Sideways The City Google Couldnt Buy Josh Okane by Josh O'kane 9781039000797, 1039000797 instant download after payment.

When former New York deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff landed in Toronto,  promising a revolution in better living through technology, the locals were starstruck. In 2017 a small parcel of land on the city's woefully underdeveloped lakeshore was available for development, & with Google co-founder Larry Page & his trusted chairman Eric Schmidt leaning into Sidewalk Labs' pitch for the long-forsaken property—with Doctoroff as the urban-planning company's CEO—Sidewalk's bid crushed the competition. 

But as soon as the bid was won, cracks appeared in the partnership between Doctoroff's team & Waterfront Toronto, the government-sponsored organization behind the contest. There were hundreds more acres of undeveloped former port lands nearby that kept creeping into conversation with Sidewalk, & more questions were emerging than answers about how much the public would actually benefit from the Alphabet-owned company's vision for the high-tech neighbourhood—& the data it could harvest from the people living there. Alarm bells began ringing in the city's corridors of power & activism. 

To Torontonians accustomed to big promises with little follow-through, the fiasco that unfolded seemed at first like just another city-building sideshow. But the pained battle to reel in the power of Sidewalk Labs became a crucible moment in the worldwide battle for privacy rights & against the extension of Big Tech’s digital might into the physical world around us. 

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Josh O’Kane is a Globe & Mail reporter who recently spent five years covering the ways technology is changing society.