This morning, Waterfront Toronto is hosting what feels like its 100,000th consultation on the Sidewalk Labs proposal for the Quayside site in Toronto, so this is as good a morning as any to trash this totally fictional thread.
/2 Start with "Google." This is a Sidewalk Labs, which may be a company in the same corporate family as Google, but it's different people with a different mandate. Most of Sidewalk's leadership is ex-public service in city/state or provincial govt in New York, NYC or Canada.
/3 This distinction matters to me for the same reason why it matters to Sidewalk's critics to say "Google" every chance they get. Opponents say "Google" b/c they want this to sound like it's basically a giant data collection project. In fact, most of the people working on it -
/4 - are specialists in city services, infrastructure policy, development, utilities, tall timber or other areas more traditionally associated with 'city-building.' In my previous role at @TorontoRBOT, the data person I dealt with at Sidewalk Labs most often was @jackiewtlu -
/5 - who is a Canadian who previously served as the Director of Data Analytics at NYC Parks. Yes, now there's a sinister voice to worry about... OMG she worked on open data! She worked to make public parks better! The horror!
/6 Fiction: "city keeps greenlighting through successive phases." Fact: the City of Toronto has not greenlit a single phase of Quayside. What's active now is just (or yet) another stage of negotiation/consultation between Waterfront Toronto - owned by 3 govts - +Sidewalk.
/7 I love how often #BlockSidewalk & those relying on their info abroad get to have it both ways; one minute, it's a brutal "takeover of Toronto," everything has been greenlit. The next minute, "nothing is resolved," "everything Sidewalk Labs wants to do can still be stopped."
/8 First breath: 'critics forced Sidewalk to give up so much in Waterfront negotiations!' (e.g. development partnerships, data now goes to a govt agency, etc.) Next breath: 'Waterfront is helpless and captive to Sidewalk! They can't be trusted to negotiate anything!'
/9 Doctorow: "vast swathe" of Toronto. Reality: both parties have agreed that Quayside is about 12 acres. To put that in perspective, a single nearby branchplant movie studio nearby is two acres larger. Toronto's proposed "Rail Deck park" would be almost twice the size.
/10 I don't blame Doctorow. I'm quite sure he's getting his information the same way some writers who've talk about "demonstrations" and "protests" against this project do -
/11 Even though the opposition to this project at any point in the endless consultations never polled above 20%, and even though opponents to an average condo development in this town have pulled more people to a public meeting than any held by #BlockSidewalk since the beginning.
/12 But that won't stop opponents from continuing to move the goalposts, hoping to kill this thing from sheer inertia. And the goalposts do keep moving. More on that later...
2.1/ One point I'm forced to repeat endlessly is the fact that while opponents are complaining that Sidewalk Labs "isn't being transparent," or whatever, there's a huge element of obliviousness or selective grief there. After all, Sidewalk is absolutely being more transparent -
2.2 - than many of its competitors or counterparts testing or actively delivering similar projects or ideas in Canadian cities already. It has to be. Waterfront Toronto has made /is making any Quayside land buy conditional on an escalating series of disclosures. In contrast -
2.3 - literally any firm wanting to try similar innovations or projects in Toronto need merely buy a private parcel of land, or assemble public land at auction at FMV, and almost none of these questions would arise, no disclosures, needed, no DSAPs or filings or whatever. None!
2.4 That's because of the absence of consistent 🇨🇦 regulation on several issues of digital concern. The result is that Sidewalk Labs has taken heat for aspiring to do things that are now already happening elsewhere while they wait for approvals (e.g. higher tall timber builds).
2.5 Imagine if every one of the 100-odd people #BlockSidewalk can pull to an 'urgent' public meeting focused on pushing for regs on issues they care about - like data governance, or public land sales generally, or whatever, instead of picking on one case with telling selectivity.
2.6 If that happened, these problems could be addressed broadly, with a level playing field for SWL *and everyone else.* But instead, so much energy is focused on bashing one firm, even though everything the firm wants or doesn't want to do is conditional on one land deal...
2.7 ...while all of those things can and in some cases are happening to a greater degree anywhere else in the Canadian economy without remotely the same discussion or scrutiny. And yet, Quayside is supposed to be the transparency problem here.... really?
2.8 Look at recent police disclosures with facial rec tech here in Canada. I support regulation - harsh oversight, if not an outright ban - on this tech. I signed off on a @TorontoRBOT oped supporting this position, too. I suspect many Block Sidewalk activists share this view.
2.9 Opponents claim Sidewalk wants to use this tech. Sidewalk insists it doesn't. Ask yourself: so why the hell aren't those activists focused on getting facial rec tech regulated *nationwide,* instead of selectively arguing hypotheticals for one firm on one 12-acre site?
2.10 No, really, ask yourself - why? :)
