Strategy Simpliciter

Submission

July 13, 2010

Brian Cantwell Smith¹
University of Toronto

Canada does not need a digital strategy. Canada needs a strategy, simpliciter. First, the country should decide what it wants to be, what it wants to stand for, what role it wants to play on the world stage. Then, in those terms, Canadians (especially young Canadians) can develop implementation plans, based on a deep understanding of the powers, promises, and limitations of digital technologies. As a nation, should we collectively envision those enabling technologies and socio–technical practices? No; that would be a disheveling distraction. Only if we raise our sights to what technologies are for do we have a chance of propelling Canada to a proud and productive future.

To put it as simply as possible, we should agree on:

(1) Who and what we want to be;
(2) What we are good at, and what we are not; and
(3) How digital technologies are changing the landscapes of possibility.

Then, based on deep understandings of (1–3), we can decide

(4) What actions we should take, what changes we want to effect, in order to get to (1).

Some specific suggestions, to make this concrete. Digitality will not be mentioned in the discussions of (1) and (2). That is the point. It will appear later, under (3) and (4).

Start with (2) — with what we are good at. For starters, Canada is a humane, politically progressive society, roughly speaking, comprising millions of immigrants speaking more than a hundred different languages from dozens of religious communities, living together in a pretty good semblance of social harmony, where tolerance, debate, and health discussion can by and large be conducted without fear, and in which opportunity, if still far from equitably distributed, is still not outright barred to any group. Other notable achievements include a relatively sound economic climate, peerless resources, a stunning but fragile environment, and more or less viable social policies. We also have a tradition of accepting, and in the best cases even nourishing, a number of forms of diversity. And not least, signs of life can still be detected in the common sense of a public good.

What we are bad at? Here I would cite: a tendency towards temerity and complacency; a predilection for passive aggressive behaviour hidden behind veils of politeness; deep–seated habits of choosing safety over guts; a stifling tradition of excessive Weberian bureaucracy; and oppressive social pressure to be "normal"². These are highly perspectival, of course, reflecting my position as an academic. Privation of our aboriginal communities, pillage of natural resources, still too unfair social policies, and the like should also be there, and would top many lists. And you, the reader, will have your own to add.

What about (1): what we want to be? This is even riskier territory to tread, but in the spirit of fools rushing in (or perhaps mad dogs and Englishman), I will hazard just one suggestion: that we be a place, a society, that shows a new way forward between two contemporary evils: (a) the excesses of an admixture of neo–capitalism and mechanist philosophy, which unleashed spectacular material and intellectual (especially scientific) "progress", but at an unimagined if not unimaginable cost, not only placing the environment and even planet at risk, but leaving many people hungry for something more, something deeper; and (b) the widespread phenomenon, happily not yet prevalent in Canada, of the religious right "preying" on such dissatisfaction, but doing so in terms that are appalling, bigoted, xenophobic, and violent. I wouldn't want to have to choose which prospect is scarier; but I would certainly deem it worth dedicating a life to fight for a society that could open up a better alternative than either of these two trodden failures.

Or whatever. Though I mean what I say, the foregoing is merely "placeholder" for something it would be worth the country collectively committing itself to. But now to the question at hand: about digitality. How should we configure out digitally–enabled material society towards such ends? That depends on our answer to (3): on what digital technologies are — or perhaps more usefully, on how society is changing, or could change, based on the transformation in the material substrate of creativity, expression, publication, and discursive exchange from marks on paper to arrangements and processes of digital materiality.

With respect to this third question, I would note that digitality is:

1. Reconfiguring materiality, shrinking distance and "expanding" time, in the sense that things happen faster, the pace of change is itself increasing exponentially, "two years back" is longer ago than it used to be, etc.;
2. Radically altering patterns of fixity and fluidity, disrupting (overwhelming, really) any easy distinction between written and oral, wreaking havoc on the notion of the ephemeral, disrupting business practices (since, as a result, the real power structures are newly fluid, too), etc.;
3. Allowing us to cope with unprecedented levels of complexity, to the point where selforganization, non–linear dynamics, etc., become constitutive regularities in human and social affairs; and
4. Catalyzing a change in the foundations of thinking, ushering out the mechanist philosophy of the 17^th century, and ushering in a radically expanded conception of the foundation of nature (and of ourselves), in which issues of meaning, interpretation, and information take their rightful place alongside notions of mechanism, cause, and effect.

These properties interact, consequentially. Because of digitality's shrinking of space and expansion of time, because of its ability to cope with self–organizing complexity, and because of its disruption of traditional forms of stability, including organisational, it turns out that a digitally–mediated society the locus of importance and transformative effect is being pushed downwards and out of fixed hierarchies, to a place "lower" in the social hierarchy, into lightweight communities, dispersed socialities, "publics" of all manner of size, etc. (and the corresponding destabilization and disempowerment of traditional hierarchies). Hardt & Negri point to this effect in their fronting of the notion of the "multitude."

The usual mantra: add your own items, strike some of these, make a mashup of the whole argument. None of this is worth doing if it isn't lively, and fun.

OK, with all of that in place, or something of the sort (substitute your own version), what, finally, would a "digital strategy" be like? I.e., what answers would be generated to question (4), about what we should do? For starters, the answer(s) would not feature the word 'digital' in any prominent way — a word that is anyway already passé, especially among those young enough for anything we do to affect.

Rather, as the whole form of the argument is intended to suggest, it would be articulated in language about the aims of society itself — that is: language articulating our most overarching goals, "what we want to hold dear." In addition, or so anyway I would argue, in order to do the impact of digitality justice, the answer(s) must not be timid. Perhaps that is the real lesson we should take from this call for consultation. The impact of digital technologies is going to be huge. Our answers to questions (1–3) should be correspondingly strong. Our proposals for (4) should have guts.

Two examples, to illustrate the sorts of thing we should be thinking:

1. Beyond categories: One of Canada's traditional virtues is, at least more than some other countries, to accept, to value, perhaps even to support, diversity. But diversity has traditionally been categorized: (i) in sex or gender: as male vs. female; (ii) in culture: as French or English or aboriginal, etc.; (iii) in language: as Arabic or Mandarin or (heavens) Serbian or Croatian; (iv) in preference: as gay vs. straight vs. bisexual. And so on, in a and myriad other examples. But what does digitality do? As we have already seen, it pushes differences downwards, and it accommodates massively greater complexity.

So here is a digital strategy worth writing home about: we should replace categories, in our social thinking, with a profound acceptance of massively more complex forms of diversity. In health care, for example, a genuinely interesting response to the digital age would be to set aside our tried and false (or tired and true, which might be a better label) blunt, kludgy categories — e.g., of male vs. female — in favour of multiply cross–cutting forms of diversity. Similarly, in higher education, we should reorganize the university so as to set aside discrete departmental boundaries, in favour of more lightweight, self–organizing units based on flexible norms and dynamic behaviours for purposes of hiring, warrant, etc. The change, though profound, would not be without precedent. Frank Geary can only build his trademark buildings using computer–controlled variation of all of the pieces; these designs would not have been economically feasible in a predigital era. Thereby he changed architecture. Mercedes and other car–makers are contemplating individually–designed cars, rather than merely offering a finite (if large) assemblage of configurations chosen from a pre–established parts bin. Tag clouds are rapidly replacing the binary, categorized brittle, clunky forms of cataloguing and classification. Slashdot³ has pioneered intensely dynamic forms of peer review. So as regards higher education, here is another digital strategy worthy of the name: reorganize the university from top to bottom to accommodate the eruptively complex forms of intellectual and academic relationality that are much closer to the warp and woof of genuine intellectual connectivity than the centuries–old chunking of today.

2. Rethink the structure of education: In the first decades of the 20^th century, it began to be recognized that secondary education (high school) was going to be required for the full participation of citizens in an increasingly complex world — and so high school was taken on as a social right, paid for by the state; laws were introduced requiring education well into the high school years, etc. In the 21^st century, recognizing the spectacular increase in complexity that has been so massively amplified by digital technologies, we should recognize that now, almost 100 years later, what we currently call a "four year first–entry undergraduate degree" is or anyway soon will be effectively required for full citizenship participation. So we should take it onboard, too, as a social right — and pay for it at the level of the state (yes, free tuition for first entry undergraduates). But then rethink it from the ground up. It is not clear, from the emergence of open–courseware initiatives, that the campus will still have the role that it does. A new class of academic professional may be required, to moderate digitally–delivered lectures from true international masters, and to catalyze deep discussion among small publics taking the courses. And while we are at it, why call it "post–secondary"? Why not embrace "tertiary education" as an additional four years beyond high school, presumed of all young citizens. And then how should we think of specialized education after it? Do we need a new configuration of "post–tertiary degrees"? And should people be educated to know anything, anyway? Ian Wilson once reported that a group of young people and a group of the elderly were asked for the name of the first Canadian Prime Minister. At first a higher percentage of the elders knew — but 60 seconds later more of the young people knew, and knew vastly more about him, too. Plato rued the displacement of textual memorization upon the arrival of writing; perhaps knowing facts will come to seem as quaint and old–fashioned. But then what about judgment; how can judgment be instilled. What will it be to be seasoned, when knowledge of facts is outsourced?

I do not know the answers — but I do know one thing. Any such profound rethinking of our educational system — which we should have the guts to take on — will lead to answers drenched in the use of digital socio–technical practices. Something else, too: the conception of education that results could be a vision worth fighting for — as was health care, not so very long ago.

And so on. It is not these particular ideas I am fighting for. It is for ideas on this scale. Only suggestions of magnitude, of gravity, are worthy of this call for consultation.

Two things characterize this moment in history. First is the transformation of society to a digital basis. The second is the fact that, in a world fraught with turmoil, Canada occupies a hopeful position as a possible model of a tenable form of peaceful, progressive, multicultural society. If the country can seize the former to empower the latter, this could not only be an historic moment in Canada. It could be Canada's moment in history.

¹ Professor of Information, Philosophy, and Computer Science; Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and Director, Coach House Institute, 45 Willcocks Street, Toronto, Ontario, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, 45 Willcocks Street, Room 303, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1C7 Canada. brian.cantwell.smith@utoronto.ca.

² While the political centre of gravity of Canadian society is substantially to the left of that of the U.S., at least in my experience the pressure on being normal is substantially higher, meaning that, if one is an outlier, one can be much closer to the norm of Canadian society than to the corresponding American norm, while at the same time being many more standard deviations away from it.

³ Slashdot