The other 2010

If by some disquieted remembrance I carry with me the tokens of this year into the next, I will not be burdened by the actions I haven’t taken.

I began this year resolute in my quest for aesthetic newness: scrap the old standards and proceed as a tabula rasa, anything goes. Mix it up a little, and see what magic happens. It has been a fun ride, but I can’t resist spending a little time revisiting some of the records that occupied space in my cultural inventory this past year. I'm sure on some level its an evaluative exercise, a necessary step in synthesizing the old conflicts and revising my discourse. Whatever the reason, I find myself embracing this seasonal closure with a return to one of my favourite recordings this year.

This evening’s party has the Hidden Names in heavy rotation. It's an apt choice for a gathering that will inevitably become a toast to alterity. (Are we really celebrating newness in the dead of winter?). Because this holiday, more than any other, is a culturally sanctioned conversation about possibility. It is a time to talk about things other than the here and now. It is a time to talk about novelty, and change, and dissolution and resolution that aren’t really apparent but that will certainly come. The Hidden Names -- so wholly an accolade to otherness that the question of 'where else could I be?' is less relevant than the responsive: Everywhere. And the implications are rendered all the more fantastic in the album's title: there are things outside the here and now, hidden things, and revealing them requires a change of perspective. It’s a subtle suggestion that if you're searching for answers, looking around is only half as good as looking beyond.

The album's opening tune is a kind of if-you-cross-this-threshold overture to a suite of songs about the contingency of existence and finding your place among life’s random turns and enigmatic offerings. “As the World Turned Out,” is itself a trope (etymologists: geddit?) on the paradoxes and ambiguities of our human efforts: with every gesture we make, we are at once in the process (as the world turns) of devising our own narratives, and at the same time perfecting those actions to completion, fait accompli (how every moment turns out); on to the next.

In the room where the guests are arriving, the step-into-my-parlour imperative commands a familiar response. Conversations revolve around the album’s thematic gravity, ambiguity. It is a condition very well established in the band’s repertoire, and more than a couple of guests are playfully taking stock of its post-postmodern vitality. They speak a dialect I know well. Take ambiguity and perhapses and contingency and doubt and turn them into wonder. Look back on the year that has just passed. This is how it turns out.

Alterity is the shibboleth of our tribe, and tonight we are all of us dreamers of our unrealized selves in impossible contexts. We talk of what could have been yesterday and what may be tomorrow. Talk of what should be here and now. If I resolve to state my case with conviction, I would fail to solecism. We are delinquents of otherness, the music reminds us. We are sentenced to this time and place. Here, the quest for individuality, for solitude, is always already thwarted by the noise of human activity, the cacophony of the streets outside the window, the clamour and the clutter of modern life.

"Convinced we are completed / We surround ourselves with junkpiles / We’re so far from naked / We’ve got walls all around us."

In the end if you're looking for your place in the world, what matters is not so much preserving your individuality, but overwriting it, redescribing it. Our stories are written through perpetual chains of self-deconstruction and rebuilding. Meshing our fragmented egos with something other means finding truths about ourselves in new contexts.

“If I fall to little pieces / you can fall to little pieces / we can mingle our debris.”

After all, none of us has complete agency over our existence, each of us living, rather, in “borrowed time and rented space.” Contending with the possibility that you’ve been initiated into the wrong tribe is as exciting as it is heartbreaking, but it is at the very least a way of ensuring continuity. It means your lexicon can never be final. Keep asking questions, keep opening doors, to keep moving.

Our festivities will continue into the night. There will be revelry, conversation, warm embraces and shared stories. The music will play on until the last clink of glasses has escaped into the night air and our voices have waned to a whisper. And then our last song. Motion, and gesture toward the new. Move, because dancing is ecstatic. Keep moving because dancing is ex-static. In this new year. Everything will be new. In this new year everything will be new. I will be new. This is our satori.

“Keep this fire in your heart / Keep this fire to their feet / In the day that we find us”

It's not going to make any sense, the song tells us. The answer is the question. But what matters is persistence, because everything is transitory. Our ideas get displaced; our egos become fragmented. So we rebuild, and we remember, and we go on.

If truth exists, then it is fleeting. Like beauty and pain and happiness and love, and everything else worth living for, truth is always contextualized. Its very impermanence is elusive. I am humbled by an infinity of possibilities that were never realized. So many would-be realities that arise and are lost in an instant… every instant. My thoughts now concern not only the astonishing luck that my life choices were ever made, but that they were exactly right.

You see, this is how the world turned out. So far so good.

Happy new year to you.

***
The lyrics cited in this post are transcribed, to the best of my auditory interpretation, from the following songs. The band’s name is, of course, hidden.

As the World Turned Out
Cluttered
Little Pieces
Soft Lies
Mad Mad Day

Quantifying the walkability of communities

I've got a birthday vacation to take in the coming months, and being someone who prefers walkable cosmopolitan areas, I found this cool site to be an invaluable resource for my planning. You can check out how your neighbourhood ranks in its walkability, and you can choose, as I did, your next holiday city from the list of walker's paradises in the U.S. Not surprisingly, New York neighbourhoods dominate the top ten.

My own neighbourhood gets a respectable score of 77 on the index. I have no argument with that, but one factor that the ranking system doesn't account for is climate. My city, for example, tends to get a lot of snow in the winter. And, as a very experienced pedestrian, I would say that although snow on its own is usually quite manageable, slippery sidewalks resulting from compressed snow and ice can make an area completely unwalkable. Where I live, sidewalk snow and ice removal is sporadic and rarely timely. Roads and vehicles are very much the priority and proponents of car culture are still the dominant voices in my community.

Of course, I'm hoping that will change. With statistics beginning to emerge about all of the peripheral problems related to driving, it would be nice to see more people getting out of their vehicles and onto the bike paths or walkways. Until then, my travel destinations will be cities that allow me to experience them with all of my senses, in the open air, unhindered, moving through their spaces wholly on my own volition.

Clearly this is a community that wants to collaborate

There were some great speakers today at the Collaborative Management conference hosted and attended by Government of Canada employees. Great turnout and some good panel discussions made for an interesting day. In case the sentiment hasn't yet completely saturated the cultural sphere, the keywords for the future are openness and collaboration. GCpedia (which is only available to federal employees) is a great forum for having these conversations, and its more than 19000 active users are showing auspicious signs of getting the party started. But there's something about getting together in person which spices up those cyber-discussions that have been in the works for weeks or even months online. The Canadian government's CIO gave a presentation in which she confirmed that Canada has an open data project in the works, it is moving forward ambitiously, and the first datasets should be ready to go online within the coming year. In the meantime, you can check out this citizen-led effort to aggregate and share datasets from various Canadian government departments. Communities of practice FTW.

The liberation efforts are catching on

Check out this cool Google map of open government data initiatives around the world.

It may not be long before India bears some of those markers as well. President Obama, during his recent visit to Mumbai, attended the first-ever Expo on Democracy and Open Government, and along with President Singh, launched a U.S.-India Partnership on Open Government.

Objective media and media objectives

The news today of Keith Olbermann’s indefinite suspension from MSNBC was just the latest in a series of recent affronts to North American progressives. In case you haven’t heard, Olbermann, the host of the network’s popular Countdown with Keith Olbermann, was suspended for having made political donations of $2400 each to three Democratic candidates in this week's U.S. election. The problem for the network was that his support constituted a breach of their journalistic code of ethics, which strives to maintain objectivity in its reporting. Or in slightly more legal terms, it strives to avoid any conflicts of interest.

If you follow Olbermann, you know that his political leanings are no secret. In fact, his career is defined by his savvy political commentary. Whether or not he is a journalist is debatable, but his employer seems to think he is one. If the network hadn't reacted, most people wouldn't have batted an eyelash over this. As Matt Taibbi puts it, "NBC punishing Olbermann for donating to Democratic candidates is like Hugh Hefner fining the Playmate of the Year for showing ankle."

So what gives? The response does seem completely punitive. All debate about journalistic objectivity aside, the network's grandstanding certainly has helped to give due public attention to some of the really big political investments recently made by media types. Rachel Maddow exposes some here. In the American media, journalistic integrity is apparently applied selectively. And this whole debacle is falling on the heels of several recent media reports about just how powerful a force the very rich and the very crazy can be.

I don't know if there's anybody who still believes that journalism can be wholly objective. But if recent election results in North America are anything to go by, objectivity is something that not enough people care about.

There are lots of geeks in the White House

Check out this interview with Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer, in which he talks about getting government online. When data.gov started in May 2009, there were 47 datasets available. Today there are 274,000.

The creation myth: Why the innovation ecosystem requires more than financial capital to thrive

Some seven months after having announced its intentions in the budget, the Canadian government launched a review yesterday of its programs that support business R&D. A six-member panel was named and tasked with taking the next year to study the effectiveness of public support for private-sector R&D, with the underlying aim of coming up with some solutions to Canada’s lagging innovation and productivity levels. Ranking 16th in the 23-member OECD for its BERD-to-GDP ratio,* Canada has a lot of work to do on its private-sector support for research and development. Our businesses just aren’t keeping up with their international peers when it comes to investing in new ideas. In comparison, our public-sector support for R&D is quite enviable: Canada leads the G7 (though not the OECD) in higher-education expenditures on R&D. Yet there are myriad government programs to support businesses that want to gamble a bit on discovery.

So why the disconnect? I think the problem, on a large scale, is a philosophical issue. We just aren’t promoting a culture of innovation. Sure there are pockets of communities in which novelty is celebrated, where having a vision is welcomed. But this is far from ubiquitous.

The inclination to create, to solve problems and come up with new ways of seeing the world is just not pervasive enough in our culture. We need to celebrate - and moreover reward - those among us who question established orders and work to redescribe the world in workable new ways. And this has very little to do with money. I would not disagree that financial backing makes a huge difference in whether an idea can get off the ground, but it is a very narrow view indeed that sees money as the only factor in promoting innovation.

Case in point: the BERD figure indicates a ratio of financial allocation only: it quantifies how much a country’s business sector spends on R&D relative to the country’s GDP. What it doesn’t measure is output: how much R&D actually gets translated into viable technologies to improve people's lives. Nor does it measure the depth and impact of those improvements.

So, aside from making strategic budget allocations, what are governments to do? Well, for starters, they can adopt open data policies and get information online, in machine-readable formats, for everybody to use. Innovation requires having access to raw data, and providing those data is something inexpensive and easy that governments can do to give people access to the tools they need to create. Several cities have already started doing this. It may take a while before the effects are substantially measurable, but the point is, liberating government data is a big step towards fostering a culture where everyone can be thinking about innovation. To provide easy access to factual, statistical information is to equip people with the building blocks of new ideas.

*****
*BERD refers to “business expenditures on research and development”. This statistic means that Canadian businesses are behind the middle of the pack when compared to their OECD peers on how much they spend on R&D.

Here comes everybody (and their agenda)

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell takes on Clay Shirky by proposing that real social change does not and cannot take place in the world of social media, because online interaction enables only “weak ties” between individuals, and that real revolution relies on “strong ties” between people and issues.

In discussing the strength of adherents to an issue, Gladwell isolates relationships among people, and doesn’t really address the notion of commitment to personal change. He doesn’t address, for example, the possibility that individuals can make a difference by simply altering their everyday activities.

So I guess how you see this issue depends on what you think a revolution is. No doubt some people would make the distinction here between revolutionary and evolutionary movement, but I wonder if real social change is being effected in ways that don’t necessarily involve strong ties between individual and issue. Maybe not all causes require that people be passionately devoted to them. Maybe people are beginning to see, for example, the power of their spending habits, or the effectiveness of their everyday food choices, or the value of collaborating with strangers on community projects.

Maybe positive social change is being more effectively achieved not through violent upheaval, but through piecemeal nudges.

*****
I previously posted elsewhere on this topic:
I read Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker earlier today and immediately thought, ‘Oh, Malcolm, you iconoclast, you.’ Taking on Clay Shirky is no simple effort. But his article, in typical Gladwellian style, is largely anecdotal and doesn’t really point to any hard data to back up his claims. The problem with his argument is that it mandates an either-or dynamic: either you’re lending your name to an online petition or you’re out in the field actively playing a role in the theatre of social change. (Or, as he would have it, you’re carrying out actions in a structured and disciplined hierarchy of instruction.)

And I’m not convinced that’s the way social movements are unfolding in our post-web2.0 theatre. Isn’t it possible that one is a complement to the other?

One major difference in the two sides is the way in which information is conveyed: written language versus speech. Gladwell seems to privilege the latter (an affinity that in postmodern terms is being a sucker for ‘présence’). But social movements have long used written/symbolic forms of communication (posters, books, pamphlets, graffiti, etc.) to reach a wider audience. Access to information is a critical factor in motivating people to act, and the network (democratic) model of spreading ideas has far greater reach and far more profound implications for individual choice than the centralized, strategic approach he’s promoting.

The would-be one in seven

I guess I won’t be immigrating to Sweden any time soon. It’s kind of a drag since I just got my new silver Tretorns. After Ingmar Bergman and Alexander Skarsgard, the nerdy line of shoes is just about my favourite Swedish export.

It appears, however, that the spacious and highly urbanized country is not immune to the fearful and prohibitive crazies that are infecting many industrialized nations these days. Having just seen a significant rise in support for the far-right Sweden Democrats in its recent elections, the country doesn't seem well positioned to take on some of the greater challenges of social integration and productivity growth. Immigration restrictions were reportedly top of mind for enough voting Swedes to prevent the formation of a coalition majority government, and in a nation where one in seven individuals is foreign-born, it's evident that the recent voting patterns signal some serious cultural divides. But the disconnect of Sweden’s status as leader of the world’s democracy index isn’t so poignant when you consider how often the freedom and democracy argument is used to justify bad behaviour. Those arguments, though, are always short-sighted. Prohibition doesn't take away fear and ignorance, rather it exacerbates the misunderstandings that get in the way of real cultural change. It stifles innovation and growth. Which is why freedom and democracy aren't enough if they're not understood as promoting openness and collaboration.

Breaking down the fourth wall

I love New York City. It’s like a mini-world of some of the greatest things that the human race has come up with, condensed into a small geographic area. I love the diversity of the neighbourhoods. I love that I can walk 100 blocks and not get bored. Love that I can get good food just about anywhere. Love the cultural familiarity, shocks and surprises. And I love that everybody’s got their own show going on. For me, New York is like one big stage, and the rest of my life is the greenroom.

One of the most notable things for an outsider going to New York is the glaring immediacy of freedom as a fixed concept in the culture. There are signs of it everywhere. If you fly to Newark, you will land at Liberty International Airport. For less than a quarter of the price of a taxi, you can take the Liberty Express bus into Manhattan. Along the way, you will pass several signs for companies aptly named liberty this or that. In fact, in that 300-square-mile area alone, there are more than a thousand businesses branded with “liberty” nomenclature. From banks to pawnbrokers, from bagel shops to pizzerias, from moving companies to production companies, to jewelers and barbers and cobblers, people in that place conceptualize freedom on virtually every corner. And that’s not even counting any business associated with her Lady of the Harbor. Liberty, for those city dwellers, is at the heart of the social economy. And in some way, this reflects what so many of us throughout North America have come to take for granted as a fundamental tenet of western civilization: People should be free to do as they please in order to be happy in this otherwise incomprehensible universe.

It does seem though that freedom in some contexts isn't much more than a received idea. I think we've come to a point in our societal evolution where freedom is taken for granted. People don't need to think about what it is, because it is unquestionably right. Because of this, it often gets used as an adjunct label to effect a political agenda, or sometimes appropriated for easy spin ("economic freedom"). It's the lack of thinking beyond the terminology that I think prevents any real discussion about how freedom and democracy can advance human knowledge. What is freedom without openness? What is liberty without citizen engagement? Or consideration and collaboration? It’s as if a certain malaise has infected our culture and it is taking its toll on otherwise really progressive commitments, such as the pursuit of knowledge and discovery, and care, and social contracts. I wonder if there’s a remedy. Can we fix the civic engagement gaps that are holding us back from realizing 21st-century advancements? Do that many people really want to opt out? After all, we’re living in a society. I'm inspired by people that do want to participate, no matter how distanced they are from public policy makers. I’m holding out for something better, hopeful that this show can get off the ground, and reminded of the colloquialism that in the theatre, there are no small parts, only small actors.