Some thoughts on the occasion of the G20 summit in Toronto.
The police presence and violent protest were both of a scale unprecedented for this city. The security cost, at over $1 billion, was also unprecedented in the history of the G-summits and is unlikely to ever be equalled.
Much ink will be shed on the taxonomy of protesters (a term which, apparently, also now includes opportunist vandals with no policy demands), the validity of their various motives and the contemptible nature of their actions. Equally, the actions of individuals among the tens of thousands of police involved will be put under the microscope.
Both those debates will prove fruitless. To me, it is more important to see the three outsized aspects of the event—police presence, violence and cost—as foreseeable consequences of the unnecessary and astoundingly poor choice of a venue for the summit.
I have heard two believable theories about how the choice was made: ignorance and spite.
The 'ignorance' theory was advanced on CBC's The Current by Deborah Cowen of the University of Toronto. She noted that the Conservative government, with almost no seats in Toronto, Montréal or Vancouver, has an essentially rural background on which it draws and little firsthand knowledge about how large cities actually are. The implication is that they might have honestly but falsely believed that the effect of promoting Toronto, Ontario and/or Canada would outweigh any disruption caused by security measures and protests.
The 'spite' theory (of my more cynical friends) holds that the disruption was expected and anticipated by the government. In this view, the decision was to be seen—and appreciated—by the Conservatives' rural base as a giant middle finger raised towards Toronto and its citizens.
The first explanation wins by Ockham's Razor, at least; but whichever is more accurate, it is certain the decision was made for political, not economical (read: cost-saving) reasons.
To explain a bit more why I think the choice was 'astoundingly poor,' and the consequences 'predictable' I will channel Jane Jacobs, late Torontonian, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities I recently read and enjoyed. Any errors in my paraphrase of her writings are, of course, my own.
One of Jacobs' criteria for distinguishing Great (very big, large scale; important) Cities is diversity of use. On a summer weekend in Toronto, the downtown streets might be used by shoppers, baseball fans, theatregoers, businesspeople, diners, marketers, people-watchers, store clerks, deliverymen, walkers, those passing through to the lake or parts west, east or north, local residents, café patrons, cyclists, taxi drivers, buskers, runners, transit staff, and a whole cast of others my imagination is too weak to summon. The vast majority of these people are strangers to one another, but their mere presence civilizes the streets, so that events like the 2005 Boxing Day shooting of Jane Creba are truly rare, unexpected and shocking.
Jacobs contrasts diverse use with the atmosphere in single-use residential projects, where the same advantages (many eyes at all hours) are not enjoyed and, not coincidentally, comparatively more gang-related violence occurs.
During an event like the current summit, normal usage is suppressed. Within the security perimeter, there is no use at all by locals. Security measures impede normal use in surrounding areas, so that the Blue Jays and theatres take their business elsewhere or cancel whole performances (even at large cost). People who would have attended these larger events have no reason to be in the same areas for meals and other secondary activities. The secondary businesses they would have frequented, always sensitive to demand, run reduced staffs, further depleting the stock of people on the streets. And so on. In the current, extraordinary situation, even residents flee who are able to stay with friends in the suburbs or out of town.
Note that at no point is a collective decision made along the lines of, "Let's turn over the streets to rioters!"; instead, the deadening is an aggregate result of reasonable responses by normal individuals.
The few uses that remain can be numbered on one hand: peaceful protesting, spectating (both amateur and professional), policing and violence. The dead streets are a boon only to those engaged in the latter two activities, who find it easier to identify members of the other groups without actual citizens around.
Without any hysterics about professional anarchists or police agents provocateurs, then, it is easy to see why emptying the city invites situations that would be impossible under everyday circumstances. That this conclusion can be reached on the basis of accessible, popular writing from the 1960s makes me doubt that no one in government raised an objection to the choice of location. Mayor David Miller and other representatives of the city claim openly that they put forward the Exhibition grounds (which, note, are already largely empty) as an alternative.
Those voices were obviously disregarded when the decision was made, and that disregard is the root cause of everything we have witnessed.
Recently several people have expressed frustration, within hearing range, over infuriating actions of large companies. For example, Apple's practice of generating excessive hype for unremarkable hardware by applying a spot of polish and a kiloton of marketing. Aggressive lawsuits and patent trolling are another instance. Attacks on the reputability of excellent sources of journalism are a third.
The corporation is a paradox. Unlike the human beings that own and work for it, the corporate entity can be physically massive and far-reaching, to the point of incomprehensibility. We are hard-pressed to even picture Toyota's 300,000 employees, or the 9 million cars it sells annually. Conversely, while the behaviour of their employees and investors as individuals is complex, corporate 'behaviour' is very simply-motivated.
In fact, it is not reductio ad absurdum to say that nearly all business ventures have a single purpose: to generate a return on investment. This is an ineluctable truth, their raison d'être.
With this in mind, we see that it is unreasonable to treat corporate behaviour as if it were human behaviour. "Singly-motivated" humans are frequently described as insane. Likewise, it is unreasonable to describe corporate behaviour using the human qualities of hypocrisy, audacity, justice, honesty, fairness, consistency, etc.
On the other hand, lower life forms, which respond predictably to changes in their environment, are a good model. If I say that ivy will put roots in weak mortar, unable to know that such action will cause the wall on which it lives to collapse, you can begin to see my meaning.
Bacterial colonies can be made to commit suicide by consuming all the food in a closed container. Similarly, when the return on investment is demanded quickly, the corporation can be expected shoot itself in the foot by generating short-term profit and ignoring (or actively denying) the possibility of long-term repercussions.
There are, of course, attempts to quantify the human impact of corporate activities. In such discussions you hear the terms goodwill, corporate social responsibility, ethical consumerism, and so on. But at root these are ways of assigning monetary value to efforts to limit profit-reducing public backlash against corporate actions which are seen as 'evil'. In nature, small creatures will avoid the unwanted attention of predators and competitors.
Applying this sort of analysis doesn't reduce the human damage often caused by corporate actors, but it certainly renders most instances unsurprising. The comparison works best for larger companies, in which the actions of the whole are most divorced from any good intent of the many individual employees. It also explains why we tend to see fewer 'inhumane' behaviours from non-profit organizations and charities. Freed of the overriding imperative to generate returns, these entities can adopt decision-making structures that tend to increase other outcomes.
Finally, to my mind, the analogy clarifies the issue of public versus private provision of government services. To shoehorn the positive societal impacts we expect from certain government programs into the measure of profit or return on investment is often inappropriate. Even where it is, private service providers can only be expected to yield the desired outcome if the direction of increased return is carefully aligned with more positive societal impact. On the other hand, as outlined above, the same providers can be expected to find all new ways of generating returns which do not necessarily correspond to any societal improvement—bursting like so many blades of grass through cracks in the figurative pavement.
I have almost finished reading the brilliant book Beyond Growth by the economist Herman Daly. It is worth quoting at length:
We have three economic problems to consider: allocation, distribution and scale.
Allocation refers to the apportioning of resources among alternative product uses—food, bicycles, cars, medical care. An allocation is efficient if it corresponds to effective demand, that is, the relative preferences of the citizens as weighted by their relative incomes, both taken as given. An inefficient allocation will use resources to produce a number of things that people will not buy, and will fail to produce other things that people would buy if only they could find them. It would be characterized by shortages of the latter and surpluses of the former.
Distribution refers to the apportioning of goods produced (and the resources they embody) among different people (as opposed to different commodities). Distributions are just or unjust; allocations are efficient or inefficient. There is an efficient allocation for each distribution of income.
Scale refers to the physical size of the economy relative to the ecosystem. The economy is viewed, in its physical dimensions, as a subsystem of the larger ecosystem. Scale is measured as population times per capita resource use—in other words total resource use—the volume of the matter/energy throughput (metabolic flow) by which the ecosystem sustains the economic subsystem. Scale may be sustainable or unsustainable. An efficient allocation does not imply a just distribution. Neither an efficient allocation or a just distribution, nor both, implies a sustainable scale.
The three concepts are quite distinct, although relations among them exist, as noted above.
(I had planned to write on this topic, but instead put a gift card towards this purchase—a lucky choice, in hindsight. Usually I am happier to read on new topics than to share my clumsy initial thoughts. Experience is starting to show this is a good habit.)
Daly points out that economics and the problem of scale cannot escape elementary thermodynamics. Human economic activity takes low-entropy matter & energy as input and produces high-entropy wastes. The ecosystem has a limited ability to convert the latter to the former. He also hints that the scale of the economy is unsustainable, or will soon be at current rates of growth. There are also a number of elegantly simple diagrams I will surely reproduce and reuse.
The very clear explanations lend weight to a number of incubating personal beliefs:
These considerations motivate major changes, but of course they don't mean that we must choose to be unhealthy, uncomfortable, hungry or unhappy.
More (hopefully) soon.
I stumbled across a short but fascinating work by the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called variously the The Art of Controversy or The Art of Being Right. Wikisource has one version; another site has what seems to be the same English text alongside the original German. Read it in full!
His topic is controversial dialectic:
...the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one's own, whether one is in the right or the wrong—per fas et nefas. A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst.
The prefatory rationale for this discussion is interesting, but more useful are the thirty-eight tactics proposed in the body of the work. For example, here is #24 ("State a false syllogism"):
This trick consists in stating a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; nay, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are inconsistent either with themselves or with some acknowledged truth, and so it appears to be indirectly refuted. This is the diversion, and it is another application of the fallacy non causae ut causae.
I have no idea of the popularity of this work among modern politicians, but even if they are entirely unaware, Schopenhauer literally wrote the book on argumentation—in 1831! The presentation is neutral, but I am inclined to read it as a spotter's guide to dishonest debate. Of statements by public figures and the online commentariat which infuriate me, not a single example falls outside his categories.
Armed with this knowledge, I have been able to point out the underlying fallacies or distractions when I see these methods in use, instead of falling prey to them. Often the author retreats from an unsupportable claim. When I prepare arguments myself, I check to see that I am giving my case honestly, and not using these shortcuts to merely appear persuasive via distraction.
Some time ago I stumbled across the following:
Despite the objections of purists and the present high cost, it's clear that this is the way of the future. Reviews point out the sophistication of the electronic control; for example, the cages adjust slightly when cross-shifted (an outer gear at the crank and an inner gear at the rear cassette, or vice versa) to eliminate the familiar rattle. The rear derailleur also overshoots so that the chain is driven into the new gear quickly.
Only professional cyclists could have the finesse to do this through delicate control of conventional shift levers, and I know I would be never be capable—certainly not while pounding up the steep hill on Walmer Road, near Casa Loma.
This, and other other innovations such as Cervélo's hidden rear brake and powerful, two-watt LED front lights suggest further ideas:
A more modest idea is a crankset side light. Many cranksets (including the FSA Omega on my 2008 Kona Jake) have one arm—on the side opposite the chainrings—clamped around a hollow axle that passes through the bottom bracket. The tube is covered by a small dust cap. Instead of the cap, insert a small device with a dynamo, battery, and a single, blinking LED. This side light would serve the same purpose as spoke-mounted reflectors.
The general concept is that small accessories don't require huge, or any, batteries. By efficiently diverting a fraction of the rider's output, electronic parts can be powered reliably whenever a bicycle is in motion.
To avoid the taint of modernity, I'll lie and say that a friend once remarked, apropos of nothing, "'Welcome' mat in an empty field."
Some weeks later, I was walking behind the University of Toronto Press warehouse on Dufferin when I saw the item in question. It was about noon early in the summer, before the oppressive, July-August Toronto heat scorched the colour out of the city. There was a welcome mat sitting on a low, grassy hill, where the back of the warehouse faces G. Ross Lord Park and the West Don River.
What strikes me now is the minimalism with which the idea was conveyed.
Were I first to see it, I might have tried to write haiku. Another friend, a photographer, would have stepped back and pulled out his DSLR camera for a shot, which to the average Flickr browser would have even odds of being carefully staged. Others I know would write contemplative short fiction.
Instead the concept was presented bare, without even an imperative — "Imagine an...", or, "Ask me where you can see the..." — anchored only by the unmentioned existence of the thing referred to. It took me some time to realize the elegance of this method.
And, full disclosure: It was his instant messaging status!
At the risk of stating the obvious, democratic government is unlike running a business in a number of important ways. David Olive gives one of the similarities in his excellent blog at the Toronto Star:
It is the death of any commercial enterprise to starve itself of necessary expenditures on R&D, new-product development and marketing. I'll never understand how today's conservatives fail to make that connection, slavishly devoted as they claim to be to free-market principles. Maybe it's because so few of them have run a business. Or had to make their way in the private sector - as I do - without being subsidized by a Rupert Murdoch, the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation.
Incompetence is universal. It should be evident that the architects of such spectacular failures as the overdue Boeing 787 project, the GM bankruptcy or the Wall Street meltdown would do no better in public office, where oversight is more open but less effective. However, even successful companies are usually inappropriate models for government.
Choose Apple, for example, whose innovation and focus on design has made it wildly successful and won it hordes of fans who might well vote for a President Steven P. Jobs. But the breath-taking, march-stealing nature of Apple's product launches depends on a rigid and well-documented culture of secrecy. As much as politicos might envy the impact of Apple announcements, they would be ill-advised to try and duplicate it. Funding announcements without stakeholder input will miss the mark and be ineffective; unannounced funding and/or cuts make the granting government look guilty when they are inevitably unearthed.
Yet governing parties at all levels, in Canada and elsewhere, continue think they can engineer positive surprises and suppress negative ones—and they continue to fail in doing so.
You can observe a number of common privacy tactics among your friend with an online presence:
I use none of the above. If identify theft is a concern, they will foil only casual (harmless) attempts. As for sharing details of one's personal life, it is mostly pretentious to expect they are consequential, or that large numbers of others will be interested in them. I—and certainly others—often neglect life proper, so why further the problem by spending time writing about it?
Alternate identities are another easy target. We spend entire phases of our lives struggling with identity, so maintaining a second (or third, or fourth) introduces needless complications. Where concerns about one's employer motivate anonymity, there is doubtless a value conflict that deserves close examination.
Having grown up before the advent of cyber-bulling and, being male, unlikely to be the target of sexual violence, I am no doubt privileged in being able to hold these views. Still, I firmly believe in consistency and honesty of online identity.
Finally, the Walrus (after disappointing in May) redeems itself with this excellent short story by Zsuzsi Gartner in its September issue. Delicious! If the quality of writing remains so high for a full year, I can quit whining forever.
The May issue of The Walrus contained this article by Daniel Stoffman. An illustrative quote:
Because they are amateurs, homegrown terrorists prefer soft, undefended targets — a restaurant rather than a military installation, a bus rather than a hydro dam. And because they are part of the community, they are hard to detect. “We have cases of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants converting to the most radical forms of Islam..."
The author perhaps hopes you will supply your own, "...because we all know white Anglo-Saxons could never be terrorists." The paragraph also opens with one of many misleading or patently false assertions about terrorism and terrorists.
Stoffman seems to be an author of xenophobic books, a troll and doubtless enjoys spitting in people's soup—so be it. I would still read his writing, and gladly, if it were at all constructive. What distresses me most is that The Walrus has chosen to waste ink on the cheap sensationalism, fearmongering and demagoguery of publications I deliberately choose to avoid supporting. Instead, strive for forward-looking, intelligent, creative discussion. Publish the controversial, by all means, but don't publish the merely bad.
If you like, read
more of my disappointed logorrhea on The Walrus' website.
I have been involved in a number of small organizations in which I held either explicit or de facto roles as a director of communications or webmaster. These include the Iron Dragons, the University of Toronto Engineering Society, the Leaders of Tomorrow Working Group (WG) for Engineering Science and later the Graduate WG, as well as project groups for several courses.
As a web development tinker, I have been able to introduce a number of tools to these groups, including:
Some thought processes are useful when choosing and deploying such tools.
Identify the spanning set. I have written about this previously. Technology needs to be applied judiciously. For example, using MediaWiki for most small projects is a little bit like sandblasting a soup cracker. Ask yourself the following questions:
The answers should help guide your selection of software tools for the organization. Further, once you have committed to a tool, they may govern how you use its features. Larger Drupal websites rely on interlocking contributed modules, configuration and theming. Often there are many ways to skin a cat; instead of using the first you come across, research and make a careful choice.
Question the need for control. Not every organization is committed to being an Open Organization, but many would do better to try. Consider information:
- Regular reports - Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
- Information accessible - Even internal operational information is available by default.
- Explicit confidentiality - It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who access them.
The first is often a requirement; especially in representative (student) government, where reporting of minutes is a mechanism for accountability. Even in smaller groups, #3 can be useful. By acknowledging and delineating what information is shared, you defend the organization against the unpredictable actions of members who feel they are being shut out of decisions they care strongly about. Finally, #2 can serve two purposes; the first is recruiting. The casual visitor may be enticed if (s)he sees something intriguing; it would take considerable effort to replicate this effect through deliberate marketing. In groups whose activities include leadership development, internal operational information further serves as evidence of the development process, as well as fodder for reflection.
In using software, implementing access control to hide certain information is always extra work. With the above principles in mind, question why it is necessary to maintain separate and perhaps dissonant sets of information for internal and external audiences.
Use Free Software. Call this bias if you like, but it is more reasonable to point your successors to http://openoffice.org than to expect them to have access to a (questionably legal) "copy" of Word. If your organization is a business, the former practice does away with worries about software piracy.
Free software is not without its faults, however, one of which is that it develops in an ecosystem. Projects which fail to attract users stagnate and ultimately disappear. Balance the features of available alternatives against the apparent health of their community; as with proprietary software, avoid "vendor lock-in". If the community behind your current software seems to be dying, migrate out.
Plan for the future. What is your level of knowledge in web development and software administration? Can you expect your successors to reliably be as knowledgeable? Even if not, favour simpler configurations which are more easily maintained. Perhaps this entails (where it means no inefficiency elsewhere) changing practice in your organization to suit the stock behaviour of some software.
Documentation is invaluable. Even if your own knowledge was assembled from hours of schizophrenic Googling, save and share a collection of links. Spend a few hours recalling problems which at first had you stymied, and explain how you overcame them. Keep this documentation in the simplest possible form, to remove any barrier to your successors in updating it.
It is the organization, and not you, which learns lessons. Do what is necessary to ensure the organization's future behaviour reflects them. The alternative is that your successor, knowing no better, will repeat your rookie mistakes, undo your hard work, and—worst of all—potentially damage the organization's data.
Work hard. If you find yourself grappling with these issues, you have already decided that your organization can communicate more effectively and therefore work better with the use of technology. But you need to do more than simply mentioning as many Web 2.0 social networking sites as you can in one breath ("FacebookMySpaceTwitterYouTubeDigg..."). Indeed, shoddy work can mean an unintuitive setup that will create an aversion reaction in your peers, at which point you have immunized the organization against all technology. The only course is to do the hard work necessary to get a good suite of tools which are accepted and adopted.
Public policy is a growing personal interest, building on my background in engineering, my morbid fixation with local, provincial and federal politics, and a view for leadership.
This term I have a fascinating graduate course in Engineering & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. While much of the material would likely cause the reader's eyes to glaze over, I hope to write about some situations that motivate the use of policy.
My mother grew up in what was essentially farmland in Aurora, Ontario in the 1950s and '60s. School always involved a long bus ride; the nearest neighbours were miles away. Her love of the outdoors led our family to own a ski chalet on 8 acres of land in upstate New York in the '90s, and for decades she has enjoyed an annual, week-long canoe trip with several women her age to one of Ontario's many parks. The works of the Group of Seven are among her favourite art.
I, on the other hand, have resolved never to own a car, which mostly confines my working life to urban areas. I am still interested in living in a Japanese-style one-bedroom apartment, the sort that tend to be too small for even a shower (a nearby bathhouse substitutes). Bicycle activism interests me, and recently I use 'driver' as an ephithet more often that not. Despite these contrasts I find that I share a high valuation of nature, of open spaces away from civilization, of the pristine. I cycle, ski, run and dragon boat because I love being outdoors. Nature's majesty has an unrivalled capacity to awe me.
Whereas earlier generations, especially in North America, had a concept of nature as bountiful and boundless, we are aware today of the limits of our planet. Conventional wisdom has it that a person is entitled to his own homestead, his plot of land, or at least his suburban home on a large lot. When space is plentiful, this is excellent—if each child had his own patch of woods to tromp through, we would surely have better mental health overall.
In Mississauga, where I grew up, there is no longer empty land; every hectare within the city limits has been zoned, and much of it for housing. The consequence is sprawl; youth who feel disconnected from communities they cannot traverse without a license and a vehicle; poor public transit in areas with density too low to support frequent service. Development, far from ceasing, continues in Brampton and other municipalities further from downtown Toronto.
I don't think this should be interpreted to mean that we no longer value nature. Imagery of the Great White North is central to our national identity and we are loath to abandon it. Nor are the developers and new homeowners inherently evil. Instead, I feel, our behaviour has been slow to change and no longer suits our values.
The course has confirmed my distaste for the varieties of conservatism that favour small government and markets. In the Greater Toronto Area, the de facto policy of letting the housing market alone has only allowed the efficient paving of large areas of green land. Yet the market provides no incentive to use instruments of collective benefit (parks, transit and multiple dwellings) over those of individual benefit (backyards, cars and individual homes). Thus the need for progressive policy. Looking to Western Europe and East Asia we can see myriad examples of both success and failure in this policy space, and we have the luxury of adapting the former to our own cities.
Thus also I can reconcile my 'city mouse' predilections with my 'country mouse' values. When wilderness and nature—the urban park, the lakeshore, the ski slopes and national parks a few hours away—are within easy reach, urban living need not feel confined or artificial.