Towards a more democratic Sidewalk Toronto
Any improved vision of Sidewalk Toronto must involve less power imbalances and more democracy.
Sidewalk Labs — the Google-funded, New York based firm working on a technology-centric neighbourhood plan in Toronto — held its second public roundtable last week. We are now halfway through the year-long consultation period before construction plans are approved. The corporate vision from Sidewalk Labs continues to rely on lots of buzzwords and rhetorical hyperbole (e.g. people-first streets, affordable housing, better mobility, improved livability, etc.), but there are still no tangible technology plans to debate. In July, we’ll get a “sketch”, whatever that means. In the meantime, there are literally hundreds of unanswered questions.
In the absence of details, we’re left to guess at Sidewalk Labs’ motives. Enter Marc Depape, who wrote last week about the current vision of Sidewalk Toronto, based on his interviews for a job at Sidewalk Labs. In the article, he explains what his job interview taught him about Sidewalk Labs’ greater ambitions, why the project amounts to a form of corporate welfare, and what Waterfront Toronto could do to better protect the public interest. Marc concludes that a corrected vision for Sidewalk Toronto would involve the implementation of five major strategic changes to the project by Waterfront Toronto, which I’ve paraphrased as:
- Reduce Sidewalk Labs’ role from a “strategic partner” to just another vendor.
- Force Sidewalk Labs to compete with or outright hire Toronto-based tech talent to build out aspects of a digital infrastructure.
- Ensure that the digital infrastructure is owned, operated and managed like a public utility.
- Leverage the digital infrastructure platform to accrue equity, almost like a public trust.
- Pay out the equity as a ‘digital dividend’ in the form of venture capital investments in start-ups, services firms, universities, government agencies, and independent contractors.
These five recommendations are an excellent start to change the shape of the Sidewalk Toronto city building project, and could represent urgent political calls to action for an organized, collective group of residents, activists and interested parties.
That said, these recommendations don’t address the economics of platform capitalism l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶n̶e̶o̶l̶i̶b̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶h̶e̶g̶e̶m̶o̶n̶y̶ [1] that brought us Sidewalk Labs. If we’re going to attack the root of the problem that Sidewalk Labs represents in city building, we need to be specific about an innovation process that involves less lobbying, fewer technocrats, more accountability, more transparency and more real people making real decisions. The best way to get there is with an intentional increased focus on democracy.
The Waterfront Toronto track record on democracy is spotty at best.
Waterfront Toronto has made admirable efforts to work in the public interest, but there are signs that their brand of public accountability isn’t enough. They chose Sidewalk Labs without broad, public, democratic consultation. They have weak transparency policies. They appoint unelected advisory panels as a proxy for democratic decision making. Their Board of Directors is not as racially or socioeconomically diverse as the rest of Toronto. Some of these problems exist in all democratic institutions, but Waterfront Toronto shouldn’t hide behind that excuse — they are funded by all three levels of government in Canada, which makes their accountability to residents all the more relevant.
Marc suggests that Waterfront Toronto should play the role of an angel investor or venture capitalist, overseeing investments in a new digital platform. This presumes that technology production is a venture, and the only problem in the current partnership is that the power imbalance is on the wrong side of the public-private fence. In reality, the problem is that there is too much money and power on both sides of the fence.
A Waterfront Toronto venture capital arm opens the door to more back-room lobbying and more closed-door decision making. The answers to the problems associated with privately funded foreign venture capitalists do not lie in the hands of publicly funded local venture capitalists. We don’t want to swap out a handful of New York City technocrats with a handful of Waterfront Toronto executives, most of whom have extensive private sector backgrounds. This will only return us back to the core problem of an unusually large amount of authority and power concentrated in the hands of fewer people, with less transparency or accountability for ventures that are being funded.
When we’re discussing public money — taxes, dividends, user fees — we must have public accountability. That can only happen when spending is controlled by a democratically elected entity. And if there is one thing the current consultation process is teaching us, it is that Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs are not practicing real democracy.
The current consultation model is vertically oriented and unequal.
Since the beginning, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs have both used language and made decisions that have the look and feel of a meritocracy or a technocracy more than a democracy. When there are privacy concerns, Waterfront Toronto turns to a thought leader in privacy rights. When there is a democratic governance deficit, Waterfront Toronto attempts to form a pseudo-government of thought leaders. Even the mere idea of seeking out a global innovation partner suggests that there is a vertical hierarchy of ideas, and our job is to find the “best” one. To believe this, we’d have to ignore the famous Edison quote in which he acknowledged that innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Sidewalk Toronto has not balanced the “we’ll take the best ideas on this thing, no matter where they come from” mentality with “the best ideas on this thing will come from the people who work, live and experience the thing we’re discussing”. There can be experts, academics, researchers and other intellectuals at the table, but thus far, the broader public is utterly clueless about the specifics of what is even being discussed.
On most public projects, there are democratic accountability mechanisms — votes, elections, referendums — that force leaders to consult with the public in order for buy-in. We can debate whether these mechanisms work perfectly in practice, but there is little doubt that when people are properly consulted through an existing democratic process like an election, voters have a greater stake in how money and power is allocated.
This consultation has suffered partly because ideas are being debated on an unequal basis, within an echo chamber of technocrats, managers, urbanists, engineers and MBA graduates. Without a greater proportion of Toronto buying into the technology vision, there will be no way to open the doors to a larger discussion about how this project fits into the larger question of building tech in Toronto. This is a shame, because a more inclusive, more democratic consultation process would expand the small frame within which Sidewalk Toronto is working.
There is no path to an improved Sidewalk Toronto without some form of democracy.
A more democratic process would distribute the power to shape technology into the hands of more people in Toronto. In the short-term, this would help us build support for Marc’s recommendations. For example, if the discussion is framed correctly, the public will be far more amenable than Sidewalk Labs or Waterfront Toronto to support the idea of public infrastructure ownership. In reality, neither entity wants to seriously relinquish control or do serious course correction on their current vision. If residents and activists can’t get Sidewalk Toronto to buy into a more democratic process, the only remaining option is to force them through other democratic means — in particular, it may mean the only legitimate path to a better Sidewalk Toronto is through a government election.
It may be too late to organize an effective opposition around the summer 2018 Ontario provincial election or even the fall 2018 Toronto municipal election, but it is absolutely time to start organizing with an eye towards the October 2019 Canadian federal election. If that is the political goal, the key will be to ensure that Torontonians are given a true alternative vision to the one put forth by Sidewalk Toronto.
What if Sidewalk Toronto was *actually* a groundbreaking, visionary project?
When the partnership with Sidewalk Labs was first announced, there was much fanfare from technocrats, political leaders and tech CEOs about how the Sidewalk Labs partnership could be seen as a visionary project. There is no reason that could not still be true if we re-thought Sidewalk Toronto as a truly groundbreaking idea: a city where everyone can shape the technologies through which they experience their work and home lives. But in order to get there, we must work diligently to prevent all forms of power imbalances. The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to a handful of tech literate people in San Francisco, New York and Toronto. Technology in Toronto should be made by and for everyone in Toronto. A vision for Sidewalk Toronto that is unapologetically against inequality, and explicitly in favour of more democracy, would be a good start.
Footnote
[1] Edit #1 (05/08/18): A few people told me that using the term ‘neoliberal hegemony’ undermines the quality of my argument because it is language that is inaccessible and imprecise. Moving forward, I’m going to try to be more specific about the deeper problem. I‘ve replaced it with the term ‘platform capitalism’, a form of 21st century digital capitalism based on data collection and private, foreign, global partnership. I’m open to suggestions on how to improve this vocabulary so that is more understandable and more readable.
