The IeSF stated that “the decision to divide male and female competitions was made in accordance with international sports authorities as part of our effort to promote e-sports as a legitimate sport.” This statement was met with reactions from confusion to accusations of sexism. A day later an emergency session was called and the IeSF retracted its policy, allowing women to compete alongside men in tournaments for multiple video games including Dota 2, Starcraft II, Hearthstone, and Ultra Street Fighter.

It wasn’t until pressure was put on the IeSF that it abandoned its sexist policy. This misstep speaks more to the video game industry’s desire to mimic other sports. But for the fighting game community, unwelcoming and misogynistic scandals are abundant.

A toxic relationship with women is a recuring theme in the world of video games. The community’s sexism manifests in many ways, from the parade of game trailers featuring prominently white men, pandering to macho fantasies at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, to the constant humiliation of female developers, to the threatening of female academics involved in the field, seemingly just because they are women.

Rightfully or not, video game culture is imagined as an escape from an alienating world. Gamer culture, as gaming journalist Bob Chipman argues, defines itself as “willingly separate from a larger and more powerful and infrequently threatening mainstream culture.”

The context of gamers breaking away from the mainstream should not absolve gamers of accountability, or excuse them of violence – yet this attitude is given power in the community, feeding into the exclusionary and violent atmosphere.

Two years ago, Capcom’s Cross Assault, a competitive gaming show centred around the release of Street Fighter 4, was marred by controversy when a leaked video showed competitive gamer and gaming coach Aris Bakhtanians sexually harassing his own teammate, Miranda “Super_Yan” Pakozdi. Bakhtanians filmed Pakozdi, his lens focusing below her neck and hips, asking her, repeatedly, to “stand up.”

“I have to have fun,” Bakhtanians quipped, continuing, until she left the room. The objectification of a female athlete’s body during competition is something that has happened countless times in the sports community, but what makes this case especially troubling is the blatant enjoyment the perpetrator derived without ever pausing to consider how harmful his actions were.

People were not happy. Jared Rea from twitch.tv interviewed Bakhtanians, asking him such questions about whether it was unacceptable practice to use words such as “rape” when describing the defeat of an opponent, especially if that opponent was a woman. Bakhtanians responded by denouncing the criticism as an infringement on his freedom of speech, comparing the suggestion to self censor to living in North Korea. After Rea asked: “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?”, Bakhtanians responded by saying: “You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 and 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community – it’s Starcraft.”

What puts into question the legitimacy of e-sports is not only segregated games, an issue which sports culture as a whole has grappled with, but more significantly these kinds of attitudes that openly accept and perpetuate rape culture as an immutable part of their community. The IeSF is trying to expand the market for e-sports, but when figures like Bakhtanians are ubiquitous, it is clear that it is an exclusionary league.

To address the outrage, Bakhtanians took to where all sincere and heartfelt apologies are given, Twitter: “When I made these statements,” he wrote, “I was very heated as I felt that the culture of a scene I have been part of for over 15 years was being threatened.”

Bakhtanians also reminisced on Twitter about the golden age of coin-fed arcade machines. “People didn’t like newcomers […] I think the sink-or-swim mentality is something that defined our culture.” Yet this culture also defines itself by being exclusive and violent; any glorification of the culture also glorifies this aspect of it.

However, the Bakhtanians case is not an isolated incident, as any gamer who has ever played a few rounds of matchmaking on Ghosts, or traded in EVE Online, can tell. Bakhtanians is also not some obscure troll; he has a huge presence and fanbase. Without this fanbase, Bakhtanians would not have a platform to spew his sexist rhetoric. The fact that he still has this platform speaks to the sexist culture of video games. And this is no accident, but a deliberate move: Microsoft even recently capitalized on his popularity by having him as a main presenter at its 2014 Gamescom keynote.

Despite constant harassment from Bakhtanians and other members of the community, people are taking a stand. Jackie Lee, semi-finalist in the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix Baltimore, endured anonymous insults from livestream viewers of her games simply for being a woman. Despite this, Lee ranks in the top 100 Magic players in the world. Lee explained that she had endured this sort of harassment before, that the comments did not personally bother her, and that she is in gaming “for the long haul.” She refuses to let the sexist nature of gaming culture win, but instead directly challenges it by doing what the sexist gamers hate the most: beating them at their own game, literally.

Hope lies not only in players like Jackie Lee, but in the conversations within the community and gaming enthusiast press. From Chipman’s web series episode With “Great Power,” to the increased visibility of inclusive gaming blog The Mary Sue, to Ross Lincoln’s Escapist Magazine article “Geeks Should Argue Politics,” opening up a discussion around these issues is the first step to creating a more inclusive gaming community.

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The upcoming World Cup in the idyllic pastures of Rio de Janeiro is no different. The World Cup, championing the very top of the world’s most popular sport, unites widely different peoples across large geographical demarcations.

In Spain, the World Cup provokes the most national pride, with Catalans and Basques screaming in the streets, not at each other, but for the same team. Spain, a country with a long history of fascist rule, carries a deep mistrust for nationalism. However, during the World Cup, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘Red Effect’ takes hold of the streets, transforming separatist blocks into crimson Candy Lands. Like Canada, Spain is a nation of nations, but while the Canadian House of Commons recognized the Québécois as a nation in 2006, Spain’s constitutional court has affirmed in 2010 that its “constitution recognises no nation but Spain,” much to the chagrin of civic national Catalans. Thousands of Catalans marched in opposition; yet, Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, leader of the separatist Republican Left of Catalonia, lamented, “This is ridiculous. […] We will end up with more Spanish flags being waved for the Spain-Holland match on Sunday than Catalan flags on the Saturday demonstration.”

But ridiculous is the name of the game. The World Cup was forever changed in 1934, when Mussolini’s regime brought nationalism to the forefront of the games. Hosting the cup, Mussolini’s administration took the World Cup as an opportunity to show off. One Italian official remarked that “the attention of the world of sport will turn itself on Italy,” and stressed the opportunity to demonstrate the regime’s entire range of skills. During the games, people cried out “Duce,” and the marching bands played fascist hymns. One observer called it “a Fascist rally rather than a sporting contest.”

Much like Spain and Italy, Germany is another World Cup participant struggling with the lingering memory of past fascist influences. A country wary of overt displays of national pride after the Second World War takes the World Cup as the exception. In 2006, Germany hosted the games, with the number of visible German flags rivaling an American Walmart on the Fourth of July. The prominent flags became the second most-discussed topic in the national news media. The situation has since risen in intensity, as exemplified by the racist comments on Twitter directed at Turkish-born player Mesut Özil during the UEFA Euro 2012 tournament.

The history of modern football since the interwar period is one of allegorical national propaganda. States pounce on the ability to overtly celebrate nationalism under the guise of friendly competition.

But besides Europe, what is Brazil’s place in all of this? By most accounts, this World Cup has not been commissioned for the people, but for the government and for corporate technocrats. According to reports by Forbes and Bloomberg in the fall of 2013, the original budget of under a billion US dollars has inflated to over $3.5 billion. The final number is estimated by some to exceed $14.5 billion – an increase attributed largely to corruption. Still many supporters cite as a sign of hope the estimate from Aldo Rebelo, the Minister of Sport, who projects an economic boost of $90 billion to Brazil’s GDP by 2019.

However, this number does not reveal where all this money will go, as of right now most of Brazil’s spending is focused on short- term projects. Instead of building schools and hospitals, the government is building monuments. Footballer turned politician Romário de Souza Faria – better known as simply Romário – urged his peers to wake up to the growing political unrest. In an interview with the New York Times, Romário described, “You see hospitals with no beds […] You see hospitals with people on the floor. You see schools that don’t have lunch for kids.” The result is a very lavish infrastructure, on display for the world to see, that lacks essential services and is impossible to maintain for long afterward.

The problem is that there is a dangerous precedent for this decorative nationalism in Brazil. Today, Brazil is a rising nation, its economy becoming among the largest in the world. It is a situation very similar to the early 1960s, when Brazil’s economy had never been stronger. The government decided to display this newfound wealth in the creation of an entirely new and meticulously designed capital called Brasília. Brasília is infamous, particularly among architects and urban geographers. It showed the full potential of modernist architecture in an urban environment. The city looked like a spaceship – indeed, it was designed with one in mind.

The city was designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer, made from highly durable and inexpensive material, with buildings of smaller height. But Brasília was built to satisfy the officials’ dreams rather than the people’s needs. As Edward Glaeser wrote, “The modernists were good at designing functional and striking structures, but far weaker at understanding how these structures fit together to form a city.” In the haste to create a city of the future, Brazil created a dysfunctional one, with its people bearing the cost. Today, we see a similar situation with the World Cup.

While we debate the effects of nationalism, we should also attempt to answer the questions it leaves us with. But the people need to ask themselves whether or not their nationalism represents their people, or the interests and power fantasies of their politicians.

The post The dark side of the World Cup appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I turned my eyes back to the game. The players were running back and forth without break. Each time a goal was scored, the goalie threw the ball back into the mix within seconds. I understood why some say Gaelic football is the fastest sport on grass.

The object of the game is to score into the opposing team’s net, and there are two ways to do this. Getting the ball over the bar (imagine a field goal post in American football) lands one point, and getting the ball in the net gets three. The players run with the ball, like in football or rugby, but every four steps they have to do something with the ball. The player can drop it and kick it back up, bounce it, or pass it – and you can’t ever repeat an action. Players pass the ball to one another by lobbing it, like in volleyball. The whole sport feels like a mesh of the most popular sports on Earth. Despite all these rules, the women never once fouled.

In Ireland, your town is known for either hurling or Gaelic football. “I started hurling when I was six,” Greene told me. “Lads stick hurls in babies’ hands – they’re obsessed over there.” In 1884, the English tried eliminating hurling, trying to stamp it out and ‘civilize’ the Irish. The various hurling groups got together and formed the Gaelic Athletic Association, where the rules were formalized, teams decided, structures arranged, and the game maintained. Today, Greene is one of the many Irish immigrants spreading the game.

Greene came to Montreal a few years ago. In Ireland, he tells me, “the story there is either you’re on unemployment or, yaknow, [struggling].” Just last year, the Irish government offered several thousand work visas overseas, and they were gone in two days. But the Irish have always been on the move.

After the Seven Years’ War, Irish immigrants established a small foothold in Montreal and Quebec. Almost a hundred years later, Irish labourers were hired to build Canada’s earliest industrial feats, like the railroads and the Victoria Bridge. Sharing the same Catholic beliefs, Irish immigrants often married the local Quebecois, resulting in many mixed heritage families. Today, the Irish are the second-largest ethnic group in Quebec behind French Canadians, and tolerance.ca estimates that almost half of Quebecois have Irish ancestry. Irish communities around the world are, once again, growing. Despite the numbers, Greene explains, “The Montreal Irish community is so small,” most of them are not aware of their own heritage. Hurling and Gaelic football, he sees, are a way to reassert that legacy and introduce it to foreigners.

When Greene arrived, he didn’t have any friends, but when he saw that there was an amateur Gaelic football league, he dove in. Suddenly, he had connections all over the city. “It’s not just [that] we play sports,” he says, “It’s a community … There’s a huge social side to the games.”

When his girlfriend moved to Ottawa, he posted an ad on Kijiji to start a hurling team there. Initially, five people responded and they began playing. It’s been a few years since Larry has lived in Ottawa, but there is now a hurling and Gaelic football league thriving there. In Toronto, St. John’s, Quebec City, and Vancouver, there are teams that compete nationally. They are comprised of players from a variety of backgrounds. For instance, almost all of the players on the Quebec City team are Quebecois, save for one Irishman.
Greene stresses that the community they’ve built, however amateur, is dedicated. “They work nine to five and they play at night like soccer players,” he says, “except no one’s getting paid.”

The whistle blew and the game ended. The Shamrocks patted each other on the back, smiled, and talked about how later that night they would all get together for a much needed pint at Hurley’s, an Irish bar. Greene suited up for his hurling match. He took out a long wooden club, straight on the shaft and curved like the root of a trunk at the tip. It looked like a warrior’s weapon. “Hurling was originally a sport warriors would play three thousand years ago to unwind,” he says, lifting the club, showing me the detail of the hand-made woodwork. Eventually, if there was a dispute between warring villages, they would settle the matter over a game of violent hurling. The violence remains today, though now with plenty of jollity.

The rules of hurling are quite similar to Gaelic football, with the main difference being the actual hurlers. A person can handle the ball as much as they want before they aim at the net, but no one would because everyone would be swinging clubs that would have made Vikings flee at other peoples’ heads. There is a distinct pop each time the ball collides with a hurler that sounds like champagne being uncorked. The players scrounge with their fingers for the tiny ball of death while the bone-crushing clubs swing freely. And it is even faster than Gaelic football.

On the sidelines, the girls were stretching and speaking. I spoke to two Montrealers, Lindsey and Veronique, and an Australian, Kate. The three girls, usually Australian-rules football players, tried their hand at the Gaelic variety and loved it. “It’s so continuous, there’s no stopping,” Lindsey said. Looking at her teammates, Veronique added, “all the girls are so encouraging.”

Kate’s life, in particular, was dramatically changed by her involvement in amateur leagues. She first came to Canada for school in British Columbia, but it was only until she made friends through sports teams that she fell in love with the country. “We’re a team,” she says, “the sense of community, the friendship – it’s more than just a sport.”

As I saw the women of the Gaelic football team excited to go to the bar together, Kate’s words solidified: “We’re a team.”

The Montreal Shamrocks GAA membership registration night for the 2013 season takes place Friday, March 1 at 8:00 p.m. at Hurley’s Irish Pub. Beginners are welcome. Email montrealshamrocksgaa@gmail.com for more information.

The post Community through competition appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Cameras rushed outside Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14 with news anchors trailing behind. Less than an hour before, a young man had walked into the school with a Bushmaster rifle shooting both teachers and students, particularly in two first-grade classrooms. Some students heard the gunshots over the morning announcements. Before second-bell, 27 people, mostly children, were dead.

The story is well-known to the public now: images, interviews, and footage were quickly made ubiquitous in all forms of media. Most people have heard first-hand accounts. A little girl hugged the ground until it was quiet. She snuck out of the building covered in blood and ran to her mom, and said, “Mommy, I’m okay, but all my friends are dead.”

How is one supposed to react to a massacre?

Six hours after the shooting, the media coverage of the scene took a break to allow President Barack Obama to speak to the nation. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” he said, “regardless of the politics.”

A month later, the president ordered Vice President Joe Biden to form a task force that could prevent such events in the future.

The appropriate response to a massacre is to take measures against them.

On January 11, Biden’s task force, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, met with leading executives of the video game industry to discuss violence in the wake of the Newtown shooting. This meeting was one of many with the various strands of the American entertainment industry. Biden told the Wall Street Journal that he would “come to this meeting with no judgement”; his intent was simply to begin the dialogue about violence.

Five days later, Obama announced 23 executive orders to Congress, including one that asked Congress to investigate the societal effects of violence in video games.

Popular discourse often questions the role of video games in the context of violence within society. However, some in the industry feel like the topic should be put to bed. “I don’t see this as any sort of turning point in the discussion,” said Dan Stapleton, editor-in-chief of GameSpy. He referred to the persistence of this discussion as a “performance to placate” those who blame video games for real-world violence instead of taking action against the violence itself.

Currently, there are more than thirty studies on such a topic, conducted at a variety of institutions, from University of Georgia to Iowa State among others. Most of the results of these studies suggest that video games did not increase violent behaviour, but could – as a study by Albert Einstein College observed – calm children. The study by Iowa State suggested that factors like familial violence and poverty contribute the most to violent behaviour.

The facts pile on: violent crime in the United States peaked in 1991, and the sales of violent video games have increased exponentially since then.

To gamers and game journalists, the meeting with Biden represents nothing new. Ian Bogost, a prolific scholar on video games and Georgia Tech professor, wrote in 2008, “Games are cogs in someone’s favourite discourse machine.” A day after the meeting, he echoed his earlier statement: “The function of this meeting was political and had little if anything to do with the actual content and use of video games.”

To Bogost, and others who work in the games industry, this meeting is a classic example of misdirection; by directing the attention at video games, it gives politicians another reason to not take gun control seriously.

Though many have identified this investigation as fallacious in the aftermath of shooting tragedies like Newtown, there is another, more sinister side to its obfuscation of the truth: in fact, few have addressed its hypocrisy within a nation embroiled in war. Just a day prior to Biden’s meeting, the CIA bombarded Pakistan with drone strikes.

Video game violence is worth talking about, because the real video game violence is perpetuated by the United States military.

Predator (or Reaper) drones are unmanned robots deployed in warzone, piloted by joystick, hundreds of miles outside their kill-zones. Drone pilots are trained using virtual-simulations – what William Gibson, the science fiction novelist best known for his book Neuromancer, called video games. Since 2008, drone use has been on the rise, and the Federal Aviation Administration is pushing for 30,000 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones patrolling the American skies by the decade’s end.

A new study by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute estimates that for every suspected terrorist killed, there are fifty civilian deaths. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the CIA targets people surrounding the attack, in a “double-tap” method reminiscent of organizations like Hamas. These lives, and these crimes, are the true cost of “video games.”

How is one supposed to react against a massacre?

The appropriate response to a massacre is to take measures against them, and those who perpetuate them.

The post The real video game violence appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Oh look, another article about The Daily! I’m tired of them as well: the self-referential debates, the mock-heroic struggles made public, the name-calling, the inside jokes: it’s like Rape of the Lock but without wit. But here we are, you and I, reader and writer. We do not know one another, and we likely never will. All that unites us is the text, this text, printed on pulp paper, or loaded on HTML.

Among the many enigmatic aphorisms of French philosopher (sigh) Jacques Derrida, the most famous is: “There is nothing outside the text.” Whatever Derrida originally meant, we can take it that if we reconstruct meaning within a text, we cannot account for what is outside the text, namely the audience, context, and author. I italicize ‘author,’ for it is the most uncertain of all three outside-text criteria and the focus of the article.

Dear Daily-dissenters: enough with the hateful, bilious ad hominem remarks. Stop attacking the author.

I wonder why, considering I’ve been around the internet for nearly a decade now (in the most explicit, nihilistic territories, mind), I was so surprised to read the comments leveled at the article, “Dear Boot-Licking Apologists” (Commentary, November 8, page 8) and its author ‘Ethan Feldman.’ I use the scare quotes because I’ve never met the individual using that screen name, and therefore can pass no judgement on them. Even if I had met them, what kind of sanctimonious prick would I be to insult (or vouch for) them on a public forum, and why would that even be pertinent to a published article in a paper that prides itself on aspiring professionalism?

Our reactions should be based on the text alone; if we’re already on a witch-hunt, we lose the message.

Now, I wouldn’t claim to have some kind of godlike authorial voice on criticism, advocating any type of critical thinking over another, but the ‘nothing-outside-text’ approach prevents cheap shots like this one: “‘U5’ Philosophy student. On the Van Wilder Plan I see. This is a sad cry for attention.” Or my two other favourites: “YOU’RE A MORON, HOW DOES THIS GET PUBLISHED?????” and “Besides, it’s not like you can EVER get a job anyways. Goodbye and kindly fuck yourself.” Even the more restrained comments like, “Your poor logic and the insanity of this piece perfectly explains why you haven’t managed to graduate in 5 years,” are devoid of textual support, as if it were an absolute truth.

Of course, this is an utterly futile effort. To improve the quality of the internet is like shooting a water pistol at an oncoming tsunami. The internet always seems to me to be divided like the Biblical Red Sea: on one shore Wikipedia, and the other, 4chan.

However, I cannot stand to see such utter disrespect leveled against any fellow student, and their entire faculties of study. It was sad moment to see Feldman respond in the comments section with, “A lot of negativity came from this article and it’s nice to be addressed as a human being.” The problem is, going back to Derrida, that even the insults were intended to a human face, and not the arguments themselves. It may seem inhuman to remove authors from criticisms of their work, but ultimately I think it preserves their dignity as human beings.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the article (maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised) was the fact that these were McGill students, and that their skills in critical thinking didn’t seem to extend outside class.

Perhaps we at McGill should live up to our own myth of entitled privilege – the myth that we are better than everyone else – in class and out.

Marcello Ferrara is a U1 student in English and Geography. He can be reached at marcello.ferrara@mail.mcgill.ca. Come at me, bro. 

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Once upon a time, there was a city, built on the slope of a hill… not the largest city, mind, but big enough to have tall buildings with ten or more floors stacked to the sky, streets of three or four lanes with constant daytime traffic, side-walks traveled by people of all sorts, dressed simply, elaborately, all with different faces that spoke with distinct voices – some childish, some sombre – and oh did they talk!

They spoke in cafes over coffee, at construction sites while the cement hardened, telling each other stories; stories about themselves or somebody else; stories of intrigue, action, drama. Stories to make you laugh, to make you cry, or both; but most of all, stories just to pass the time until the coffee cup was empty and the cement was set.

One night, in this same city, behind a yellow door, down the basement steps, thirty young students sat on brown, blue, and orange seats, dipping chocolate chip cookies into cocoa with attentive ears in front and around of a woman with curly silver-white hair and brilliant white teeth. “I am a storyteller,” she said, “I have been telling stories for almost eighty years.”

The stories the storyteller told were not the kind of stories you would hear around town. Her stories were not native to the town, or even the times. They were stories from places far away, and from people long gone. These stories were quite old, older than the storyteller that stood in front of the young audience. The storyteller’s name is Christine Mayr, a member of Montreal’s Storytelling Guild.

“Why tell such old stories?” she asked. “Even though times have changed,” she smiled, “I think they still touch us.” Once her words settled in the subterranean air, once she was sure all the young people were silent, she told stories, stories from around the world.  Her voice rose and fell with a sprung rhythm. Her hands delicately mirrored the actions of the stories’ subjects.

She spoke of the sad love of a Japanese crane, the journey of an African spider son and father and their encounter with death, the river-ride of Australia’s red riding hood, and others. Each story seemed to belong not to any time in particular, but to the unchanging demands of the human heart. Certainly, the crowd was touched by her stories that night. They were quiet in the sad parts, and laughing in the comic bits. And at the end of her time, everyone clapped, and Mayr thanked the young people for coming and keeping the tradition alive, from one generation of storytellers to the next.

“Relatively few people are given to mathematics or physics, but narrative seems to be within everyone’s grasp,” E.L. Doctorow once wrote. “Perhaps because it comes to the nature of language itself. The moment you have nouns and verbs and prepositions…subjects and objects, you have stories.”

The Storytellers Guild of Montreal meet at the Westmount Library, 4574 Sherbrooke, every second Thursday of the month from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. People are welcome to come, listen, and share stories of their own. 

The post A city of stories appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Zambito goes on to describe the racket in detail: each firm would pay the Montreal Mafia 2.5 per cent of the total contract value, minus externalities like taxes. Cash would be sealed into brown Canada Post bags and sent to the middle man, in this case Nicola Milioto, at the Consenza Cafe over coffee.

The best mobster movies – Goodfellas, The Godfather, et cetera – always have the cafe scene. The two Mafiosos meet, discuss life, catch up on family gossip, and down their espressos, and before they part ways one of them utters a euphemism or gestures that reveals their private agenda, hidden behind the public appearance. In these films, Timothy Sun once wrote, “We see the American dream – and in turn, ourselves.”

For the Charbonneau Commission, however, the concerns are very public indeed. In the past months, the anti-corruption squad, comprised of detectives, lawyers, and judges, has uncovered and exposed staggering amounts of corruption in the public-private practices of the Quebec construction industry.

Just a few weeks ago, McGill University’s own Health Centre was raided by Quebec’s anti-corruption unit when officers of Operation Hammer entered the doors early in the morning with search warrants in hand. Since then, the entire investigation has branched into two main inquiries: 1) Construction company SNC-Lavalin’s involvement with bribery and embezzlement and 2) the various staff members who received bribes or embezzled money themselves.

Former director of the McGill University Health Centre Stella Lopreste is the subject of an investigation for alleged fraud of up to $1.6 million. The evidence against the suspects includes spending this money on personal expenses such as luxury clothes, flower deliveries, travel expenses, cellphones, a computer, and much more. The entire investigation, to remind everyone, surrounds a contract to build a new super-hospital that would focus on cancer research. McGill makes no secret of its desire for private money.

Public-private partnerships have been pushed around the world in recent years. In August 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime issued a statement, from its resident anti-corruption expert Giovanni Gallo, that the “public-private partnership is the best way to reconcile diverging perceptions which may generate conflicts and opportunities for corruption…particularly in the area of public procurement, where the two actors interact the most.” The situation in Quebec today flies in the face of this statement.

The crime movie genre has often been interpreted as allegorical of the failure of the American dream, or, in broader terms, the structural failures of the free market. Criminals have come to represent the most ardent believers of said system. They never fail at trying to take any wealth away from the public to support their materialistic fantasies. Corruption and crime, these movies tell us, are acts of entrepreneurial spirit. The desire to take money away from public scrutiny and legal authority: this is the nature of corruption.

The solution for Quebec today is not more public-private collusion, as Gallo would suggest, but a new system where public money may be used in service of the public.

Marcello Ferrara is a U1 English and Geography student. He can be reached at marcello.ferrara@mail.mcgill.ca.

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A sterile technology is fixed to expectations of the producers. Think of train tickets, punch cards, or Instagram-only cameras. They are made to accomplish a specific task within specified limits. A generative technology is the opposite: its uses are not limited to the desires of the vendors of the hardware or operating systems. Generative products give birth to new products, from the personal computer to Facebook. Zittrain calls this process, spread across multiple layers of social and technological relations, “generativity.”

Before the swift showers of September 8 soaked the city of Montreal, I saw on the 3rd floor of SSMU the process of generativity in action. The SSMU ballroom was the scene of a hackathon, an event where computer programmers find new uses for old hardware and software.  This event, called “Hack Ta Ville,” was an initiative to combine the disciplines of sustainable urban development with programming in order to improve cities. Generativity is inherent in the structure of a hackathon such as this.

“You Say City” is an example of generativity in practice. Pierre Beaudreau, the creator of You Say City, spoke with programmers and designers about his project at Hack Ta Ville. You Say City is a 3D tool for displaying new building designs. Users can upload models of both planned and imagined projects in a three-dimensional map of a city embedded in the Google Earth service. Each model comes with a marker indicating its location, which also contains a forum to discuss the design. These forums are where Beaudreau hopes people can “start talking about what they think is important for the city.”

Collaboration and networking was integral to the structure of Hack Ta Ville. While I was interviewing Beaudreau, a software technician sat at our table. He explained that he was looking for simple work, on the side, even though he already has a job. I spun around the room. At every other table, there were attendees on their laptops, turning and talking to one another, pointing at their screens, smiling and shaking hands. It reminded me of those romantic scenes writers and artists conjure about the modernists sitting in Parisian cafes sharing their grand ideas and collaborating on their exciting new projects. Some, including myself, dream of that time, and here it was in front of me, playing out in Javascript and PHP instead of paint and prose.

Throughout the day, workshops taught computer novices the basics of data visualization and programming languages like Python, while workshops for computer experts introduced them into the topics of urban planning, transportation, and sustainable development.
The purpose of Hack Ta Ville was explained to me by Jason Prince, research coordinator at the McGill School of Urban Planning. Prince said that he wanted to gather young people “on top of new emerging technologies and see what they come up with.”

Hack Ta Ville also offered a chance to observe the results of the Open Data Movement.

For the uninitiated, Jonathan Brun, the co-creator of Montreal Ouvert, delivered a talk at Hack Ta Ville on the Open Data revolution. This movement calls for transparency in municipal and federal governments, asking them to release their data in an open, centralized, and permanent platform. The data must be open, that is, it must be accessible to everyone in a non-proprietary format (so not in PDFs or Word). Most importantly, there must be a legal license allowing people to reuse the data.

Prince also believes that the Open Data movement is essential for the development of cities. “Urban planners depend on data for everything they do,” he said. He also expressed his dislike of how universities – a bevy of important data – continue to keep it private, despite being publicly funded. “It’s fundamentally wrong to not let that data [be] freely available,” Prince said.

The darker side of Open Data was also addressed in Brun’s workshop. When the Indian government published its entire datasets on land ownership, opportunistic construction corporations identified areas in which much of the population lives in poverty and has little formalized education, and proceeded to swindle the landowners out of the real worth of their land. This phenomenon ultimately exposed loopholes in India’s legal structure.
Both Brun and Prince are currently lobbying in Canada for more transparent government data. The movement is much further ahead in countries like the United Kingdom and United States, where laws advocating open information on the internet are being strengthened and rewritten.

Hack Ta Ville was ultimately successful in its attempt to plant the seed of the importance of open data in the minds of young creative digital entrepreneurs. However, the counter examples highlighted in Brun’s workshop demonstrated a more maniacal avenue for open data that exists outside the room filled with bright people with big ideas about improving cities. He showed that, though there is a push for open data to liberate us, the seductive emancipatory fantasy of the internet may instead blind us to the new expressions of old powers.

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