So I would like to welcome everyone to platform labor and struggles for alternative platform models.
So, my name is Stephen Surlin and i'm a PhD candidate at McMaster University in communications and multimedia.
My current research seeks to cleverly design decolonial multimedia archiving toolkits to empower
Hamilton's Afro Canadian Caribbean Community, to honour cultural history community managed digital archives.
bring some of that in the questions, possibly, so today we'll be hearing from David Dubinski, Derek Hrynyshyn, Daniel Paré, and Charles, well is Charles here
No, just Daniel Paré, Julie Yujie Chen, Guy T. Hoskins, and Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte.
So each presenter will have 12 minutes to give their presentations and i'll send you a one minute remaining message in the chat.
So after each presentation, there will be about a minute more for question, then after the presentations we'll have more time, as a group
for group Q&A, so please write any questions in the chat and I will call on you to maybe speak on your question, elaborate and
have a discussion around that.
So everyone in the session is invited to leave their cameras on or off according to their preference and
We ask that you leave your microphones on mute when you're not speaking, and the conference team is recording each session but will only
share recordings, in accordance with individual presenters preferences indicated in the conference recording permission form.
So, to get started.
David Dubinski.
So.
Would you like to.
Okay, thank you i'm pleased to be joining you from Ottawa and pleased to lead off this panel.
I'm pleased also to be talking on a topic that was raised yesterday in Jesse Wente's opening
talk on narrative sovereignty as i'm talking on cultural sovereignty and its evolving meetings.
DAVID DUBINSKI: Let me begin by saying cultural sovereignty emerged as a core objective of Canadian cultural policy in the 1980's
In the context of mass media and continental free trade.
It has retained a central place in cultural policy ever since and is now widely cited as an objective of bill C-10.
My paper today I want to show how this application of the legacy objective onto the new streaming environment
is emblematic of the general pattern of extrapolating from old policies onto new environments that applies to the whole gamut
of Canada's response to big tech. I said out why I believe this approach will not be sufficient, either for cultural or communications policies
and outline an alternative strategic policy approach with a mission to assert the deliberative sovereignty of citizens.
Now let me.
put up some slides.
Is that, showing?
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yep, yeah we can see it.
Ok.
So these slides contain a lot of detail, which I won't be able to speak to in my
short talk today but I've put the slides on the conference website for your reference.
So.
The.
The number of new initiatives gives the impression of there being a lot of novelty
in Canadian policy response to big tech, but as I will show in the next few slides, there is a pattern of applying old logics to new problems. My point will be that this pattern
fails to address what we know to be entirely new about the toxicities of algorithmically curated platforms. My approach is framed by such
works as Shoshana Zuboff's foundational surveillance capitalism, Rana Foroohar's don't be evil, and Ronald Deibert's Massey lectures, Reset.
So there are four recurring themes.
The first is the fact that Canadian policy is seeking to address new problems to existing policy silos.
This means that each silo has used their experts to examine new issues through the lenses of their old policy frameworks.
The second is the guiding principle of technological neutrality found in many of Canada's framework policies.
This includes the definition of broadcasting and the broadcasting Act and the definition of cultural industries and trade agreements.
While technological neutrality is convenient for regulators, it creates a predisposition to bring new technologies into the embrace of existing policies.
And this can lead to a fundamental error in strategic policymaking, and that is to choose your policy instruments before understanding a new problem.
So, for example, Bill C-10s treatment of Internet streaming as broadcasting ignores the fact that it is broadcasters use of spectrum
that gives government, the authority to license them and to regulate what they can broadcast, but this authority does not exist for the internet,
instead, the government is claiming that the right to regulate streamers is a condition for their access to Canadian markets.
This brings two large problems, first, bill C-10s de facto licensing of streamers raises complex questions of internet openness which presumably should be a core policy goal.
Secondly, claiming it as a price for market access, raises a very big red flag to the Americans, who, as we know, have a right to retaliate under the new NAFTAs cultural exemption.
A third recurring theme has been to continue to seek to redistribute advertising or distribution revenues to cultural content and news services.
Such cross subsidies were foundational in the legacy system of supporting Canadian content.
This old logics apply to the new proposals by bringing foreign streamers into the broadcast and CanCon obligations
and requiring search and social media platforms to share their advertising revenues with Canadian news services.
However, these could bring unintended consequences.
Redistributing platforms advertising revenues to Canadian news services would mean a public sphere, financed by toxic advertising practices.
and leave intact the algorithmically curated news offerings of big tech with their attended problems of disinformation and polarization.
Bill C-10s obligations on foreign streamers could result in foreign streaming services becoming dominant producers
of some forms of Canadian content in competition with Canadian producers and broadcasters.
Both measures could ironically enhance rather than constrain the role of foreign big tech in Canada's public sphere.
A final theme has been the effort to fix market failures, the classic instrument choice of regulators belief in market efficiency.
Fixing market failures through transparency requirements, giving consumers agency to assert their interests over data or content held by platforms or managing the terms of trade
of market players, these are found in a number of the new initiatives, are classic types of measures that try to fix market failures.
But the market failures lens can misinterpret and underestimate what is really at stake.
The proposal to have platforms share their advertising revenues with news services, is based on the assumption of a market failure between platforms and news services.
The real problem, however, is in the relationship between platforms and their users and the social and
political toxic outcomes of algorithmically driven targeted advertising and behaviour controlling apps.
The problem is therefore not fundamentally a classic market failure, but the emergence of an entirely new type of political economy, Zuboff's surveillance capitalism.
In one of her most striking insights, Zuboff describes how the ability of the platforms to use their
knowledge to modify their users behavior, strikes at the core of individual agency and autonomy.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, she calls this a threat to our right to a future, that is the right to have confidence that
as we use media to make up our own minds, that we have confidence that we are making up our own mind.
This is not a market failure, but an entirely new threat to citizens epistemic rights.
There are there for many grounds for questioning whether the extension of legacy policy frameworks
into the future will be adequate to the task of asserting the public interest in the new ecosystem.
Instead, we need to take on board what is entirely new about the environment, rethink what it means
for the cultural, social, and democratic life of citizens, and fundamentally retool our policy frameworks.
Zuboff describes this as the need for public authorities to devise entirely new forms of collective action.
Deibert describes it as a reset.
Now, unlike an approach that seeks to extend existing policies into the future, deciding on the appropriate policy instruments is no easy task.
In fact, many of the panels in this conference will be exploring some possibilities, what I would like to do is sketch out what kind of policy development exercise
grosso modo would help us get there.
Mariana Mazzucato offers a promising method for executing policy transformations on this scale.
She draws on a rich tradition of public value approaches to policymaking and argues that public policy should not fix market failures
but shape them, and to create public value with publicly determined missions set out for market players and public institutions.
setting out to replace the legacy objective of cultural sovereignty with deliberative sovereignty could help Canadian policy define such a mission.
It would involve replacing an objective that was developed for cultural industries in the age of mass media
with a mission that put the deliberating citizen and social media at the center of the policy narrative.
This would deepen the ambition of the digital charters existing goal of protecting democracy, which is very narrowly framed around protecting the integrity of elections.
It would also signal the importance of having access to subjectively relevant CanCon as part of the public sphere, and not just driving cultural industries.
Now this exercise would involve finding the democratic rationales for both restraining the processes
of surveillance capitalism and for harnessing the new technologies to enhance democratic governance.
Deibert makes an elegant case
that the tradition of smaller republicanism could provide us with some of the principles we need to radically restrain the abuses of power present in the new system.
On the positive side, before the full onset of surveillance capitalism, some commentators were hopeful that social media
could help realize Jürgen Habermas's idea of public sphere where citizens could become deliberators and not just consumers of mass media.
David Runciman underlines the importance of finding a way to realize the immense potential of the Internet for democratic self government.
Such reflections invite us not to accept the current dominance and practices of big tech as an endpoint, to look beyond recovering
revenues from these toxic services and to set out to create the conditions for the deliberative sovereignty of citizens.
So what would such a policy development exercise look like, let me put up a slide.
Here we are.
So first, before embarking on a proliferation of separate initiatives, start with a holistic examination of the public interest implications of the new technologies.
That would bring coherence across diverse policy solos. On a positive note budget 2021 announced
the creation of a new data commissioner, that could bring coherence across the silos.
Second, that works you replace the assumption of technological neutrality, with an understanding of the specific dynamics of each technology.
Third, instead of seeking to harvest the revenues of big tech to sustain current cultural policy instruments,
deliberative sovereignty would require a fundamental retooling of those instruments, it would mean abandoning cross subsidies and require increases of direct financial support.
It would involve as Richard Stursberg has argued, changing definitions of Canadian content to encourage
the creation of content that is subjectively substantially relevant to Canada and not just produced by Canadians.
Jesse Wente made a similar point yesterday in his opening talk.
Finally, it would require, sorry, it would require reimagining the roles for public institutions
such as public broadcasters and properly funding them as recommended by the Yale commission.
David Taras and Chris Waddell have shown how Canadian policy evolution repeatedly left out
the CBC out of responses to new technologies and bill C-10 has done this again.
Finally, rather than imagining that the toxicities of surveillance capitalism are fixable market failures,
we should consider Zuboff's advice to effectively outlaw the market in manipulating the futures of citizens.
The recent update of Apple's operating system to make it easy for users to opt out of being tracked by apps shows how easy technologically it would be to do so.
But given the social, financial, and political entrenchment of big tech and the international governance issues involved,
it will not be easy to do so, politically, but because it is difficult doesn't mean it's not possible or necessary. Thank you.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah thank you for that, and
Yeah I found really like that last slide there.
I think summed up, I was maybe thinking of some questions, but I found that last slide helped connect where to maybe move forward there
So yeah we could maybe continue the discussion after, so let's see, next is Derek Hrynyshyn.
All right, thank you, Stephen and thanks to Sarah and all the other organizers of the conference. Going very well so far, it's been very interesting.
And thanks David for setting this up so well. It was a very good first paper in this panel. I'm going to address I think some of what you're asking for.
Although with a slightly different direction, perhaps. What i've been trying to do in my recent work is think about
Ways that platforms could actually operate very differently, I agree that we shouldn't see the problems of the platforms as market failures, although I do think that.
Understanding the problems that market transactions built into social media platforms
is a big problem, and I think, in fact, what we need are entirely different kinds of platforms.
That would work in ways that are very different from the ways that Facebook and Google and Twitter work.
But I think doing this requires us to rethink what platforms really are all about and what serving the public interest in with communication policy actually can do.
There's been a lot of work, of course, addressing the failures of social media platforms to serve as these kinds of habermisian democratic public spheres.
A lot of work and Zuboff is probably the best known, but we could mention many, many others, and
this is actually, I think, a very different situation that we're in when we think about the public reactions to platforms.
Over the last decade, because a decade ago we were, most of the literature that seem to attract the most attention was about how great the Arab Spring was and how
Facebook and Twitter were facilitating these revolutionary movements and things like occupy. It's pretty clear now that that kind of
optimism that we were experiencing back then is not well founded and people have come to realize, I think that that there's a serious problem.
Not just with our social media platforms, but they are contributing to a very serious crisis in democracy broadly across the world.
authoritarian populace governments coming into power is just simply not a good thing from the democratic perspective.
And this is a crisis that we knew well for four years, and we seem to have thought that it has abated with Biden's victory in
United States but even the way that trump's presidency ended showed pretty clearly that there are serious problems that remain.
And these problems, probably don't need to be enumerated at length, but I will just suggest that the most notorious one, the problem of disinformation or fake news
is part and parcel of the same process of the bleeding way of funds from established media sources to the global monopoly platforms.
And this continues to be a problem, despite the fact that the platforms claim to be addressing it with both human and automated moderators.
Another serious problem is the polarization of discourse that happens as a result of the algorithmic
amplification of extremist content and this again is driven by platforms need to basically addict users
To their use of platforms in order to maximize engagement and therefore profits and, of course, in the background there's the privacy violations as well, which
are driven by a process that makes informed consent essentially meaningless. All of these problems are happening, mostly in a vacuum of regulation.
But, the good news is, there is now relatively serious consensus around the need to do something to regulate these platforms.
Even in the United States there's bipartisan consensus, now that something has to be done about section 230
giving platforms essentially unlimited immunity from prosecution for how they moderate
discourse and Canada's got legislation on its way as well, and Europe, of course, has passed several several bills,
but the thing is that none of these regulations have really, the ones that have been put in place so far really haven't addressed the problems.
And the ones that are coming I would suggest might be able to deal with some of the worst excesses, but the basic
the root of the problem is one that really needs to be addressed in a much more fundamental way.
It's not just that the companies are too powerful, I mean the debate in Australia that ended up with
the government, basically backing down and failing to regulate Facebook in any serious way that would
See news industry, a serious news industry funded more substantially. That indicates that the depth of the problem
when it comes to the imbalance of power between the democratic governments that are trying to regulate platforms and the global scale of the programs themselves.
But even if governments were more powerful, even if governments like Canada or Australia
could actually require some more democratic accountability, out of the Facebooks and Googles of the world.
The problem is, and I think David is pointing at this, a number of times as well that the basic business model
is not really one that leads us towards democracy, the basic business model of all the commercial platforms
Is the commodification of the attention or consciousness of the users and the sale of that commodity to advertisers.
This is not something that that moves us towards deliberative sovereignty or any kind of deliberative process, what it moves us towards is
A situation when which users emotions are manipulated their fears and desires are
preyed upon and the only logical result that we could actually expect, I think, is a situation in which
platforms exploit the outrage and anxiety of populations, this just is not good for any kind of attempt to promote critical deliberation.
Now I do think there's a role for regulation and I don't want to make it sound like I think we should give up trying to regulate but
Stopping the worst forms of hate speech that we could all agree on which are probably not very many.
And limits to how advertising can be displayed and perhaps extraction of a little bit of money that might support some kind of serious news.
Are all possible, but the real dangers to our democracy, I think the algorithmic the promotion of extremism and polarization.
And the inability to hold these global monopolistic corporations accountable aren't going to be dealt with by any kind of regulation, and in other words, I think we need to
find ways to replace these platforms with something more accountable that can promote critical deliberation, deliberative sovereignty if you like.
Now
That leaves us the question like what else is there, other than advertising to fund these free platforms and there are a number of proposals have been floated, some people
Think maybe it's a good idea to have the users pay a few dollars a month instead and not have advertising on it
I suppose that that might go somewhere, I don't see that actually happening I don't think seen very likely at all, more likely would be, I think
What David has just referred to as the application of old solutions to new problems.
The attempt to rely on the precedent of public broadcasting as a solution to the
What I see as the market failure of private broadcasters unable to serve the public interest providing the kinds of information that the public really needs.
We recognize that the market of private broadcasters doesn't do that, so we fund a public broadcaster.
And there are people who advocate that we should have a publicly funded platform, instead of the commercially funded ones.
And you know, probably a well intentioned idea, but I really think that
Here again, I will follow David, like the technologies that are different and to have it's one thing to have a public broadcaster, where there are say journalists on public payroll
providing reliable information. You could perhaps have that compete with private broadcasters and you can have an information economy that people are
likely to trust at some level is providing publicly reliable information, but when the public authority actually administers the platform.
Even in the societies that are most committed to the principles of liberal democracy such a platform would at least raise the fear of
A bias or systemic problems in the moderation of content with partisan political motivations behind it and I doubt that users are ever going to trust such a platform.
And so I think we need something quite different, and I would suggest that those who talked about an open source distributed architecture platform are on the right track.
Tim Berners-Lee for instance, inventor of the World Wide Web, is working on such a proposal, and you can find other things if you look online for them, Mastodon is one, Friendica
there's a number of these projects that are open source created by volunteer labor programming released publicly so that anybody can download it and implement it.
And I don't want to make a very technical argument here about the feasibility of it but
This is basically the way that email works and it's basically the way the World Wide Web works, the protocols are open
anybody can install and run a web server or email server, why don't we have a social network that works, the same way.
I think there would be numerous advantages, I think we could have a set of protocols that that could be implemented.
In ways that are customizable, that would perhaps allow extensions, where people could
choose their own moderating service so that you wouldn't need to rely on
the algorithm run by the company that runs the network, you could simply set up your system
In a way, that interacts with a moderating service that you could choose from an open market of moderating services that would filter
Your content, the way you like it, rather than the way some corporation or some State wants. The other advantage of this is that since there
wouldn't need to be a centralized place where everybody's personal information is held, privacy would be a much easier thing to maintain.
You can also find ways to fund this that don't rely on advertising being sold to a single monopolistic Corporation.
I'm not suggesting it would solve all of the problems of platforms and democracy, I think
it's likely to be better, it would still allow the extremists and the racists and misogynists their own little filter bubble.
But it would mean that their activity would have no effect on those who chose not to participate, which is different from what we have now.
Where algorithms are set up specifically to profit most from the kinds of activity
that those kinds of people are going to lead to that will be profitable for the company to use.
Now, the problem with open source projects is that it's really hard to say hey let's do an open source alternative
to this corporate thing because it's been done so much that it never works. It's really hard to argue for something that has failed so systematically.
There have been lots of attempts to produce open source software that just seem to have gone pretty much nowhere.
And you know if anybody else out there uses Mastodon or Diaspora or Friendica, please let me know i've never met anybody who uses them.
Most people don't know about them, and so they remain very, very marginal and the
idea that we could create something that would compete with the size of Facebook or Google, yes, it seems quite
unrealistic, but the problem here is that there is no funder, no source of
resources that is secure for the development of such a project or its promotion.
And that's where I suggest that a government policy designed to produce a more democratic style of platform could actually play a positive role.
Logistic and financial support, not for content, and not for actual moderation, but for the construction
of a set of protocols that could be shared openly, I think would go a long way to make things much better.
This is by the way.
The way the original Internet was built and rolled out, and so I think there's good reason to return to those kinds of principles.
Now, I admit, this is a utopian proposal, i'm not suggesting that it was going to happen anytime soon or that
there's many governments around the world that are about to rush into supporting an open source platform project but
Unless we're willing to imagine as a serious alternative not just as some form of performance
or regulation to the existing structure, but a complete, I guess Deibert's word, reset is a good one.
Then the threat to democracy posed by the unregulated operation of informational platforms that amplify the most dangerous tendencies within us
Simply can't be addressed. We have to confront the power of platform capital and rethink how we can make platforms, not just serve the interests of the public,
But act in a way that allows the democratic potential of our daily communicative activity to be actually realized. Thank you very much.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Thank you for that, yeah very interesting, I think I have a question, maybe for you and
Daniel at the end here, so yeah just we can maybe keep moving here on to Daniel.
If you want to get started there.
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On the top left.
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Yeah no.
You can see, the presentation I think now.
yeah okay, I can see, but I just wanted you guys to see the slides.
yeah yeah like I could see the slides here.
Can you see all the stuff around the side as well or.
No.
So, thanks everybody.
I'm going to take
This talk is a little bit different direction from our two previous speakers
in that the focus of my talk isn't so much on the platforms themselves but the uses to which people are
Putting these platforms and specifically in the context of freedom of expression
in the workplace.
It comes as no surprise that you know throughout the past quarter century that the boundaries between employees personal lives and work
have become increasingly porous, not least because the widespread domestication of internet based communications. Today we regularly learn people posting material online
That subsequently leads to employers taking disciplinary action against these individuals.
Many employers view this mode of expression as constituting a potential threat to their interests and prerogatives.
Chief among these concerns are online comments from employees that are directly critical of the workplace or the employer.
And or that could damage the company's product or brand images, content that is deemed contrary to employers mission.
And content of course that could potentially harm employees reputations in any number of ways, it comes as no surprise that
Employers are very protective of their reputations right, in other words the privacy
and speech rights of employees are coming up face to face against the legitimate business interests of employers.
Now this said, there's nothing particularly novel about the interest in employee conduct and the potential consequences there for employers.
What is new, are the types of challenges arising from employees off duty use of social media to express their voice about both work and non work related issues.
The tensions arising from the expression of voice through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram TikTok
are being played out in arbitration tribunals, in court rooms, and in the media of many countries.
And its the decision outcomes of these processes that are shaping the contours of what expression is to be deemed appropriate or legitimate within the context of relationships.
To put it simply, I want to suggest to you that there's a new expression centric governance trajectory that's being charted in the domain of labour relations.
There's an emerging body of arbitral jurisprudence in case law that focuses on the
social media employment nexus and that raises questions about the extent to which employees off duty behavior
is subject to increasing employer control, indeed the learning of the boundaries between on and off duty that are
afforded by the constant presence of social media in people's lives, raises the very specter of employees, never being entirely off duty.
I'm not going to delve very heavily into theory in this presentation, suffice to say, though, that in terms of social theory the work that my colleague, Charles Smith and I are involved in
is inspired by the intersection between E. P. Thompson's classic observation that perceptions of
time and capitalism cannot be understood, apart from the lived experience of work on the one hand
And on the other hand, Harold Innis's clasic maxim that the more the technology of communication improves, the more difficult human communication becomes, on the other hand.
This would be normally the point in the presentation where I would buy some time and reach out to the audience and say
hey does anybody recognize these faces so it would have been difficult to do and in the Zoom context.
So rather than ask the question we'll just jump to say that these three individuals are
celebrities of sorts with regards to the cases that they were involved with precisely because of their off duty
online expression. On your left is Carolyn Strom who was a registered nurse from Prince Albert Saskatchewan who in 2015 shortly after her father passed away
While in palliative care and posted some comments online expressing, sort of raising questions about the quality of care that he'd received.
The Saskatchewan registered nurses association accused her of misconduct for posting those comments online, proceeded to take disciplinary action against her.
Which consisted all together imposing $1,000 fine requiring that she submit two self reflective essays to the association and that she paid $25,000 in tribunal costs.
She appealed these decisions and in late 2020 the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal overturned the associations
decision, incited that indeed, the association had infringed upon Ms. Strom's charter rights of freedom of expression.
In the middle we have Stephanie Katelnikoff, who was a former train conductor with CP rail.
She also has a sideline as a model, and she was posting lots of photos online, modeling photos online, many of them sexually suggestive.
Photos that were taken both on railway property and off of railway property. In 2017, CP sought to dismiss her on the grounds that her off duty social media activity
constitutes constituted a violation of CP's code of ethics. She was posting inappropriate
internet content and that her postings represented conduct unbecoming of a CP official.
In 2009, she grieved this of course, and in 2019 in arbitration, the arbiters ruled that
she had not engaged in any form of misconduct, and that her actions did not want dismissal on the part of CP.
She was not reinstated, however, because she did not seek reinstations and so she was granted compensation in lieu of.
On the far right, a very recent case Ahmar Khan, who's a young journalist working on a temporary basis with the CBC Manitoba newsroom, who in 2019 after
Don Cherry had made his infamous comments about you people had fired a tweet expressing his displeasure with xenophobic broadcast taking place on the CBC.
The CBC asked Ahmar to remove his tweet which he did he then leaked his story to some other journalists about the actions at CBC had taken against him.
Another employee then accessed his computer and provided CBC managment with the whole bunch of information about him
All this to say, CBC sought to fire him in the end through because of these actions and then in early January just a couple months ago.
In arbitration the arbitrator rule that
In fact, the CBC had acted inappropriately for dismissing him with cause and again so they use forced they were forced to rehire him in his position.
On the thread throughout all of these cases, of course, is people having disciplinary actions taken against them
because of their off duty posts, okay. Now, and this is what we're we're seeking to investigate in this project
One of things that were interested in and the project has been involved with is examining the extent to which employees
off duty behavior is becoming subject to increasing employer control and in order to to look at this case.
we've conducted a systematic review and content analysis of Canadian arbitration cases where employees were
subjected to workplace discipline or dismissal, whether in whole or in part because of their off duty social media activity.
Through our review we've been able to identify 51 cases spanning roughly the last 20 years.
Those cases against, the challenge of course there's all sorts of cases right it's about finding cases specifically for actions off duty, is a little bit trickier.
I should point out that, before I present some of the findings, a couple of the limitations with our study is that
the fact that we're looking at arbitration cases means that we're limited to Unionized work places.
And secondly, that we obviously can only report on cases that have been settled through the arbitration process taken through to its end, with no means of counting for cases
In which settlement may have been reached outside of the arbitration process. So what have we found so far just by way of quick sort of summary.
In terms of the 51 cases that we've looked at, the vast majority involve Facebook, with Twitter not even closely behind, but things involving Facebook comments.
The types of postings that have gotten people in trouble all for the most part
pertain to different aspects of the workplace, whether it be generally about the workplace, whether it be about mentioning specific supervisors or
coworkers, whether it be mentioning customers or clients, so you know nasty observations about ones clients.
A case, you know people posting silly stuff to, you know posting photos of a suicide case in one instance.
People posting songs and whatnot. It's only 10% as you see from that pie chart that we've identified so far.
Where people had disciplinary actions taken against them on the grounds of having made comments that had no direct
comment or relationship to the workplace, and there was nothing that immediately identified them to their workplace.
The types of complaints that we see in terms of breaking down the complaints, the arbitration process
as you'll see, the vast majority have to do with employee claims of unfair dismissal and unfair discipline.
Now, in cases where disciplinary action is challenged in a grievance process
there's two issues that have to be addressed. The first is the extent to which the employee's exercise their right to freedom of expression
falls under the purview of an employer's right, sorry, management right to make decisions relating the operation of their business, so this brings us into the domain of duty of loyalty and such.
The second issue to be addressed is whether there's a sufficient connection exists between the off duty conduct of posting messages on social media platform and the workplace itself.
Now the basic rule is that an employer has no jurisdiction over or authority over an employee, including where they live
outside of working hours, unless the employer can show that it's a legitimate business interest that's affected. Okay.
The other aspect of this that disadvantages employees, those posting things online, is that when an employer seeks to take disciplinary action.
there's only a need to demonstrate the risk of a potential harm arising from a social media post.
Employers are not required to demonstrate actual harm having been incurred from people's social media posts.
Now, in terms of the decision outcomes that we're seeing so far, as you see from
this side there's a split roughly a 60/40 split favoring employees over employers.
And this decision, this breakdown has to do with the way in which cases are analyzed and such in many ways. Now
The main thing, the main issue in judging cases for off duty speech
involve two tests that arbitrators have to engage with. The first is something called the Millhaven test.
And the Millhaven test is used to establish if there's sufficient connection between
the off duty actions of an employee and the workplace, and this test involved five questions.
The first question being, does the conduct of the employee harm the company's reputation or product. The second question,
Does the employees behavior render the employee unable to perform their duty satisfactorily.
Third, does the employees behavior lead to the refusal, reluctance, or inability of co workers to engage with this individual.
Fourth, has the employee engaged in, sorry, is the employee guilty of a serious breach of the criminal code.
And fifth, has the employees behavior created sufficient difficulty to prevent the company from properly carrying out its functions.
Now in order to justify dismissing an employee, an employer only needs to demonstrate one of those five points.
So, in an instance where an employer has been deemed to sort of make that case
So if the expression in question deem to impinge on the employers business interests
and sufficient connection is established, we then move to the next step of the process, which is an assessment of the justness of the discipline that's evaluated.
This is where we get sort of we see this breakdown from this pie chart in terms the dispositions coming out of
the decisions, okay, whether a grievance is upheld, whether it's rejected whether it's modified in some way.
For Unionized employees in the Canadian context, assessments of justness are anchored in another test called the Scott test and the Scott test consists of three questions.
First, being has the employee engaged in conduct meriting discipline.
The second being does the circumstances surrounding the employee's conduct justify their dismissal.
And third, if dismissal is deemed to be excessive, what alternative measure may be substituted
and it's really this application of alternative measures that we see the modification of grievances. Now these three questions, the Scott test takes on particular salience
In cases involving social media posts, precisely because it's the privacy and speech rights of individuals that are at stake in these instances.
And the Scott test, one of the things that it does is it offers a measure of protection against efforts of employers
to control employee's freedom of expression outside the workplace in so far as those questions
Direct arbitrators to weigh the composition, among other things, of sort of who's the intended audience,
was this message meant for wide public dissemination, was it within a closed group, are there other extenuating factors at play.
STEPHEN SURLIN: And, yes sorry to interrupt there but yeah just because you're over time so.
I'm just wrapping up right now so.
To wrap it up
The conclusions that come out of this basically sort of
One of things to keep in mind that we see is a tremendously wide spectrum of comments, right
so from the most inane comments to the most vile racist threatening comments that are online.
Secondly, that off duty speech now is, by and large, considered an extension of the workplace, and one of things that were postulating is that we are seeing a chilling effect
Within the workplace right, so the idea that employers can go for the most extreme levels of punishment, whether they succeed in the individual case or not.
pursuing that line of discipline, you know, conveys a message to other employees and just finally one thing I was going to say is that the unions need to start thinking about incorporating
protection of expression in their collective agreements.
almost like, you know, academic freedom for non-academics.
If you will, sorry that i've gone over the time.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Thank you for that, so
we'll keep going, and we have some time at the end and so Julie Yujie Chen, so if you want to get started.
JULIE YUJIE CHEN: Yep, i'm sharing my screen, can you all see it?
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah
JULIE YUJIE CHEN: Ok, well, thank you everyone for coming. My paper today explores two questions
while in a different geographical context. First, how are platforms envisioned
envisioned and operationalized the in the dominant framing of the economy in China, and secondly, how have the normative envisions of the platform
economy shifted the ground for the politics of social participation and development. So the study has two components, first I analyze
This is just a selection of the policies that I analyzed.
I analyzed discursive constructor of the platform economy in a major government policies, as you can see here.
And the second I connect the experience of workers and operations of the platform companies to the framework and rationale pertaining the platform economy
and the development policies.
Just to be clear
The case that I focusing on is not just, actually is more focusing on a work related platforms, instead of
interaction and social media platforms. So in doing these two parallel analysis together, it enables me to go beyond the discursive critique
and explicate the complex process, in which actually digital platforms and platform economies are produced
and the practices in contemporary China. So in China, the platform economy is usually framed as sharing economy.
The discursive framing of the digital platforms is characterized by embracing the platform economy
as the opportunity to achieve a variety of social and economic goals. From the economic growth,
restructuring and upgrading to new ways of consumption or even lifestyle. Not all these elements are new actuallty.
Nor are they exclusively applicable to to Chinese context, for instance, many scholars, you know basically in the US and UK
have criticized that the term sharing economy was a protein signifier and the digital developmentalism
has been embraced by China, as well as other developing countries.
And, to a certain extent, developed the societies as well, however, I would like to focus on two related things. One is only
the construction of the participant, quote unquote participant workers in a sharing economy and the other is the discourse of job creation.
I don't have the time to go over like every single policies and
Institutions that actually issued those policies, however, just to highlight one single agency, the state information Center, which is a public institution.
institution, a think tank formed in 1987 as part of the governmental
Informationization initiative to develop its economy. It actually has published an annual report on China's of platform economy, since 2016.
which plays an instrumental role in legitimizing the emerging of the economic forum as it terms as the sharing economy.
So the initial, SIC report refer to the platform economy as that everyone participates, and everyone shares
and that, I quote, it creates more opportunities for people from lesser developed regions or with a lesser
income to participate in economic activities so everyone can share the fruits of the development. So i'm going to just give you a highlight one.
specific wording here, so in his initial report it is stated that in 2016 over 600 million Chinese have participated in the sharing economy.
And participant service providers were about 60 million or subsequent reports from 2018 to
2020 all called workers, regardless of their employment status or contractual arrangement, all workers on the platforms, they call them.
Participants service providers, together with other participants that are usually referred to.
You know customers or users, so the subsequent the reports also suggested that the significance of the Platform economy.
In becoming the engine of job creation or a career the stabilizer or, and the
reservoir for employment because it has a chapter recently laid off factory workers, veterans, or people from the poverty
stricken regions, the SIC sharing economy reports did not specify the economic status of the quote unquote participant service providers.
let alone the working conditions, instead they featured market leading companies as the champion of the job creators and contributors to the social growth and development.
From here a problematic circulation of information or data and enhancement of discourse services, for example.
The largest online ride-hailing platform called Didi Chuxing in China claimed to have created 17 million flexible jobs in 2016 and the numbers seem to grow to 21 million in 2017.
The SIC sharing economy report actually cited Didi's job creation figures, word for word in its report published in 2017 and 2018.
The 2019 report also highlighted the company's contribution to reducing poverty and offering opportunities to otherwise disadvantages workers.
Similar circulate of information and discourse is also salient for the for the food delivery platforms, as I see again the sharing economy.
Report cited data from Meituan, which is a leading food-delivery platform in China.
and claim that by the end of 2017 about one third of its active carriers will workers in the coal or stealing.
steel industry and about 9.2% are from rural counties. The proportionate figure of job creation 2.7 million carrier jobs in 2018 and.
Again 3.9 million in 2019 were both sided in the sharing economy reports, the platform companies being the sole data source quoted in the governmental.
Documents enjoy a, are presented the power of information asymmetry in cherry picking the data to protect their brand.
So but more at stake than the asymmetrical information power. The normalization of
Participation as benefits helps create a mirage what I call it a mirage of participant
participation which obscures the business practices implemented by the platform companies. First,
As Kristy Kelly has pointed out that usually the discourse of participation has this aspiring logic, this aspiring logic actually
neutralizes the structural inequality between workers and the platform companies and helps to play down the roles, the government should have performed to to solve the structural problems.
It is not incidental that migrant workers or workers from you know rural areas and the poor counties.
Concentrate on food delivery platforms. Most workers are attracted to a job by acquaintances in their own social networks or by
advertisements, it is very common to see as I post a picture here of to see the recruiting at ads here at the back of the riders box.
About, which is another food delivery platform is reported to place ads in the rural areas with words like.
Like you know, come quick and being a delivery driver so that you can have you know climb, you can go to
another stage in your life or becoming a food delivery driver, no more worried about getting your wife or house.
And, here is another one, the contrast between the decaying rural areas and the promises conveyed in the advertisement point to a dire reality.
That not many desirable or alternative job opportunities are available for those workers, you know living in rural.
areas in the first place because of a slow down economy and that the national strategy to restructure the economy per se.
In addition, apart from using algorithms because recently
There are a growing body of studies on how platforms are using algorithms to manage and control workers, but in addition to using algorithms
the platform companies have deployed a wide range of management tactics to control the operational costs which actually Labor costs.
Are a major part of that. Take the delivery platform company Meituan as an example.
Initially, as you can see, when it first started to do the business, the company actually directly hired.
Food delivery workers, which is not independent contractors and offered them relatively stable monthly income and the corresponding Labor production.
In the course of the food-delivery platform development, the company expanded to have.
Independent contractors working on the platform, however, they have another term in China, which is called a crowdsourced riders.
And then the layers of the mediation, or, if you will, the intermediation of Labor contractual relationships become even more complicated, and its in the surging presence of the intermediary.
Temporary staffing agencies to help recruit and manage the outsourced and the restaurant in house or riders, apart from.
The platform hired riders and the independent contractors and riders are increasingly organizing in teams, or you know location based
restrictions on the neighborhoods accompanying this expansion of temp staffing agencies is the casualization and the decrease.
Casualization of work and the decrease of the platform hiring employment and the rise of the right independent contractors and other subcontracted riders.
As of, actually as of December 2020 the first initial group of riders, which is directly hired by the platforms almost disappeared in both
market leaders in China. The dynamic management structure, and you can see, this like evolution is what actually sets the platform company.
For work, apart from a previous other you know employers.
As Moore and Joyce summarize, a management quote portfolio, according to the contextual requirements end quote.
is at the company, at the platform companies disposal to flexibly assemble disassemble and reassemble the heterogeneous labor forces on the mediated
on the platform mediated labour market. Just a few words on conclusion, so a blind celebration of job creation, these two.
One minute, yes, one minute, thank you, a blind celebration of job creation leads to a priority of job quantity over job quality, which is actually
Even more relevant and not just in the Chinese context, but actually for the entire world in post covid-19
context. Continuing to buy into the mirage of participation in the platform economy distracts attention from other social
issues facing platform workers, such as health and safety or social protection and okay i'm going to skip the second one, however.
I would like to just say a few words about the policy.
implications. The crucial role played by the intermediaries agencies in China's platform economy means that
The discussion on how to classify workers needs to go beyond the dichotomy thinking between employee, independent contractors or employees, dependent contractors. The regulatory bodies for digital
economy, particularly for work needs to consider accommodating the existence of third party labour agencies, for instance.
In might be worthwhile to just consider to include a multilateral contractual relationships which stimulates the responsibilities for third party intermediary companies and the platforms.
And thank you for listening.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah Thank you.
Yes.
That was good.
So just moving on now just Guy T. Hoskins, you're next
GUY T. HOSKINS: Okay, thank you very much, Stephen. Thank you very much to the conference organizers for all of their work in putting this together.
Let me just wrestle with my screen share here.
This in fact is my first live video presentation in this brave new world of pandemic conferences, I should probably offer a preemptive apology for my children bursting and because that does seem.
Like quite a plausible scenario. The work i'm going to present today is a bit of a deviation from the advertised billing.
I'm going to be presenting work on digital rights, it's a strand of analysis for my soon to be defended doctoral research on Brazil's Marco Civil
one of the world's first legislated charters of digital rights and the inequities and exploitations of informational capitalism have become.
Full screen this.
Have become highly visible in recent years, a so called techlash has emerged in response to myriad conjoined factors.
And the question of platforms accepting responsibility for the harm caused by the content they circulate is chief among them.
The immense size market power of the major technology companies is another.
legislators and regulators have certainly taken notes with proposals to address platform power being debated in jurisdictions throughout the world.
These appear to represent an ambitious slate of reforms, they include enacting greater content liability, such as reforming section 230 in the US.
bolstering user privacy by mandating opt in for tracking as included in the EU's GDPR, addressing market power by using anti trust rules to enforce a partial breakup of platforms.
I argue, however, that such proposals remain deeply inadequate while they fail to address the commodification of data relations pervasive surveillance and commercialization of online space.
And while they fail to imagine a civic valued public oriented alternative to proprietary platforms, then the techlash will count for little.
In excellence, the responses to the harms caused by informational capitalism from policymakers, the mainstream media.
As well as repentant figures from within the tech sector have converged on the idea that we can, in the words of Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, step aside and let them more enlightened forces of capitalism fix the problem.
Meanwhile, voices that call for decommodified data relations, rethinking advertising as the underpinning of the Internet, recasting social networking and search as public utilities, remain muses at the margins.
Although such ideas may seem radical to many impractical, or even inconceivable it's essential to ask why these ideas exist beyond the bounds of common sense. In order to answer that question.
We need to track the trajectory of informational
capitalism and the measures that have been proposed to check its expansion across a long Arc. A good part of that explanation comes from a critical analysis of the digital rights movement.
digital rights may have been very recently superseded by reforms grounded in anti trust and content liability concerns but they remain a core part of the toolkit when it comes to platform regulation.
As evidenced in Canada's Digital Charter and indeed over the last 20 years constitute the dominant response to the exercise of repressive power within informational capitalism.
The fact that digital rights elude ready definition is one of the few things on which scholars of the topic agree.
The panoply of applicable names, it reveals the uncertainty you've got user rights, Internet rights, Internet related human rights, rights of the digital era.
Partly the lack of clarity derives from their fuzzy intellectual lineage? Is there a direct line to be drawn
to the human rights tradition, or does the moral, political and technological scope of digital rights represent a radical disjuncture.
Did digital rights build upon the communication rights movement of the 1970s, or is that history largely forgotten.
there's also a huge variety in the type of initiatives that comprise digital rights you've got manifestos from advocacy organizations.
intergovernmental statements you've got national legislation.
And you've got a small cluster of groups that's emerged within civil society whose remit is the advancement of digital rights, you've got the access now group internationally.
The Pakistani digital rights foundation here in Canada, you've got the digital rights Center and within this complex network of organizations and initiatives there's more diversity than coherence.
Research does show, though, there appears to be a dominant paradigm in terms of the nature of the digital rights that are promoted.
i'm going to talk about this a bit more later, but for now it suffices.
to note that a dominant framework for digital rights has emerged that combines a reimagining of traditional civil rights for the Internet in the form of privacy and freedom of expression.
With digital native rights in the form of access openness net neutrality and innovation, more critically, we can also see that it's a framework characterized by the trope of freedom.
It's populated by individualized liberties and technical and market friendly fixes.
By undertaking a genealogy of digital rights from their forgotten pre history either side of the WSIS summits, to the present day.
I show how dominant paradigm emerged that ultimately cohered with the central logics of informational capitalism, those of commodification and control.
The political, economic dimensions of this history of course deserve attention but it's the discursive dimension that is less obvious and is the principal focus of my talk today.
As many scholars, including Thomas Streeter and Becky Lentz have shown, discourse is constitutive of media policy.
How concepts like network neutrality is discursively constructed and the way it's defined and the meanings
assigned to it shaped the possible regulatory and policy decisions made about it.
Analyzing the discourses of network neutrality help to explain how it could become the first amendment of the internet
a top tier digital right presented by many as the sine qua non for just and equitable networked information environment.
Now I borrow a key construct from the work of Eran Fisher, this is the concept of the digital discourse.
In his work, he shows how informational capitalism legitimates itself discursively using the technological form that underpins it.
There's many other scholars like Moscow and Nye have shown, technology enjoys a privileged place in society. It's ubiquitous even sublime.
The architects of capitalism have harnessed this perception for their own ends in order to make capitalism feel right in the words of
Tom Streeter. It provides a material basis for market metaphors. In essence technologies killer app, is the legitimation of capitalism.
So Fisher shows how fordism shifted into a new mode of production that was informational and networked.
Unlike fordism, it was decentralized it was flexible and it demolish the social compact.
So this new capitalism incorporated the material form of digital networks to produce a new legitimation discourse.
In his words it translates many of the neoliberal tropes into a digitalistic language.
It articulates with both cyber libertarian and technocratic discourses.
It champions deregulation, globalization, and precarious employments and it legitimates these new arrangements by showing how networks ICTs
produced autonomous, creative, and expressive individuals. My contention is that digital discourse
Ultimately provides the foundation we need for understanding the congruence between the rise of informational capitalism and construction of digital rights.
I can't elaborate much on this point, but I believe that if we look back into the World Summit on the Information Society WSIS
In 2003, we can see a major turning point for how the dominant understanding of communication rights changed.
It shifted away from one that focused on defending a collective good through systemic change
One that was articulated in a vibrant way during the NWICO debates, towards one framed around mitigating harm to the individual within the boundaries of
A commercial system. As many scholars have demonstrated, WSIS coincided with the high watermark of information society rhetoric.
As well as with neo liberalism firmly entrenched. That meant that technocratic market friendly
individualists solutions would become the official means to realize the information society on a global scale.
There will be little accommodation of the kinds of radical collectivist and redistributed demands
that characterize the NWICO process of 20 years earlier, those lessons have been well learned.
Proponents of more substantive communication rights were certainly present, such as the Chris campaign but their demands were marginalized.
It's significant that the main outcome of the formal WSIS process was
a multi stakeholder forum for Internet governance. This represented the archetype of a technocratic, neutral, and system friendly resolution.
So that a pivotal discursive fork occurred after WSIS. Communication rights, which is substantive and marginalized in one direction.
and digital rights compromise the dominant in the other and with the change in prefix, a fundamental shift in their characteristics.
I did have some various slides, including a nice table to kind of show you the difference in those characteristics, but some reason
I'm unable to change any any slide so we'll just move move swiftly on and so.
Another sort of mini a little vignettes which can also show the shift in the emergence of.
The the dominance of digital rights is in the emergence of network neutrality as a core digital right out of the open access debates in the US.
This proceed the WSIS summit but it tracks, the same fundamental dynamics as potential challenges to informational capitalism were deflected away from the political economy of the Internet.
and focused instead on de politicized individual rights. The open access to debates took place in the 90s.
In the US, pitting media reform advocates against the incumbent broadband oligopoly. The defenders of open access were concerned with the increasingly hyper commercial character of the Internet.
And they promoted the idea of a structural separation framework. This wasn't a single issue consumer campaign, but the debate around the political economy of the Internet.
The way that these debates were eclipsed by concerns over net neutrality gives a potent example of the way that a genuinely oppositional civic discourse
Was eclipsed by legitimation discourse of informational capitalism.
Russ Newman offers a compelling account of how this happened. Wu's milestone essy in 2003 coining the term net neutrality
lauded a Darwinian competition amongst every conceivable use of the Internet so only the best survive. This evolutionary
model of innovation was thus a laissez faire vision for the Internet that discounted the importance of public or civic resources online.
In discourse terms neutrality, is like freedom, another grand signifier.
It's ambiguity accelerated the struggle to imbue it with meaning and it's contested vigorously by different sets of actors.
The flux largely settled on the preferred value set of informational capitalism ideas like competition, free speech, innovation.
Where citizens became consumers and consumer interests eclipsed the public interest. Post WSIS, net neutrality became a tenant of the growing wave
of digital rights charters. Let's have a look at some of those now, so a swathe of research, we've got research at the Berkman Center of Internet society.
We've got, it was in 2015
Various others that converge on the idea it's kind of seven broad groupings that can be observed in digital rights charters.
Fundamental Freedoms, limits on state power, Internet governance, privacy rights, access, openness, and the stability of networks.
And there's a clear emphasis on individual rights and freedoms, especially expression and privacy.
And although the state is assigned duties as guarantor of a limited array of rights, its more often frames a threat, as both sensor and spy.
The coherence between the tenants of the digital discourse expression freedom participation, etc, and the defining features of digital rights paradigm are striking.
Fundamentally informational capitalism's core logics of commodification and control unchallenged when the subject of rights
claims are atomized individuals and the liberties they safeguard serve as fuel for a system of accumulation and exploitation.
Net neutrality is a foundational principle for protecting access to information, innovation and expressive rights, but it does almost nothing to mitigate the commodification
and concentration of the Internet. Safe harbors as a proxy for freedom of expression are a fine legal principle in theory but in practice they've enabled platforms to better profit
From the flow of toxic content online, and finally individual digital data protections in the context of pervasive surveillance represent little more than a bandaid on an axe wound.
What is emitted from the digital rights paradigm is just as important, conspicuously absent are any connection to broader social justice
concerns, a focus on the internets hyper commercial character or on public provision of content or services.
The occluded possibilities for digital rights as a collectivist
and require systemic change. Information justice is one discourse that's proposed by Karppinen and Puukko to describe this approach.
And these have been articulated in numerous concrete proposals, including a data tax, government provision of online public
journalism or public provision of, beg your pardon, platform corporatism, municipal broadband networks.
distributed digital Commons and outside of the academic realm NGOs as such as the Internet Social Forum advocate for substantive measures to address the exercise.
of repressive power on and through the Internet. In the political sphere, you've got the pirates, pirate and Green parties around the world, we've integrated values of information justice into their platforms.
Some may claim that measures within the information justice approach fall outside of the purview of the rights based framework, I would argue that if
technolegal policy measures like net neutrality and data finality
are common place, then why should it be inconceivable to include structural reforms, establishing public broadband provision or data commons.
It's worth returning to the communication rights approach for a vital corrective to any misapprehension
about the proper purview of digital rights. Communication rights are a programmatic attempt to establish a communication environment that promotes social equality and a substantive democracy.
It employs a wide angle lens to encompass systemic reform alongside individual rights and effective
policy interventions in the form of digital rights must account for the discourses that legitimate informational capitalism.
social relations institutions and discourses after all exist in a dialectical relationship with one another, discourse is constitutive of media policy.
Meaningful reform will not occur through claims for freedom or innovation. Freedom is perilous conceptual terrain, in which to stake any claim for digital rights.
Only to the way that freedom as a signifier has been usurped by the forces of capital. Much surer footing can be found a top justice equity and democracy.
These are the signifiers that are grounded in a social critique of capitalism, they can be used to justify substantive reforms that could secure
civil rights and they lack the long history of discursive colonization evident in the tenets of the digital discourse.
And that's me wrapping up.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah thank you, that was good.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Okay, and then.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah, so just our final presenter, Mariane
Bourcheix-Laporte
Thank you, so i'm going to take us in a completely different realm.
But I was thinking, while Derek was presenting that my presentation may offer some.
words of caution to the model that he was proposing, alright so good morning, thank you, and so my presentation i'll just.
Alright, so my presentation considers questions related to the online distribution of Canadian film and video or independent Canadian film and video I should mention.
And I do so from a artist run or artist driven perspective, so I will be focusing on VUCAVU.com
which I consider to be a particularly interesting case study within a larger research framework that considers the adoption of digital models in the market failure artistic sector.
I want to propose that lessons learned from this case study are relevant to consider in relation to the
ongoing push for the adoption of digital models in Canadian cultural policy and arts funding programs.
So, since I submitted my initial proposal for this presentation several important changes have taken place at the level
of operations and governance of VUCAVU, some of which, of course, have been accelerated by the pandemic.
The platform has, notably shifted its model from being primarily focused on transactional video on demand distribution to actively
developing partnerships with arts presenters so as to serve as an online presentation platform, in addition to a distribution platform.
Also, since the fall of 2020 I have been working with the independent media arts alliance on a Community driven research project looking at establishing online presentation standards for media arts.
Including a fee schedule for online presentation and best practice guidelines in the areas of accessibility, technology and
intellectual property. So the research that i'm doing there has been definitely influencing the way in which i'm rethinking and revisiting the VUCAVU case study.
So, after a soft launch in 2016, VUCAVU was officially launched in 2017 as a pay per view streaming platform for independent Canadian film and video.
Independent here, means that the artist or producer had complete artistic control and that their work was created primarily for purposes of artistic expression.
VUCAVU was created through initial investments from the Canada council for the arts totaling $1.5 million, which were dispersed over two large grants in 2012 and 2013.
To the coalition of independent media art distributors or CCIMAD. This coalition brought together eight independent media art distributors from across Canada.
That is to say, most of the distributors of independent film and video that at the time, received operating support from the Canada Council.
These are nonprofit organizations that emerged from the late 1960s onward out of the artists run Center
and alternatives film distribution movements, as well as existing at the time videotape exchange networks.
There are currently over 1400 titles available for streaming on VUCAVU for rental fee varying for for the most part,
between $1 and $7. The rental fee is set by the artist in consultation with the distributor that carries the work.
And then VUCAVU, the distributor and the artist splits varying percentages of the rental fee.
The platform includes works that range from seconds to feature length and that were produced by a range
of artists from emerging to established, including some well known comedian film and video artists.
VUCAVU includes works that were produced from the 1970s onwards in digital or analog formats,
including 16 millimeter and super eight film, three quarter inch or half inch tape, betacam, DSLR, etc.
Since its inception, VUCAVU has also presented over 50 curated programs produced in collaboration with independent curators and media arts presenters.
These programs are available to you for free for a limited time frame and they have been treated similarly to exhibitions or to
screenings in the sense that the fees paid to the future artists are similar to offline exhibition models.
So these programs were initially conceived up as a way to promote VUCAVU's catalog however through VUCAVU expanded.
A new initiative, the platform has been shifting its operating model so as to increasingly seek to partner with media arts
presenters but also with presenters from other arts disciplines like dance, theater etc, so as to present works online.
Beyond serving as a distribution or a presentation platform, I would like to propose that VUCAVU should first and foremost, be seen
as a research tool and as a repository of information pertaining to the history of independent media arts in Canada.
The works are organized in 85 searchable categories, some of these are conventional categories
referring to genre but other categories testify to the particularities of the content that is on VUCAVU.
So, for example, the installation and performance categories relate to videos relationship to experimental visual art practices.
Social and political categories and identity based categories also testified to the rich history of independent Canadian film and video practice.
So categories such as works by women, activism and protest, decolonization, HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ2S+, racism, etc.
These are all connected to the history and mandate of CCIMAD member distributors, which have positioned themselves in the margin of commercial distribution.
The platform also provides significant metadata about the works such as original shooting format, exhibition formats.
And a repertoire of the festivals, in which the works have been shown. So these are
useful research tools for curators and academics, but also for artists who are looking for venues to screen their work.
The platform also constitutes a database of artists and curative profiles.
And finally, VUCAVU also allows programmers curators and broadcasters to create a professional account, which provides free access to the entire collection for research purposes, for a period of three months.
Artist run distribution in Canada emerged, out of a grassroots movement that sought to democratize production, distribution and exhibition of media arts.
distribution is by nature process that mediates between reproduction and rarity, and thus is where the politics of access and control
are negotiated. In the case of distribution of independent film and video, these politics are played out across a tiered economy.
Chris and Simon have proposed that quote, video art economies are thus triangulated among commodity based art market the legacy network of distributors programmers and the Academy
And the attention economy of the Internet, a pas de trois of for profit, nonprofit, and no profits, end quote. So in this framework, VUCAVU falls between the second and third tier.
That is to say no profit digital distribution going out of a legacy of alternative distribution networks.
So in this context it should come as no surprise that the platform has been struggling to maintain its operations due to low revenues generated from streaming sales.
The administrative fee that the platform takes as a percentage of every video rental is gravely insufficient to cover the platforms basic administration, let alone support ongoing tech and design updates.
If we look at the governance CCIMAD ensured the initial governance structure for VUCAVU with the board composed of representatives for each member organizations.
These individuals and other staff members of CCIMAD organizations contributed their Labor and expertise to the development
of VUCAVU between 2012 and 2017 and have continued to do so, since the platform has launched.
Tt's important to note that the Canada Councils initial funding was not intended to cover operational costs of the distributors engaging in this endeavor.
But rather only designed to support the design of the Platform and some money also for digitization of archival materials in some of these distributors collections.
So this partly explains why some other Canada Council funded distributors, like VTape in Toronto, and video CAF in Montreal
opted out of the coalition from the get go and were not part of the development of VUCAVU or of its original content library.
And recently VUCAVU
has been in the process of making changes to its governance structure in order to incorporate.
Representatives of the board to represent other arts disciplines, given their recent focus on expanding their presentation
activities, and so some of VUCAVU's founding organizations which were part of CCIMAD are moving away from the platform.
It's important to note that several CCIMAD members are also currently distributing works through other VOD platforms, such as TV5 unis, Gem, and Vimeo.
Also, since the launch of VUCAVU, several third party VOD platforms have made it a lot easier for media arts distributors and presenters to make works
available online via streaming and we have seen several of these festivals and presenters turn to these platforms over the last year.
Other Canadian platforms specializing in independent VOD distribution, the Chest Tank launched in 2020.
A fin launched in 2021, have also become important players in the world in which VUCAVU operates.
So by of a brief conclusion, I want to highlight the rapid pace at which the landscape for digital distribution of independent film and video in Canada is evolving.
The issues that VUCAVU has faced since its inception, are important to consider and to learn from given the significant influx of public funds that have supported the platform's initial development.
This project is in many ways a precursor to many of the platforms and digital initiatives that have been stemming out of the Canada council for the arts digital strategies fund.
or covid-19 pandemic relief funding for the arts. The sustainability issues that VUCAVU has faced
and the changes that it has had to make to its operating model illustrate the fact that opportunities to go digital are not without their challenges.
This is important to consider as we move forward towards an arts landscape increasingly oriented towards digital models, thank you.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Thank you.
That was good.
So I guess that concludes our presenters, very thought provoking research.
Very interesting, I see some claps happening here so just wondering how much time, maybe we have for a couple questions.
Then, a couple minutes, but I don't know what people want to say but so maybe if there's any questions in chat we can get started with those.
So, though I'm not seeing any right now, but I do have a question, maybe just for David and Derek from before just when
Speaking of open source platforms and then how what David was speaking of kind of like old.
Solutions or yeah was it old solutions to new problems kind of thing and then Derek with the Open Source platforms i'm just thinking off the top my head, you know.
kind of responses to that like say 8Chan and like Parlor especially some of these platforms have pop up in response i'm just wondering
Maybe ideas of any even jumping off my own research ideas of like local community moderation or kind of like place
based engagement or moderation, do you see maybe any of those either models you've seen or aspects of that coming up or.
ways to deal with those.
Oh David do you wanna.
DAVID DUBINSKI: Sure, I would just start by saying.
There might be I don't have any specific expertise or knowledge of particular models, but I thought Derek's
suggestion and what you're suggesting the point is to incorporate both space in the policy making process and resources
to be exploring what kind of place these alternative models have in the future, because the
The problem is not just constraining restraining the toxicities of the current platforms, but exploring the earlier
optimism that the Internet was somehow going to be a deliberative emancipation and if I could just comment on the net neutrality observations that Guy made
In his presentation, I was working in international cultural policy at wise this time, and what I remember about that time and your analysis was
Very good, about the the problems of it but ironically from my memory net neutrality was seen as
an emancipatory way of liberating the communications environment from corporate interests that by
Creating the space that, like the cable companies and the broadcaster's used to have control and the worry was that the Internet was going to be
controlled, like the broadcasting system and the net neutrality was a way of preventing you know Internet service providers from
asserting their own corporate interests over autonomous individual
Experiments coming from the margins so.
And, ironically, the direction now we're going with bill C-10 seems to be going back to seeing the Internet as something that can be regulated
directly by public authorities.
Yeah yeah, thank you for that well and then just to jump on that quickly, we have another question here, but.
Just as Derek brought up because I actually have used Mastodon as you asked and brought up so i'm familiar with that and I was looking at
Decentralized networks and those issues, but I just feel like that content moderation question you know almost like this Tarleton Gillespie kind of issues around moderation and community and place so.
I found those came up pretty quickly, so you know that's where I don't know we can maybe talk later about that, but so just a question from Sara Bannerman
here just for Daniel Paré what types of employee posting slash critique should be most protected so maybe also.
If you want to speak.
That's a great question
And certainly the one level that's afforded a bit of protection is around Union related speech negotiation related speech that's often protection.
Where you run into other problems, though.
In terms of protection movements around organization right trying to organize employees there's also, I think, as well.
The case of Marcon is very interesting because on the one hand he's punished for critiquing the CBC but on hand
On the other hand, he was also commenting on an ongoing discussion, there's ongoing discussions about this within the CBC.
And not too long after you know the actions have been taken against him, it was instituting a new internal policy to deal with some of the concerns that he's
raising, so I think the issue in terms of protecting speech I guess would be sort of you know, allowing for
Criticism or questioning
of employers you know certain policies that are in the workplace, we have right now I mean effectively there's no
whistleblower protection for employees at the moment either sort of that's the kind of speech we want to have protected as well.
One of the things that's difficult sort of cases that we've been looking at is the speech runs the whole gambit so we have some whistleblower people who are punished and discipline for whistleblowing.
At the one end of the spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum, we have people who did it, you know either posted some really silly stuff for some really vile stuff right so.
I think it's perhaps thinking in terms of sort of structure and protection for the types of speeches that we might want in that regard.
Yeah thank you yes sure so.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Then another question
SARA BANNERMAN: Stephen if you don't mind I may i'll just interject for a minute to recognize that we are running over time and i'd like to stay on so that
We do have a little bit of chance for discussion for those who have time to stay online, but for those who have to leave certainly we understand that
And maybe we can stay another 10 minutes or so, for those who are able.
And I just wanted to mention that tomorrow's conference starts off with the Edward Greenspon keynote speech, so that
should be interesting and lots of more other interesting sessions tomorrow, so why don't we continue our discussion here for a few more minutes.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah thank you Sara there
So just seeing another question from Sara for Mariane just be interested to hear
more about the VUCAVU recommendation engine and how that might be governed, who designs and governs how that works.
Yeah thank you
It's a good question that i'm not sure, even the
platform managers right now would be able to answer.
In part of the response is because
Initially it was conceived a certain way, and the $1.5 million funding went for the beginning and the
continuing upgrades on the platform as things new demands coming along it was very, very difficult for them to do.
At the moment, my sense is that it is mostly based off of the same artists works or categories in which it may be attached to.
But that is certainly something that they want to develop if they can, and if I may just take a moment to say why I said it was maybe a case of caution, for what Derek was
Proposing on a very, very smaller scale, of course, but VUCAVU I see it as embodying this kind of
Utopian vision, where collective development of an alternative platform.
But ultimately we are always faced with the challenges of funding and public funds not being there to sustain the project later on.
And so that's why a lot of the distributors who initially started the project and spent so much of their time and resources developing it.
Are now just moving on to Vimeo, OTT and other things like that, and so that we are stuck with this platform that is not nimble.
You know, because of the way it was originally designed and the issues of constantly upgrading that design.
And even though it was supposed to be this kind of utopian thing bringing eight organizations who are who are essentially competitors to each other, together to develop that platform, thank you.
STEPHEN SURLIN: Yeah thank you for that.
So next question from Sarah here for Julie, I was so interested to hear your comments on the equitable distribution
of employment ads, so I think also of ads for educational institutions that might not be equitably distributed to.
Yeah well I think it's related to the idea, obviously, the targeted ads.
JULIE YUJIE CHEN: Is related to other issues for example, I think perhaps the first step is to break the
break the chain of information flow one way flow from the platform companies to, for instance, the government policies, I feel
It needs to be more public access for data on, for instance, the work conditions, you know the pay the payment and the income
so that it's not just the platform companies monopolizing the data on the work conditions, so I feel
In this way, at least the workers and the public will have a better idea of what is really going on, so it's kind of like another way to
build up the information literacy, for not just the workers, you know for everybody to tell the doublespeak by the platform companies.
Yeah it's interesting challenge it seems important thing to look at so and then see a comment here from Alicia.
And then, also a question for Guy do you see similarly practical solutions for moving
digital rights towards a more social justice collectivist model or at the very least practical ways to confront
STEPHEN SURLIN: prevailing capitalist market conceptions of individual consumer based digital rights.
Yeah so that's a great question I did try and flag, some of those in my presentation, but unfortunately I was hamstrung by the fact I couldn't couldn't move through my slides.
In the preamble to that question Alicia made reference to Derek's suggestion about
The prospect for open source platforms which I think is you know absolutely needs to be you know, an idea in the toolbox, I mean it did just sort of trigger in my mind, you know, the fact that
amongst you know the sort of early iterations of kind of digital civil rights and I use this term sort of fairly loosely
in this context but free software was a really a concept that was imbued with really sort of radical potential for
reimagining you know the digital communication effectively, and it was gradually sort of colonized
by the sort of the forces of capitalism open sources very much big businesses, IBM and Red Hat
have shown, so I think there's you know there's certain sort of red flags around you know
Open source, but I think it's absolutely needs to be sort of part of the solution i'm also
Reference also Ron Deibert in the conclusion to his research book. He talked about the fact that we need to kind of draw together all of these disparate initiatives
Because they're all actually part of the same struggle, whether whether it's you know the push against Smart Cities and and proposals for
Civic data trusts instead whether it's you know resistance to digital ID cards in India, whether it's pushes to unionize big tech in the US.
All of these disparate initiatives are in fact kind of fighting on a broad front in the same battle, and if we can draw them together somehow.
I think that's really important, and I think that reform of big tech as it currently stands, is you just going to be picking at a scab
really, we need to be much bolder in our thinking and we need to be building from the bottom up, you know public
Values, civic valued
platform initiatives, and I think that you know there are people and ideas out there that could very well carry that momentum forwards.
Yeah thank you, yes, and I think this next question kind of jumps off at that as well.
So for Julie just from Tony Porter here.
STEPHEN SURLIN: So picking up on the issues in Daniel's presentation have worker criticisms of platform employment experiences in China been articulated
through social media there, so I guess speaking in terms of Daniel's reference to workplace mediation ability to engage with.
They are very active on social media actually social media is one of the tools that they use to organize themselves
besides just airing or voicing out their dissatisfaction, workers also tend to again appear on the
social networks and using social media to like protest and they will also take the issues
Not not necessarily for labour disciplining or
dismissal or unfair dismissal, but the issues that the workers usually would take to the labour disputes, like the institute's that handle that
are related to, for instance pay cuts or pay cuts related to harsh management by the third party intermediary staffing agencies.
Another thing that I actually I didn't get a chance to talk to in the presentation is because of the involvement of the
The temp staffing agency which usually have an office like physical office operating in the city, which actually helps in a way to
to translate you know the disintermediation of the platforms into a more localized Labor struggle, so you know
The way the labor struggles that these Chinese workers are facing in this way is very different from like, for instance, the
The independent contractors like Uber drivers that you know they can't even find an office of uber in Toronto
you know it is not so they can actually found that the office of the temp staffing agencies and
In my study I have observed and I'm also made aware of the workers will actually take to that you know the staffing agencies office and
Having a very direct confrontation with the managers so it's not just happening on social media as like expression, they also have actions as well.
Yeah thank you yeah that's an interesting kind of summary what we're talking about where that localized action using social media
I don't know if they're even room for a decentralized kind of platform that workers are a part of etc so.
Yeah that sounds very interesting, so I think at this point though we'll be wrapping up the session.
Even though its such interesting discussion here, and I think pretty poignant and important work that we're discussing so
Thank everyone for being a part of this session and the great questions good discussion.