Metaviews presents the first of a regular series dedicated to sharing insights into political participation — from running for office, to rallying around a cause, to engaging in punditry through all forms of media.

Sessions will consist of debating, dissecting and discussing best practices, strategies and the necessary steps to succeed in having a voice heard in the political arena.

Campaign School will look at the emerging issues in both government and society, evaluate what it takes for a candidate or issue to click with voters and review lessons learned from recent political history. Whether you have entertained taking a run at public office, or just want to be a more engaged observer, each session will have something different to offer.

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Impossible Ideas: The Revolt of 2012

Rick Salutin will initiate our Thursday night series on January 5 with a conversation focused on the return of social movements and the means by which their message is spread.

With the worldwide political disruptions of the past 12 months being constantly compared to the events of four or more decades earlier, Salutin will share his critical view on the emergence of new social movements and how they compare to decades past.

What role has media and technology played in social movements? If 2011 was a reminder as to how powerful actual bodies in the streets can be, what sort of mobilizing should 2012 bring? Has the way we react to all of these events changed along with the media? Does any of this foreshadow a change to the generally sluggish systems in Canada? How can the political narrative in Canada, and around the world change?

These questions and more will be chewed over in a 90-minute salon hosted by Academy of the Impossible director Jesse Hirsh.

With recent news that a virus was found to have infected the "cockpits" of U.S. drone aircraft hovering around the Middle East and Pakistan, concerns have been raised not just around the security of such devices, but the implications of having machines that make semi-autonomous decisions be manipulated.

For example if an operation that theoretically employs the most vigilant cybersecurity specialists can't figure out its source, what does that mean for how similar technology is applied in our daily lives?

As algorithms now play more of a role in our daily lives — from stock market trading to microwave ovens — the potential for security holes, or even unintended side-effects, can literally throw the world off its axis. More horror stories may result from handing key decision making capabilities over to these machines.

At the same time that technology has made it possible to perform digital tasks from anywhere on the planet, cultural debates seem to be increasingly driven by geographical divides.

The chasm has been increasingly pronounced in Toronto, where the 15-year-old decision to amalgamate the city core with its former boroughs is still blamed for the downfall of municipal management, as the sensibilities of downtown condo dwellers don’t match the mindset of suburbia.

Meanwhile, politicians at all levels of government seem loathe to even acknowledge regional antagonisms. Provincial and federal politicians are forced to appear impartial toward the capital cities where they do their work, lest they lose any rural votes, while many of Toronto’s city councillors continue to rely on the trope of a city united in its diversity.

In spite of this, such divides persist, and like so much of our politics these days, they’ve made their way onto the internet. Here in Toronto, a full 380,000 voters cast ballots for Mayor Rob Ford, but you’d be hard pressed to find those people online. According to a poll conducted by the Toronto-based Social Media Group, Ford’s popularity among plugged-in Torontonians hit new lows this summer, with some 61 per cent of all blog posts and tweets expressing negative views towards the mayor.

Similarly, when Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti turned to Facebook for advice on how to reduce the city’s deficit, he was met with, to quote The Globe and Mail, “wide ridicule and derision.”

The internet’s bias towards progressive or left-leaning ideas is hardly unique to Toronto. The popular website If the World Could Vote asks online users about issues of the day and the results are seldom surprising. During the U.S. Presidential election in 2008, the site revealed that a majority of netizens the world over would vote for Barack Obama, and at the time of writing, a poll pertaining to Wikileaks reveals that 86 per cent of users feel Julian Assange should not be charged for his role in leaking classfied documents.

The politics of place, and how they relate to technology, will be discussed in the next Metaviews Telseminar. We will examine the ways in which the divide between the urban and suburban, and the rift between online and offline overlap, and ask why the internet fails reflect the entire political spectrum.

After all, is the internet simply the domain of “urban elites”? Is Twitter just a big digital gala? Or is there something about the interconnectedness of living online that makes users more likely to lean to the left?

The recent suggestion that Toronto could save money by closing some public library branches, just one of several slashes advised by KPMG consultants seeking ways to save money on core services, struck a nerve that eclipsed any debate around parking lots or tourist attractions.

Margaret Atwood used Twitter to step up as the loudest voice of taxpayers who felt undermined by the idea of eliminating spaces where everyone can browse physical books, and borrow them for free. Whether the publishing industry will produce enough printed material to keep the stacks fresh is another matter.

Naturally, the debate over the future of the public library reaches beyond Toronto, although it remains the city with the world's most popular system. The notion of reducing the real estate dedicated to books is not only opposed by bibliophiles, though, but anyone who might seek a specific kind of inspiration within local branch walls — something which all the tables at Tim Hortons can't be counted on to provide.

The bankruptcy of Borders in the U.S. and reduction of book inventory at Chapters and Indigo across Canada also shows how fickle and fragile physical spaces once dedicated to selling words have become.

Yet, at the same time, only the biggest Luddites amongst library defenders remain dependent upon a system to the same degree as they would have been 15 or 20 years ago. There's not much of a case for keeping all locations intact on nostalgic grounds alone.

Regardless, even as we turn to the internet for nearly everything we want to know and more, expenses are still required for maintenance and distribution. After all, the knowledge-based economy is lucrative, too. Software libraries have been essential in getting rich off the web — monetarily and intellectually.

So, if a case is to be made for leaving public libraries intact — if not opening even more of them on a smaller scale — we will hash it out in the next Metaviews Teleseminar.

In December of 2010 we began our first major research project, examining the future of authority. After six months we're ready to deliver the project's mid-term report.
The goal of this project is to investigate how authority is changing in the network age. How is it established, how is it maintained, how is it legitimized? Is a new form of authority emerging? How can and should authority react to dissidents and opposition?
As social upheaval and discontent with government spreads across the Middle East and Northern Africa, doing so in a consciously networked, internet-oriented way, we begin to wonder about the implications for North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, places that are even more networked and have broader online access. With this report we examine the implications of the internet as a challenge to and the legitimization of authority.

Bitcoin is a 2 year old electronic currency that is taking the internet by storm. It combines the basic economic concept of scarcity = value, and that cryptographic operations are computationally expensive. Hundreds of businesses accept them as payment online, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation now accepts donations in BTC. The current global market is worth approx. $US 50M+ at current exchange rates, with over $5M USD traded on May 26th, increasing exponentially as Bitcoin goes viral.

The coins are generated and transactions verified by participants' computation with increasing difficulty over time. Already supplies of cheaper older computer gaming graphics cards (more efficient per watt than a CPU) are running out and there's a run on newer models. There is talk about custom ASICs (chips) fabricated to generate coins more efficiently - would Intel one day cash in, or the US Nat'l Security Agency compute an attack on the market with their supercomputers? Unlikely, say supporters - currently the computational power of the market is beyond the aggregate of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

With a huge gap in a micro-payment solutions for the net (Paypal notwithstanding), can a libertarian-friendly currency - backed by no entity or commodity other than mere collective community fiat and a strong cryptographic algorithm - replace traditional paper-based currency? Bitcoin claims to be not easily manipulated, tracked or otherwise regulated by any government - presenting the ultimate in anonymous cash with instant micropayment capabilities transiting no middleman or costing any tangible transaction fee. This is fundamentally different from electronic payments with existing currencies in the digital economy - Bitcoin is an entirely new currency.

While the web continues to deliver a new world of wonders, the one persistent and pervasive problem is the ongoing erosion of our privacy. The social web is opening up new frontiers for data to find its way from private hands into the public. Whether this is voluntary, or involuntary, it is foisting a new era of transparency onto a society that so far seems entirely unprepared.

The reality is that in spite of our general euphoria and embrace of social media we do still value privacy both personally and organizationally. Indeed most organizations are nowhere near ready to operate under the type of scrutiny and transparency that public officials are now subject to. Wikileaks as a cultural phenomena may represent a watershed of corporate information that will start to be leaked either as a public service, or just to disrupt and sabotage.

Privacy therefore is ripe for a rebound, along with a re-assessment of how we can protect and pursue the values associated with it. The notion of privacy-by-design speaks to the need to integrate privacy considerations into the heart of a product, service, or process, rather than appending it as if it were a nuisance one has to adhere to. Yet the expected expansion of data retention laws also makes it difficult to protect this privacy when massive pools of data are mandated into existence.

Today, maybe more than ever, persuasion forms a core component in the operation of our daily lives. At the core of this is the question of “what is truth?” Every substantive argument attempts to lead us to truth using persuasion. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes less so.

Each day we are propositioned by the advertising that attempts to persuade us of the truth of timeless styles and unrivalled utility. Telecommunications lobbyists attempt to persuade politicians about the truth of usage based billing or net-neutrality. Environmentalists and scientists attempt to persuade a sceptical public about harsh realities of climate change. All the while on message boards, chat clients and through text messaging, people are rabidly debating these things every day in a swirl of discourse.

Yet in the search for truth about all sorts of problems, there is the spectre of cognitive dissonance. In the age of “truthiness” do facts matter anymore? What does it take to persuade people today, especially in the face of information overload? What do activists, business leaders and politicians need to make good decisions, and how do people persuade them to do so? What technologies can aid or enhance persuasion, and what technologies inhibit it?

Canada is in the midst of a general federal election, and social media is amplifying all related political activity, creating an overwhelming volume of data to decipher. It is this torrent that causes many to ascribe to this process the title of social media election, in spite of the status quo reigning supreme when it comes to the level of interactivity and transparency practiced by the leaders and their parties.

Perhaps the greatest irony is the role of the leaders debate, which once again has garnered controversy by excluding the leader of the Green Party, done in a way that demonstrates the lack of transparency found throughout the process as a whole. Yet if this is a social media election, why have any debate at all? Rather the debate can be ongoing, and online, if only the leaders were capable of having a civilized discussion anywhere but under the hard gaze of television cameras.

Like a wildfire the influence of social media has spread across society causing companies and organizations of all sizes to assess how their world is changing. At the forefront of this change has been consumer facing brands that have had little choice but to adapt to the new market realities of consumer empowerment and mobilization. If you're customers are unhappy or dissatisfied they have the means and incentive to do something about it.

As these consumers come to terms with their new found powers, will these same individuals express that influence as citizens? Elections have had incremental, yet steadily expansive use of social media, however that has not yet translated into public policy participation.

Is there an opportunity for companies and organizations to employ social media as part of public affairs and influence of public policy? Are there leadership roles to be played by organizations who are willing to use social media to connect citizens and policy makers? What advantages do companies already engaged in social media engagement have when it comes to shifting from brand marketing to broader public initiatives?

This will be our first teleseminar in a longer series that discusses our research project "The Future of Authority" and the issues surrounding it. For this first discussion we'll be looking at the power of Anonymity, and the role of sites like 4chan that help gather and articulate this phenomena. We'll also touch briefly upon related decision making methods, such as xerocracy, and it's role in creating cryptohierarchies. The focus for this discussion as a whole will be how this relates back to markets, and the risk that brands face from militant and organized consumers.