A Mastodon post about my mayoral campaign policies. No, I didn’t foresee a global pandemic as such (though I certainly was on Twitter perplexed at why the WHO had not declared COVID-19 a global emergency in January 2020), but I did feel there was insufficient resilience in our economy and wanted to advance ideas that would at least put this city right.
I saw the cafĂŠs all opening around town, the PM John Key’s support of tourism, and thinking: there’s not enough diversity among these types of businesses, and we’re well behind other cities on the percentage that IT plays. We need more high-wage jobs if we were to increase our rates’ base sustainably, not make Wellington unaffordable by taking a bigger and bigger chunk of incomes that had barely risen in line with the cost of living. All this I stated at the time, and they were trends that stared us right in the face.
Working from home was a way of alleviating stress on our traffic network, or at least help stagger the amount of traffic on the road at any given time. Tied in to that was publicizing real-time about public transport, which I think is starting to happen, to encourage their use.
The expansion of the wifi network meant that Newtown would be next, heading out to Berhampore, the whole idea being to bridge the digital divide for our less well off communities. I had already been into a meeting with Citylink and had a model through which it could be funded. I lived in Newtown as a boy, and I know how little we had in terms of the family budget. And, as we saw in lockdown, internet access was very far from being equal among our communities.
I’m not subscribing to ‘That’s easy to say in hindsight,’ because all these ideas were a matter of record, as well as the reasons behind it. I am subscribing to a degree of cherry-picking but when you consider these were my “flagship” ideas, I’m not even being that picky.
To think we could have set all this in motion starting in 2010 and been ready for 2020. I don’t really sell nostalgia if I’m running for office because that would be disingenuous. You’re being asked to vote on the future, and so many politicians are trying to resell you the past. I’m grateful to those voters who got this and put me in third place twice. We have a good mayor now who’s young enough to get it.
I suppose it shouldnât surprise me that I have a US Library of Congress entry, as a published author, though if I am reading it correctly, it relates to my 2010 mayoral campaign.
Following the links there, I arrived at a Virtual International Authority File but the data there seem to relate to my Wikipedia entries. Disappointing.
Keep going, and thereâs an entry at OCLC, a non-profit library collective, also linking to Wikipedia.
Thereâs some 2010 mayoral campaign stuff, five references to academic papers I wrote (nice to see they are âheld by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwideâ), an early book I wrote, Typography & Branding (though I donât recall having written it in 2002 as they claim), and a book I didnât author but am credited in the colophon as the body typeface familyâs designer, Mainland Island from Wai-te-ata Press.
Iâm flattered that Typography & Branding is held at two Australian locations, the University of Newcastle Auchmuty Library and the Curtin University Library. I hope their students are getting a lot out of this early book of mine.
I admit I like this tag cloud:
Commiserations to my namesake, Jack Yan, on not winning the Toronto mayoral election. I was getting a lot of news hits from Toronto and Ontario, far more than our media here managed back in the day. I also thought he did rather well in the televised debates. We only had one episode of Back Benches in 2010 that wasnât really a debate. But there was a fun quiz, which I wonâsome of us know more about this city than others.
In a very crowded field, Jack managed seventh out of 31, with incumbent John Tory holding on to his gig with 62 per cent of the vote.
I hope he has another crack at it if he feels he has something to offer. I found him a really great guy to deal with.
Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October.
It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, replacing the below.
It just never occurred to me any earlier how ideal the Te Papa video was, and how much it speaks to my whakapapa and my identity. But the penny has dropped now.
I know I still need to update the 2018 intro. It needs to be more profound than what appears in these blog posts.
It should also reduce confusion for visitors trying to find out more about my Toronto mayoral candidate namesake, who I note still does not have a declared website or email address on the that city’s official list.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonât name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iâll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
⢠have forward-thinking policies;
⢠appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
⢠frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canât advise how to win since I didnât. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
⢠Use rose-coloured glasses;
⢠appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
⢠suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnât do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.
I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.
Thereâs a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know itâs not an exclusively American phenomenon. Tom Nichols, the bookâs author, writes, as quoted in The New York Times, âAmericans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told theyâre wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that arenât true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.â
I venture to say that the “death of expertise” is an Anglophone phenomenon. Head into Wikipedia, for instance, and youâll find proof that the masses are not a good way to ensure accuracy, at least not in the English version. Head into the German or Japanese editions and you find fewer errors, and begin to trust the pages more.
Given that many of âthe peopleâ cannot discern what is âfake newsâ and what is not, or who is a bot and who is not, then itâs absolutely foolhardy to propose that they also be the ones who determine the trustworthiness of a news source, as Facebook is wont to do.
I canât comment as much on countries I have spent less time in, but certainly in the Anglosphere, Iâve seen people advance, with confidence and self-authority, completely wrong positions, ones not backed up by real knowledge. You only need to visit some software support forums to see online examples of this phenomenon.
When I visit Sweden, for instance, thereâs a real care from individuals not to advance wrongful positions, although I admit I am limited by my own circles and the brief time I have spent there.
Itâs not so much that we donât value expertise, itâs that the bar for what constitutes an expert is set exceptionally low. Weâre often too trusting of sources or authorities who donât deserve our reverence. And I wonder if it comes with our language.
Iâll go so far as to say that the standing of certain individuals I had in my own mind was shattered when we were all going for the mayoralty in my two campaigns in 2010 and 2013. There certainly was, among some of my opponents, no correlation between knowledge and the position they already held in society. It didnât mean I disliked them. It just meant I wondered how they got as far as they did without getting found out.
Fortunately, the victor, whether you agreed with her policies or not, possessed real intelligence. The fact she may have political views at odds with yours is nothing to do with intelligence, but her own observations and beliefs. I can respect that (which is why I follow people on social media whose political views I disagree with).
In turn Iâm sure many of them disliked what I stood for, even if they liked me personally. Certainly it is tempting to conclude that some quarters in the media, appealing to the same anti-intellectualism that some of my rivals represented, didnât like a candidate asserting that we should increase our intellectual capital and pursue a knowledge economy. No hard feelings, mind. As an exercise, it served to confirm that, in my opinion, certain powers donât have peopleâs best interests at heart, and there is a distinct lack of professionalism (and, for that matter, diversity) in some industries. In other words, a mismatch between what one says one does, and what one actually does. Language as doublespeak.
So is it speaking English that makes us more careless? Maybe it is: as a lingua franca in some areas, merely speaking it might put a person up a few notches in othersâ estimation. Sandeep Deva Misra, in his blog post in 2013, believes thatâs the case, and that we shouldnât prejudge Anglophones so favourably if the quality of their thought isnât up to snuff.
Maybe thatâs what we need to do more of: look at the quality of thought, not the expression or make a judgement based on which language itâs come in. As English speakers, we enjoy a privilege. We can demand that others meet us on our terms and think poorly when someone speaks with an accent or confuses your and youâre. It gives us an immediate advantage because we have a command of the lingua franca of business and science. It gives us the impunity to write fictions in Wikipedia or make an argument sound appealing through sound bites, hoping to have made a quick getaway before weâre found out. Political debate has descended into style over substance for many, although this is nothing new. I was saying, although not blogging, things like this 20 years ago, and my students from 1999â2000 might remember my thoughts on Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign as being high on rhetoric and light on substance. Our willingness to accept things on face value without deeper analysis, lands us into trouble. We’re fooled by delivery and the authority that is attached with the English language.
Youâll next see this in action in a high-profile way when Facebook comes forth with more comment about Cambridge Analytica. I can almost promise you now that it wonât hold water.
As he has done so many other times since we encountered each other in 2001, Simon Anholt has articulated my thoughts on governance and politics much better than I can through his ventures. I think this puts a very good context on why I ran my mayoral campaigns the way I did, and for that matter, a good deal of my own businesses. The ideas here are in line with what we believe at Medinge Group, tooâmore on that in an upcoming post. We live in a connected, globalized planetâand the sooner our leaders wake up to this fact, and the positive potential it brings, the better.
How can we better organize ourselves as seven thousand million people? My belief has been: if we can start at a city level, we can bring about change.
Head to Simon’s website at good.country to find out more.
The latest Victoria University study, expressing that there is a shortage of creative people, sounds very familiar. Dr Richard Norman highlights in a Fairfax Press editorial that knowledge economy companies are âstruggling to capitalise on opportunities for growth because of limited local talent âŚ
âMany of these companies are well-seasoned and high-earningâa third of those interviewed had total sales of over $50 million for the most recent financial year and about half had been here for more than two decades.â
The study also revealed, ‘Views varied widely about the effectiveness of current promotion of Wellington. The strongest recurring idea for promotion of Wellingtonâs attributes was to focus on its potential as a digital city.’
In other words, had people been listening to this sectorâas I had for many yearsâthis comes as no surprise.
In both my mayoral campaigns, I expressed that Wellington needed to be open for business for tech and the knowledge economy, and last year I made it very clear that I would find ways to bridge the training at the tertiary level with these very companies seeking talented graduates. Not only would there be a city-supported internship programme modelled on that of Dunedin, but specifically geared to this sector, but there would be another that would connect graduates directly to these firms, which told me that they knew these young people were there, but their sits vac werenât known to them.
Wellington is a haven for companies operating in the knowledge economy, whether itâs down to our creativity thanks to the highest-profile firms being based here (Xero, Trade Me) or our workâlife balance, and it has been heading that way for all of my career, since I began developing digital fonts in the 1980s and digital publications as the 1990s unfolded.
Frictionless exports form part of a productive, profitable future for our city and yet they have often been ignored by some of the same-again politicians and business âleadersâ who have a Life on Mars mindset to our economy.
To this end I approached the Chancellor at Victoria University last week, and formally in writing earlier this week, to see if I could still create something that would help todayâs students find the jobs that they want.
Already I had signed up to the Alumni as Mentors programme (on to my second âmenteeâ now), and was part of the pilot programme for Vic internships late last year, to help enhance the employment prospects of final-year students. But that’s just in one company. I can do more.
After a discussion with a senior Victoria University professor last year, I was very keen, had I been elected as mayor, to get Wellington to a level of critical mass when it came to R&D and technology. I have similarly been talking to representatives at other tertiary institutions such as Weltec, and of course, I still serve on one advisory board at Whitireia.
My hands are more tied as a private citizen, and things will take longer, but they are still worth doing.
As Dr Normanâs study was developed in partnership with the Greater Wellington Regional Council, with support from Grow Wellington and the Wellington City Council, there will be others who are thinking along the same lines. Iâm sure that all these efforts will intersect, but we have to act.
I only wish such a study was released a year earlier, as I don’t recall anything of the sort in The Dominion Post during the election cycle.
I was consistent about the Basin Reserve flyover in my campaign. Yes, I agreed we needed improvements to the area. But no, spending millions on itâit did not matter whether it was from taxes or rates at the end of the day, because that still meant you and me, as citizensâseemed foolish if there were better-value options out there. What I said in 2013 was: itâs not one flyover, itâs actually two, if you studied the wording in the plans. And by the time you add up the totals, it was looking like $500 millionâand for what benefit? The more roads you create, the more congestion there would be.
What if we could get the traffic improved there without the blight of a flyoverâthe sort of thing some cities were removing anyway, making them as liveable as Wellingtonâand save the country hundreds of millions?
In San Francisco, when the highway around Embarcadero Drive (now just ‘The Embarcadero’) was removed (you can see it outside the dodgy hotel room in Bullitt), that area became far more lively and pleasant, where there are now parks, where property values rose, and where there are new transit routes. The 1989 Loma Preita âquake hurried the demolition along, but there’s no denying that it’s been a massive improvement for the City. Younger readers won’t believe how unpleasant that area used to be.
Admittedly, I get ideas from San Francisco, Stockholm, and other centres, but why not? If they are good ones, then we need to believe we deserve the best. And we can generate still more from Wellington and show them off. Making one city great helps not just our own citizens, but potentially introduces new best practices for many other cities.
The Richard Reid proposal for the Basin was my favoured one given the traffic benefits could be delivered at considerably less cost and would not be a blight on our city, yet it was getting frustrated at every turnâthe media (other than Scoop) had precious little coverage of it.
A Board of Inquiry was set up and I am glad to receive this word from Richard yesterday.
âOur practice is very pleased with the Board of Inquiryâs decision to decline NZTAâs Basin Bridge Project. We are equally pleased that the Board has accepted the evidence we submitted against NZTAâs project on behalf of the Mt Victoria Residents Association and ourselves. Of particular note is the Boardâs recognition of our alternative at-grade enhancement of the roundabout (BRREO) which we prepared as part of an integrated and holistic solution for the city.
âThe Board notes: âWe are satisfied the BRREO Option, particularly having regard to the adverse effects we have identified with regard to the Project, is not so suppositional that it is not worthy of consideration as an option to be evaluatedâ [para 1483]. The Board also stated that âWe found that it [BRREO] may nonetheless deliver measurable transport benefits at considerably less cost and considerably less adverse effects on the environment. We bear in mind that BRREO is still at a provisional or indicative stage and could be subject to further adjustment by further analysis.â
âGiven the Boardâs comprehensive dismissal of NZTAâs application, it makes sense that we are given the opportunity to continue to develop BRREO. We look forward to working with NZTA, the Regional and City Councils.â
Regardless of which option you favoured, I think you will agree with me that all proposals deserved a fair hearing. The Reid one did not prior to 2014, and that was mightily disappointing. I said to Mr Reid that if elected, every proposal would be judged fairly. Let every one be heard and be judged on its meritsâand I am glad the Board of Inquiry has done just that.
My forced Facebook sabbatical came to an end in the late morning. So what did I think of it all? One of my Tweets last night was: âI hope [it is temporary], though I have found people out for 7â12 days now. Now itâs Monday I hope they have got over their hangovers!â At the time I thought: this Facebook is probably not a 24-hour operation. These guys are probably off for the weekend, and they work part-time. We might see them on Monday morning, US time, or whenever they come back from Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Bill Cosby Day, or whatever it is they celebrate over there. Oh, itâs California, so they are probably stoned.
Sixty-nine hours werenât quite enough to break my habits, though they were beginning to change. No more was I looking up Facebook in bed before I go to the office, or having a quick gander at night. But on the desktop, I left one tab open, which would always draw me there to have a glance at what friends were up to.
The timing was a bit exceptional: we had the top 23 pages for the Miss Universe New Zealand 2014 finalists to launch. Had it not been for that, I wonder if I would have bothered with Facebook at all. I had queries to field, direct messages to respond to.
The direct messaging is obviously separate from the rest of Facebook, as it was the one thing that hadnât failed. But everything else was worsening: initially losing liking, commenting and posting, then losing the fan pages I administered. Friends could not see my wall, while a few who could see it tried to like things and were given errors. Aside from a few exceptions, no one seemed to think this was out of the ordinary and worth chatting to me about. Not that I mind this: they could all get in touch with me via other media. But this signals that it is OK to get an error when liking something, and shrug it off as temporary, because we believed Facebook when it told us to try again in a few minutes. Never mind that in Facebookland, âa fewâ means 4,000. We have low expectations of these dot coms.
So when people joke about how these things always tend to happen to me, I wonder. Iâve always maintained they happen to us all. Maybe the difference is I donât believe these buggers when they tell me that things will be back in a few minutes, because invariably they donât. So I put an entry in to Get Satisfaction, or on this blog, so others donât feel they are alone.
And if I had found the limits of the siteâbecause I believe on Vox I did in 2009, when exactly the same thing happened, and the techs had no way outâthen Facebook should know about this.
Facebook was, through all of this, useless. It had closed down its Known Issues on Facebook page, which seemed foolhardy, because this certainly was a known issue with the increasing number of Tweets about it. There were no acknowledgements, and most of the time, feeding anything into its report forms resulted in errors. Sometimes I got a blank screen. Its own help pages told you to do things that were impossible. If it were any other firm, people would be crying bloody murder or wanting their money back. (And I am technically a customer, through my mayoral campaign last year.)
A few other accounts came back, for the people I interacted with on Twitter and Get Satisfaction in the same predicament.
So what now? I might Facebook less. The 69 hours were a good reminder. One of the things I had watched during the sabbatical was the following video via Johnnie Moore, where Douglas Rushkoff speaks about how these big innovators arenât really adding value, only capital. He gives the example of Twitter:
The company that was going to be the maker of things now has to be the site where he aggregates the other makers of things ⌠so that you can show multi-billion-dollar returns instead of the hundred millions that you were doing ⌠You know, for Twitter, I just saw yesterday, they’re failing! Only $43 million last quarter! Isn’t that awful? Oh my God! Only $43 million, which is, I mean, how many employees do they have? I think that would be enough but their market cap is so outlandishly huge, so much money has gotten stuck in there, that they’re gonna be stuck looking for a new way to somehow milk more money out of an otherwise great tool and they’re gonna kill it. They have toâthey have to, âcause they need that home run.
Can we expect there to be greater innovation in such an environment, for any of these platforms? If we arenât feeling the same buzz we once did with these sites, thereâs a good reason, and the above is part of the problem. They arenât creating value any more, only market cap and stock, or, as Rushkoff says, âstatic capital.â
This is what [Thomas] Piketty was really writing about ⌠Capital has the ability to actually create profit, so all these companies, all this development, are really just different versions gaming the system rather than rewiring the system, rebooting it, which is the opportunity here.
I spent part of the last few days looking at the PDF proofs for Lucire Arabia, where at least I know I am part of making something that is creating value and, through its content, helping people. While my original motive for being on Facebook et al was promotional, for my businesses, I have to question if that was the best use of my time, and for creating value. Facebook organized my friends, as Google organized the webânow that those are done, there is the next step.
I left Voxâor rather, Vox left me when the site died and I was no longer able to postâand put more time elsewhere, namely into my first mayoral election campaign. I knew I was creating an opportunity to help people, and the upshot of that is the free wifi system we have in Wellington today (ironically probably very heavily used to update Facebook). It meant more than a means to Facebook and Instagram: the bigger picture was to signal to the tech sector that Wellington is open for business, and that we arenât being left behind in an industry that can create frictionless exports and intellectual capital.
We arenât quite there again in 2014, as Facebook is back, but it may be worth contemplating just where Iâm creating value for business and society when itâs not election year. This year, I don’t have a book plannedâbut it may have to be something where a good bunch of people are going to get some benefit.
In two elections, I told people some blarney on why I decided to run.
In 2010: âI was working at Lewâs Diner and this guy had been picked on. I told him, âStand tall, boy, show some respect for yourself. Do you think Iâm going to spend the rest of my life in this slop house? No, sir, Iâm going to night school. Iâm going to make something of myself.â Some weird guy sitting next to him in a life preserver chimes up, points and me, and says, âThatâs right, heâs going to be Mayor!â And thatâs when I got the idea. Mr Carruthers did say, âA coloured mayor, thatâll be the day,â but it didnât deter me.â
In 2013: âI was wondering whether to stand again and decided to chill out and watch Doctor Who. In that episode, Jenna Coleman turns to the screen and says directly to me, âRun, you clever boy, and remember.â So I did.â
You have to admit these are better answers than the stock politiciansâ ones.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, have a blessed Anzac Day.
The latest Victoria University study
