Anonymous submission to North Shore
Last night some anarchists visited the Sidewalk Toronto office on Parliament Street. Their cheerful paint job needed some touching up to remind everyone that for all their land acknowledgements and “consultations”, sidewalk is a sinister force in our city [tag reads “Fuck Off Sidewalk”].
There are plenty of reasons to oppose sidewalk. Indigenous elders have criticized their tokenistic consultation of First Nations (hey, why not just remediate the stolen land and give it back, anyways?) Their aggressive proposals for data collection, private police forces and cashless stores are all pretty dystopic. and we can bet that their “affordable” housing stock will be nowhere near attainable for those who need it.
Respect to the efforts of groups like Block Sidewalk for their pushback against this plan. It isn’t a done deal so let’s keep fighting! we chose this tactic to reflect our hostility toward google and all forms of exclusivity and surveillance, and hope it inspires future action!
It’s important to oppose sidewalk now, before it’s built and other cities begin to view it as a viable model for affordable housing. A future where people don’t think twice about exchanging access to affordable housing for constant surveillance of their personal living spaces might seem like dystopian sci-fi today, but when facebook was launched fifteen years ago, no one expected how easily people would offer it the most intimate details of their lives, even after it became common knowledge that facebook’s business model was to exploit them for profit, even after scandals that demonstrated facebook’s abuse of users’ trust and privacy.