Design by Valerie Thai

1. The Rise of the Alt-Right

Andrew Scheer formally addressed the United We Roll convoy in February, a protest that began as a pro-pipeline demonstration and grew to represent racism and xenophobia characteristic of the worldwide yellow vest movement. In May, Conservative MP Michael Cooper read a passage from the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto into parliamentary record, though his comments were later purged. In June, the RCMP launched a hate speech investigation into the Canadian Nationalist Party, an extremist far-right group that failed to gain federal status in the 2019 election. The party’s leader, Travis Patron, posted a video calling for the removal of the “parasitic tribe,” a not-so-subtle dog-whistle for Jewish people.

Far-right hate groups aren’t new in Canada, but they’re getting louder and some of their rhetoric is starting to seep into mainstream politics. Not challenging this rise in the upcoming election would send a clear message to these groups that there’s room in the political mainstream for the hateful views characteristic of the alt-right. “If you don’t condemn that kind of activity, you’re actually giving it oxygen,” says Barbara Perry, the director of the Centre on Hate, Bias, and Extremism. She says the number of far-right extremist groups in Canada is closing in on 300. Around the time of the 2015 election, she says that number was more like 100. This movement to the right, she says, is being called something of a “perfect storm.”

“We often like to blame Trump for … normalizing hatred,” Perry says. “But you know, we had our own patterns of a movement to the right, some of which predated Trump,” like the increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in the 2015 federal election.This “perfect storm” has emboldened far-right hate groups and people who have ties to them in Canada. In the 2018 Toronto municipal election, Faith Goldy, a former correspondent for Rebel media, ran for mayor. She’s been widely criticized for her association with white nationalism, especially after her reporting at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and her appearance on The Krypto Report, a podcast from the neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer. She garnered over 25,000 votes in her run for mayor. “There is that political normalization of hate and hostility I think that we’ve seen now modelled in Europe, modelled in the U.S.and then our own brand as well,” Perry says.

Coverage of the alt-right and far-right hate groups can have massive implications in public understanding. There’s a risk that taking fringe groups too seriously can give them too much oxygen, but ignoring them means these groups can continue to operate unchecked. The often ironic rhetoric of alt-right fringe groups does require extra analysis, and there’s work to be done in debunking their claims.

“So much of [the work] around anti-immigrant sentiment is taking down those myths, taking down those stereotypes that they associate with it,” Perry says.

—Michal Stein

2. Foreign policy

On February 28, 2019, the New Democratic Party published a statement urging the Trudeau government to cease arms exports to Saudi Arabia: “As Canada joins the international community to provide desperately needed assistance in Yemen, it continues to export arms to Saudi Arabia, the chief instigator of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” says the NDP International Development Critic, Linda Duncan.

The Saudi arms deal—and other, similar policies—tell the true story of Canadian politics. During elections, domestic issues tend to dominate the agenda. What we fail to realize is how seriously Canadian foreign policy impacts the world beyond our borders; it stimulates famine, refugee crises, environmental destruction, and political repression.

As an example: we often discuss immigration without recognizing Canada’s role in creating refugee crises in Latin America and the Caribbean. Forced migration is the product of sustained, racist intervention in those regions, like Canada’s armed support for the 2004 Haiti coup. Canada has interfered in Haitian elections, destabilized its institutions, and supported right-wing politicians, all in an effort to reduce wages and open up Haiti’s gold reserves to Canadian mining companies. These actions create economic conditions that force Haitians to flee and seek asylum—only to be met with anti-Blackness and unjust detention.

Canadian policy is regularly determined by the interests of mining companies. As a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian mining companies contracted paramilitary security teams in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru that are accused of kidnapping workers, protestors, and their families. The Liberals promised to regulate the industry in 2015. Yet, as the group MiningWatch Canada notes, the government never committed to legislating the international operations of Canadian mining companies, despite ongoing protest against abuse. Broken promises and willful ignorance are Canada’s de facto foreign policy, in part due to the connections between corporations and politicians. The mining industry and the political class share financiers, investments, and economic interests.

The failure to ensure livable wages at home is directly reflected in the coercion of cheap labour abroad, in defiance of human rights and international law. Canadian free trade with Israel, for example, relies on and benefits from the economic and political repression of Palestinians. Still, as the government of Canada website boasts, “Since CIFTA [Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement] first came into effect over two decades ago, Canada’s two-way merchandise trade with Israel has more than tripled, totalling $1.9 billion in 2018.”

Canada’s close relationship with Israel has wider international consequences. While Canadian relations with Iran have improved in recent years, the Canadian government still views Iran as inherently threatening, and continues to find new reasons to halt diplomatic relations and impose sanctions—including those instituted in 2006 and 2010 in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, at the urging of Israeli government officials and pro-Israel lobby organizations. It is worth recognizing that Canadian hostility towards Iran does not happen in a vacuum, but comes partly as a result of extensive lobbying by officials and organizations that perceive Iran to be a threat to Israel, and have thus made it a priority to characterize every action by the Iranian state as a violation punishable by a regime of coordinated isolation, marginalization, and sanction.

The sanctions, imposed by Canada and the U.S. among others, are monstrous; they directly endanger Iran’s most vulnerable communities. Sanctions disproportionately impact women, as over 170 Iranian women artists and activists argued in an open letter opposing American sanctions. Iran also holds a substantial refugee population, most of whom will go without vital services and will be instead pushed to deportation due to the sanctions. Canada’s bellicose policies against Iran—integral to its support for Israel—contradict our leaders’ “pro-woman” or “pro-refugee” public image.

It is necessary to draw links between these destabilizing economies of extraction and the waves of forced migration, income inequality, and climate crisis that have shaped the 2019 election. The same global capitalist system that makes rich Canadians richer and poor Canadians poorer relies upon state-sanctioned violence abroad. It succeeds by deflating wages, repressing protests, and killing local economies. Canada’s foreign policy agenda is deeply enmeshed with its domestic policy choices. This election, Canadian voters must recognize the global stakes.

—Alex V. Green

3. Artificial Intelligence

Since March 2017, Justin Trudeau has been hyping the federal government’s investments in AI. At every budget announcement, ribbon cutting, and international panel, he has talked up responsible adoption of AI that is human-centric and grounded in human rights. The initial investment of $125 million was topped up with another $230 million in 2018. In the meantime, dozens of jobs for AI researchers, and graduate student positions have been created in computer science and engineering schools.

As a job creation and innovation strategy, it seems to be doing well—there’s been a boom in tech startups in Toronto and Montreal—but there’s been a conspicuous lack of investment on the human rights side. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in AI research, exactly $0 of that is going to hire or train people with the expertise necessary to make sure the results won’t be a dumpster fire. While deep-learning experts are getting cushy jobs, experts in the social and ethical implications of AI are only getting a couple of workshops.

It’s unclear whether the strategy is that the people with the training needed to stop the ascendancy of our AI overlords should volunteer their time, or that the AI geniuses should do this work themselves, because after all, they’re geniuses. But letting AI geniuses take care of human rights issues would be as reckless as letting artists perform brain surgery. There is a long history of people in AI being blissfully unaware that other kinds of expertise exist, and this attitude is exactly why companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are now mired in controversy over their ethical blunders.

Some of the not-so-genius ideas AI workers have come up with recently are algorithms that recommend home movies of kids running through sprinklers or doing gymnastics to people who watch child pornography, selling facial recognition software that barely works to cops who don’t know how to use it, but are making false arrests with it anyway, and pretending to sell music players or thermostats that actually conceal hidden microphones that monitor your conversations.

The average doomsday naysayer may think they have nothing to hide, but stalkerware is enabling disgruntled exes, incels and other trolls to track, harass, and potentially kill people. Cell phone tracking data is being sold to bounty hunters, resulting in Coen brothers-esque shootouts, and hundreds of millions of social media users were unknowingly exposed to fake news stories during recent election campaigns.

Trudeau has a mediocre track record for keeping his promises about protecting digital rights. He campaigned on the promise to repeal Bill C-51, which allows CSIS to spy on Canadians without cause in the name of anti-terrorism, but he only rolled back select parts of it. That said, Trudeau is the only official party leader who seems to have a policy on tech innovation at all. Andrew Scheer only cares about innovation when it comes to oil. While Jagmeet Singh’s commitments don’t mention the tech sector, other NDP members, in partnership with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May, have been vocal in advocating for a stronger Digital Privacy Act, and giving the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada more enforcement power.

AI and commercial surveillance are going in directions far worse than even the most paranoid imagination could cook up. This is not a field that is capable of regulating itself, and empty rhetoric about human-centred AI isn’t doing anything to hold beneficiaries of AI investment, like the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to their promises. The money is there. If even a small fraction of the investment in AI were directed toward protecting rights, we might have a chance at avoiding creating our own homegrown AI dystopia. So far none of the official party leaders seem up to the task.

—Catherine Stinson

4. The opioid crisis

Since 2016, more than 10,000 people have died of an opioid-related overdose in Canada. After years of headlines, such a number can seem abstract, or even worse, desensitizing. These are more than statistics though; each one of those numbers represents a void: someone who will not be at a birthday party, at a graduation, at a wedding, at the dinner table. From January to September of 2018 alone, 3,286 Canadians died and of this 73 percent of deaths were attributed to fentanyl.

Things have changed in the past three years. Safe injection sites, once limited to a section of Vancouver, are now opening up across the country—thanks to the dedicated work of frontline workers, who initially risked arrest by opening up unsanctioned sites. Once scoffed at by politicians, local mayors are now accepting that these sites save lives. Still, the death toll continues to rise. Safe injection sites are not a panacea, nor can overworked frontline workers be everywhere at once to stop an overdose. As the federal election looms and the opioid crisis rages on, one has to ask: are our representatives doing anything?

No party has thus far put forward a comprehensive plan to tackle the opioid crisis beyond vague platitudes. Even the NDP plan, which promises to expand treatment and decriminalize drugs, in the same vein, proposes going after “the real criminals—those who traffic in and profit from the sale of illegal drugs” with harsh and strict penalties, betraying the entire point and purpose of decriminalization. Meanwhile, Liberal party officials keep tweeting about how the overdose crisis is a crisis, while ignoring the fact that they currently have the power to do something about it. 

The solutions to the overdose crisis are clear: while we need more safe injection sites and we need those sites to be supported by federal funding—and harm reduction workers need supports too—these sites do not actually stem the rate of overdose.
They do however, prevent overdose deaths—a key distinction.

In order to stem overdoses, people need access to a clean supply of drugs. Advocates are calling upon the government to allow prescription heroin, and some doctors have taken it upon themselves to start prescribing another opioid, hydromorphone.

Treatment also needs to be made easier. Typically, drugs like methadone or buprenorphine are used in treatment, weaker opioids that reduce withdrawal symptoms while a person is in recovery. Two years ago, British Columbia switched the medication used for treatment from methadone to methadose, a drug that is even weaker than the former. As a result, the B.C. Association of People on Methadone says that switch resulted in people resorting to using heroin. The College of Pharmacists of B.C. says the switch was made to reduce the tendency of “abuse,” a false idea that reaffirms stigma against drug users and reinforces the moral panic around drug use.

One last piece of advice to politicians as they hit the campaign trail is this: listen to people who use drugs and those on the front lines. Go to an overdose prevention site without cameras, meet with members of drug users unions across the country—learn about their experiences and use those to shape policy.

There are deeper conversations to be had about addiction in Canada. How the lack of housing, financial support, and health care among other things are feeding the overdose crisis; but for now, a safe supply of drugs, better access to treatment and more safe injection sites make up a good plan to stop the deaths and stem the rate of overdose. People who use drugs, harm reduction workers, doctors, and public health professionals have been saying this all along; let’s hope our leaders listen for once.

—Abdullah Shihipar

5. Climate justice

We’ve got a problem. The climate crisis is on our doorstep, but instead of looking to scientific data and ongoing evidence, the issue has been divided along political lines. Ideologies about trade and taxation have become the test-pieces about whether one is actively working to limit climate change, recognizing it as a concern, or remaining, still, a skeptic.

Fortunately, international science shows that it’s not too late to keep global warming below the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming—a level that will not halt climatic change, but will significantly temper the impacts. However, instead of hunkering down and working to a) keep the warming to 1.5 degrees, and b) put measures in place to deal with the impacts we know are coming, political parties—and much of the media around them—are mired in discussions that would have been outdated a decade ago.

In Canada, two of the most public climate conversations are around the carbon tax and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. These are certainly not insignificant issues, but the laser focus on them obscures the bigger picture. There is a solution to the climate crisis, but only one: we have to radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. At this point, neither the Liberals’ nor Conservatives’ climate plans are sufficient to keep global warming to the threshold 1.5 degrees Celsius. To meet that target, there can be absolutely no new carbon infrastructure, never mind a project like the Trans Mountain Pipeline that is the equivalent of putting two million more cars on the road.

Here’s a broader slice of the picture: a 2019 report using government data and approved by independent scientists, states that Canada is heating up twice as fast as the average rate of the planet—twice as fast.

Global warming causes major events, including melting permafrost, loss of ice caps, rising seas, record high temperatures, severe flooding, and droughts. In turn, those events can lead to further impacts: loss of income, loss of housing, food insecurity, tainted water supplies, and so on. Much of Canada has already experienced at least some of these effects and the magnitude and frequency of impacts are projected to increase over time.

On June 17th, Canada declared a national climate emergency which was, in a weird way, heartening. Except the meaning of it was lost the next day when they also re-(re)approved a significant expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. The longer we dither, the less likely our solutions will be robust or equitable. And we only have just over a decade before we’ve stalled so long there is no way to limit climate impacts to a reasonable level. This is a crisis. But, unlike many crises, we know how to stop this one. We need politicians to recognize this as a fact, not an opinion, and face this issue head on. We can still keep the ship afloat, but to do so we’re going to need all hands on deck.

—Nola Poirier

Jeanette Stock and Taylor Bond. Photo by Blue Trail Creative.

As a queer young woman fresh out of university entering the workforce, Jeanette Stock had several challenges to navigate. “The biggest barriers were my own about me being queer. I had never been schooled in workplace 101 on being queer,” says Stock. Challenges included coming out at work and getting comfortable with speaking about her personal life. Despite coming out at work early in her career to a boss who made no issue of it, it was one of the scariest things she’d ever done. “My boss asked me if I was seeing anyone or what I had done that weekend,” Stock says. She remembers pausing for a beat. She considered avoiding having to disclose her partner’s gender by using gender-neutral pronouns, or simply referring to her as a friend. At the end Stock decided to disclose. “The second between disclosing and her nonchalant response felt like an eternity to me, even though it was a totally normal conversation,” she says. “The rest of the day was this weird mix of relief and exhaustion.”

Although Stock admits the barriers about her sexual identity were her own, she does agree that society contributes to the fear factor. “You can’t be what you want to be. I never really had any queer professional role models,” she says. But, she adds, LGBTQ communities need better and professional role models “so that people like me can say, ‘Okay, this is a piece of me that I can bring to my work.’”

While Stock was lucky that her company, Jack.org, was supportive of her queer identity, she noticed a lack of queer leadership in their senior management. Then Stock met Albert Lam and Stefan Palios at a StartProud conference, a pan-Canadian organization that’s been helping LGBTQ youth transition from university to the workforce for the past 10 years. They connected immediately over what they were wearing—jeans and Converse sneakers, unlike most attendees who were in bespoke suits. This sparked a “queer” predicament for the trio. “We were having a hard time connecting in our industry or space,” says Stock. “We’d go to tech events and there were potentially other queer people in the room, but it was hard for us to find each other. I was a part of these two communities—tech and queer—but they were separate.”

With a burning desire to integrate their two identities, Stock, Lam, and Palios founded Venture Out, a volunteer-run non-profit for the LGBTQ, specifically those working in the tech and entrepreneurship space, to create that much-needed intersection in addition to their nine-to-five employment in city startups. What began as an incubator project with StartProud became a two-day tech conference in Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District in March 2017—the first of its kind in the Greater Toronto Area.

“We realized a lot of LGBTQ students don’t consider startups as a career because they don’t see themselves as ‘tech’ people,” says Stock. “I didn’t even know there was queer female leadership at tech companies in Toronto until I joined.”

Achieving diversity and inclusion has been a perennial problem in tech companies. While research is replete and growing with statistics about the paltry representation of women in tech boards, statistics about queer folks working in tech in the country are hard to find. Most companies don’t report their diversity numbers, and in Canada, companies are not required to report on diversity. The companies that do often don’t report LGBTQ statistics.

Our technology landscape “is like Silicon Valley where hardly any of the founders or senior executives identify as a minority whether it’s gender, sexuality, or racial,” says Taylor Bond, chair and vice president at Venture Out. That there is a huge gap in the flow of funding and resources available for minority CEOs and executives to build and scale their startups is obvious. Venture Out helps plug that gap. The non-profit provides resources and insights to founders that are more diverse and inclusive in nature.

Venture Out challenges Toronto’s Silicon Valley lookalike, male, heterosexual bro-tech space. This is significant as, according to a 2016 report, for the first time 51 percent of people under the age of 20—those in Generation Z—reported being somewhere either on the gender or sexuality spectrum and outside the binary.

Attendees of the organization’s two-day annual conference in 2018 met and heard from noteworthy role models like Shopify’s Andrea Ross, who shared her experiences as an LGBTQ woman in the Canadian tech space; social scientist Kai Scott, who, as a trans man creates tools to help transgender employees and customers address exclusion; Canadian actress Natasha Negovanlis, who talked about leveraging technology to create queer representation within the digital space; and Dax Dasilva, CEO and founder of Lightspeed, among several others.

The organization’s speaker selection aims for more than 80 percent of speakers to identify as LGBTQ, within which emphasis and priority are placed on gender equity, racial representation, and trans representation. To represent the 20 percent non-LGBTQ allies, invitations are sent to tech leaders who have a track record of implementing initiatives and teams that are LGBTQ and minority positive. “We’ve always welcomed allies for panel moderation,” Bond explains. “As moderators our allies acknowledge their position of privilege in a room full of minorities and are giving a voice and platform to underrepresented groups.”

Complete with TED Talk-style fire-side chats, pitch competitions, workshops, and a hackathon, Venture Out’s presentations had what most tech conferences lack: they had heart. Personal stories of LGBTQ role models’ triumph over exclusion from workplaces resonated equivocally with audience members.

“I think it’s amazing that there’s a tech conference specifically for us queer folks and that there are this many of us in tech Toronto,” says Tiffany, a 2018 attendee. “There aren’t a lot of visible or out queer people in my company, so I heard about Venture Out through word-of-mouth within our queer community. It’s a powerful experience for me to be in a room full of people who are likeminded and face the same issues within the same industry,” says another attendee.

With ticket prices not exceeding $50, inclusive of three meals per day, Venture Out stands in stark contrast to what Canadians identify as a tech conference. Even though the organizers admit that they are in an “eat-what-you-kill” stage, they are breaking systemic barriers to create a community of resources and mentorship for LGBTQ communities, and for other racial minorities, as well.

Individual news organizations tweet upwards of 100 times per day—a content diet even the most obsessive tweeter can’t digest. Instead, we pick out small bites, our personal interest and bias helping us choose what tweets we see and which accounts aren’t worth a follow. With each retweet and mention, Twitter’s algorithm goes to work, shaping our feeds for us. And if we’re not careful, we’re soon stuck inside a chamber of the algorithm’s making, where only the things we want to hear (or see) are echoed back.

But Ania Medrek has built an app for that.

It’s called Echology. Medrek developed the app while researching the echo chamber phenomenon on social networking sites during her final year as a Master’s candidate at OCAD University in Toronto. An extension for Twitter, Echology takes note of what accounts you follow and scrapes each news tweet for important keywords. After you click the small Echology button below each tweet, the app randomly generates related tweets from news providers you don’t follow. The suggestions appear under the heading “People who’ve read this may not have read,” a conscious spin on the way sites like Amazon and Facebook recommend products and content. But, Medrek clarifies, Echology doesn’t just show opposing political views. It presents everything in between, the diversity of each news story and the context needed to understand each headline.

If you were to click the Echology button under a news tweet summarizing the latest congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg regarding Facebook’s data privacy, for instance, the app might generate a tweet from Politico with new reactions from lawmakers, a story from NPR that highlights a different section of the day’s testimony, and BBC coverage on the U.K. Parliament’s response. These are tweets from news providers you don’t follow, and would not have appeared in your feed otherwise.

Before the idea for Echology was born, Medrek read dozens of studies about the echo chamber phenomenon. What she found surprised her: there were distinct, non-human reasons for the polarization, aggression, and ignorance she had seen percolate on her own Twitter feed for years, reasons explaining how and why one news story plays out in countless different ways with countless different consequences, almost all unseen to the average user. Medrek “tweezed out” the 25 most important and compiled them onto deck of cards, each with its own factor. One reads “misleading headlines,” another “hashtags,” and a third, especially important one: “personalization.”

Personalization is just what it sounds like: the ability to make your Twitter feed unique by filtering out who you follow and who you don’t. When it comes to news, Medrek says, personalization is dangerous. “You start seeing only one perspective,” she says. “You’re not understanding the people around you.” And following a range of news sources won’t necessarily help you break free of a social network’s algorithm, which is programmed to show you more of the content you interact with. “It can trump your decisions,” Medrek says. “The algorithm can decide, oh, but you only actually ever click on this point of view, so we’re actually going to hide and suppress the others, even though you chose to follow those [accounts] too.” You may follow CBC on Twitter, but if you only ever click on articles from CTV News, you’re less likely to see CBC tweets on your feed. It’s the algorithm giving you what it thinks you want.

Medrek knew that to break free of the echo chamber, Twitter users would need to see news stories the algorithm was blocking. So, armed with her deck of 25 contributing factors, Medrek sat down with a group of news industry professionals for what called “participatory design” workshops. After three meetings, Echology had taken shape. 

Once she linked Echology to her own Twitter account, Medrek was intrigued by what she noticed. “The different tones, the hierarchy of words, what you chose to highlight and what you didn’t totally shapes peoples news experiences,” she says. “Those little differences mean a lot.” Visitors to OCAD’s graduate exhibition, where Medrek debuted the project in May, tried out Echology and had similar reactions. “People we’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know I needed this, but now that I see it, I need this,’” she says.

Echology isn’t ready to be distributed to the public yet, but Medrek aims to find more developers and work out the app’s kinks, like improving how Echology recognizes keywords in each news tweet. And the workshops she held during the development stage could morph into tools for teaching in high schools, colleges, and newsrooms.

Thinking about and engaging with the echo chamber phenomenon can bring change, Medrek says, pointing out that most social media companies are genuinely open to finding new solutions. “But it’s not just on tech giants to solve this,” she says, “it’s on journalists, it’s on designers. So there’s hope.”

UPDATE (05/24/2018): This story has been slightly modified to clarify information about social networks’ algorithms and the titles of those in the news industry involved with Echology.

CBC’s Strategy 2020 has adopted a particular language of Silicon Valley. Photo courtesy of CBC/Radio-Canada.

I spend a lot of time parsing the language of Silicon Valley, that heady mix of technobabble and pseudoeconomics where many words are used to say very little. It’s a lexicon designed by “visionary” business types (though they prefer to be called “entrepreneurs” now) and the middle managers they hire, saying words filled with pomp, promise, and superfluous syllables. Why “think” when you can “ideate”? “Use” when you can “utilize”? “Talk” when you can “engage”?

This is how we speak now: “The focus is to engage target segments intensely with some, but not all, services; to engage Canadians in the public space in a way that is meaningful and personal to the individual.” These particular verbal gymnastics come courtesy of a rising star in the startup scene, with a billion dollars in public backing—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

It’s one of many techspeak paragraphs that made up CBC’s Strategy 2020. This framework from 2014 features boxes with arrows pointing at other boxes, millennials listening to music on iPhones, and variations on the word “invest” a staggering 17 times across 18 pages. More recently, our federal government released Creative Canada, a “new vision and approach to creative industries and to growing the creative economy.” There are more boxes, arrows, and pictures of tech-savvy youth, and a near identical one-to-one ratio of “invest” to page count.

Neither of these documents is necessarily bad. Investing in art and artists (“content creators” and “cultural entrepreneurs,” as the government calls them) is a fantastic idea.

But there’s a real problem when people attempting to define Canadian culture use the language of rejected TEDx Talks. We’re talking about what is supposed to make us distinctly Canadian, and, in the official policy of our government, how to position Canada as “a world leader in putting its creative industries at the centre of its future economy.” Words matter, and today it appears that our collective discussion around culture is akin to pitching rich people for startup capital.

We’ve already seen this story play out in other industries. News media pivoted to Valley-jargon years ago, diligently using it to define success. It has worked out well for Silicon Valley, and maybe news organizations had to lean in to survive declining revenues. But I don’t think anyone will claim this language shift has benefitted truth and understanding. We measure success now with “clicks” and “digital reach,” which has more to do with people hitting “like” and “share” than it does with comprehending the world.

Words matter, and today it appears that our collective discussion around culture is akin to pitching rich people for startup capital

For years we’ve let tech companies like Uber get away with skirting municipal regulations. Facebook, meanwhile, has whittled away at the very nature of privacy (and, we’re discovering, democracy) mainly because we have accepted that it’s the price we pay for “innovation” and “disruption,” exciting words and, therefore, good for us.

This bafflegab and the mode of thinking that comes with it is everywhere. It was probably inevitable that it would eventually set the terms for “culture”—a word with a definition that seems perpetually open to debate. I’m not sure we should be giving Twitter or Netflix a say, though. If you’ve ever worked at a tech company, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “There are no bad ideas.” Except there are. And this is one of them.

Adopting tech-speak as the language of culture dumbs down our collective discourse and reduces achievements to “engagement metrics.” It’s volume over substance; vista over hinterland. MBAs with an impossible number of LinkedIn connections have usurped our language, leading to discussions about the “creative economy” instead of creativity.

Why foster an appreciation for art when we can just teach artists to sell it, like insurance or shoes or special in-game add-ons that are absolutely necessary to beat the really hard levels?

This doesn’t feel Canadian. At least to me. But I grew up when Canadian culture was staunchly guarded by protectionist policies that constantly reminded me how distinct and important our art was to our identity. It wasn’t a perfect system, but at least it didn’t emerge from a PowerPoint presentation assembled in San Francisco. People like to speak like the ruling class, and somehow that became Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—men with varying degrees of vision and very careful vocabularies—and the companies they got rich building. Maybe this kind of naked capitalism is our culture now. That would mean Strategy 2020 and Creative Canada don’t represent a modernization of old policy, but a realignment toward reality.

Second confession: I don’t crack as many spines as I used to because a lot of my reading happens on my Kindle and my phone. I fought the war on digital reading for a long time, a position I defended in the July/August 2015 issue of This. It was a principled stand I made because I wanted my kids to see me enjoying books. Unfortunately, having kids means I need to take my reading time when I can get it. I used to spend each evening quietly sitting with a book or magazine. Now I slide in and out of reading a few minutes at a time, on the bus, while waiting for the four-year-old to put his clothes on and, yes, when I’m in the bathroom (don’t even pretend you don’t use your phone on the toilet). This kind of reading is possible because every book and article is always in my pocket or backpack. It’s not the ideal way to read, but it’s what my life allows right now and there is no principle so strong that it isn’t thoroughly trumped by convenience.

I don’t think my approach is unique. I’m a hybrid. There’s a lot of stuff in the world to read and it’s easier to be agnostic about how I go about it. My nightstand still has a pile of unread books that grows and shrinks yet never disappears, but I carry my Kindle everywhere. A handful of magazines and newspapers get jammed into my mailbox every week, but I’m also a power user on apps such as Instapaper, Texture, and Zinio. I’m a staunch library supporter and even steward a “Little Free Library” in front of my home, but I’m happy to see my monthly donation to the Calgary Public Library going to increasing digital holdings and diversifying access to those materials.

Globally, book sales are up in every category but one: e-books. By every measure in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., people are buying more physical books and fewer e-books. (Oddly it’s digital sales of those paper books carrying most of the increase. We want the books, but we’re tired of going into bookstores, I guess.) People try to make sense of that in a few ways. Some declare digital reading a complete failure; others just yell, “See! I told you!” into the void (or on Twitter). This is as stupid as declaring that books were dead back when e-books starting eating into the market. It’s a bad opinion perpetuated by people who cling to feelings of nostalgia and familiarity with their hardcovers and paperbacks.

I don’t want to point fingers, but the person who edits this magazine called me a “traitor” when I mentioned that I love my Kindle, and she’s not the first. A surprising number of people I know want to take sides in this fight—I did once too, even though I was also happy to switch sides a few times (it’s possible I actually am a traitor)—but there’s no real fight to be had. Or at least it’s not the fight we thought it was. We live in a world where everything and everyone is competing for your attention. When Netflix and Facebook consider each other competitors because the thing they want most is every second of your time, does taking a bold stand against reading Fahrenheit 451 on a screen make any kind of sense?

If you love to read, stop caring about how you and especially other people do it. Just embrace it all—it’s messy, and that’s good. As long as we aren’t watching TV shows with B-list celebrities baking cakes, things are probably fine.

On the morning of the U.S. election last November, I logged onto Twitter and spent several hours arguing about privilege—mostly white, but also male—with someone who believed the entire concept was, itself, racist and sexist because he “judges people individually,” systemic issues be damned. As often happens, the discussion devolved to me calling him “willfully obtuse” and 20 minutes later, “fucking stupid.” I’m not terrific at debating, but I am fairly certain of two things: privilege is real and nobody has ever been convinced of that on Twitter, even without name calling.

We all know how that day ended: with the the unfathomable, terrifying, and depressing culmination of a campaign that saw a brick heaved through the Overton window, followed by a molotov cocktail and several bags of dog shit. On November 9, several tech companies woke up wondering just what role they played in getting a neophyte demagogue elected to the office of President of the United States. Twitter, for its part, finally had to take a hard look at its service and its contribution to public discourse.

Its approach up to that point was mostly to avoid the question. Sure, they locked out “alt-right”¹ nihilist haircut Milo Yiannopoulos, but the cesspool of humanity he controlled just kept on keeping on in their unceasing war against “cuckservatives” and “libtards” alike. After the election, Twitter admitted its staff were having “challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct,” added new controls for shielding oneself from such conduct (really, just a slightly more sophisticated version of the Twitter mute button), and started shutting down some of the more egregious “alt-right”² accounts. Delightfully, this caused several terrible people, such as actor-turned-racistuncle-to-the-entire-internet James Woods, to leave in a “free-speech” huff. But former “Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” David Duke still gets to tweet, so let’s call the effort inconsistent at best.

Twitter is motivated to try and fix things. Last fall there were rumours that the company could be bought by Google or Disney or Salesforce or Microsoft, but nothing ever came of it. Which is fair—who wants to assume that much liability? Meanwhile, its problems seem like a more focused version of the web at large, where newspapers are shutting down comment sections and at least one major advertising network is pulling its service from sites such as Breitbart.

It’s getting easy to start thinking that maybe the entire internet was a terrible idea, and Twitter encapsulates that perfectly. The things that make Twitter fun and addictive—It’s instant! It’s pithy!—also strip complex subjects of any kind of nuance. Twitter rewards snark, invective, and cynicism, lighting up your brain like a slot machine every time someone clicks “favourite” or “retweets” you. More than anything, Twitter feels like all of the loudest people—including me—yelling at each other. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, but always, always yelling.

Could I be a better at debating issues with people on the Internet? Sure. It would just take a little patience, some empathy and a concerted effort to fight every instinct I have while scrolling my feed. But even then, I’m not sure I could convince the willfully obtuse or the fucking stupid that systemic racism and sexism actually exist.

Twitter, for all the time I spend on it—and genuinely enjoy it—just might not have the gestell for grown ups to talk about grown-up things. I suppose that’s why someone like Donald Trump enjoys it so much.

1 The “alt-right” is a big tent of awful people, including racists, misogynists and other assholes. Yiannopoulos’s specific brand of altright is the narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who gives the appearance of wanting to watch the world burn, but is really too shallow to care about much beyond their own microfame among white guys with bad opinions about ethics in video game journalism.

2 Real, actual, literal Nazis.

Illustration by Matt Daley

Are we too apathetic when it comes to social media user experiments?

A few months ago, Facebook got into trouble for experimenting with some of their users. In the name of “science,” the company decided to start tweaking people’s newsfeeds with an excess of either positive or negative status updates from friends. The study showed that exposure to these updates could make people more positive or negative themselves. In short, Facebook made some people sad. On purpose.

Shortly after Facebook published its study, the dating site OK Cupid admitted that it, too, was screwing with its users. The company told people who weren’t matches that they were perfectly compatible. It removed photos from profiles. It tracked conversations between people. Its motive was simple: to see what would happen and maybe improve its own matching algorithm.

Both of these experiments were wildly fascinating. They were also wholly unethical. Neither company had anything even close to informed consent from the people they toyed with. These sites treated their users like guinea pigs, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure it’s even legal to treat guinea pigs like guinea pigs anymore.

The response to these experiments was strange. Some people were outraged, obviously. But most either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Facebook—a site with more than a billion active users—decided to screw with random people’s emotions and the general response was an overwhelming “Meh.” Data collection is bland and uninteresting.

Maybe we just aren’t surprised when this stuff happens anymore. If you use the Internet, you’re experimented on. It isn’t new. In the early 2000s, I worked for a digital agency and one of our clients was a large retail website. For about six weeks, we showed half the site’s visitors yellow “buy” buttons, while the other half saw shiny new green buttons. The green ones showed a marginally higher click rate, which, extrapolated over a year, meant about $50 million. So all the buttons turned green. This is basic A/B testing—an exercise in using data to determine and influence behaviour.

By today’s standard, that kind of experiment is quaint. In the last decade, the Internet has become exceedingly good at tracking and manipulating people. Amazon uses browsing and purchase history to flog products, Google “scans” (but doesn’t “read”) email to try targeting ads, and pretty much every website you visit weighs and measures the actions you take for their own gain. As far as the Internet is concerned, you are the sum total of your clicks, likes and purchases. You are a data profile they can apply an algorithm to and nothing more.

It’s not the worst deal. You get a worldwide network of infinite information and constant communication; they get to sell you stuff. As far as Faustian pacts go, that seems sort of fair. But how far does it go? We get upset when a government starts peeking at our data, but we willingly hand it over to Facebook, Amazon, and Apple and, well, everyone else, assuming that the “Terms of Service” we didn’t actually read are reasonable. (It’s worth noting that Facebook inserted the clause saying they could experiment on you only after their emotion experiment had been conducted, but before they told anyone about it.)

I’m not bringing this up to fear-monger about the evils of modern technology. I like technology, I use Facebook and I shop with Amazon. And I understand that sometimes it brings on big sweeping cultural shifts. But we’re on the cusp of owning Apple Watches that can send our heartbeat to our spouse. Or, theoretically, Facebook. Or a doctor. Or an insurance company. Given where technology is headed, it’s not too much to ask that the companies handling our data be honest about what exactly they’re doing with it (or that we bother to pay attention).

Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle, examined people willfully (even gleefully) handing over their information, their privacy and, ultimately, their humanity. People who didn’t like the book criticized that Eggers doesn’t understand technology; that he just doesn’t get it. After seeing the the crowd at Apple’s iPhone and Watch announcement react with almost religious fervour, though, I’m convinced saying Eggers doesn’t understand technology is a lot like reading 1984 and saying George Orwell doesn’t understand government.