To Protest or Not to Protest - That is the question.

Last week Elizabeth May leader of and the only sitting member of Canada's Green party got arrested while protesting at the gate of the Kinder-Morgan tank farm in Burnaby, B.C. (much less noticed was the arrest of NDP member of Parliament - Kennedy Stewart). A piece of me wants to clap my hands in almost an excited way that at least someone who has some sort of status is prepared to do something to draw attention to the issue. But there is an almost larger part of me that wants to yell out - so what!
 
My lack of excitement for their act of civil disobedience  has nothing to do with their cause or the fact that their concerns are reasonable for any rational, forward thinking, grandparent-thinking-about-their -grandchildren type of person - it is because it is such an inadequate response. In fact to call the miniscule protest at the Morgan-Kinder site a civil disobedience fees like a profound exaggeration. I think much of my discomfort at the protests over the pipelines is the fact that the protesters suggest that they are acting on behalf of all First Nations and other British Columbians while very small numbers of people are actually showing up and protesting. I suspect that those protesters and the hundreds of people who pass comments on their Twitter and Facebook pages have little or no understanding of the amount of energy required to actively engage in any sort of civil disobedience.

If one were to look at some at examples of effective civil disobediences that have occurred on this continent  - two conditions become apparent. One was that a large percentage of the affected citizens were involved and secondly that the protests lasted not just for a few hours or a weekend - but for weeks and weeks - if not months. For example if one looks at the Montgomery bus boycott - it lasted for 13 months and during that times no (or at least very few) African Americans used city buses.  In March of 2011, in the province of Quebec a handful of students staged a protest over the announce hikes in university tuition. A year or so later there were student lead protests for night after night - some of which were attended by 200,000 people.

A march or a protest of a few thousands or even a hundred thousand but that last but for a few hours does not impact the bureaucrats, the politicians or the corporate elites. It is no more effective at stopping anything than are a few mosquito bites. A number of years ago, during the Mike Harris days in Ontario, the public service unions orchestrated a series of rotating day long, city wide strikes. For a day the downtown core of Toronto was shut down. There were thousands of workers taking the day off from work - supposedly in protest over some significant cuts to budgets and services. It was a lovely day - nice weather, great people to talk to; it was fun walking down the middle of major streets with no concerns about traffic etc. Everything was closed down - there were no civil servants visible nor were there any corporate offices that seemed open. The next day we all went back to work, Harris ignored that and other similar protest and continued with the cuts. A short while later the union announced that there would be no more large strikes.

If the actions of such people as Elizabeth May are to have any effect, there must be a continuous, planned, and focused strategy developed and carried out. As tempting (and as lazy) as it is to believe that Facebook and Twitter are all that is required to (1) get people out and (2) to maintain a long term, sustainable agenda of civil disobedience - it will never work. People need to commit the time and energy not just into getting to the demonstration but into keeping it fresh and vital for weeks if not months.

So good on Elizabeth May and  Kennedy Stewart for having the courage to make a point - it is just too bad that their energies may have been wasted

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Who to Blame? Part Two - Solutions

Who to Blame? Part Two - Solutions

Perhaps it is entirely coincidental but this morning's CBC site reported on two diametrically opposite solutions to the ever present (and some might say intrusive)  presence of Facebook and other social media apps.

Solution #1

Matt Stoller, a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute has suggested that "Facebook be restructured to neutralize its market power and be forced to divest some of its holding like Instagram and WhatsApp" (CBC). Interesting solution - one would think that some people believe that Facebook etc. are essential services such as oil to keep our houses warm, or even media such as radio television or newspapers. We certainly do everything we can to prevent those things from being in the hands of just a few people (please excuse the sarcasm).

Solution #2

Elon Musk the owner/inventor  of Tesla and SpaceX has deleted the Facebook accounts for both of those companies. He does not have a personal Facebook page.

I like the second solution better. If you don't trust Facebook- don't use it. If some organization or bureaucracy suggests you should - tell them no. Facebook is being used because it makes things convenient but it is not a necessity.

We should not allow governments and others who have vested, sometimes commercial interest in utilizing the internet to "make things more efficient" (code words for cheaper, fewer employees) to convince us that it s better for us. They only have control if we give it to them.

Who to Blame

It may be my imagination, but it feels as if there is an ever increasing moral outrage over Facebook's  willingness to be used by entrepreneurs, political entities or countries to manipulate people and their opinions. Whether or not it was the creators/owners of Facebook's intention to allow this to happen or whether it is just because of poor designs and incompetence seems to be a matter of some debate. Regardless of why it was allowed to happen, it is now apparent that a some countries including Britain and the USA are discussing what to do. Of course the USA is involved as it may be that their president was one of those entrepreneurs and/or political entities who used Facebook to manipulate people's opinions; Britain is starting an investigation because a British company may have been one of the partners in the above alleged manipulation; Russia which denies any involvement  in any such manipulation is none-the-less assumed to be one of the initiators of the alleged manipulations.

Political parties who didn't win the last election or who see a chance to rack up some points of the ever present campaign trail see allegations of fraud on such a large scale as low lying fruit to be picked. However their moral outrage has some validity. People who thought that such social media sites such as Facebook  were at least somewhat secure; that as long as they did say anything too outrageous or show pictures of themselves that were too revelling that there was nothing that could happen to them, that no one was really interested in what they showed or said. For people to find out that in fact someone was mining data from their post, that someone was actually was keeping track of what they looked at, who they "followed" and what they "liked" are understandably somewhat concerned. For people to find out that some of the things posted or reposted by friends or friends of friends may not have been true must make them wonder as to who they can trust. To find out that their opinions can be so easily manipulated must make some of them feel vulnerable.

The owner/creator of Facebook has vowed to stop such flagrant misuses. He does so, I suspect, in an awareness that if his company does not make all of the right noises and at the very least look as if they are fixing the problem, governments will try to find ways of limiting social media's capacity to mine and manipulate data. While it is not clear as to whether or not governments in a free and open society can do anything, it is good to know that at least some people are aware of the potential problems.

There is however, a solution to the potential mining and manipulation of date. Quite simply people need to stop assuming that free services such as Facebook exist to serve the public. All of the service on the internet exist for one purpose-  to make money for the owners/inventors. Why would Google or Yahoo or Facebook use massive amounts of electric energy, maintain huge warehouses full of date storage/processors if they didn't make money. Anyone can look up the value of those companies - where do people think that value comes from? The money those companies make comes from them selling the information we freely give them. Is Facebook responsible if I give them information without any coercion, if in their multipage fine print contract (that virtually no one reads) is explicit that the information will be shared or do I share at least some the responsibility if I use their services?

If I read and repost stories that I like - without any attempt to verify the accuracy of those statements - who is at fault? Is it solely the responsibility of the author of a potential wrong story or is it the thousands of people who re-posted it? When is it my responsibility to realize that almost of the news feeds etc are about things that I care about and contain stories that either I agree with or that cause me to be outraged? At what point is it my job to edit the information that I read?

There is no doubt that social media can be wonderful vehicles to share information. But I would have hoped that by now, there would be enough of us who were bright enough to know that the purpose of capitalism is to make money and that therefore we should be rightly suspicious of any entity that on one hand purports to want to do good and on the other hand makes their developers rich.

Pipelines and Protest

Last weekend, in Vancouver approximately 5,000 people marched in protest to Kinder-Morgan pipeline expansion.  As was noted in numerous releases including the CBC, the people gathered in support of First Nation peoples who are opposed to any additional capacity for the pipeline  and the resultant dangers to both the interior and to the coast line of British Columbia.  There was a much smaller gathering of people who are in favour of the expansion. This debate will go on for some time. No matter what the final outcome is -there will be some who will never agree.

It seems to me that that part of the problem is the fundamental dishonesty (or at least the leaving out of pertinent facts)  by both sides. We would be all better served if people admitted that there are legitimate concerns on both sides. The possibility that a decision could be reached that most people could live with increases if we understand all of the facts.

Of course if there is three times as much oil to be shipped through pipelines, across extraordinarily beautiful mountains and valleys - there is an equally increased risk that something will go wrong. There are just too many stories of pipelines developing cracks or breaks. There will be leaks not because the managers of the project are bad people or that the welders are incompetent but because with that much pipe - there will be failures. We know that such projects disrupt the natural movement of animals and no matter what attempts are made to create corridors, the animals will be affected. We know that if there are three times as many freighters in the straits around Vancouver that something bad will eventually happen and when it does it could be catastrophic for generations. Again it is not a matter of incompetence or being evil - technology and humans fail. For the federal government or for the oil industry to even suggest that the risks are not substantial is absurd. They would be better off to admit the risks and then start discussing ways of mitigating them.

On the other hand, the protesters are at the very least being a bit disingenuous when arguing that they are protesting along with and on behalf of First Nations. It needs to recognized that a number of First Nations along the pipeline route as well as number of communities who are active in resource extraction have indicated support for the expanded pipeline; other communities are in negotiations with Kinder-Morgan.

The protesters are also either impossibly naive or wilfully avoiding the realities of their lives. I would find the protest so much more meaningful if they, the protesters, acknowledged that most of them got to the protest via vehicles powered by a petroleum product, that in fact their vehicles are at least in part made with materials derived from petroleum products as are their clothes, their iPhones, tablets and water bottles. In fact a significant percentage of what they touch and use each day is comprised at least in part of a derivative of petroleum. Their food, their furnishings, their very life style is only possible because of petroleum. The argument that there cannot be any increase in the amount of oil that reaches the BC coast - without appreciating that we need to use that oil is a bit childish.

I would agree without hesitation that the pipeline is a bad idea. The risk to the coast or the interior is just far too great. But if we continue to demand petroleum products to maintain our life style, it strikes me that it is probably hard to argue that we should have oil but that no one else should.  It is equally as difficult to argue that oil production should only exist for our direct needs and that oil production companies are not allowed an effective economy of scale.

We need to find solutions - but first we need to be honest with ourselves and those on the other side.