Sad by Design

Abstract

In many countries, including Canada, financial and other circumstances have forced governments to transfer important monopoly or quasi-monopoly services to the private sector. Invariably, decisions must be made on the right level of autonomy for the operators of such servicesenough to attract the private sector and to secure the efficiency gains obtainable but without exposing users and other stakeholders to abuses of monopoly power. This article considers whether an appropriate degree of autonomy was granted to Nav Canada, a private, not-for-profit enterprise created in 1996 to take over all air-navigation facilities and services previously operated by Canada's Department of Transport (Transport Canada). This article does not examine that question in the abstract, as a theoretical issue, but in a very practical way, by looking in detail at the pricing policies Nav Canada has adopted (and has been legally allowed to adopt). It focuses on this aspect of Nav Canada's behaviour, because this is the area in which monopolies have always been considered to be especially in need of supervision, as a substitute for the missing discipline of the market. The conclusion is that Nav Canada's pricing policies have important deficiencies, from the standpoint of fairness and promotion of efficiency, and that their supporting documentation fails to explain the grounds for the key decisions made. These weaknesses could have been challenged more effectively, without significantly threatening Nav Canada's financial viability, if the guiding principles in the enabling legislation had been less vague. A specific remedy is proposed. The proposed improvement could also apply, mutatis niutandis, to many other transfers of government responsibility in Canada and particularly in the case of the many airport authorities (all quasi-monopolies) created in the past decade.

‘Absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media

“…In this regard, instead of focusing on extraordinary media events, I am more interested in people’s relations to media in the ordinariness of everyday life, and in how these routinely, uneventful interactions with others and with the world are mediated by digital technologies. Underlying this decision is the assumption that the power of social media emerges precisely from their world-building capacities (Frosh, 2019) and their apparent banality (Lovink, 2019) – or, as put by Chun (2017: 1), that ‘our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all’. I emphasize, however, the fact that even these habitual engagements are often punctuated by particular (media or life) events, and continuously impregnated by potential eventfulness (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018) – that is, the expectation that something remarkable might happen any time, all the time, and that thus you need to be able to follow it as it unfolds in real time, ‘live’.…”

Cultures of rejection at work: Investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism

“…Echo chambers or filter bubbles are not only conducive to rejective attitudes and affects, but can themselves serve as responses to crises of institutionalised solidarity and desires for stability (cf. Chun, 2016; Lovink, 2019). These trajectories point towards the fact that the acceptability of rejection is linked to a ‘multiple crisis’ (Houtard, 2010) that reaches beyond conditions of production and ranges from a crisis of political authority to one of the welfare state, affecting everything from patterns of social reproduction to the public sphere.…”

Unsettling individualized design practice through collaboration

“…In Sad by Design, Geert Lovink delineates: «In a design context, our aim should be to highlight ‹the process in which a designer focuses on the consequences of the current situation instead of dealing with the causes of a particular problem›» (Lovink 2019). In order to focus on the consequences of a current situation, makers would actually need to become vulnerable.…”