by John Degen — @jkdegen
Originally published in Ottawa’s essential paper, The Hill Times: Monday, Aug. 8, 2016
In May, Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced a review of Canadian cultural policy, one that would put laws, regulations, and funding mechanisms on the table for possible amendment or updating in response to the digital shift. This is a welcome initiative, and long overdue, but it inspires a bit of anxiety for those of us with livelihoods affected by those cultural policies, laws, regulations and mechanisms.
The first step in the Canadian Heritage review was an online questionnaire, which began by asking respondents to declare as either a consumer of culture or a stakeholder. For anyone trying to make a living through cultural work in Canada, that first question was profoundly unsettling. I’m both a cultural consumer and a stakeholder in the policy framework underlying my industry. I can’t choose between those two realities as though picking a side for softball. Doing so implies my consumer self is somehow in a zero-sum competition with my creator self, and I just don’t think that way.
My consumer self is careful about cultural products. He knows just how much work goes into each and every work, and that the consumer price-point rarely if ever reflects actual value. In other words, my inner consumer knows that the cultural economy must operate somehow other than simple supply and demand. Because of that, he thinks about how he consumes, and tries at all times to balance consumption, support, and responsibility. He understands that the culture/money ecosystem is about as delicate and vulnerable an environment as there is, especially in Canada, where domestic works must compete with a flood of foreign product benefiting from vastly different scale. That’s not special pleading; it’s just reality.
We hear all the time about the digital shift and the disruption that rides with it. Uber is eating the cab industry’s lunch. Lunch itself is being disrupted by apps like Foodora or Ritual. Our consumer selves seem to love the advantages of these disruptions, but we can’t ignore that they often come with a heaping side plate of social upheaval.
Traditional cab industry players and employees quite rightly feel ill-used by regulators, who are often tempted to throw up their hands at Uber’s slick, side-door entry into the car-hire marketplace. Uber’s treatment of its drivers is also controversial: Are they employees or freelancers? Who pays their insurance? How much do they actually make, and does that compensate above and beyond wear and tear on the car?
Lunch-ordering apps are, on the surface, less troubling, but they’re attended by similar economical/ethical questions. How do food servers feel about privileging those app-generated walk-ins over those standing in line? What’s the actual pay like for those cyclists pedaling food all over our urban centres? A recent piece in The Atlantic by Robin Sloan expressed some dark thoughts about these apps “because the way they treat humans is at best mildly depressing and at worst burn-it-down dystopian.”
I believe as we travel further into the digital shift, we’ll spend a lot more time with our consumer and stakeholder selves bumping up against each other — not in zero-sum competition, but in a cooperative effort along the lines of the fair trade movement. Speed, convenience, low price — these are all attractive consumer benefits. But surely we know that if we don’t find the right balance on the supply side, they’re short term benefits only.
I urge Joly and her advisers to take the long view as Canada’s cultural policy review moves forward. Fair trade culture, with a focus on sustainability and growth, should count at least as much as the raw consumerism inspired by disruptive technologies. Canada’s cultural workers have proven ourselves to be remarkably welcoming of and innovative with digital technology. Technology now needs to value our work properly. Policy will play a big role in making that happen.
John Degen is a novelist and poet. He is Executive Director of The Writers’ Union of Canada, an organization representing more than 2,000 professional authors in Canada. He is also Chair of the International Authors Forum, which represents over 650,000 professional authors worldwide. Reach him on Twitter @jkdegen
Read John Degen’s most popular Medium article: 5 Seriously Dumb Myths About Copyright The Media Should Stop Repeating.
