The years, as a modern philosopher once said, start coming, and they don’t stop coming.

When the 2024 US presidental election happened, I asked on social media where the progressive organizing was happening in Canada. I felt like I could see what was going to happen: there would be a federal election, the right wing would come into power, and Canada would follow its southern neighbours off a metaphorical cliff as we’ve been known to do. When that happened, I wanted to be tapped into spaces of resistance that I had tapped out of for a few years when my husband and I found ourselves unexpectedly raising a teenager.

Lots of people responded to my question, but none of it felt quite like the right answer. The NDP is shambolic at multiple levels, even before they lost official party status federally, but what was being done about it? Doug Ford’s snap winter election saw an abysmal turnout that delivered an overwhelming majority for his legislative agenda of cruelty and cronyism and fucking with Toronto specifically, but what was being done about it? Poilievre was kept out of power for now by a wave of hockey-metaphor-based nationalism, but a central banker is driving the country further right by wielding the austerity hammer that seems to be the only tool in the Liberal chest, while the rich keep getting richer and the planet keeps getting hotter and life keeps getting harder, and what was being done about it?

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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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In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations.

Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me.

You can watch the talk here:

Seeing as I am personally allergic to watching any YouTube videos longer than five minutes unless I absolutely have to, I’ve also included a lightly edited version of the text of the talk below.

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