of progress—the confidence that things will always get better—he counters that the health of the world is following a very different path and that our only hope rests with those who already have (or are willing to nurture) the ability to start over again, to survive, even when they find themselves in the darkest places.

As I listened I found myself wondering: when is the last time that anyone I know had to figure out a way to survive from one day to the next?

And as with MacFarlane’s lost “words” and “descriptions of nature”: how much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly “throttled” world?

There were glimmers of anger, impatience and disgust in Lopez’ uncertainty on Tuesday night, but only briefly and they quickly disappeared behind his refusal to despair. In a recent interview, Lopez acknowledged these judgmental tendencies when he talked about why it took him so long to follow up on “Arctic Dreams”:

I think I had a greater tendency when I was younger to judge, to maintain states of anger. I had impatience. And I had to bleed all that off before I wrote ‘Horizon.’

In their place, this new book and his coming out to talk about it is more like one of the prophet Jeremiah’s Old Testament lamentations. Particularly in his fifth lamentation, Jeremiah tells of how the people of God lived through the destruction of Jerusalem but in the end stubbornly refuse to abandon their hope despite a deep uncertainty about their deliverance.

Lopez sounded like an Old Testament prophet when he said of himself a couple of years ago: “It is necessary to have people out on the edge calling back to us about what’s coming.”

Like others who have cried out to be heard from the wilderness, his perspective today is forged by his own survival, his willingness to look at the voids that chronicle our race towards destruction, his urgent recognition that we have limited time to turn the tide, and his refusal to despair because so many of those he has encountered as he’s wandered this earth have also found dignified ways to survive.

Without hectoring or drama, the prophetic perspective in Lopez’ current stories invites us to re-imagine the future in ways that—quite frankly–seem impossible for us to ignore.

This post is adapted from my April 7, 2019 Newsletter. You can subscribe here and receive it in you inbox every Sunday morning

Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

March 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When people decide what is most important to them—and bother to champion it in conversation, in voting, in how they act everyday—they are helping to build the future.

It’s not just making noise, but that’s part of it. For years, when Emily was in grade school, the argument for an all-girl education was that the boys dominated the classroom with their antics and opinions while the girls were ignored or drowned out. Those making the most noise hog the attention, at least at first.

Later on, it’s about the quality of your opinions and the actions that back them up. Power and money in the commons of public life is not synonymous with good commitments or actions, but it does purchase a position with facts and experts and a platform to share it that can hold its own (if not prevail) in the wider debate over what the future will be like and what its trade-offs will cost. Not unlike the over-powered girls in grade school, it takes courage to stand up against what the best-organized, best-financed and most dominant corporate players want.

Part of the problem with these companies today is that many of them are nurturing, so that they can also cater to, lower-level priorities that we all have. For example, we all want convenience in our daily lives and to embrace a certain amount of distraction. The future that some companies want to deliver to us aims at catering to these (as opposed to other) priorities in the most efficient and profitable manner. For example:

-companies like Amazon profit by providing all the convenience you could ever want as a shopper, or

-when when your aim is relief from boredom or stress, social media, on-line games and search engines like Google provide wonderlands of distraction to lose yourself in.

Moreover, with the behavioral data these companies are harvesting from you whenever you’re on their platforms, they’ll hook you with even greater conveniences, forms of escapism and more stuff to buy in the future. Their priorities of efficiency and profit almost perfectly dovetail with ours for convenience and distraction.

This convenient and distracted future—along with a human yearning for something more—is captured with dazzling visuals and melancholy humor in Wall-E, a 10-year old movie from Pixar. (It’s worth every minute for a first or second view of a little trash robot named Wall-E’s bid to save the human race from itself.) In its futuristic world, the round-as-donuts humans who have fled the planet they’ve soiled spend their days on a We’ve-Thought-of-Everything cruise ship that’s floating through space. Except, as it turns out, the ship’s operators aren’t providing everything their passengers want and need, or want and need even more, like a thriving planet to call home.

Wall-E’s brilliance doesn’t come from an either/or future, but from a place where more important priorities are gradually acknowledged and acted upon too. It’s deciding to have more of some things and somewhat less of others. Back in the real world, that change in priorities might involve diverting some of our national resources away from economic efficiency and profit to support thriving families and communities (January 27, 2019 newsletter). Or, as in Wall-E’s case, using fewer of our shared resources for convenience and distraction and more for restoring an environment that can sustain our humanity in deeper ways.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried it knows: it can be hard to find enough courage to stand up to those who are dominating (while they’re also subverting) the entire conversation about what we should want most. It’s our admiration for Wall-E’s kind of courage that makes Toronto’s citizens so inspiring today. Why these northern neighbors? Because they are trying through their actions to meet a primary shared objective—which is to build a sustainable urban environment that protects its natural resources—without losing sight of other priorities like efficiency, convenience and strengthening the bonds of family and community in their city.

And as if that weren’t enough, there is another wrinkle to the boldness that Torontonians are currently demonstrating. The City is partnering with tech giant Google on a key piece of data-driven redevelopment. As we admire them from afar, maybe we can also learn some lessons about how to test-drive a carbon-free future while helping that future to evolve with data we provide as we live and work. This fascinating and hopeful city is raising the kinds of questions that can only be asked when a place has the courage to stop talking about its convictions and start acting on them.

I was walking in lower Manhattan this week when I caught the sign above, encouraging me to bring my hand in for a palm reading.

I knew the fortuneteller wouldn’t find my future there, but she was probably right about one thing. Your prior experience is etched in the lines on your hands and your face. But as to where these lines will take you next, the story that Toronto is writing today is likely to provide better guidance than she will—and more information about the priorities to be weighed and measured along the way.

1. A Carbon-Free Future

Toronto has initiated two experiments, one is to gradually reduce its carbon footprint to nothing and the other is to build a community from the ground up with the help of data from its new residents. Both experiments are in the early stages, but they provide tantalizing glimpses into the places where we all might be living and working if we commit to the same priorities as Toronto.

When I’ve visited this City, it always seemed futuristic to me but not because of its built environment. Instead, it was its remarkably diverse population drawn in large numbers from every corner of the globe. Only later did I learn that over half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born, giving the place a remarkable sense of optimism and new beginnings.

Declaring its intention to radically reduce its use of fossil fuels, Toronto has taken a long stretch of King Street, one of the City’s busiest commercial and recreational boulevards, and implemented a multi-faceted plan that bans most private traffic, upgrades the existing streetcar system, concentrates new residential and commercial space along its corridor, and utilizes these densities and proximities to encourage both walking and public transportation for work, school, shopping and play.

In contrast to a suburban sprawl of large homes and distant amenities that require driving, Toronto’s urbanized alternative offers smaller living spaces, more contact with other members of the community, far less fuel consumption, and reclaimed spaces for public use that were once devoted to parking or driving. One hope is that people will feel less isolated and lonely as proximity has them bumping into one another more regularly. Another is that residents and workers visiting daily will become more engaged in public life because they’ll need to cooperate in order to share its more concentrated spaces.

Toronto’s King Street experiment envisions a time when all of its streets will be “pedestrianized.” There will still be cars, but fewer will be in private hands and those that remain will be rented as needed—anticipating the rise of on-call autonomous vehicles. Streets and roads will also remain, but they will increasingly be paid for by those who use them most, further reducing the need for underutilized roadways and freeing up space for other uses like parks and recreational corridors.

Toronto’s experiment in urban living also promotes a “sharing economy,” with prices for nearly everything reduced when the cost is shared with others. Academics like Daniel Hoornweg at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology have been particularly interested in using reduced prices to drive the necessary changes. It’s “sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you’re not there,” says Hoornweg. Eventually, the sharing economy that started with Uber and Airbnb will become almost second nature as it becomes more affordable and residents exchange their needs to own big homes and cars for other priorities like a sustainable environment, greater access to nature within an urban area, and more engagement over shared pursuits with their neighbors.

For a spirited discussion about Toronto’s King Street experiment that includes some of its strongest boosters, you can listen here to an NPR-Morning Edition segment that was broadcast earlier this week.

2. Toronto’s Quayside Re-Development

Much like in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post, some of Toronto’s most desireable waterfront areas have been isolated from the rest of its urban center by a multi-lane highway. In response, Toronto has set aside a particularly lifeless area “of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials” that’s spread over a dozen acres for the development of another urban experiment, this time in partnership with a “smart-cities” Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs. In October, a coalition of the City, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk to produce a $50 million design for a part of town that’s been renamed Quayside, or what Sidewalk calls “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”—a sensor-enabled, highly wired environment that promises to run itself.

According to a recent article in Politico (that you can also listen to), Quayside will be “a feedback-rich” smart city “whose constant data flow [will] let it optimize services constantly” because it is “not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but [also] shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars.” For example, in keeping with Toronto’s other pay-as-you-go priorities, one of Quayside’s features will be “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes that automatically separate out recyclables and charge households for their waste output.

Here are a couple of views of the future development, including tags on some of the promised innovations.

The new Quayside neighborhood in Toronto

A truly smart city runs on data that is generated from its inhabitants and behaviorally informed algorithms instead of on decisions that are made by Sidewalk’s managers or public officials. Not surprisingly, this raises a series of legal and quality of life questions.

On the legal side, those questions include: who owns the data produced by Sidewalk’s sensors and WiFi monitors; who controls the use of that data after it’s been generated; and whose laws apply when conflicts arise? On the issue of data privacy (and other potential legal differences), the Politico article notes that there are:

few better places to have this conversation than Canada, a Western democracy that takes seriously debates over informational privacy and data ownership—and is known for managing to stay polite while discussing even hot-button civic issues.

Moreover, because Canadians view personal privacy as a fundamental human right instead of one that can be readily traded for a “free” Gmail account or access to Google’s search engine, Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside will never be used to sell targeted advertising.

Undesirable human impacts from machine decision-making have also been raised, and Sidewalk is hoping to minimize these impacts by asking the City’s residents in advance for their own visions and concerns about Quayside. A year of consultations is already informing the initial plan.

Longer term, urbanists like Arielle Arieff worry about “the gap between what data can and cannot do” when running a neighborhood. Part of the beauty of city living is the connections that develop “organically”–chance occurrences and random encounters that a database would never anticipate. Arieff says: “They really do believe in their heart and soul that it’s all algorithmically controllable, but it’s not.” As if to confirm her suspicions, Sidewalk’s lead manager seems equally convinced that today’s technology can “optimize everyone’s needs in a more rational way.”

Given the expertise and perspective Toronto will be gaining from its King Street experiment and its citizens’ sensitivity to human concerns (like privacy) over efficiency concerns (like convenience), there is room for optimism that the City will strike a livable balance with its high tech partner. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has a significant incentive to get it right in Quayside. There is an adjacent and currently available 800-acre lot known as Port Lands, “a swath of problem space big enough to become home to a dozen new neighborhoods in a growing metropolis.”

To me, Toronto’s Quayside experiment seems to have little downside, with more serious issues arising in Sidewalk’s future smart city projects. Sidewalk may not be selling its Toronto data to advertisers, but it will be vastly more knowledgeable than other cities that lack either the rich pools of behavioral data it has accumulated in Toronto or the in-house expertise to interpret it. Among other things, this creates a power imbalance between a well-funded private contractor and underfunded cities that lack the knowledge to understand what they stand to gain or to forge a working partnership they can actually benefit from. Simone Brody, who runs the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ “What Works Cities” project, says: “When it comes to future negotiations, its frightening that Google will have the data and [other] cities won’t.”

But these are longer-range concerns, and there is reason today for cautious optimism that American regulators (for example) will eventually begin to treat powerful tech companies that are amassing and utilizing public data more like “utilities” that must serve the public as well as their own profit-driven interests. That kind of intervention could help to level the public-private playing field, but it’s also a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, Toronto’s boldness in experimenting its way to a future that champions its priorities through the latest innovations is truly inspiring. The cities and towns where the rest of us live and work have much to learn from Toronto’s willingness to claim the future it wants by the seat of its pants.

This post was adapted from my March 17, 2019 newsletter.