This Globe report, by Josh O’Kane and Tim Cardoso, is just extraordinary.

In essence, the US-based multinational wants to privatize cities and turn them into profit centres. Everything. Along with control over taxation and transit – like they want here in Toronto – Google even wants control over our system of justice, schools and even people’s’ “behaviour.”

This thing reads like a science fiction/horror movie script.

How can anyone at Waterfront Toronto – or Ottawa, or City Hall – continue to treat Google’s ambitions as benign?

They can’t. They shouldn’t.

A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services.

The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how people living in a Sidewalk community would interact with and have access to the space around them – an experience based, in part, on how much data they’re willing to share, and which could ultimately be used to reward people for “good behaviour.”

Known internally as the “yellow book,”the document was designed as a pitch book for the company, and predates Sidewalk’s relationship and formal agreements with Toronto by more than a year. Peppered with references to Disney theme parks and Buckminster Fuller, it says Sidewalk intended to “overcome cynicism about the future.”

But the 437-page book documents how much private control of city services and city life Alphabet leadership envisioned when they created the company, which could soon be entitled to some of the most valuable underdeveloped real estate in North America.

Since 2017, Sidewalk has been in negotiations with Waterfront Toronto to redevelop a section of the city’s derelict eastern waterfront…

The book proposed a community that could house 100,000 people on a site of up to 1,000 acres, and contains case studies for three potential sites in the United States: Detroit, Mich., Denver, Colo. and Alameda, Calif. It also includes a map with dots detailing many other potential sites for Sidewalk’s first project, including a dot placed on the shores of Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan.

From the beginning, generating real estate value was a key consideration for Sidewalk.

The company presents “enormous potential for value generation in multiple ways,” according to the document: “As a global showcase, as an adaptable testbed for innovation, as a generator of new products, and as perhaps the most ambitious real-estate development project in the world.” It includes profitability estimates for all three sites…

To carry out its vision and planned services, the book states Sidewalk wanted to control its area much like Disney World does in Florida, where in the 1960s it “persuaded the legislature of the need for extraordinary exceptions.” This could include granting Sidewalk taxation powers. “Sidewalk will require tax and financing authority to finance and provide services, including the ability to impose, capture and reinvest property taxes,” the book said. The company would also create and control its own public services, including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure.

Sidewalk’s early data-driven vision also extended to public safety and criminal justice.

The book mentions both the data-collection opportunities for police forces (Sidewalk notes it would ask for local policing powers similar to those granted to universities) and the possibility of “an alternative approach to jail,” using data from “root-cause assessment tools” that would guide officials in finding an appropriate response when someone is arrested. The overall criminal justice system and policing of serious crimes and emergencies would be “likely to remain within the purview of the host government’s police department,” however.

Data collection plays a central role throughout the book. Early on, the company notes that a Sidewalk neighbourhood would collect real-time position data “for all entities” – including people. The company would also collect a “historical record of where things have been and vector information about where they are going.” Furthermore, unique data identifiers would be generated for “every person, business or object registered in the district,” helping devices communicate with each other.

There would be a quid pro quo to sharing more data with Sidewalk, however. The document describes a tiered level of services, where people willing to share data can access certain perks and privileges others may not. Sidewalk visitors and residents would be “encouraged to add data about themselves and connect their accounts, either to take advantage of premium services like unlimited wireless connectivity or to make interactions in the district easier,” it says.

Shoshana Zuboff, the Harvard professor emerita whose book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism investigates the way Alphabet and other big-tech companies are reshaping the world, called the document’s revelations “damning.” The community Alphabet sought to build when it launched Sidewalk Labs, she said, was like a “for-profit China” that would “use digital infrastructure to modify and direct social and political behaviour.”

While Sidewalk has since moved away from many of the details in its yellow book, Prof. Zuboff contends that Alphabet tends to “say what needs be said to achieve commercial objectives, while specifically camouflaging their actual corporate strategy.”

According to the document, personalization would increase as users contributed more data, leading to “more complete or personalized services from Project Sidewalk in return.” An example states that people choosing to share “in-home fire safety sensor” data could receive advice on health and safety related to air quality, or provide additional information to first responders in case of an emergency.

Those choosing to remain anonymous would not be able to access all of the area’s services: Automated taxi services would not be available to anonymous users, and some merchants might be unable to accept cash, the book warns.

The document also describes reputation tools that would lead to a “new currency for community cooperation,” effectively establishing a social credit system. Sidewalk could use these tools to “hold people or businesses accountable” while rewarding good behaviour, such as by rewarding a business’ good customer service with an easier or cheaper renewal process on its licence.

This “accountability system based on personal identity” could also be used to make financial decisions. “A borrower’s stellar record of past consumer behaviour could make a lender, for instance, more likely to back a risky transaction, perhaps with the interest rates influenced by digital reputation ratings,” it says.

The company wrote that it would own many of the sensors it deployed in the community, foreshadowing a battle over data control that has loomed over the Toronto project.

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And our federal leaders say nothing.  Oh, and our Prime Minister says he’s okay with “values tests.”

Does anyone care about what is happening, here?

Immigrants who want to settle in Quebec will soon be required to pass a values test.

Starting Jan. 1, they will have to prove they have learned “democratic values and Quebec values” in order to obtain a selection certificate, the first step toward permanent residency for those who want to live in the province.

The test was a key election promise made by the Coalition Avenir Québec.

It is still unclear exactly what questions will be asked on the test, but the values are defined as those expressed in Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

Premier François Legault was able to bypass Ottawa by deciding to administer the test during the selection process, which is Quebec’s jurisdiction, instead of during the permanent residency process, which is Canadian jurisdiction.

All adult immigration applicants and their accompanying family members will be required to pass the test if they want to move to Quebec, the government announced in the official Gazette Wednesday.

 

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Frank Bruni, who I hero-worship, has a typically-amazing column in the Sunday New York Times. 

Best bit:

On Twitter in particular, Trump doesn’t exclaim; he expectorates. You can feel the spittle several time zones away.

And Twitter suits him not just because of its immediacy and reach. It’s a format so abridged and casual that botched grammar isn’t necessarily equated with stupidity; it could simply be the consequence of haste or convenience. Formally written letters follow rules and demand etiquette. For Twitter all you need is a keypad and a spleen.

I love that last line, about needing only “a keyboard and a spleen.”

Over the past few days, lost of people have asked me to come back to Twitter and Facebook and all that social media stuff.  I might, I might not.  I haven’t decided yet.

I didn’t turn off social media, by the by, because I couldn’t handle the crap – I’m actually not bad at handling the social media crap.  Twitter is punk rock Internet, which is why I (usually) got a kick out of it.  It’s fast and nasty and blunt, like punk rock is.

So, I’ve even taught people how to use Twitter, and how not to let it get you down.

But it was getting me down, so I turned it off.  Click.  It was easy.  Haven’t missed it, either.

The Internet is a vanity press for the deranged, someone once said, and it has always been thus.  Expecting enlightenment in 240 characters is kind of ridiculous, when you think about it.

 

 

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It’s big news, certainly.

And, naturally, Republicans will say that the death of the head of ISIS will make their leader a lot more popular. They will say it’ll get him re-elected as president. But are they right?

Well, the only recent precedent we have to go on is the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, which had been ordered by Barack Obama. It was pretty popular, too. Obama even made a controversial campaign ad about it in 2012.

Obama was re-elected in that year, but that probably had more to do with his opponent, and the improving economy, than the dead al-Qaeda leader.

Gallup, for example, found that Americans’ approval of Obama was up six points after the death of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid on the al-Qaeda leader’s Pakistan compound. Obama averaged 46 per cent approval in Gallup Daily tracking in the three days leading up to the military operation – and averaged 52 per cent in the days that followed. Gallup called it “typical for rally events.”

Ditto Pew. They found that the mission to take out bin Laden did nothing to diminish Americans’ concerns about Obama’s handling of the economy, Pew reported in the Washington Post.

There, 56 per cent of Americans said they approved of Obama’s performance in office overall, which was nine percentage points higher than an ABC News/Washington Post poll found in the previous month.

But on the economy, Pew said, Obama’s numbers remained pretty low and unchanged — only 40 per cent approved of his economic strategy, which was the lowest rating of his presidency.

And so on. The guy who recently left the Kurds to be killed by the Turks – and who thereby permitted the escape of scores of ISIS prisoners who had been held by the Kurds – now wants credit for killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

He’ll get some. But not enough to prevent his impeachment in 2019, and his loss of the presidency in 2020.

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