The provincial Tory education White Papers

[note: this conversation is a response to provincial Conservative policy as published on their website:  http://ontariopc.uberflip.com/i/108917 ]

Hi Mr. Leone and Mr. Hudak,

I’m curious about the position on student loans represented by your party’s most recent “white paper”, as well as the comments which you made during today’s press release. While I do not presently wish to address the idiocy of tying provincial education dollars directly to employment statistics, even though this proposal is as unfeasible logistically and it is intellectually abhorrent (how does one judge what a student’s “field” is relative to their later employment; I don’t know of too many professional philosophers or literary critics outside of academia, for example, but I have noticed that many of the corporate executives in the Fortune 500 list have graduate and undergraduate degrees in such fields), the purpose of this present letter is to discuss with you the most obvious problem with your party’s proposal.

Indexing student loans to academic achievement has a superficial logic to it, granted. However, such a system of funding does not allow a student who does poorly in one area to transfer into another more suited to their aptitude. I can give as example in this regard British politician whom I once met who described failing out of the science program in his university. He transferred to history and political science at another university, and proceeded to finish a doctorate several years later before entering into federal politics in Britain. Under the Tory proposal to index student finances to academic performance, this individual would not have graduated from university and would not currently be a sitting MP in the British Parliament.

What about a student who has issues with mental or physical health affecting their grades? What about people with developmental difficulties? Or, to take a personal example, what if a student endures trauma or grief due to the death of a loved one? What if they endure physical and/or emotional abuse at home during the course of their studies? What if they’re just irresponsible for a moment during their youth (kids start post-secondary school at 17 now) and learn the lessons of responsibility as they mature and learn from their more ambitious peers? In short, there is a very long list of reasons why a student’s performance at school may be negatively affected at any given moment. It is my view, shared by many experts in the field of post-secondary education, that a functional educational system is flexible enough to cope with the individualities presented by all students, not simply those who do not struggle with paying for or performing in school during their studies. How dare your party be so callous as to assume that a student’s academic performance be exemplary and if it is not they are lazy and should be cut off from funding. What you are saying, Mr. Leone, is that students from affluent families are able to make mistakes, and students from poor families do not get to enjoy such privileges. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that your proposal will result in “better” students, and neither of you, Mr. Hudak and Mr. Leone, have the expertise or credibility to suggest otherwise. More importantly, since student loans are a for-profit system of student financing greatly beneficial to the profitability of several Canadian banks, the idea that student loans are a great expense on the taxpayers of this province is a hyperbolic inaccuracy. The majority of student loans are paid back to the banks, and the government benefits from increased tax revenue from a more advanced and productive workforce. All empirical data points to education being a good investment for the state.

“Market discipline”, as you call it, is neither practical nor desirable, and should not be expected of our students. Education and knowledge are more important for the advancement of the human condition than is the pursuit of money for the sake of itself. Perhaps now is the time to discuss market discipline in relation to the marketplace, and here we can talk about why the world economy went into the toilet in 2008...   

As a student from a relatively poor end of the middle class who has struggled very hard to enjoy the privilege of working on a doctorate in a “good” program at a “good” school, I cannot emphasize this point (and pun) enough: Tory educational policy is an act of class warfare.

Regards,

>>> 

Thank you for your e-mail. 

Nothing in the white paper precludes this British MP from doing what he did.  It's actually encouraged.  Put it this way, the major issue that you have raised in this white paper is a paragraph which follows another paragraph that talks about minimizing debt.  I think we need to talk about the 1 in 5 students who do not finish university.  They may have really struggled in first year, probably failed a couple courses, and came back for year 2 or 3, only then to drop out.  This student may then go to college to finish a 2 or 3 year university diploma, meaning he or she spent an extra 1 or 2 or 3 years getting an education than needed.  That's 1 or 2 or 3 more years of student debt. That's 1 or 2 or 3 years of government investment in this student's education.  So, what we're suggesting is that we encourage the student to do what the MP has done and find a different program sooner.  That pretty well falls in line with our thinking.  Look at our colleges strategy as providing this kind of direction.

We propose that institutions have greater control in managing financial aid.  In every one of the cases you outline, such exemptions are already provided by institutions, so you're really grasping at straws.  We never gave a minimum grade/mark, and we never said we want to be punitive (i.e. taking loans away from people).   You assume, incorrectly, what our intent is on this issue by posing every hypothetical that comes to mind.  We are a compassionate party.  Inside the framework we have set, we could encourage the use of incentives to encourage student improvement.  For example, for those we may want to incent students to achieve higher by forgiving a portion of their loans for student success. These options are on the table, and we don't specify because we want to encourage a discussion.

You are actually making assumptions about my assumptions, and they are incorrect. My focus is to improve student success not to focus on who can make "mistakes".  This is entirely your hyperbole.  I actually believe I do have "expertise" and "credibility."  I have a PhD in Comparative Public Policy.  I hope that when you get your PhD, you begin to appreciate the enormity of your achievement.  You may not agree with what I have said in this white paper, and you're free to do that.  However, to suggest that I have no expertise or credibility is an ad hominem fallacy in argument.

Finally, you conclude with your position on how this is class warfare.  I'm offended by this, because my parents were immigrants who came to this country with just the shirts on their backs.  My father worked hard to provide for my family in a blue collar job.  He and my mom are proud to have a son who ended up with a PhD. I know your parents will take as much pride in your success as mine did for what I was able to accomplish.  I wish you the best of luck.

All the best,

Rob

>>>

Mr. Leone,

It is clear that we have different interpretations of Tory policy as published on the Conservative website. My bias against the line of thinking which this white paper presents centres upon the idea of higher education being solely for the benefit of particular fields of education most easily indexed to employability records, while other fields are deemed “wasteful” by government bureaucrats who do not understand the correlation between education and employment. To restate a point from my last email to you, in what manner is Philosophy or Ethics directly quantifiable in terms of monetary gain or employability? Surely, you do not wish to challenge the value of philosophy to the human condition or the experience of humanity, for you would undoubtedly be wrong. When examining student employment post graduation, the Tory white paper cites the 2012 Auditor General’s report which indicates that student employment outcomes are not always tied to their field of study in university or college. My worry is that you interpret such data as being a negative outcome of the educational system. Many contemporary studies on pedagogy and labour indicate that a breadth of experience and education is required for the lateral strategic and logistical thought processes which define successful business strategies in the 21st century. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous email to you, if you examine the education backgrounds of many corporate leaders, it is evident that many of them were trained in university or college programs which are ostensively of little use to their executive careers. And yet there they are: corporate managers with English or geography degrees. I myself was employed in the music industry for several years after having received an MA in English. Surely, my employment would have fallen outside of my field of study, despite my continual utilisation of “English degree” skills at a “Music degree or MBA” job. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 1, 5, and 10 in the Tory white paper explicitly details the need to tailor fields of study to fields of employment.

University professors are expected to perform more duties than simply teach classes in their field, and the typical 40-40-20 split mentioned in the Tory white paper reflects this fact. However, the paper also suggests that universities should employ full-time, teaching only professors. While such a suggestion makes sense in a superficial manner, it ignores the fundamental reality of university education: the continual expansion and refinement of human intellectual activity. The knowledge being taught by a full-time teaching professor would likely be obsolete after a few years, and they would then need to retrain themselves, likely at the expense of the province. Please note this important fact: the process of research is precisely the manner by which university professors update and refine the information they are teaching. In effect, it is research which keeps the education system “up-to-date”. Furthermore, it is a school’s research profile which determines its standing in the global academic community, with the consequence of a higher research profile attracting a greater number and “quality” of students. Like you, I too am concerned that universities are increasingly relying on low-paid, part-time, contract teaching from newly-minted doctoral students. Not only is the education of students compromised by poorly-paid and overstressed part-time faculty, but arguably this situation is poor for the economy as a whole, as good wage, full-time jobs are replaced by temporary and expendable contract labourers. You know what would improve this situation however? Releasing more provincial and federal funds to universities to hire more full-time professors. In terms of their employment practices, universities are acting like fast food chains in terms of hiring low-paid, disposable employees because of the same “market diligence” championed by conservative thinkers for decades. The end result of such thinking is that student education is increasingly compromised by the myopic constraints of free market capitalism, with the outcome of students treated more like consumers with desires than as students with needs. Look at the American University of Phoenix as the logical conclusion of this process: an online university which tailors its programs to the “needs” of students (which, unsurprisingly, are defined as contingent with profitability for the school’s stakeholders) and which produce students with worthless, made-up degrees that are not recognised as being useful by most employers; the unskilled and untrained students of the University of Phoenix are for all intents and purposes the unqualified remnants of education dictated by free market principles. Such is the consequence of a university which employs teachers who do not research anything and whose outcomes are “employability”. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 6, 9, and 10 in the Tory white papers explicitly discuss the need for online, free market, non-research focus for university education.

Here’s a proposal. The corporate and business communities in Canada benefit greatly from having access to a large pool of highly-educated and healthy workers, and yet the corporate and business communities have seen their taxes decline significantly since the mid-1990s. Corporations hire employees who have skills with computers and technology, language, and mathematics, and these skills are deployed by the corporation for profitable gain. However, the business and corporate communities are increasingly paying a lower share of the costs of educating their employees. Presently, corporations, which are granted the rights of “personhood” under Canadian and international jurisprudence, do not pay taxes at anywhere near the same percentage of their income as do individual Canadians. Such corporate taxation policies have been championed by Conservatives as well as the Liberals as encouraging job growth. However, according to recent findings by the Bank of Canada, corporations and large businesses in Canada have not invested the money saved from lower taxation and no jobs have been produced as a result, and this accumulation of “dead money” (in the words of the Financial Post’s Gordon Isfeld) is in fact harming the Canadian economy. Since it is not likely that major corporations will cease operations if their taxation levels are restored to the rates extant in the mid 1990s, when they were also profitable entities, I propose that significant investments be made in higher education be financed by increasing the corporate tax rate back to previous levels. Again, all of this increased revenue from corporate taxation would be earmarked for investment in education, which is of direct benefit to corporate and business employers. The trend of public subsidies for private profits has to end; using the same “free market”, fiscally-conservative logic behind most other Tory policies, it’s time to end the socialisation of expense and the privatisation of profit and “charge” employers for the education received by their employees.

I know full well that your party follows its own ideological vectors regardless of the empirical data which may contradict such positions. As such, it is not likely that Conservative policy will lead the charge, as it were, to a better system of higher education in Ontario. There is one thing on which we can agree, however: like you, I believe that perhaps 15-20 percent of the students enrolled in university programs would be better served by study at a college. Having taught at Mohawk and Sheridan, as well as Columbia International College, I can state that the commonly-held mantra of “go to university, unless you are dumb then try college” is both incorrect and elitist nonsense. Indeed, many students are avoiding the trades because of unfounded class prejudices against such employment. However, I must point out that the reason that universities have lowered their standards and are significantly increasing undergraduate enrollment numbers has to do with cuts to provincial and federal funding which force schools to rely increasingly on tuition dollars from students to pay for their operation. To restate my position above, academic standards would be improved by funding schools directly by increasing the rate for corporate taxation.

PS: Path 11, in which you call for student unions to be made accountable, is a red herring, as student union expenses are less than 1% of a student’s tuition. Even if that 1% truly reflects waste which could be recovered through policies of oversight and accountability, which it does not, the amount of money saved by students (note: not the government; no tax dollars are spent on student union activities) would be negligible.

Regards,

>>>

Dear Quintin,

Thanks for the time you took to respond to my e-mail and the discussion paper.  The purpose of doing these discussion papers is to encourage debate.  While we don't' agree on many issues, it's nice to know there are a couple things in which we can agree.  Thank you for participating!

All the best,

Rob

a letter (once closed and now open) about the corporate branding of public spaces

Mr Merulla and others at Council,

Your stated interest in renaming all public spaces after corporate donors is troubling for several reasons. The most obvious is that such a move signals a dangerous encroachment of corporate advertising into the space in which the identity and politics of both the city and its residents operate. The politics of branding are not benign, and do not simply invovolve changing names. Corporate branding involves the theft of the histories and identities which constitute a given area, as local stories and historical figures are painted over in favour of the corporate image. Corporate branding signals the erasure of history and local specificity in favour of a universal and timeless corporate-sponsored immediacy or “now-ness” which serves to remind people who use that public space that the corporation in question has the solutions they need for the problems of the “now”: if thirsty, Coke is available in every store; if hungry, McDonald’s is always open; WalMart provides the important experience of “playing in the park with one’s children” just as it provides low prices for the consumer goods necessary for participation in modern disposable consumer society. Presently, we name public spaces after important political, historical, or cultural figures, or we use the long-standing tradition of placenames mirroring natural elements of that place: Churchill Park in Westdale, Confederation Park in the north east, Gage Park in the city’s centre. The people and events chosen as namesakes have contributed to building the community, and the history of a place is folded neatly within its name. In other words, we use the naming of public spaces to mark our history but more importantly to mark the values and dreams we have for our communities: peace, freedom, the rule of law and the granting of rights to all people, and the intellectual tradition of cultural development.

Corporate branding is a quick infusion of cash, and for municipalities increasingly under fiscal pressure from provincial downloading of social services, that cash infusion may indeed represent the importance of corporate money for the process of community building. However, that reality of desperation and dependency does not account for the history of North American economic development or the new trend in corporate branding of public spaces, which began during the last major recession of the early 1990s. Why is corporate branding happening now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and not at the beginning of the twentieth, when most of the public spaces with which we presently live were mandated and named?  When the economic development of the twentieth century brought middle-class wealth to tens of millions of people and the economic output of nearly all North American communities flourished, we named public spaces in the public interest. Now that such economic activity within communities is in decline (due to globalisation, multinational corporations and investors not tied to specific regions or communities, resource decline, etc.) and has been threatened with recession and depression, municipalities struggling to find funding for public spaces are increasingly turning to corporate naming rights of public spaces. Instead of allowing corporations to insert their will into every aspect of human life, we should be asking questions such as why does the corporate world have the money to pay for “community”, while the community , whose members were ostensibly the recipients of that economic activity, does not, and furthermore, what is the point of using corporations to build community wealth if that wealth is to be used for corporate gain?

While the distribution of wealth in a just socisety is somewhat of a large and complicated topic for municipal councillors to handle, the smaller issue of naming rights is one which should not be entered into lightly by the City. In allowing corporations to name (and in fact to own, in real terms) public spaces, the city hands over political and civic authority to corporate interests. One example: let’s say that a park in the north east of the city is renamed “Home Depot Park”. Now, if that park were mostly used by individuals whom the corporation deems to be undesirable to its corporate image (vagrants and the mentally ill, poor people, etc.), it seems reasonable to assume that the Home Depot Corporation would pressure the city to remove those individuals from the public space which bears its name. Similarly, if a politically controversial organization (such as those which promote religious and sexual equality) were to schedule an activity for a corporate-branded area, it seems naive to assume that such events would not face resistance from the corporate entities whose name adorns the space in which the event is to occur. Corporations do not pay for community spaces out of the goodness of their hearts or out of any sense of compassion or commitment to a community or cause. They pay for naming rights in public spaces because they have calculated economic benefits which serve their own interests, and it seems obvious to most people that when faced with threats of withholding future money, city councillors will do whatever it takes to keep happy the corporations who have paid to name public spaces.

Please consider your decision in this matter wisely. If Merulla’s intentions are taken up by council, it is likely that grassroots organizations in this city will work incessantly to un-name the public corporate spaces, legally or otherwise.

“So Batman, Guy Fawkes, and Andy Warhol walk into some bar called Echelon…”: Personalised Communication, Media Consumption, and Political Agency

The realization of an authentic self is the principle challenge for the subject within contemporary (post)modernity. According to Habermas, the project which developed and realised the Western human subject, as inaugurated by the Enlightenment, was a process in which an entity’s status as an individual was defined and increasingly fore-grounded. Over the course of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, both the symbolic and the practical conceptions of the individual as a self-sufficiency, as an agency, and as a unique will inhabiting a unique body propelled by its own will-to-power was gradually extended to all citizens from its origins as a uniquely aristocratic privilege. Simultaneous with the development of the individual defined against the fabric of the public sphere was the individuation of nation-states against the fabric of geography and the geo-political, and which has ultimately resulted in the liberation of multinational financial and industrial entities from the legal and geographical limitations posed on citizen-humans.

         As Paul Virilio notes, digital technologies articulate a means of controlling and defining subjects by imposing a globalized sense of time and environment informed by a simultaneity which makes obsolete any local analogues. Unlike the monolithic rigidity of prior systems of control, the proliferation of information production technologies allows subjects to be interpellated as individuals, their differences rationalized as ‘personal profiles’ intended to catalyze modes of consumption. The Western philosophical tradition has prided itself on liberating the individual from hierarchical circumscriptions dictated by social protocol and into a space where the modern subject is expected to realize and satisfy their own needs in society. Such is certainly the myth of foundation by which the ‘American Dream’ can be seen to operate, and to which the Occupy Wall Street protesters gestured in their criticism. And while the spirit of protest and rebellion is currently manifesting with a popular interest and sympathy not evident since the 1960s, this paper will argue that such enthusiasm for revolutionary change has (so far) been entirely co-opted by mechanisms which interpellate subjects as consumers in a manner which limits their potential as citizens who can express political agency.

         In this capacity, mobile telephony is situated at the intersection of personal agency and systemic control. While cell phones can be seen to have recently enabled protests for democratic reform in several Arab countries to flourish, simultaneously, however, mobile telephony as used by police and government agencies allows a degree of surveillance and behaviour modification seemingly at odds with the democratic and philosophical traditions associated with a liberated human subject. Following Frederic Jameson’s reclamation of Adorno’s critique of the capacity for self-agency within mass culture, this paper will conclude that in the 21st century, individualism is the precise means by which rigid social conformity will be achieved.

         In postmodern consumer culture, the freedom to realise a process of wilful self-individuation derives in large part from the social and political transformations which occurred in the 1960s, or more importantly which have been periodised and branded as the 1960s. The 60s counterculture begat the self-awareness of the consumer initially as a process rejecting the vulgarities and corruptions of consumer culture, best manifest in the ubiquitous use of plastics in manufacturing and incessant miniaturization in electronics which brought to market an increasing number of consumer distractions. In fact, the alleged austerity of the hippie who rejected mass culture in favour of the primacy of the natural world does not align with the actual expansion of consumer capitalism in the years leading to the 1970s oil crisis in the West, when consumption was momentarily depressed, and the fallacy of this particular narrative is further evidenced by the subsumption of nature-centric, ostensibly anti-modernist hippie idealism into the full flourishing of contemporary consumer capitalism and the reactionary but consumer-centric environmental movements which emerged over the 80s and 90s and continues to flourish into this century.

         The political agency which enabled the expression of dissent in the 1960s evolved into the free market individualism in which the very same expression of dissent is refocused upon uncovering the market value of the self; in this context both dissent and conformity are acts of self-realisation within the material terms of the economic. We can speak of this process as a Heideggerian uncovering and disclosure of being as resource and potential, and the desire which grounds such potential in materiality in this sense quantifies the self within an order of value. The process of uncovering thus reveals and quantifies subjects as individuals while at the same time aggregating them under the aegis of a collective desire itself rationalised and historicised as abstract transcendent ideas such as patriotism (understood as brand loyalty), “freedom”, and “terror”. In other words, the historic-technological configuration which can be conceived as the “project of Western civilisation” simultaneously liberates the human-subject into individuality at the same time as that individuality is used to further conform individuals to the will, if you like, of the system as a whole. Due to the conflation within the market of high and low culture understood by Fredric Jameson as a condition of what he defines as postmodernity, as variety and difference serve not only to reflect a democratic equality of taste and judgement, but also to energise the market with an ever-increasing pool of consumer satisfactions.

         Of course, one cannot invoke quantisation without its material analogue, as it were, the computer. As depicted in many science fiction and espionage films of the 60s and 70s – here I am thinking of Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld, and THX 1138, among others – the computer entered into the public consciousness in the 1960s as a monolithic and autocratic entity which troubled distinctions between inanimate objects and wilful organic sentience, ultimately threatening human independence. The malevolence threatened by the computer is perhaps best realised by the murderous rebelliousness of HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose monstrousness stems from the logical sacrifice of human life in pursuit of what has been reasoned to be a more significant collective purpose and whose all-seeing eye signals the omnipresent surveillance with which this presentation will conclude. An even more prominent aspect of the counter-cultural movement, and one which overtly connects the 60s with the Occupy movement of today, involved democratic political agency as realised by mass protest – civil rights, feminism, the anti-war movement, and gay rights, wherein the agency of the individual is realised and enabled by the strength of the group.

         In his 1984 essay Periodizing the 60s, Frederic Jameson describes rebellion and popular activism as fundamentally tied to the colonial history of the countries in which such forms of protest materialised. He argues that the emergence as subjects of women, homosexuals, minorities, and the disabled – along with other minorities – granted the full extent of political and social standing is fundamentally a process of de-colonisation(498). As I will further discuss momentarily, it is the proposition of this paper that such neo-colonialism does not simply implicate those subjects who have been historically marginalised. Rather, I wish to extend Jameson’s interpretation of neo-colonialism as precisely the project of late capitalism. Instead of ships full of Europeans who encounter a “New World” full of economic potential manifesting as resources and slave labour, colonialism under late capitalism requires a new geography and conception of the socio-economic world, one in which the desires and needs of the body of the individual subject are elevated to the superposition of the desires and needs of the incorporated state, a virtual realm of borderless finance and the self-realised sovereignty of the multinational companies. It is for this reason that we are confronted with the logic of massive corporate subsidies and austerity budgets, in which the middle- and working classes are sacrificed for the abstract and, in world-history terms, unsustainable benefit of economic growth, itself inordinately tailored to continue economic growth for the investment class (see, for example Thomas Piketty’s recent book). In this capacity, the modern subject is granted individuality within the circumscriptions of citizenship, which grounds the subject within the praxis of the legal and economic systems in which political agency most concretely manifests, namely the aristocratic privilege of property.

         Viewed in concert, the major and minor socio-cultural transgressions which occurred in the 1960s in fact really were threatening to the authority and dominion of the established hegemonies in Western civilisation. However, the cultural and political legacy of the 60s does not live up to the popular conception of resistance and rebellion. While the drive to satisfy the will and desires of the individual by extending to rights of the citizen to all individuals regardless of gender, class, or ethnicity is indeed an important and ongoing procedure – most importantly in the sense of the Hegelian recognition of the Other – we should not allow such progressivism to blind us to the consequences of a continued and enthusiastic individualism. The counter-culture idealism of the 60s, made iconic by the young hippie protester, enabled the popularisation and broad (or mainstream) acceptance of free love (sexuality outside of marriage and/or child production, ultimately elevating the commodification of sexuality into daily and habitual practices of consumption – images, bodies, people), “new age” lifestyles of self-exploration and a spirituality governed by the self (constituted not only by the crystals, vibrations, auras, “Eastern” polytheism, and psychic readings popularly referred to as “new age”, but also in the mainstream acceptance of psychiatry and pharmacology as therapeutic practices, the latter deriving from recreational drug use intending to “expand consciousness”), and the foregrounding of personal feelings as foundational to the establishment of new and alternative lifestyles.

         As should be evident by the list I just provided, such gestures to counter-cultural resistance have been entirely co-opted by forms of consumerism. Over the decades that followed, the image of the hippie and of 60s protest has been sanitised as itself a commodity, to the point where the rebellious and revolutionary potential inherent to 60s counterculture now signals the precise manner in which market forces interpellate individual subjects as individual consumers.

The popular conception of the 60s radical ignores the realities of life for many of those who truly did “drop out” – perhaps best exemplified by the model and junkie Joe Dallesandro, the star of Paul Morrissey’s trilogy of films Flesh, Trash, and Heat, whose bohemian and transient life critiques both bourgeois complacency and working class (masculine) hedonism. Of course, under Warhol’s tutelage, Dallesandro was himself commodified, although not at all to the degree of his heirs.

The contemporary rebel, commodified in the wake of James Dean, is safe enough for mall fashion and daytime television.

         In this sense, we can understand the revolutionary discourse of cultural history as a means by which the past is rationalised, enclosed, and invoked as a series of walled gardens of commercial potentiality. The hippie commune is now the corporate retreat, while the expansion of consciousness in realisation of a “true” self has become personal fitness training and the self-help industry. The deviant, do-it-yourself fashions of hippie youth became not only the heavily-accessorised fashion trends of latter decades, as well as the continued proliferation of youthful rebellion as “sexiness” for the beauty industry presently, but also served to ensconce the perpetual novelty of youth culture as the principle driver of consumer capitalism.

          In this sense, we should perhaps be a little weary of the symbolism behind the appropriation of the Guy Fawkes mask from the film version of V For Vendetta, as the history of political rebellion invoked by the mask is inaccurately glossed by the film in that the Gunpowder Plot was not a rebellion against aristocratic or authoritarian control of the body politic, but rather it was a conservative and Catholic reaction to Protestantism.

This historic-political gloss is mirrored in the use of the mask by the middle-class left, for such consumer-enabled activist symbolism was acquired at dollar stores and manufactured in China. As Zizek has recently warned, protesters must beware of taking pleasure in themselves and the good time they are having.

         And so with the middle-class privilege of citizenship, finally we come to the mobile phone itself. The common narrative describes the manner in which, like a techno-centric inversion of the Horatio Alger myth, what was a luxury item in the 1980s and early 90s has by 2012 become available to nearly everyone in the “developed” world and a substantial portion of people in countries collectively known as the “developing” world. In ways that are both obvious and subtle, the mobile phone brings together the worlds of the private and the public, which includes the intimacies not only of social and interpersonal relationships, perhaps best (and incidentally most humorously) realised in the “sexting” phenomenon which troubles teenager and politician alike, but also the intimacies of the virtual and quantified self, and such intimacies are both financial and geographical in nature. That mobile phones are viewed by financial analysts as having the potential to replace both physical currency and bank access cards further enshrines the mobile phone as the principal new mark of citizenship.

The authoritarian potential of an individual’s subject-identity to be quantified in such an individuating and technocratic manner for commercial purposes is evidenced by the famously apocalyptic rants of the character Johnny in the 1993 British film Naked, wherein the barcode prefigures the cell phone in dividing the self into material agent and virtual consumer.

         On the other hand, the democratic potential of mobile telephony extends from phone acquisition to its actual use, or so we are told.  The freedom to communicate at our will and at our leisure is perhaps a necessary by-product of a democratic capitalism which allows and often demands freedom of travel.

And so we read in the popular press (Guardian, Globe and Mail) that the glut of inexpensive cell phones enabled the flourishing of popular protests in the Middle Eastern countries, an event collectively narrated under the sign of the Arab Spring. Spontaneous crowd organisation and mobilisation (flash mobs), as well as a high degree of tactical co-ordination are enabled by mobile telephony, and the resultant activities are themselves rendered into a self-reflexive catalyst for protest as the still and moving image making capabilities of mobile phones are exploited and photographs and video circulate through social media.

The 2008 film The Dark Knight depicts one possible implementation of the surveillance possibilities of the mobile network which, while rendered in the thoroughly sensationalist and fantastic manner typical of Hollywood “realism”, is grounded in contemporary research into information analytics. Batman himself can be seen to represent the conservative fantasy of individual agency enabled by the corporate nation state. Batman is himself an individual whose privilege is under threat from a morally corrupt and politically rebellious underclass of criminal elements. In one sequence, he uses the powerful computer systems in his Batcave to access an elaborate spy network which uses the cell phones of every citizen in the city. Not only does Batman have access to the location information of every citizen in real time, thus allowing him to locate and monitor their behaviour and communicate with them. More fantastically, the Batcave computer can access the microphone and camera of each individual cell phone, and that data, when interpreted and analysed, allows the Batputer to render a real-time audio-visual map, thus reifying what Paul Virilio describes in The Information Bomb as the “audiovisual continuity of nations”, in which “political frontiers ... shift from the real space of geopolitics to the ‘real time’ of the chronopolitics of the transmission of images and sounds” (13).

         Virilio further describes the results of such, as he calls it, “amplification of the optical density of the appearances of the real world” (39). As an aside, it should be noted that the computational power necessary to interpret the data sets produced millions of simultaneous mobile phone users is already available in the supercomputer-class of machines already in use by large corporations and national governments. As is often noted, US Intelligence agencies currently use a system called Echelon, which in the wake of the attack on the World Trade center in 2001 has expanded its Cold War era role of media and electro-magnetic signal transmission analysis to include the acquisition and analysis of every email message and most if not all cell phone traffic (voice, sms) and internet searches, as well as possibly Amazon purchase histories as well. The National Security Agency is currently building a very large data centre in Utah, which will be used, according to former NSA official William Binney, as a permanent archive for this ever-growing intelligence database, which Binney describes as currently containing roughly 20 trillion sources of data. Furthermore, computer science predicts that by 2030 the same computational power will have “trickled down” to the individual consumer by means of the same mechanism of capital and industrial investment by which the computational capabilities of a computer which cost $10,000 in 1995 has been matched or exceeded by an inexpensive mobile phone in 2012.

          More practically in the short term, however, and more specifically relative to the protest activity occurring with the Occupy and Arab Spring movements, among others, is the ability for cell phone users to be located geographically in real time. Governmental and military authorities are presently using this capability to locate and monitor individuals of interest, and indeed by analysing the mobile traffic which occurs at locations of protest or conflict, criminal guilt may be assigned with the assumption that proximity equates with participation.

The internet-enabled cell phone permits a further capacity for control, and here we can turn to the commercial model championed by Apple and its iPod and iPhone technologies. First of all, we need to remind ourselves that there is relatively little that is unique about Apple’s products other than a unified design aesthetic. The iPod, which like every other digital media player and flash drive in existence is in fact a software media player laid on top of generic flash memory, exists solely within the postmodern virtual geography inhabited by marketing and branding. Similarly, the iPhone is neither the first portable digital device with a touch screen nor the first internet-enabled phone. The revolutionary and individuating potential of their devices is quite simply a fabrication of Apple’s marketing strategy. Much more important than the individual devices, however, is the infrastructure on which such devices operate. Apple’s mobile infrastructure involves a closed-hardware/software platform in which all user interaction with the device is controlled, regulated, and profited upon by a home electronics company now worth as much as an oil company. In a market strategy which involves rendering traditional optical media obsolete and all content delivered to the end user will be downloaded to the iTunes store, the capacity for the Apple customer for cultural awareness will be limited to what has been approved by Apple. Indeed, that the socio-technological configuration known as (iDevice) + iTunes is presently the most optimal means by which corporate capitalism and the individual subject can be seen to cohabitate within the virtual geography of the self (which, as this paper has elaborated, is the corporate body of the citizen) is reflected in the fact that the financial markets have christened Apple as the most valuable corporate entity on the planet. The desire for communication is the fuel for this dependency. In this capacity, mobile telephony will be seen as the dominant means to control and conform the individual subject, much like oil was the means by which individuality came to flourish over the course of the 20^th century.

a letter to Vic Toews about Bill C-30

Hello Mr. Toews,

I just listened to your interview with Evan Solomon of the CBC, in which you stated that you have neither read nor do you understand the content of Bill C-30. Putting aside for a moment the question of why you slandered critics of the bill by stating that they "support child pornographers" when you yourself have not read the bill and cannot demonstrate an understanding of its contents, I am presently writing to you in search of an answer to the question below. In seeking an answer to this question, I will also put aside for a moment my doubts as to the wisdom of conjoining a large variety of important legislation into one Omnibus Crime Bill, thus limiting the possibilities for debate or scrutiny over the individual parts of tabled as "Omnibus". I will also ignore the recent events surrounding Vikileaks's illumination of the public records related to your personal life, Mr. Toews, except to state that now you may better understand why Canadians will not tolerate the governmental unconstitutionally spying into their affairs (although Vikileaks itself does not represent criminal or unconstitutional activity).

My question to you is the following: is it not normal parliamentary procedure for a minister (and indeed other MPs) to read and understand the legislation that is under the mandate and jurisdiction of their department, which they will be championing in public forums (in this regard, you rather childishly and boorishly denigrated critics as "supporters of child pornography"), and upon which they will be voting in the House of Commons?

Surely, such activity is in fact at the heart of the function of an MP, and most especially one who is also a senior minister, for otherwise Canadians would have elected to Parliament an incompetent and irresponsible Member. Given that in this case you, Mr. Toews, are ostensibly the Minster responsible for Public Safety, it is paramount that you competently perform this charge lest the public be endangered due to irresponsible governance.

It is now clear to all Canadians who look into the matter, in either a systemic or a cursory way, that Bill C-30 is either ill-considered and poorly-formulated, or it represents a wilful disregard for the constitutional rights granted to all Canadians. It is here that I will return to your insulting comments about child pornography. I know several victims of childhood sexual abuse, and furthermore my mother The Reverend Dorothy Hewlett (Anglican) has spent a great deal of her professional life counselling victims of childhood sexual abuse. Your casual and irresponsible invocation (use) of the horrors which abused children suffered and continue to suffer is a callous and opportunistic ploy to silence critics of what is an unconstitutional or ill-considered legislative mistake. How dare you, Mr. Toewes? You are in effect condoning the suffering of individuals as the rhetorical justification for the ignorance which Bill C-30 represents. If you are a religious person, Mr. Toews, you need to look at yourself in a mirror and then speak with your god. If you aren't religious, then please just look at yourself in a mirror for a while.

Mr. Toews, due to the fact that you do not appear to be properly performing your duties as minister, due to the fact that in the process of performing your responsibilities you insulted not those Canadians who are critical of Bill C-30 but also the victims of childhood sexual abuse whom you purport to be defending, I cannot in good conscious allow the epithet "Right Honourable" in the same sentence as your name.  

VIC TOEWS'S OFFICE RESPONDS IN FORM STYLE:

Thank you for contacting my office regarding Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.

Canada's laws currently do not adequately protect Canadians from online exploitation and we think there is widespread agreement that this is a problem. 

We want to update our laws while striking the right balance between combating crime and protecting privacy. 

Let me be very clear: the police will not be able to read emails or view web activity unless they obtain a warrant issued by a judge and we have constructed safeguards to protect the privacy of Canadians, including audits by privacy commissioners.

What's needed most is an open discussion about how to better protect Canadians from online crime. We will therefore send this legislation directly to Parliamentary Committee for a full examination of the best ways to protect Canadians while respecting their privacy.

For your information, I have included some myths and facts below regarding Bill C-30 in its current state.

Sincerely,

Vic Toews

Member of Parliament for Provencher

Myth: Lawful Access legislation infringes on the privacy of Canadians.

Fact: Our Government puts a high priority on protecting the privacy of law-abiding Canadians. Current practices of accessing the actual content of communications with a legal authorization will not change. 

Myth: Having access to basic subscriber information means that authorities can monitor personal communications and activities.

Fact: This has nothing to do with monitoring emails or web browsing.  Basic subscriber information would be limited to a customer’s name, address, telephone number, email address, Internet Protocol (IP) address, and the name of the telecommunications service provider. It absolutely does not include the content of emails, phones calls or online activities.

Myth: This legislation does not benefit average Canadians and only gives authorities more power.

Fact:  As a result of technological innovations, criminals and terrorists have found ways to hide their illegal activities. This legislation will keep Canadians safer by putting police on the same footing as those who seek to harm us.

Myth: Basic subscriber information is way beyond “phone book information”.

Fact: The basic subscriber information described in the proposed legislation is the modern day equivalent of information that is in the phone book. Individuals frequently freely share this information online and in many cases it is searchable and quite public.

Myth: Police and telecommunications service providers will now be required to maintain databases with information collected on Canadians.

Fact: This proposed legislation will not require either police or telecommunications service providers to create databases with information collected on Canadians.

Myth: “Warrantless access” to customer information will give police and government unregulated access to our personal information.

Fact: Federal legislation already allows telecommunications service providers to voluntarily release basic subscriber information to authorities without a warrant. This Bill acts as a counterbalance by adding a number of checks and balances which do not exist today, and clearly lists which basic subscriber identifiers authorities can access.

BOB RAE'S OFFICE RESPONDS IN SLIGHTLY LESS FORM

-LETTER STYLE

Dear Quintin Hewlett:

On behalf of Liberal Leader Bob Rae, I would like thank you for your email regarding Bill C-30, the Conservative legislation that will allow Vic Toews and Stephen Harper to creep your Facebook and read your emails.

It’s unacceptable for the Conservatives to paint this as strictly an issue of pedophilia and child pornography; Canadians deserve an honest debate on something this serious.  This is a complex bill that contains numerous provisions requiring scrutiny and careful examination at Committee.  A proper balance must be struck between the privacy rights of Canadians and public safety.

Privacy is a fundamental freedom enshrined in our Charter and Canadians have every right to be worried about heightened surveillance of their online activities.  Liberals are seriously concerned about the lack of judicial oversight in this bill relating to subscriber data, and that forcing ISP and telecomm providers to have the capacity to trace all communications in their system could create a very slippery slope.  After all, this is a governing party that has proven itself willing to violate online privacy before – like with its Facebook creeping activities during the last election.

The Liberal Party will be proposing several amendments to Bill C-30, including adding the requirement that there is judicial oversight before law enforcement can access personal subscriber information.  In addition, we are calling for open and transparent hearings on this legislation.  If you would like to support these proposals you can sign our petition.

Thank you for taking the time to write to the Leader of the Liberal Party.

Yours sincerely,

Colin McKoneOffice of the Liberal Leader 

RESPONSE TO TOEWS

Mr. Toews,

Since you did not address my complaints about your invocation of child abuse, I will address your interpretation of Bill C-30. I have taken into consideration the "myth/fact" sheet forwarded to me by your office. 

VIC TOEWS OFFICIAL RESPONSE MYTH: "Our Government puts a high priority on protecting the privacy of law-abiding Canadians. Current practices of accessing the actual content of communications with a legal authorization will not change."

FACT: Several Provincial Privacy Commissioners have outlined the precise manner in which Bill C-30 will undermine the privacy of law-abiding Canadians. Furthermore, since Canadian law protects the privacy of non-law-abiding persons in an equal manner as it law-abiding persons (the key word upon which the law rests being "person", not "law-abiding"), the government has no right to breach this privacy during the course of an investigation **without judicial oversight**. In other words, law enforcement agencies are required to obtain a search warrant in order to breach the privacy of *any* person. 

VIC TOEWS OFFICIAL RESPONSE MYTH: 1: "This has nothing to do with monitoring emails or web browsing.  Basic subscriber information would be limited to a customer’s name, address, telephone number, email address, Internet Protocol (IP) address, and the name of the telecommunications service provider. It absolutely does not include the content of emails, phones calls or online activities."2: "The basic subscriber information described in the proposed legislation is the modern day equivalent of information that is in the phone book. Individuals frequently freely share this information online and in many cases it is searchable and quite public."

FACT: Not only does the "modern phone book" allow real-time monitoring of the location data associated with ISP and wireless connections, but the Vic Toewes Myth is being entirely disingenuous to its own intentions. Law enforcement agencies would seek subscriber information in order to read the contents of that person's communications in order to determine evidence supporting the guilt of that person relative to the criminal intentions presumed by the law enforcement officials who initiated the investigation. Otherwise why would law enforcement bother to engage in breaching a person's privacy?

VIC TOEWS OFFICIAL RESPONSE MYTH: "Fact: Federal legislation already allows telecommunications service providers to voluntarily release basic subscriber information to authorities without a warrant. This Bill acts as a counterbalance by adding a number of checks and balances which do not exist today, and clearly lists which basic subscriber identifiers authorities can access."

FACT: The checks and balances you indicate are entirely at the discretion of the investigating officer(s). Under the proposed bill, investigators would have to log and report the activities of their online investigation. However, there is no mechanism in the bill by which a party exterior to the investigating officer(s) has supervisory jurisdiction over the investigation except in the retrospective manner. Thus, the bill assumes an element of "faith" and "due diligence" on the part of investigating officer(s) as to the intentions behind their capacity to breach the a citizen's privacy. A hypothetical example: an officer pulls over a female driver for speeding. A few days later, that officer accesses the woman's personal information without a warrant. Under Bill C-30, there is no mechanism by which the officer will be impeded in his illegal activities; the woman's privacy will be breached. 

Mr. Toews, at this point I wish to address the fact that the Bill itself, as well as your childishly irresponsible description of opponents of the bill as "supporting child pornography", casually and wilfully invokes the suffering of children for political gain. There are absolutely no provision in the bill which will specifically address the needs of victims of childhood sexual assault (as a minor example, there exists a great number of sex abuse victims who cannot afford to pay for the counselling or psychological treatment; they are left to fend for themselves), so naming the bill itself "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act" is a unconscionable travesty, and you and your government should be absolutely ashamed for your disgusting rhetoric in relation to this issue. 

Mr. Toews, It is clear to me that your government operates with a myopic and opportunistic arrogance which demonstrates the morally-bankrupt nature of your politics.