tech isn’t the future it’s just capitalism faster
responding with slowness in relations
In 2012, I did some of my first work as a facilitator to support a public engagement process for the Kay Gardner Beltline Park and Trail in Toronto. Through that work, I had one of my earliest experiences with what it meant to support inclusive design for landscapes — how to make sure everyone could enjoy the space, both alone and together, as well as how to do the best for the health of the land. In that process, I made a funny mistake at a public meeting (now it’s funny, then I was sweating) that turned out to be an accidental lesson about patience and humility.
The point of both of these stories below — and all that is in between — is how time relates to quality of relationships with each other, and with the land, how inefficiency can create unexpected and welcome moments for building collectives, and how these themes can inform tech organizing and advocacy efforts.
In the early days of doing work on the Kay Gardner Beltline Park and Trail, I visited it together with a small group of people that knew it well and enjoyed it often. The accessibility issues that related to how people spent time there were numerous — slow walking and fast cycling, being there as kids, being there with dogs, how much or how little light to add, which materials should be used for the trail and where, local use, broader city use as a connective space, and on it went.
Through these conversations, I learned what a switchback is (see the photo on this post). It’s part of a path or trail that zig-zags back and forth, so that you can manage an incline without it being too steep and without going too fast. The design also limits erosion. This, from a US hiking blog, on both what switchbacks are, and how they’re sometimes used or ignored:
“Switchbacks are cut by the people who maintain the trails, which in the case of most hiking in North Georgia, is the U.S. Forest Service — Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests or the Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites. When the trails were originally built, they put the switchbacks in to make the climb easier and to minimize as much erosion as possible.
However, a big problem on most trails are hikers jumping off the switchback and trying to blaze up the trail via a “shortcut” by going straight up or down. Besides hikers wanting to prove their bravado by making the hike challenging, these shortcuts happen because with switchbacks you can usually see the next section of the trail mere feet away up or down the mountain. So its awfully tempting to just “skip ahead” when on a switchback.”
Switchbacks can be an example of inclusive design, a method of designing spaces, both physical and digital, to be inclusive of the needs of many different kinds of people, and ideally, for the land. So while it may take longer to walk the switchback than to run straight up or down the hill if you’re able to, the trail has now become manageable for people using strollers, for people using mobility devices, for people that can’t do steep steps or heights, which are people of all ages, and many kids and seniors. The material used for a switchback (dirt, stones, gravel, paving) is a critical feature regarding accessibility, as is maintenance — without the right materials and maintenance, switchbacks don’t necessarily support accessibility.
The reason that this switchback and the trail project came to mind recently was in thinking about speed and pace and how it relates to organizing, after reading “Collective Breathing: Post-Election Grief, Organizing, and Surviving with a Disability” by Vee Copeland. Copeland’s piece really needs to be read in full, please do so. The politics of pace. And chronic illness. And grief. And disability. And crisis. In it, she writes:
“It matters that we remind each other that our passion and yearning for justice, albeit from our beds, makes a difference and that we do not have to move at the pace of the world to fight against fascism. Perhaps our need to proceed slowly will uncomfortably, yet thoroughly, contest everything others know about building sustainable movements. Perhaps in moving at our own speed, others will recognize their need to pause and breathe with us as well.”
Making common cause in slowness. Operating actively against the industrialized clock of never-ending productivity is part of disability justice. It’s also a way to protect the time and space necessary to reconsider and reconfigure relations.
Yesterday, Jeff Doctor wrote a post that called on Canadians to consider this political moment in US/Canada relations as an opportunity to make common cause. It’s titled “We can do something different” and opens: “Right now, for a lot of Canadians the temptation is to ignore Indigenous people because the threats from the US seem way more important. This turn to fervent and ignorant nationalism is a mistake. Don’t alienate the people who know more about your “country” than you do. Find common cause instead.”
That offer looks like thousands of different courses of action. As one possible starting point for those of you in Toronto, there is a book called “Indigenous Toronto — Stories That Carry This Place” edited by Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, and Brian Wright-McLeod. There is a chapter in the book titled “Remember Like We Do” by Ange Loft. In it, Loft writes about the history of treaties in Toronto and in doing so remarks: “I’m always so afraid to put things down in writing. We know how that can go wrong.”
Toronto’s lands are subject to treaties. In this context, Loft and her collaborators created “A Treaty Guide for Torontonians” which “is an artful examination of the complex intercultural roots of treaty relationships in the place we now call Toronto. From the Two Row Wampum and Dish with One Spoon to the Treaty of Niagara and the Toronto Purchase, we trace the history of treaty making between Indigenous nations, and between Indigenous nations and the Crown. Part of Jumblies Theatre + Arts’ multiyear Talking Treaties project, A Treaty Guide inspires an active approach to treaty awareness through embodied learning tools. Land-based activities, theatrical exercises, and drawing and writing prompts help readers find their own relationship to this history, and to take up their treaty responsibilities in the present.” For more on the subject of treaties, see the Yellowhead Institute’s The Treaty Map project.
Which brings me to my second story about the Kay Gardner Beltline Park and Trail. How little I knew about the land in question. How little I knew about its history. Beyond that, in 2012, I was new to this type of facilitation, to running a public meeting, managing a room full of people that were there with conflicting opinions, as well as fear. I do not trust my memory that any of what I’m sharing here is exactly right, but it’s right enough to keep sharing.
The night of the first public meeting, there was a much larger turnout than expected. In doing prep for the night, I had an agenda that included some time set aside at the beginning for introductions for a small group. When the meeting began, and there were way more people than expected, I didn’t have the experience to have the confidence to go off-script and skip the introductions, which is what I learned fast, and would do now.
It was panic-y for me. People were clearly not in the best mood, they were fearful that changes they weren’t going to like were coming to a place they had feelings about and connections to. And in that panic I held even tighter to my script. As I went around the room, and people were saying their names, sometimes adding in commentary, it was clear this was going to take quite a while. People were getting irritated and grumbling and I was sweating. Then, as person number forty-ish (guessing) took the mic, they said “I’m Kay Gardner”. The room broke out in applause. Kay Gardner was there at the Kay Gardner Beltine Park and Trail meeting. Suddenly everything was ok, and I was out of the hot seat.
From Wikipedia: “In the 1970s [Gardner] became involved in a campaign to save a former railway right of way called the Belt Line from development. Eventually this was turned into a pedestrian and bicycling trail called the Beltline Trail. It currently runs from Yonge Street south of Davisville Avenue northwest to the Allen Road and Eglinton Avenue West. In 1999, at the suggestion of councillor Michael Walker, Toronto City Council renamed the park the Kay Gardner Beltline Park in her honour.
She was best known for advocating for tenants’ rights. She helped lobby the city to save three low-rise rental apartment buildings on Eglinton Ave. West from conversion to condominiums. At the time they were occupied mainly by seniors on fixed incomes. Her first act as a city councillor was to support a motion for the city to purchase the buildings. They were bought by Cityhome, the city’s non-profit housing company.”
I don’t remember if we finished the introductions, or if the applause shocked me out of my panic-cling to old plans. My mistake that night was to hold fast to my old plans (everyone introduce themselves) even though what was happening in the room meant I should have switched to new ones (skip it, move into the presentation and discussion). In the end the meeting went well.
But in the beginning, I was asking the room for patience in a way that didn’t make any sense, and for trust in a process, and in me, that had not yet been earned. But my mistake of inefficiency made Gardner’s presence there not only visible, but visible in the most pedestrian way. She was there like everyone else. Maybe if someone else had run the meeting they would have known her or spotted her, called her up, or made her presence formal. But for whatever reason, it happened the way it did. I got off easy because people were relieved to learn that the project was mostly about making improvements to a place they loved. There were way fewer people at the second meeting, once the fear of the unknown was out of the way.
Part of this meeting made me reflect on how many people we can work with at a time, in what ways, and the challenges in making honest space for each other no matter how much longer the whole thing will take. This in some ways relates to what Copeland’s writing and Doctor’s writing suggest to me. That revisiting every part of how we come together is worthwhile. What is my job today in tying the history of the land I’m on, the full history, to all the different kinds of work that I do?
I am unapologetic now about spending small meeting times with people to just get a better idea of each other, thinking together, without the productivity of an “outcome” right away. When COVID began, urgency exited my life, in organizing, and in everything else. Removing urgency, removing panic, especially in crisis, is important, life-preserving, and often, welcome. But it’s also not always a choice. Productivity pressures are crushing, and political dangers are mounting.
How do we make disagreement welcoming? Especially in the heat of crises, and depths of grief? “Freedom is an Endless Meeting — Democracy in American Social Movements” is a book by Francesca Polletta. In it, she writes about participatory democracy’s many facets, including the meetings that are part of organizing. She talks about the need for methods to manage conflict, to understand that organizing relationships are a different flavour than what many of us may be familiar with.
To disagree well is generally inefficient because it’s not about passive-aggressive agree to disagree statements made in a huff. It’s a lot of listening, which takes time. And it’s a lot of persistence to keep things together. “How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?” ask Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kabe, in which the authors write:
“In organizing, we sometimes expect people, including ourselves, to shed the habits this society has embedded in us through sheer force of will, when in reality we all need practice. Activities that help us hone our practice of listening can make us better organizers, improve our personal relationships, and help us build stronger and longer-lasting movements.”
To tie this all together, and back to technology - a lot of automation relies on leveraging convenience. AI summaries do very little to help us learn how to listen. Skim and speed-read, no physical discomfort of sitting through a tedious conversation. The short-cut on the switchback, the summary of the meeting so you don’t have to go, and in the process, you don’t have to engage with the mess that is a bigger set of relations.
In broader terms, automation generally is not supportive of reciprocity, of difference, of back and forth. When you use software in your job, you often become aware of how limiting your help becomes — you can’t do something because the system says no. That’s messing with your authority and agency, and it’s also removing your capacity to be creative in how you respond to someone that needs different help, a different timeline, a different language, a different format.
As Ursula Franklin wrote in The Real World of Technology: “Whenever human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general, technical arrangements reduce or eliminate reciprocity. Reciprocity is some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication among interacting parties… design that rules out reciprocity is a continuing form of technologically executed inequality. It has very profound political and psychological consequences… Reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment. It is designed to improve a specific performance.”
We have to try to protect time and space to be inefficient with each other in as many places as we want to have healthy relationships. All the places that we have contact with each other, every single one of our relationships holds political power, responsibility, and ideally some degree of reciprocity.
Of overarching importance is making peace with the need for diversity of tactics. There’s no right way to organize, writ large. Everyone can’t be everywhere. Not every space is for you, and that’s not only fine, it’s good. But each of us can always think more about how to extend our spaces to bring more people into them to work towards the common cause of life, and health, and ultimately love. Which paces of work best encourage that?
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Thanks always to Third Party Public (formerly Swerhun Inc.), a firm with decades of experience doing great facilitation work. This is where I got to work on the Beltline project. They provided me - and others - the space to make mistakes and learn and grow together. Special, rare, and life-long appreciated :)
