News, Events & Comments

2 thousand deaths from COVID-19 were reported in Poland this week (22-Nov.2021) another example for any inattentive to date that, as TorontotheBetter has previously documented, pro-market ideologues, all male, like Jaroslaw Kaczynsky of Poland, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India Boris Johnson of England and other neo-liberal nationalists are bad for the health of the populations they claim to value. The politics of COVID, have been  lamentably ignored in the emphasis of mainstream media on the medical technicalities and the sentimentality of the pandemic. COVID-19 kills, but mainly the excluded, aka the poor, and their deaths are most often attributable to leaders who value market wealth over social health. For a Better Toronto in a better world we need leaders genuinely committed to the public good.           Politics matters always, but its life and death impacts are clearer than ever at times like the present.                 

On Friday and and Saturday, Nov.19-20,  Torontonians disrupted downtown traffic to show their solidarity with Wet'suwet'en first nation protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline project near Prince Ceorge BC. Not only is the project disrupting local first nation communities it will facilitate more fossil fuel energy use and make Canada's sustainability and net zero carbon goals even harder to achieve. A better Toronto and a better world means less fossil fuel dependency and less carbon. TorontotheBetter sends solidarity greetings to Wet'suwet'en and calls on all to support their struggle. However many miles distant our struggle for a better world is the same. We are all Wet'suwet'en.          

Three trends that most profoundly determine our tomorrows are Inequality, as fore-fronted by the Occupy movement, which, as Michael Levitin, in his book “Generation Occupy”, has described, continues its societal impacts long after its emergence, Artificial Intelligence, as described in Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan’s “AI 2041”, which is reaching into all human affairs, from personal to occupational life, and Migration, particularly for our TorontotheBetter focus here, human migrants.  Together, however, these disturbing trends can and must, actually contribute to the possibility of a better world.

The necessary counterpoint to inequality's social plagues is a renewed determination to remove it,  so generating informal "communism", particularly, as ever in modern history among the young, though it may be without a single political formation as its agency.

As for  AI, its potential is for the removal of work as drudgery, so realizing the aspiration for free life that has motivated utopian science fiction as long as humans have dreamed beyond their historical boundaries.

Thirdly, the consequence of Migration, the negatives of its involuntary version now horrifically before us once again, is to reveal, albeit often destructively, that we are together with others in this space we call human society. Global warming and the environmental movement have made the cliche of "we're all in this together" an unavoidable reality.     

To synopsize the three trends, our limitations and separateness in community, must and can, be surpassed in a societal communism that frees us all, the original ideal of communism.       

Like its voracious Internet twin, Amazon, the house of Facebook, recently renamed Meta by founder Mark Zuckerberg, to the chagrin of Yanis Varoufakis of Greece, the home of meta the word and Meta the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilization Varoufakis Claims Zuckerberg Stole "Meta" Name for Facebook (greekreporter.com) has come to define an age of previously unimaginably reachable population scale. If Facebook “friends” are not real friends and their likes as transient as a screenshot these phenomena have come to define this cultural moment. There is huge power here but, as recent revelations by Facebook insiders have shown about the predatory, unaccountable and hitherto largely untaxed corporate wealth has highlighted little or no public accountability is taken for the manipulation of cyber bullies and others that the metaverse enables, its victims often the most isolated and weak. More than one young person teenager has been driven to near, and actual, suicide, automated trollers are infiltrating democratic processes as high profile as U.S. elections and the publication of false news is available to anyone with an Internet connection and a keyboard.  What to do about the adolescent dorm room fancy that became a monster fueled, it seems by a passion for nothing more than growth?

Splitting a corporate beast like Facebook, aka Meta, into separate entities like news and networking technology might reduce the threat of collusion but ultimately such powers will integrate.  Regulation, like that of alcohol or gambling, is possible but who could or should do it is far from easy to determine. Self-regulation runs counter to the self-interest of the corporate interests that prosper from its absence while external regulation by objective third parties is as yet wildly unequal to scale of the virtual wild west it must confront globally. As for public ownership of virtual media the culture of civil withdrawal created by neoliberalism, added to the sheer scale of the target phenomena, has made this option unrealistic.