I 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.