Post-Canada features articles that may be of particular interest to people who live in the geographic region known as Canada.
It is managed by Bryan Carney.
FAQ / Explain more…
Post-Canada? Do you hate this country and are you trying to reference Canada Post, or any of the national media containing “POST”?
No! And hell, no.
My thoughts here all roughly relate to a desire to move past, i.e. POST-, (or at least stand below to observe/analyze) what, for me four key themes:
- Post-Nationalism
I am among the luckiest birth lottery winners of this globe for being born within the borders of what we call Canada today. In many ways this is thanks to the traditions and efforts of compatriots present and past. Some of these are worth celebrating. Others were well-intentioned. Many — as has been only recently widely acknowledged — were despicable.
One of my favourite traditions in this land, compared with our neighbours to the south (who ironically have a wonderfully pragmatic, unbranded title “united states of X geography” which failed to deter national identity delusions), is our tradition of eschewing flag-waiving.
Why? Though it can make me swell up, too, national flags and the powers that control them can represent and sustain many different, opposing and (most importantly) fast-changing norms.
It makes a lot more sense to explicitly emphasize what principles and ideas we cherish and want to preserve and share with the world than the nation and flag that held them at any point. Appeals to be ‘proud’ of your mere birth or membership in your country very often succeed, by design or not, in diverting attention away from how the country and the target is actually behaving relative to these convictions.
Some things we have been proud of about this country, to me: somewhat universal health care, foreign aid contributions, peacekeeping and refugee policies, anti-violence, funding of education, science and research, belief in the rule of law, opportunity for social mobility and many more.
These could all be ended altogether tomorrow without the flag or country’s name changing one bit. And indeed all of these have been severely compromised.
For this and a thousand more reasons I will explore, I will write to encourage recognition and critique of the active construction and maintenance of the idea(s) of “Canada” and reverence for it, though I love very much some of our shared delusions and realities about this fortunate place. - Post- Political Spectrum
The binary classification of all political thought and association into The Left and The Right has, on the one hand, never held more visible sway over Canadians wanting an identity and a sport-like, low-entry way of addressing, cheering for and classifying politics writ large.
And on the other hand, the arbitrary system has been stretched and exploited so ridiculously (online especially, and famously by Russian bots, for instance) that its tenuousness seems ever more visible.
In pains me when intelligent people elevate Left and Right political identities and characteristics in this age (with our access to how this is used) to something more than first and foremost, accidental, basic and unfortunate phenomena like boom and bust cycles in market economies.
The terminology began with the accidental layout of the French National Assembly during the revolution — revolutionaries seated opposite those for the king, on the left and right, of course. But two all encompassing groups would have taken some other name or division had the same current democratic rules unfolded differently.
The importance of this binary division is sustained and grown not primarily by some conspiracy (though it is exploited as such), but by an accident of democracy adhering to rules of simple math and social psychology over history.
As political systems, parties and interest groups mature and enfranchise all available participants within these systems, they learn they must align into the largest group possible or be defeated by whichever opponents organize better and larger on the other side of same issue.
To the extent to which democracies remain one vote per person, the two sides tend to remain roughly the same in size also, producing regularly thin electoral margins in the oldest and most stable, most first-past-the-post democracies. An large imbalance means one side will have to move enough to entice some interest group or another to trade sides for a stronger expression.
The end result is that no interest or opposition can hope to find useful political expression in other than one of two large umbrellas, except for during fractures under one or both poles.
Perhaps thankfully, these fractures occur regularly (and more often in young Canada than our more established neighbour) since the adhesion of the collection of interests under each umbrella is often out of mere convenience and tradition. Smaller parties occasionally add some interest to electoral options, though rarely in a significant way in Canada other than handing a victory to the ‘side’ that is less fractured at any given vote time.
Democratic reform around voting systems offers some hope of lessening the strength of this pragmatic, “big-tent” self-organizing, but it seems as though we are stuck with it to some degree in our “worst form of government except for all the others” thanks to negotiations that happen around coalitions in proportional representation anyways.
What we aren’t stuck with is pretending — or rather, allowing our natural impulse to imagine — that the groups are a result of anything other convenient, arbitrary collections of interests and values. If you think there is something essential about you and one side of the spectrum, you are deluded. Like nations and flags, there is nothing essential about these sides at all. This is bad faith.
The repeated playing out of arguments on wedge issues and reification, reinforcement and identification on The Left vs The Right on the Internet’s messaging boards, social media and partisan websites is certainly the largest waste product of human intellect and computing resources ever continuously generated.
It contributes more to the eventual heat-death of our species than the emergence of cryptocurrency mining could ever dream.
It is the simplest, reliable sort of controversy-generating spectator-sport anyone can play in online exchanges, encouraged strongly by the attention economy Internet enterprises so rely on.
You, too, can actively resist it, without being embarrassed you were ever drawn in, and put yourself to solving a problem or a debate that actually exists. Anyone can and will be drawn in to an extent.
Please just don’t ever say “The Left” and “The Right” to simplify the ecosystem of ideas in this country, because you will succeed.
But isn’t a spectrum the opposite of a binary? No, the convenience of framing every political thought along some degree of alignment to one of the two Left or Right or now Center simply reinforces this entirely accidental belief system. - Post- Digital (Utopianism)
The amount of human life increasingly played out via measurable computation mediated by internet-connected screens, portable as they might be, is an absolute tragedy. Just look at any street corner with fresh eyes and see the bowed human heads.
It is a terrible loss of richness of sensory and bodily range and experience. And yet, technology is so powerful and seemingly impossible to go back from once you’re aware of the more efficient option.
That dissonance of doing things a less efficient but more enriching way can be reduced if societal values change. Environmental values have proven this. People will use mechanical push mowers, hang clothes to dry.
Placing a value on rich, real, physical world experiences and single-purpose built technology can help us all overcome the cult of efficiency and measurability that has dominated our culture.
And there may not be trade-offs in efficiency at all in the end. I will explore technologies that move experiences in these directions:
From the adoption of technology as simple as E-ink screens whose images persist without further energy and which are lit according to the light in a room, as one subtle further connection to it… to efforts to ditch screens altogether in favour of purpose-built physical interfaces.
I will aim to ask, indirectly in many ways:
What would a homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods and cities look like that are so engaging, dynamic and rich that you would be afraid to look down at your screen for Fear Of Missing Out instead of the other way around? - Post- Oligarchism
Canada’s long-standing laws on competition were written to encourage our largest companies to grow and consolidate in order to compete in the global resource export markets of scale. We have to allow our companies to get huge, the thinking was, or companies from this tiny nation won’t have a shot.
The so called ‘efficiencies’ defense in competition law, for instance, routinely stops merger reviews of large corporations before they begin, producing monopolies that harm Canadians, but theoretically increase the economies of scale of the corporation. Like other similar arguments favourable to corporations, the benefits must be assumed to trickle down to all Canadians.
This policy and others like it do not make sense in many or most situations for Canada’s growing non-resource and non-export sectors, most especially those where foreign competitors are limited from entering the market and a few hugely profitable companies dominate.
The influence these dominant corporations have in every form of regulation and policy in government reveals itself in scandal after scandal. The attitudes that got us here are foundational and need a massive realignment if we will have a meaningful democracy.