And so we come to the end of the year.

The last few weeks of the year are contradictory ones: there is so much to do, and not enough time to do it all while still focusing on the rest that everyone says we should be getting. People always promise there will be less to do at work, but often the timelines get tighter for things that need to be done before the next year begin. The weather can be beautiful, yes, but it also can be a hindrance to getting where you need to be and doing the things you need to do.

It is a time of contradiction, but also a time of reflection.

It’s at this time of the year we often try to make time to remember the year gone by: to remember what made us laugh, what made us cry, what joys and delights we found, and what obstacles we were able to overcome. It is the time to make lists; we are inundated by “best of” and “favorite” lists in the last month of the year, and this is but a natural way for us to organize the time that has gone by into small markers of what was impactful.

It is a time of reflection, but also of celebration.

The holidays are a moment in the year where we make a conscious effort to be with loved ones—friends, family, pets, community—and to reminisce on what makes them special in our lives. There is joy in knowing we are loved; there is a nostalgia in remembering the people who once were in our lives and who are no longer; there is a hope in knowing we’ll be celebrating with new friends and family in the years to come. We celebrate the people around us, and they celebrate us.

We’re coming to the end of the year, and I’m not sure how much more I’ll publish after this, so I wanted to say happy holidays and thanks to all of you that read these posts, to those of you who email me back, and to those of you that inspire me to share more. I might post some stuff over on the blog in the next few weeks, but otherwise, I’ll be back in the new year. See you then.

A poem

Dust of Snow
Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

(via Lucas)

Some links

By now you’ve all heard about “enshittification” and the process of companies (especially tech companies) becoming worse as they extract value from the user on behalf of the shareholder. It’s a concept I’ve thought a lot about: how do we build an internet (and a society) where we focus on what’s best for the user, where small is good and growth isn’t the first priority, and where we believe in the need for creating good for the people and places around us? Cory Doctorow, the person who coined the term “enshittification” and has been one of the key thinkers in this space, thinks a lot of this comes down to legislation and the decisions of governments that created the dystopic landscape we’re in now, and believes that good choices from decision-makers can get us out of it, too. I really enjoyed this podcast episode of the Vergecast where Doctorow talked a little bit about what we can all do and what our responsibilities are in this arena, as well as his notes from a keynote speech he gave in Toronto about how Canada got to this place and how we can reclaim our digital sovereignty. There’s still a lot of thinking (and action) left to do in this area, but I’m glad Doctorow is carving out some time and space to guide these discussions and posit a way forward.

There was a time, earlier in my life, when I was “bulking up” under the advisement of my trainer, and my diet was mostly chicken breasts and tuna. The protein boom (the most current one) hadn’t quite started yet, but the emphasis on protein was still there in the culture: by maximizing this macronutrient and minimizing the others, you could build muscle mass quickly and easily. The current protein boom is fascinating to me—everywhere I go I see protein milks, protein cereals, protein chips, protein everything—and I was curious on where it could have come from. This episode of Decoder Ring was just what I was looking for: not only a dissection into why everything is protein-focused right now, but also a dive into the protein booms of the past.

My incredible wife was interviewed by her hospital about how HIV care has transformed over the past four decades. It’s a short piece, but I’m proud of the work she does every day to help people living with the disease.

An interesting post by Maaret Pyhäjärvi about being “self-taught,” which got me thinking about community and how we stand on the shoulders of the people who have supported us through our journeys:

I hate 'self-taught'. You're not self-taught, you're community taught. Self-taught is erasing all the work that allowed you to learn from freely available materials and people.

It's a poor phrase for the idea that you are degreeless. And there's nothing wrong with skipping formal education.

Living between two Great Lakes—and in close proximity to a few more—has made me more conscious about their roles not only in the ecosystem of the region, but also in how the lakes act as a way for people to connect with each other and have been historical routes of movement between people and goods. There’s an entire history in the lakes, waiting to be unearthed; Tamara Thomsen is one of those people discovering that history by diving among the thousands of shipwrecks. This podcast episode of There’s More to That takes a look at why there are so many shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, and what is being done to use those shipwrecks to learn more about the past of the region. (In related news: a shipwreck was uncovered in Lake Erie near Kingsville during a recent bout of strong winds. Best guesses are that the ship was from the 19th century.)

My friend James Shelley asks an important question: if you need to use a chatbot to do your job, does that make YOU the robot? There’s more and more talk at my workplace about using AI and how it’s already improving the productivity of people I work with. What hasn’t been examined is the extent to which our basic functions in the workplace are being replaced by AI, and if they are, how we will operate without them, if we ever need to. What part of our agency is being sacrificed in an effort to increase productivity?

Unsurprisingly, AI is marketed as a helpful assistant. It is here to augment our capacity and supercharge our productivity. But in this spirit of consensual reliance are echoes of the dependence that an Uber driver might have on their app. The app, or the algorithm and API underneath it, directs and mediates the driver's obligations. Sure, the choice to install and open the app is discretionary, but eventually the option to close the app becomes less tenable as one's performance, commitments and economic livelihood are entwined with the API behind it. Perhaps, over time, the app no longer represents liberation as much as servitude. […]

Civilization is the story of human subordination to our own productivity. We are systemically subservient to oil, fertilizers and fibre optics. Progress is an ever accelerating hamster wheel of accumulative dependencies. This is why comparing generative AI to mechanical looms, electricity, calculators, and shipping containers makes for interesting thought experiments. But history is a timeworn lesson that gains in worker output efficiency and productivity do not necessarily come with any inherent, preordained guarantees of directly benefiting workers themselves.

More about AI: my friend Larry sent me this excellent article about how academia (and society) may be driving students to use AI because we don’t make their learning journeys feel included in the way we think learning ought to be done.

When a chatbot provides more belonging than a classroom, we haven’t just failed as educators – we’ve forgotten what education is for. […]

Students turn to AI because it offers what we withheld: curiosity without judgment, questions without shame, exploration without gatekeeping.

I’ve been making a conscious effort to spend less time on my phone these days (ironic since almost everything I share on these list of links are available online) but one thing I haven’t been very conscious of is what I am doing to replace that time spent off-screen. I love this call by Mandy Brown that reminds us “that that turning away from screens is turning towards something else” and that there is opportunity to discover new paths as you turn away from one of them.

I do not need to pay attention to the table, because nothing is happening with it that requires or even asks my attention. I can simply trust it. I can turn around and turn back, and even with my eyes on something else, I can reach for it and know it will be there, exactly where I left it.

Screens, of course, lack any such sameness or stability. Screens are inconstant, unsame, unstable. A screen demands my attention--not only via the regular chirping of notifications, as hungry and unrelenting as a baby bird--but through that fundamental inconstancy: I know something may have changed since I last looked at it, know I cannot trust it to remain the same, to be steady or faithful. I must be vigilant towards a screen, always on alert, suspicious.

And vigilance is exhausting.

Thinking is becoming a luxury good: “just like the negative health impacts of junk food overconsumption, the cognitive harms of digital media will be more pronounced at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.”

Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after the war destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities.

A few thoughts on neighbourliness and community:

There’s something I’ve been grappling with for a long time now, especially since I’ve withdrawn from the overt public advocacy I used to do and haven’t been formally volunteering for a while. (I often blame having a child for this, but the reality is that I haven’t felt invigorated to participate in the public commons as much as I used to for some time.) What I grapple with is the question: am I being a good neighbour? Am I making the community I live in a better place, even if it is through small actions of “good neighbouring” that bring a sense of goodwill to those around me? I definitely don’t do as much for the community as my parents did at this point in their lives—and still do—so I often feel deficient in my neighbourliness. (The other day I helped a neighbour move his car that was stuck in the snow—mostly unsuccessfully but I still tried—and it brought me joy to know I was helping.) I enjoyed this post about supporting our neighbours and the idea of “good neighbouring” by J Wortham recently, and I also was inspired by this list of five questions to spark your generosity by Courtney Martin I recently discovered. Worth exploring both of them if you feel you need to reconnect with your neighbourliness this holiday season.

Related to being a good neighbour: 50 reasons why everyone should want more walkable streets. We don’t live in a particularly walkable neighbourhood and are beholden to our car more than I’d like. There are a few changes I think the city could make—including putting in more sidewalks, reducing the speed limit, allowing for neighbourhood retail (see below for more on that)—that would make this community more walkable, and thus more vibrant. I’ve written to city council about these before, but it might be time to re-intensify my efforts.

Also related to neighbourliness, has anyone played with Roundabout yet? It looks like it’s a bit like Nextdoor but with a more socially-conscious mission. Creating good digital spaces to connect our physical spaces is a noble effort, and I’m excited there are people working in this area.

Related to walkability and roundabouts, the city of Keene has become an example of the safety and climate benefits of swapping traffic lights for roundabouts. Turns out that roundabouts aren’t just good for moving traffic, but they are good for the environment too, reducing the time spent idling at lights. After installing more traffic circles in Keene, soot and other small airborne particulates, which can be harmful to human health, had fallen by up to 40 percent. We have a roundabout at the foot of our cross street and while it can be sometimes frustrating when people don’t seem to know what they are doing while driving through it, overall it has been a welcome addition making it much faster to navigate through the intersection. Our city keeps talking about an aggressive climate plan; perhaps thinking about traffic circles needs to be part of that planning.

When we lived in Cabbagetown, we had a convenience store that doubled as a garden centre at the foot of our small street. Next to it, a sushi restaurant, and a few other places that made living in the neighbourhood convenient and cozy. These were community spaces: everyone walked to them, not drove, and you inevitably ran into people you knew when you frequented them. They didn’t cause congestion, but instead caused serendipity. Now, we live in a neighbourhood where basic amenities and small community gathering spaces are confined to large strip malls on major streets, surrounded by large parking lots because they are almost impossible to walk to safely. We are missing walkable points of interest, places where people can gather, embedded into the suburban landscape where we live. That’s why I’m so fascinated by the debate happening in Toronto city council around neighbourhood retail: at a time when we need more reasons to congregate, to find solace in the communities where we live, many politicians are advocating for retail to be pushed out to impersonal, less-accessible areas. Charles Broskoski talks a little about these kinds of “personal businesses” in his piece for are.na—in a world where business is impersonal and faceless, where are the places that make you feel included and welcome?—and John Lorinc dives into the Toronto debate about neighbourhood retail in Spacing magazine. Let’s make the places we live more vibrant and alive; I wish more decision-makers cared about this.