Last week I gave a talk for The Walrus, a gem of a Canadian magazine. I was invited to contribute the tech angle to a Walrus Talks panel “The Billionaire Problem” (spoilers: I’m anti) so of course I talked about tech worker organizing.

The talk is nine minutes long, I’m quite happy with how it went¹, and you should watch it and share it with your colleagues and also boss, probably. If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, I’ve included a lightly edited transcript below.

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Hello yes, I am aware that it’s been almost a full year since the last post. This is largely because running Show Up Toronto and writing a newsletter for it every week takes a lot of time and energy. I’m quite proud of the project, and if you live in Toronto (or know people who do) you should sign up (or tell them to).

Another side effect of running a community calendar for a year and a half is that I now have quite a lot of Opinions™ about how events are promoted online. At time of writing, Show Up has posted over 3,100 events from over 900 groups, and I’ve easily looked at another half as many that weren’t good fits. These opinions are, shall we say, painfully acquired.

Here’s what I wish every event organizer would do for their event listings.

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In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

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Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post.

Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care:

The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.

…

The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns.

Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

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Some of you know me because of a daily political newsletter project I ran in 2017-2018 centered on American politics. I am eight years older and wiser, with much more clever and original ideas, so I come to you now with a new project: a weekly political newsletter slash website centered on Toronto.

The project is called Show Up Toronto, and it launches today. The scope may be smaller geographically but it’s not any less ambitious, just more focused. My current goal is to aggregate public organizing, mutual aid, and advocacy events from around the city, so that it’s easier to discover how to get involved in organizing even if you’re not already plugged into the right social media circles. I am also actively interviewing organizers in the city for a related research project, and if you are an organizer in Toronto I would love to hear from you.

On the advice of a smart friend, I wrote a manifesto for the project to serve as my own north star, which I’m reposting below. I think it’ll be clarifying and engaging even for people who don’t live in Toronto. If you do, sign up for the newsletter or RSS feed and tell your friends.

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