UNBeknownst Podcast Episode 21
Josh O'Kane (BSc/BA'09) is a reporter with The Globe and Mail who has spent much of his career reporting on technology and music, and currently covers the institutions, economics and policy that underpin arts and culture.
In 2022, when he recorded the podcast episode with host Katie Davey (BA’17), his coverage focused on the relationships between tech companies and human beings, governments, economies, and each other. His latest book, Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, investigates the failed effort by Google sister company Sidewalk Labs to build a future-focused neighbourhood in Toronto, the many institutions that company won over, and the consequences of Big Tech’s push into the physical world. That book was a finalist for numerous Canadian and international publishing prizes, and was adapted for the stage as The Master Plan.
Josh has extensively reported from Berlin, Halifax, Fredericton and Saint John, and is based in Toronto. He got his start on the UNB campuses – he has a science and arts degree from UNB, wrote for the UNBSJ student paper, The Baron, and was editor of The Brunswickan on the Fredericton campus.
Listen to the episode
Highlights from the episode
Katie: You've just done something big: you've written your second book, Sideways, The City Google Couldn't Buy. What inspired you to write this book, and what did that process look like for you?
Josh: So I've been with the globe now like 11 years and I still frankly can't believe it. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be a kid from Saint John working here, and about five years ago, I was asked to join the technology beat. Sidewalk Labs had announced a partnership with this sort of obscure government agency called Waterfront Toronto to build what was kind of colloquially, at the time, called the Smart City, although neither organization really wanted to call it that.
This company, Sidewalk Labs, was a side company of Google, which had rearranged itself under this big old parent company called Alphabet a couple of years earlier. This gave the company, basically Google’s money to fund these sort of side hustles to look at what is the future of innovation and various other things. And one of them was cities, and Toronto was going to be the very first one they were going to attempt to build. I basically started covering this on a regular basis. You know, it started out with news stories I would do so that I could better understand the issues at hand. Like why does data matter to the future of the economy, and data helps you understand patterns about how people live their lives. And once you know those patterns, you can build products to solve problems in their lives. This is how the entire internet economy has been born.
But what happens when you scale that into the physical reality? This is the frontier for digital innovation by applying it to the physical world: it was this 12-acre patch of land and Google really wanted to start experimenting and try to figure out what the city the future would look like. I just started writing and reporting and built up sources. Then this thing called the COVID-19 pandemic hit and about four months into that, Sidewalk Labs pulled out and I had been covering the project at that time for more than two years. I realized, there's something here that is a neat narrative start, middle and finish like a three act play.
And I was like, well, it's also a pandemic. I can't see anybody. Why don't I see if I can turn this into a book? I got an agent and then over a few months wrote a proposal, got a publisher and then got a deal at the very end of 2020 and spent an extremely intense nine months writing, reporting and trying to get at the human element of it. Because, you know, writing news stories is fact, fact, fact. Writing a book is really trying to show the human nature and the human drama at the center of a story. And so I was interviewing people, going back and if people wouldn't talk to me, talking to people close to them, trying to get a sense of motivation, of drama, of why people were focusing on the issues that they did. I fired off a first draft about a year ago and then I've been editing it ever since, which has been fun. Now it's about to come out. I'm very excited.
Katie: How did Sidewalk Labs actually get into bed with Waterfront Toronto? What did that look like?
Josh: There was a fully transparent request-for proposals process. There were at least one Canadian consortium of individuals and companies that bid on the project, basically Waterfront Toronto, an interesting tripartite government organization which in an optimistic way is supposed to reflect the interests of all three levels of government: federal, provincial and city. But it also means the federal, provincial and city each only have a 33% share of the organization and no one necessarily is able to take a definitive leadership role. What unfolded was quite interesting because each level of government had different sets of laws around big thorny issues like privacy, driverless cars, traffic laws, etc.
Katie: It's clear that the backdrop of this is a larger conversation around monetization of data privacy as a human right. And frankly a bit of a disregard for democracy as well. That's, you know, I think played out in this case in some ways, but it’s also playing out in this broader technology conversation. Is that a fair characterization in your mind?
Josh: Yeah. I would say the way that Sidewalk interacted with democratic institutions did change overtime. By the end of the project, they were exhibiting a significant amount of willingness and effort to partner with governments to make things work on terms that governments and the people they represented wanted. But for a large number of people, particularly who were watching this organization’s every move, it was too little, too late and they felt that a significant amount of goodwill was lost, and that did, I think, have a significant amount of discoloring of how people perceived the project.
Katie: I think the lessons will need to be applied to the future because you know it's not only cities that are messy. As a society right now we face massive challenges: climate change, healthcare, reshaping of geopolitics, rising inequality, inflation. I could go on and on. Won't these all these big challenges also need big, innovative solutions? And can we can we learn to actually solve some of these big challenges or are we just going to be stuck with not being able to match the speeds each player needs to operate at?
Josh: That's a very deep and thorny question that I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer. I think the result of what happened here is proof that solutions are extremely hard to come by. Cities do need to change. You know, affordability is the number one problem afflicting so many people. People are dying because they're unhoused. We are polluting the environment because there are cars everywhere. We're not investing in ways for people to get around in a safe and economically friendly way and people are flocking more and more than ever to urban cores. And we do need to figure out solutions to that. I think it’s going to be a while before we figure out how we can actually properly solve that in a way that satisfies people, in a free and democratic country.
Katie: To your point, we as citizens play a role ourselves in contributing to and engaging in these big questions. But as you know there is a broad conversation unfolding in Canada and globally right now about regulating big tech generally. I know just in the last month you've been writing about Amazon and their tax avoidance in Canada. But there are these other discussions around online harms. What can or should Canada be doing in this current environment and are we even a player globally on some of these bigger questions?
Josh: One of the things that I've learned over the last four or five years as I've spent some time reporting in the US and Europe is that Canada isn't really that big of a player, unfortunately. And Canada has taken a particularly interesting evolution in its thoughts about Big Tech since 2015, when the Trudeau government first took power. What I have learned is that in the first term there was an extreme hesitance to do anything to criticize big tech because they saw big tech as the core of a genuinely progressive future. That may be a very classic, I think, misunderstanding between the idea of societal progress and technological progress. Those two are very separate things. And technological progress does not necessarily account for harms in the same way that societal progress does.
And that's why privacy has become one of the defining human rights discussions of our age. And so there was very much a desire to not want to anger these organizations that could be genuine sources of economic development in Canada. Genuine sources for jobs. We’re talking 2015/2016. But then, in 2018, this thing called the tech lash began, and it was sort of centered around data collection issues from the organization Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and allegations of the misuse of data. And suddenly people are like, wait, what are these companies doing with the data they've been collecting about us? That fundamentally has generated the entire economy of the internet. And people started to question that and then overtime, the federal Government of Canada did also recognize that and distanced themselves from the Sidewalk Labs controversies. In their second term, they took a much harder attack.
There were a number of bills in late 2020, including the one that I focused most on, which is on privacy, that genuinely tried to catch Canada up to more progressive jurisdictions. And when I say progressive in those terms, I mean it in terms of the idea of embracing technological process in such a way that allows for social progress, and the two jurisdictions that have taken the greatest leadership are the European Union with their general data protection regulation and California with its own regulation. So Canada put all these bills out there and then they spent 2021 basically preparing for the next election and most of these bills. It went nowhere. Some of them are now coming back up. But for the most part, it does seem that Canada is very interested in actually applying the lessons learned from the tech lash and genuinely trying to regulate big tech. We are trying more now than ever to grapple with the power of big tech.
Subscribe to hear from other incredible UNB alumni at: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
