EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Living on a Fault Line

The other day I had a long phone call with a friend of mine who was scheduled to be in Edmonton this week to deliver a talk about modern technology and its impact on various aspects of society to an audience of assorted deputy ministers and policy wonks. His message will be something of an admonishment; our leaders and authorities have been too slow to embrace its possibilities and opportunities, let alone keep pace with the velocity of the digitally loosed arrow.

Civilization is currently floundering somewhere in the primordial quagmire of a new historic age, one worthy of a proper noun in the future annals of human progress. The Industrial Revolution is over. Something else is happening right here, right now. I’ve been trying to navigate my way for a few years but I feel I’m baked into the middle of a Black Forest cake, I can’t discern the layers of enlightenment for the candied cherries and the cream trees.

Evidence of this period of transition is all around me, in my neighbourhood and on my street. The city’s livery firms are more responsive to my needs because they realize I can summon Uber instead of a taxi but I have to leave the neighbourhood to shop because our district’s modest commercial corner proffers brown paper window coverings and dust. Who pays the property taxes due on dead retail space and how does the City assess the value of a vacuum when ‘location, location, location’ really doesn’t matter anymore?

Blocks surrounding the Crooked 9 are undergoing neighbourhood renewal. The immediate area is clustered with machines, steamrollers, cement trucks, mustering crews and their own private vehicles. The project is a decade late, if only because Canadian cities are handcuffed by a legal inability to raise revenues for building, maintaining and expanding their required infrastructure. Anyway, I got mine just in case Edmonton hits that Detroit city flat-line. The gas company and a couple of telcos were ripping up what the City had just repaved, upgrading their hardware. Any soul on my street in a neon safety vest blends right into the occupation.

Two weeks ago one of my neighbours’ homes was broken into. Property crimes in the area are spiking. Employment in Edmonton is usually stable because it’s a government town anchored by a major university. Still, some sectors of the economy are suffering and idle hands… I was outside that afternoon, mowing the lawn and then repainting a stick of furniture in the garage. If I saw something, I didn’t know what I was seeing. Something else struck me too: I do not know the people in my neighbourhood as well as I used to. Here was the new gig economy at work.

There is always a stream branded courier van delivering Amazon wares. There are sub-contracted couriers too with magnetic decals on their car doors. Food is delivered by grocery stores, specific restaurants and app drivers who pick up meals pretty much from any place with a functioning kitchen. There are dog walkers and maid services on regular schedules. There are hired gardeners and landscapers, snow removal services. Nobody seems to possess a whit of inclination to do anything themselves.

Paying another to perform one’s mundane chores adds up. Consequently many homeowners in the area have developed basement or garage suites to ease existing expenses even as mortgage interest rates rise. Back lanes are crawling with legitimate strangers entering and exiting through side and rear entries. Tenants come and go. I never get to know them. There’s someone in the alley. So what? Around the front, some tenacious door-knocker is looking to raise funds for a soccer team, a jazz ballet club, an elementary school or some disease only an unlucky few acquire.

So unless the bad guy is masked and decked out in a Beagle Boys black-and-white prison outfit I’ve no clue who’s suspiciously treading in my patch on my watch. I am as mystified and confused about the new reality as those politicos my friend was engaged to lecture. I can sort of see a sea change but can’t make any sense of it. The lesson is simple: being blind in these times, ignorant, just won’t do.

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