More on Leaving the Garden: Does placemaking mean playgrounds for the urban elite?

Last week Tim Redmond, my former editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, published on his excellent blog 48 hills an incendiary, comprehensive and whip-smart speech given at a business conference on the “Mid-Market Transformation” last week by the former CEO of Salon, David Talbot. 

The piece is significant because it contextualizes the growing, palpable rage over everything from Google Busses to tech-friendly tax breaks that have dominated conversations on the future of urban planning in San Francisco, addressing what many see as an inexorable, shuddering earthquake sliding over the land — the subduction of a thriving and diverse city by a technophilic elite.

Talbot’s assertion that he is “no luddite” should be obvious to anyone familiar with the digital pioneer and his award-winning online publication, which frequently covers topics in tech, innovation and business. But it is nonetheless an important precursor to a discussion that, while granting the great potential of tech entrepreneurship to do good, also outlines a host of real and tangible negative effects directly attributable to the cult of digital capitalism, which promises to strengthen its hold on this city, and plenty of others, in coming years.

I’m a strong believer in the power of technology to liberate the human spirit. And I’m very proud that San Francisco is a beehive of this kind of buzzing innovation.

Talbot writes, and then continues

But over the years, the innovation bubbling up in the Bay Area has become much more market-oriented than socially driven. Vast fortunes have been created overnight by raiding the intellectual content that others have painstakingly built over the years. Other new empires have risen by convincing millions of people to give up their privacy and reveal their deepest thoughts and desires for free – a kind of Tom Sawyer business model based on persuading the public that it’s lots of fun to paint someone else’s fence.

The Tom Sawyerism to which Talbot refers applies to everything from the offering up of private information to a bevy of salespeople eager to pummel it back at us in the form of targeted advertising . . . to the relatively more glacial, but no less tangible, process by which populations create the "cool" that will later be rewarmed and served back to them -- at a fair markup, of course.

In San Francisco, this process is playing out on the physical landscape, as tech entrepreneurs flock to the city and its outposts -- not least of which is Burning Man -- to slurp up what's innovative, repackage it digitally, and use it to finance the very real "reinvestment" by which the city is becoming attractive and commercially viable for a certain set - to the necessary exclusion of others. 

As I begin to contemplate my own move from the Bay Area and the art community I've been part of here (more on that later), it's a constellation of issues I'm struggling to reconcile all the time: my belief in the power of place and in the importance of using space to rebuild community, with my fear and mistrust of the bright-eyed and buzzwordy discourse of creative placemaking; my love for the way new forms are born and breed in the crevices of the city and the cracked desert landscape, with my skeptical mistrust of those who say it will "change the world"; my grudging acceptance of the superstructures of real estate and finance and politics and technology that govern what is likely to happen and what is even possible in the complex system we inhabit, with my intense, prideful, jealous, possessive, passionate and perhaps irrational love of the places I have built a home over the past few years.

If you want to struggle with me, perhaps start with Leaving the Garden, Part 1, or

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Education: STEM . . . or flowers?

STEM is gaining steam as the new educational mantra, with everyone from NASA to the President to the Boy Scouts of America championing initiatives to help strengthen America's foundation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Though the message about strengthening America's competitive advantage in a global economy often comes off as vaguely xenophobic (implying elite armies of technophilic Asians marching overseas to steal our jobs) the point is duly noted: Americans, depending on who you listen to, have been falling behind in math and science education – actually, education in general – for years, and now that our economy has fallen behind as well, it's time to fix the two problems – together, obviously.

I'm sitting in my favorite coffeeshop researching Obama's Educate to Innovate campaign to pick apart the particular failings of a merely instrumental approach to tech education, when I hear the following words:

Mere technological solutions don't fix anything. Students need to cultivate heart, compassion, humanity . . .

It's a little strange, because I'm right in the middle of an Alfie Kohn article titled "Against Competitiveness," explaining that the utilitarian, economics-is-everything, us-versus-them approach to bolstering school -- and by extension, student -- "performance" actually harms education and inhibits future economic growth by limiting creativity and entrepreneurship. Then comes the reply:

Students are stuck in the stimulus reward framework - how do we get a good grade in this class?

At this point, it's pretty weird -- I feel like the table next to me is having a conversation directly with the scholar writing from his tiny office inside my computer screen (what, he's not in there?) which is coincidental even for Local 123, the progenitor all untold numbers of serendipitous meetings and fruitful conversations. 

The speaker continued, explaining that he would have his students reflect on the habits and incentive structures that motivate them, and how that would differ once they had to start going after jobs

'Don't feel like I'm going to fire you -- that's what's going to happen in six months when you get out into the workforce.' 

He explained that right answers and wrong answers wouldn't matter any more, that being afraid to ask questions would result in the kind of fatal errors that ended careers, that being robotic, in general, would just simply not serve.

At this point, I turned around and introduced myself.

It turns out, he and his table mate are both science teachers in Berkeley; one for the high school and one for Cal. The larger, hairier one, who teaches Stat Reproduceability and Collaborative Data Science, pointed out the competitiveness and reward-driven systems aren't only problems for students, but for "science in general -- we just want to get shit done, publish papers, you know. There's no incentive for reproduceability because no one's going to try to reproduce your results. The publication pressure is so huge that no one is repeating experiments at all. They all want to discover something new. Which is great and all . . . but without repeated testing, we don't know if any of these discoveries are actually true."

We chatted for a while longer, and I asked how we could be begin to change the paradigm. Well, I couldn't have made it up any better myself: both teachers emphasize a collaborative learning environment, where they make use of teamwork, creative technology approaches and . . . wouldn't you know it . . . art. They were looking for more ways to get students in the shop, prototyping, building ideas and just having fun together as a community. 

Taking the science and aiming it at real-world goals and problems involves the type of problem-solving and consensus-building -- not to mention, repetition after failure after repetition --  that takes science out of a theoretical, competitive, finish-line - oriented framework, and into a creative, iterative, collaborative . . . sure, I'll say it . . . "art form."

For anyone looking for more information on positive interplay between arts and technology, check out stemtosteam.org.

Or, for a more fun and practical and collaborative approach, contact me directly, as I am often able to assist in involving interested students directly in learning hands-on skills through the shared shop spaces in which I work.