On Canadian tech entrepreneurship, innovation as a public good and democratic alternatives
Toronto tech executives want to share technological control with Google. Toronto residents should demand more.
This month, Toronto Life magazine published its October issue on big thinkers evaluating the role of Sidewalk Labs on Toronto’s waterfront. One of the opinion editorials is from Yung Wu, the Chief Executive Officer of the MaRS Discovery District. MaRS has evolved over the last decade into one of Toronto’s premier science and tech startup hubs.
Wu devotes his editorial to make the case that Toronto tech innovators — presumably describing entrepreneurs, early-stage funders, early tech employees and startup hubs like the one Wu leads at MaRS — should be more involved in executing Sidewalk Labs’ digital strategy. Wu praises elements of the proposal presented by Google’s sister company, while lobbying politely for a greater share of the local urban innovation market. Wu’s viewpoint is in lockstep with the Canadian tech industry, who are wary of losing ground to American Big Tech, but also recognize that Google, Amazon and Netflix represent a huge influx of capital for economic infrastructure, civic contributions and political lobbying.
For working people in the tech industry, Wu’s comments seemingly reflect a reasonable, widely held viewpoint that shared technological control with Google and other tech giants is appropriate. But a more complete, critical analysis must challenge the political, social and economic conditions that underlie Wu’s statements — and it must offer democratic, socially responsible alternative technological futures.
Entrepreneurship — the process by which individuals take individual risks to start a business — continues to be the dominant vehicle through which tech work is envisioned. When seven Toronto-based technology leaders were asked to describe their role models, they all chose entrepreneurs, including tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
The history of tech entrepreneurship runs deep, but its most recent iteration has come from Internet-based, Silicon Valley tech startups over the last thirty years. Greg Ferenstein, a researcher and author of “The Age of Optimists”, has written about the underlying political philosophy that drives tech entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley’s libertarian but pro-government political ideology that “sees government as a platform for innovation” and “Google as its eventual champion”. In Canada, these “Silicon Valley Democrats” find their political homes with free-market, socially liberal globalists like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who regularly links the Liberal Party of Canada to Canadian innovation, and Toronto Mayor John Tory, who received high profile endorsements from major tech leaders in Toronto as part of his re-election campaign.
“Silicon Valley’s denizens love government, at least in theory — they [see] it as a kind of alpha venture capitalist, funding citizens to be as healthy, civic, and entrepreneurial as possible.”
— Greg Ferenstein
For Canadian tech entrepreneurs, the role of government and innovation is clearly signalled, if rarely vocalized. Silicon Valley Democrats want to “make people in general educated and entrepreneurial, rather than singling out disadvantaged groups and regulating capitalism to protect them,” Ferenstein explains. The result is a Canadian tech industry that explicitly portrays entrepreneurship in socially virtuous terms, but remains complicit and silent on major policy changes that hurt marginalized people.
Entrepreneurship is not inherently bad, but it’s a narrow lens through which to view the sum total of all innovation. All signs point to tech entrepreneurs, not as the cause of society’s greatest successes, but as the result of successful, democratically-informed public policy, civil society, social movements and publicly funded government institutions. Canadian entrepreneurs benefit greatly from our publicly funded systems of health care, education, immigration, public transit and infrastructure planning. Much of the innovation infrastructures that Canadian tech innovators use to build their own fortunes are kickstarted through a complex, multi-disciplinary network of government-sponsored research labs, academic institutions, science projects, well-regulated financial institutions and well-funded business development initiatives.
In other words, tech entrepreneurship in Canada is less onerous, not because government has gotten out of the way, but because government has correctly laid the foundation. In The Entrepreneurial State, UK economist and researcher Mariana Mazzucato lays out a compelling case for why the public must receive an increased share of the rewards — higher taxes, more ownership, more democratic voice — in taxpayer-funded innovation. According to Mazzucato, the innovation policy debate must be reframed towards broader interests: “How can we socialize, through public and private interactions, not only the risks, but also the rewards?”
On Toronto’s waterfront, where innovation, real estate and public policy intersect, there is an opportunity to move away from individual-centric, entrepreneurial innovation, towards a more exciting, democratic, community-centric model in which the political, social and cultural benefits of innovation are shared broadly. This transformation process is just as risky as any single entrepreneurial pursuit, but its potential benefits to larger society are far better: increased tech worker wages, improved democracy, more tech representation, more equitable wealth distribution and genuine solidarity with digitally marginalized communities.
For tech engineers, designers, support workers, consultants, project managers and other digitally literate working folks, a shift away from entrepreneurship and towards innovation as a public good will require greater support for collective, long-term public investments, funded by broad, robust, progressive taxation. It will also require us to reframe who gets to be called “innovator”, away from a small pocket of downtown startup hubs and tech offices, and towards schools, libraries, parks and wider swaths of civil society.
The choice of activities which should be invested into, in the name of innovation, is a critical consideration for more than just tech entrepreneurs, founders and supporters. The question of whether a particular innovation hurts or helps the public good must be answered by those who comprise the public. We must answer these questions collectively, through a more democratic process that meaningfully includes targets, users and producers of technology.
On the topic of Sidewalk Labs, Toronto must indeed think big. That means taking on the political, social and economic conditions that brought Google to Toronto. It also means an inevitable confrontation with the culture of individualistic tech entrepreneurship and investment that many Canadian tech supporters, like MaRS CEO Yung Wu, take for granted as a starting point. Innovation is too important to be an individual sport — and residents are too important to be spectators.
