Because you probably don’t not want to
March 12th, 2010 by Noisy
Thank you, no
City budget chief Shelley Carroll said I should run for Mayor (please don’t tell my anarchist friends. If you are my anarchist friends, please don’t… tell me?). For the whole race, Carroll has easily been the favoured candidate among people voting for people not actually running for Mayor. And it’s easy to see why - she is certainly running for Mayor far less than any of the other high-profile candidates, who, sources tell me, are all running for Mayor.
So, in the world of people not running for Mayor, she is something of a kingmaker, and if I’m not reading too much into a 140 character message (which I think we will agree is basically impossible), she has thrown her non-support behind my non-campaign, telling all the people who won’t have an opportunity to vote for her that they should really think of it as an opportunity to not have an opportunity to vote for me instead. And why not? I want the job even less than she does.
I don’t not want the job so little, in fact, that I have decided to step in to the ring and run the only campaign that could ever establish the passionate passivity people aren’t disinclined to imagine demanding of someone who could technically be Mayor if absolutely everyone else died. As Toronto member of the National Abdication Party, my platform will be simple: Once I am elected, I will resign.
Give me your vote: I don’t want it.
CANADA (is slashing childcare funding)! CANADA (supports torture)! CANADA (is an arbitrary pseudo-geographic entity created to facilitate the upward transference of wealth)!
March 1st, 2010 by NoisyThe most surprising thing to me about the victory of the People’s Glorious Skate Brigade would have to be just how many Team Canada members live in Toronto - almost all of them on College St. to boot. And they flew back here immediately after the game (before its ultimate resolution, in fact) just to spread the word. That shows spunk. And hustle. And… lack of respect for space-time.
“WE WON!” shout revelers in Little Italy. “WE WON!”
No, listen. The Olympic hockey match you just watched was in Vancouver. You and I are in Toronto. What you propose is impossible. That was some science I just did, there. Free of charge. No, don’t thank me. The fact that you didn’t vomit on my shoes is thanks enough.
I find all this Olympic revelry to be a fascinating study in cognitive dissonance. Canadian government’s approval of torture? Not our problem! Public money subsidizing the tar sands? We have better things to worry about! Genocide of First Nations people? In the past! It wasn’t us! Let it go! Gold medal in hockey? EVERY CANADIAN DID THIS WE ARE ALL THE BEST I AM JOINED IN SYRUPY ORGIASTIC UNITY WITH THE NATION STATE OF CANADAAAAAHHH OH MY GOD IT’S NEIL YOUNG I THINK
Look, while we’re all in A Mood, there are a great number of other things I also didn’t do which I would love to be getting public credit for right now regardless - and, honestly, some things I didn’t do but really should have, for which I might be able to use a little absolution. I’m not above the forgiveness of strangers.
What I’m saying is that I love the idea of all of us going out in to the street and meeting eachother. I just think I’d like it if we could stop shouting. And I must add: I think I might not want us to go back inside - at least, not until we’ve figured out a way to stop doing whatever it is we’ve been doing every day that makes us need such frantic cacophonic fantasy so badly every night.
What I’m saying is that I love the idea of all of us going out in to the street and being happy. I just think I’d like it if first we could all go out own up to also being rather sad. I think the latter will make the former ring so much more true. And I know that sounds simplistic. But so does everything you’re shouting right now - and honestly unless you start shouting poetry, I’d really like to just get some sleep.
The opposite of open
February 20th, 2010 by NoisyI was struck, recently, by a phrase written by one David Weinberg. In the context of the internet, he said, the opposite of ‘open’ isn’t ‘closed.’ “[T]he opposite of ‘open’ is ‘theirs.’”
By the same token I’d say the opposite of “engagement” isn’t “apathy.” It’s “exclusion.”
From what I can tell, Weinberg is part of the open source technology movement. In the last few years, Toronto has seen a real growth in a certain kind of activism driven by people rooted in that movement, and centred around increasing “collaboration” and “engagement” in existing civic structures. I’ve circled around at the edges, occasionally diving in to things like OpenCity, the Creative Spaces and Places conference, and the “Camp” scene. Most recently, there was ChangeCamp, focused on creating “toolkits” for civic engagement.
I go to these events feeling hopeful; I invariably leave feeling let down. And it’s led me to look further in to what we might mean when we speak of engagement or collaboration.
If we speak of collaboration, we’re speaking of open exchange between equals. So, if we say we want to increase collaboration, we’re really saying we want to address barriers to a wider free exchange between equals. Which means we’re talking about inequality. We’re talking about power, and its concentration. We’re talking about class.
I’d say I’m relatively “engaged,” politically. I read the news, from more than one source. I feel I’m familiar enough with their biases that when I read one, I have a sense of what I’m likely not being told; and I’d like to think I’m savvy enough to have some idea of where to look for the missing information.
I chat about “issues” with folks in the neighbourhood. I’m aware of at least a few matters of ongoing concern in my neighbourhood, city, country, hemisphere. If you mention a cause that interests you - poverty, city planning, food security - I could probably name a couple of local activists you might want to speak with, and might have their phone number. I’m on a first-name basis with a number of city Councillors and mid-level city staff.
I haven’t taken political engagement lessons, and at no point was I handed a political engagement toolkit. After all, I was born with one - and my upbringing transparently, by implication and unstated example, guided me daily in its use. I’ve been able to live my adult life as an ongoing, self-directed political engagement lesson.
Though technically hovering around the poverty line, I consider myself middle class: I have an intellectual inheritance, handed down in a good education, lifelong easy access to books, a stable home environment, and countless invisible reiterations of the presumed truth that, as a young white man with (relatively) stable economic support, I can do whatever the hell I like and I’m more or less welcome wherever I go.
(This invisible toolkit has already been called the invisible knapsack (PDF Link). It also seems not too different from what art critics might refer to as “funded experience.”)
And on any given day, I’ll informally encounter folks in the same situation without even leaving my neighbourhood. I didn’t struggle for this. I work for my paycheque, and it affords me the choice of an apartment in well-appointed neighbourhood flush with hipster intellectuals - and enough time to indulge in their leisurely company. You’d know us to see us: we have laptops. We spend hours in rooms that aren’t ours, drinking coffee we didn’t make ourselves. Most but not all of us are likely rather pale.
When we talk about political engagement, we’re talking about time. And if we’re talking about time, we’re really talking about class.
As far as my political engagement, I’ve had the privilege of - god help me - electively devoting hours, every week, for the last nine or ten years, to politics. (To be clear, that’s privilege: “benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most,” not necessarily privilege: “source of pleasure.”) And I get to choose the boundaries of that engagement. I can choose to restrict my definition of the political to procedural theatrics and ideological battles. I’ve rarely ever been forced to mix day-to-day politics with questions of how to put food on the table every night.
You don’t have the same time for politics - especially the rarefied and byzantine governmental sort - when you’re working multiple jobs to take care of multiple kids. You don’t have the same opportunity for political engagement (or at least certain privileged, non-confrontational kinds) if your neighbourhood doesn’t provide inviting, accessible, informal public spaces where you can languish unharrassed. And no new political system, no matter how collaborative, is going to change this on its own.
Of course, marginalized communities (be they formal or informal, be they marginalized by economics, gender, culture, skin colour, physical ability, or any combination of them all), do organize politically - and, in my experience, with more insight and vitality than any of us allowed to fetishize Politics as an identity (and precisely because it’s inconsequential to our survival.)
There are systemic reform projects at least partially rooted in this understanding. I Vote Toronto is pushing to allow non-status people (folks who live in Toronto but aren’t officially recognized as “citizens,” as if that means something) to vote in municipal elections; Better Ballots advocates for a move away from the “first-past-the-post” voting system, partially out of a belief that this will make a monochromatic Council more “representative” of the city it governs.
I support both initiatives, along with any challenge to the unintentional but effective white supremacy (let’s just call it what it is) on Council.
But I’m uncomfortable with the suggestion that because someone in power has roughly the same skin colour or general cultural background as members of certain communities that those communities are then “represented.” It verges on tokenism of the individual in power and - in glossing over differences in privilege that cut across community lines - homogenization of the community in question. And it says nothing of whether “representation” could ever be the same thing as - or even compatible with - real, actual engagement.
“Civic engagement toolkits,” “collaboration frameworks,” “open culture,” and other terms which just seem to naturally come shrink-wrapped in quote marks, are valuable things. Architecture defines spaces. The shape of a container defines what we can and can’t carry. And democracy will never be anything but an ideal if it occurs in discursive spaces not designed for genuinely horizontal and cyclical exchange. (That last sentence comes with bonus quote marks included, for you to insert as you feel: “” “” “”)
I’m all for reform of existing systems, but to what end? Not itself, hopefully - I don’t want to strengthen those systems, because I honestly can’t imagine them existing in a context of real social equality. And if we only tweak high-level political processes to make them more collaborative, we may just worsen that which we’re trying to alleviate: collaborative process makes a system more resilient, it’s true - and if we make the top of the pyramid more resilient, we are arguably presenting a threat to the majority of people toward the bottom.
We can’t increase collaboration without addressing privilege as a central concern, since privilege is by definition exclusive. But then, by the same token, we may be able to increase collaboration by dissolving privilege.
A more collaborative city would be one in which we could assume some certain basic rights: the right to safe affordable housing. The right to meaningful, creative work which enriches you and your community, pays you a living wage, and doesn’t take up too much of your time. The right to healthy, inspiring, engaging living environments. The right to socialization unmediated by artificial barriers of class or culture. The right for communities to have power over themselves, rather than simply (at best) have the ear of those who have the power.
Given these rights, there are many tools, it’s true, which could greatly amplify and enrich our natural abilities for working together. I am all for building those better tools, but only if we have something new in mind to build. If we aren’t talking about the roots of disempowerment, we’re at best spinning our wheels, and at worst hurting those we arrogantly seek to help - and ourselves.
Honestly, the marginalized and “under-represented” (”silenced” might be a better term in many cases) communities in Toronto don’t need anyone in situations of privilege, no matter how clever our deck-chair patterns. But those afforded privilege definitely need those who aren’t. Whether it’s because those labouring under marginalization have developed far more creative collaborative strategies just because it’s been necessary to survival, or because the thing which most excludes them from privilege - working the shit jobs - is the only way the politically privileged can be free to do what they do.
But there are ways in which procedural activism can be linked to actual struggle. When the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty researched and publicized the Special Diet Supplement (a welfare fund kept mostly secret by the province) and organized public clinics at which doctors helped people fill out forms entitling them to SDS money, they were working within the system to help people become less reliant on that system. The workers co-operative model - reorganizing new economic relationships within the shell of the existing economic system - also feels instructive.
People are social beings. We tend naturally toward collaboration. We don’t need to be taught how to do it. We need to not be taught how to not do it; we need - each of us, to widely varying degree - to be freed of countless, daily economic imperatives toward competition, deceit, and selfishness, and disengagement. The economy as it functions relies on disengagement of swaths of people. It enforces it. Suggesting otherwise, suggesting that lack of political engagement within certain communities is due to some inherent disinterest, rather than purposeful systemic barriers - or an understanding that the existing system is hostile toward their interests by design - just strikes me as counterproductive at best.
I don’t have any answers. I’m no working class hero. To be honest I’m not at all sure what the next steps are. But if some basic truths about power and its relationship to decision-making were at least being explicitly acknowledged by the capital-C collaboration crowd, I imagine that would go a long way toward its credibility. I think the true exciting challenge is how those of us in privilege can disassemble and dissolve our own privilege, without new forms showing up to fill the vacuum.
Your bias is showing
February 16th, 2010 by NoisyToronto’s operating budget, like a body floating into the portlands just before sunrise, approaches. So, it’s time for the the Toronto Sun to call us all “taxpayers” and complain about how stuff costs money.
The piece, though unremarkable in terms of content (Doug Holyday discovering something people could have not spent money on just means it’s a Monday), is an interesting little study of how objectivity works in the news media.
The tone is traditional J-School Disclamatory. The author himself is barely present; it’s “critics” who move the story, their expert observations which are dispassionately presented for our assumed benefit. But what about that term, “critics?” For such a dry, unremarkable, almost diminutive word, there’s tremendous privilege conferred.
Note the rhythm. First, we meet Shelley Carroll, budget chief. One individual - and not one with much of a voice, since there’s no quote. Then, we are introduced to “critics,” suggesting a large group of people joined in ther opposition to the likes of Shelley Carrol. When we meet Holyday and Minnan-Wong (who are quoted fulsomely, and without comment - more on that in a second), they are the implied representatives of this larger mass.
What if the term “Mayor’s opponents” had been used instead? How about the more specific but less ennobling, “Two of the Mayor’s right-wing opponents?” Or even just “fiscal conservatives?” “Privatization champions?” “Perennial axe-grinders?”
Savings could have been made by contracting out some services, limited hiring instead of 4,000 new staff added since 2003, and not letting unionized staff bank sick days, Minnan-Wong said.
There’s no reason to believe contracting out - privatizing - services is naturally cheaper, and there are cases when it increases costs. Most hiring has been to keep up with mandated service levels - legally required according to current arrangements with the province. And Minnan-Wong knows well that the sick day bank is being phased out by the strike settlement.
“Objectivity” - just print what the “experts” (who usually just happen to be in positions of jealously guarded power) say and let people decide for themselves - is easily exploited, by either politicians or reporters. In this case, it would appear to be both.
But really, I just came here to point out one wrinkle in particular which caught my eye:
The Toronto Police Services Board’s operating budget requires 4.8% or $41 million more than in 2009, Toronto Zoo’s board wants 3.2% or $500,000 more, the Toronto Public Library Board wants 3.9% or $6.4 million more, and Toronto Public Health has asked for an extra 1.7%, or $743,000.
Your money! The Zoo and Libraries want it; Public Health asks for it. But the police, whose budget dwarfs that of the other three combined? They require it.
As they say, the devil reflexive conservatism is in the details.
Skills I wish I could list on my job applications
January 23rd, 2010 by NoisyHave been madly in love (2001 - 2009, excepting brief sabbatical); Interest in both Buddhism and alt country not entirely faddish; Once sat a few seats down from Al Pacino in a theatre.
Starting to get a handle on emotional problems; possibly coming to grips w/ own mortality; Doing dishes pretty regularly now.
Stopped thinking, “She wants me” when women tell me I dropped my hat; No longer guiding every casual conversation back to the exploitative nature of capitalism; Grew up at some point and it’s working out OK I guess.
Established commitment to making ill-fated attempts at real human connection w/ co-workers (references available); Long tradition of treating children like actual people; proven track record of not lying to dogs; CLEAR ABILITY TO NEED MONEY TO EAT SWEET GIBBERING FUCK GIVE ME A JOB YOU PREENING APPARATCHIK
Cubism goes to war
November 22nd, 2009 by Noisy
The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up.
“Creative Class,” or class (re)creation?
November 5th, 2009 by NoisyMy latest print piece is out today. It was intended to be another, clearer - and hopefully less negative - piece inspired by the Creative Places and Spaces conference. But who knows? It mostly ended up being about Richard Florida.
When Florida speaks of the need to involve everyone in generating wealth, especially workers, it’s perfectly genuine.
But can’t we do better than “wealth”? He relates a conversation with an executive from Toyota, which was opening factories in the Midwest while the Big Three were shuttering theirs. “’We harness the creativity of each of the workers on our factory floor,’” the exec told Florida, who elaborates: “The workers themselves form teams; they improve the process themselves without an engineer telling them what to do.”
In other words, new responsibility flowed downward. But I’ll bet you clunkers to cash that the new profits still flowed upward. That’s “collaboration?” In my day we called it exploitation. And we said it over the telephone. And the phone had a cord.
I would very much like to like Richard Florida. Honestly. He occupies a somewhat undefined - and therefore potentially powerful - space. I’m just never sure who it is he thinks he’s speaking to; and call me old-school, but I don’t think you get to talk about some vaunted “creative class” until you’ve proven you can actually talk about class, period.
In one way, he reminds me of McLuhan: it seems as though he’d like to be working with activists, yet it’s mostly businesspeople who have any idea what to do with him. (The difference, of course, is no one ever had any idea what to do with McLuhan, even if they thought they did.)
Of collaboration
November 2nd, 2009 by NoisyI spent Thursday and Friday at the Creative Places and Spaces conference, where both imagination and Kool Aid flowed in roughly equal proportion. The theme was “Collaborative Cities.” When I left, I had no more idea of what that meant than when I showed up. Maybe that wasn’t the point.
To me, collaboration implies a coming-together of disparate energies and viewpoints; and, if we’re going to turn it into a capital-letter fetish object, the meausre of a “Collaborative” society would seem to relate to the initial distance between the participants, and the ability to identify and bridge these distances. Otherwise it’s just called “working together,” which is something you can really only avoid if you make an active effort these days.
There was, as expected, a preponderance of “social media” types, and my question for them remains the same as always: how did the telephone, the megaphone, even the soap box, never qualify as “social media?” The term as we use it often just seems to apply to tools used by those of us in certain privileged, technology-enabled social groups, and “collaboration” used in the same context seems, with some exceptions, to mean not so much a dissolving of barriers as an expansion of this particular caste in to government and Non-Profit circles, and them into it.
From where I sit, admittedly on the outside, it appears largely as the already upwardly-mobile strategizing ways to become horizontally mobile. I don’t think it’s even much of a stretch to make a limited analogy to mega-corporations dissolving national barriers in the name of “globalization” but functionally in the service of ecological destruction and class conflict.
Don’t misunderstand - a number of the folks and organizations in this nascent “Open” milieu (open source, open data, open cities, open government) have genuinely progressive goals and ideals, and even occasional designs on wealth-redistribution. But others just want to have fun, make money, and accelerate the process of turning “world cities” in to playgrounds for them and their friends. And unfortunately, the former seems so fare unwilling or unable to coherently call the latter on their limitations.
I’m genuinely excited that there are people with access to power and resources talking about making collaboration a guiding principle of urban society. I’m also worried that without addressing some basic questions about who has the privilege to engage in a technologically-mediated, time-intensive paradigm grounded in “social networks” (ie., neutral-sounding, refractory subsets of what we used to just call “class”), it’ll end up as just yet another way to recapitulate old power relations under a new guise. Lipstick on a pig. A green roof on a slaughterhouse.
Collaboration can only happen among equals, and equality these days is at more of a premium than square footage in a waterfront condo. If we’re not addressing this, what’s new? In polite society, we’re not supposed to point out that there is still a class war raging across the globe, and urban regions are becoming its primary theatre. There was at least a flickering, vestigial recognition of this among some attendees - including, surprisingly enough, Mr. 14:59 himself, Richard Florida - but it needs to be articulated more clearly, and it needs to be recognized that many partisans of “collaboration” are placed, not by desire, but by default, by the nature of the economy, within the circle of the agressors. Otherwise, I fear the warm and fuzzy principle of “collaboration” will only come to evoke echoes of its historically more sinister cousin: every ugly conflict, after all, has always had its “collaborators.”
I’m still going through audio from the conference for a piece in the print edition of this week’s NOW Magazine. In the meantime, here are a few exemplary quotes I jotted down during the conference sessions:
THE GOOD
“We have a saying at tamarack: fear not communities that have no leaders, fear communities that need them.” - Paul Born, founder, Tamarack
“Collaboration is a fundamental violation of ‘command and control’… it’s a non-market exchange.” - David Wolfe, U of T
“If this were kindergarten, we’d say [of Toronto government], ‘Doesn’t play well with other people.’” - David Wolfe again
“[Digital society means] we can collaborate with whomever we want to, at any time– we’re also becoming very segregated, in that we get to choose who we can collaborate with… Go find people that you don’t know, who your life doesn’t let you cross paths with. Ask them what it’s like for them.” - Katerina Cizek, NFB’s filmmaker-in-residence at St. Mike’s hospital, director of The Interventionists
THE BAD
“360 degree thinking [is] going to change the world.” - Tom Wujec
Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t “360 degree thinking” sound like something that would just naturally lead to “talking in circles?”
“Collaboration is as simple as sex. It’s coming together and becoming more. It is who we are as beings.” - Paul Born
It’s a nice analogy, as far as it goes. We’ll assume he was talking about consensual sex, of course - which, unfortunately, is precisely where the analogy collapses. The majority of people with less power or (class, race, gender, pick a card, any card) privilege don’t get to truly “come together,” despite pretty frequently getting fucked.
“There are some people who [incorrectly] look at service as subservience” - Ken Robinson
We call these people pessimists. Others look at it as a chance to steal Ken Robinson’s chequebook. We call these people optimists.
THE RICHARD FLORIDA
“Neoconservatism isn’t about foreign policy… it’s about an attempt to control the cities.”
He’s right about that, even if The Stranger beat him to it by about five years.
[Farmers in the exodus from rural lands to cities at the end of the 19th century] “came to cities to be themselves.”
Turns out a lot of farmers were, in their heart of hearts, displaced and newly landlesss wage slaves. Some people live their whole lives without ever discovering this about themselves. Thanks, rural displacement!
“People [newly immigrating to cities] will pack themselves in tighter and tighter spaces - for collaboration.”
Rooming-house bedbugs also offer unprecedented opportunities for Parasite-Hemoglobin Synergy.
THE TWEETS
Participants regularly posted thoughts to the #cpands hashtag on Twitter; most of them were streamed live on monitors throughout the conference venues.
“As Pier Giorgio [Di Cicco, Toronto's former Poet Laureate] warned, be wary that govt/Corp world doesn’t just adopt “collaboration” as buzzword without structural change.” - Jowi Taylor of Six String Nation, @SixStringNation
It would be lovely to have an opposing view on this panel. The opinions are valued but the audience has koolaid smiles on. - @jasoneano
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
“Collaboration means giving something up. And it’s the people without the power who usually have to give up the most.” - Jacqueline Gijssen, Senior Cultural Planner with the City of Vancouver, who wasn’t speaking at the conference, but who I (gladly) spoke to near the end
Specific groups of not less than 15
October 16th, 2009 by NoisySeeking defeat in victory
August 6th, 2009 by NoisyRounding out my coverage of the 2009 city workers’ strike, a little screed on right-wing Councillors’ latest organized attempt to shit where they eat. Why? Because, hey, Mayor Miller has to eat there too.
« Older EntriesThe right lost yet another battle on Friday, July 31, when it failed to defeat the Miller-sponsored settlement with TCEU 416 and CUPE 79. But to the sink-the-mayor faction, the war is one of attrition.
The space for rational discourse shrank. The leftmost border of the reasonable shuffled right. And lefty columnists are now in the awkward position of having to defend the strike deal as progressive.
