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I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing chorus of aspirational claims that “Toronto’s tech ecosystem is growing faster than anywhere else in North America” or “The Toronto-Waterloo corridor is ‘the nice person’s Silicon Valley’” honestly do not portray an accurate picture of what we’ve built here. To be clear: I am not saying there are no individual success stories of Canadian startups, or that there are no good angel investors or VCs here, or that there are no individual instances of things going right. Shopify obviously worked out great, there are other big success stories like Lightspeed making their way up, we have some really good initiatives around bringing new builders into Canada, and there are a good many individually inspiring startups that I admire. ....
Alessandro Baricco is one of Italy’s most versatile contemporary writers and public intellectuals. His new book, The Game (McSweeney’s, 2020, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford) is a journey that maps out the transformations that the digital revolution has wrought upon the landscape of human experience Brian Christian is the author of three acclaimed books on the intersection of humanity and technology, including, most recently, The Alignment Problem. The interview begins in utterly 21st-century fashion. I send a Zoom link but somehow end up in a different Zoom room from Alessandro, each of us patiently waiting for the other to arrive. Zoom sends me a notification that Alessandro has arrived in a different meeting room, but it goes to my personal rather than my McSweeney’s inbox and I don’t see it. I email Alessandro’s assistant and get a WhatsApp message on my phone in reply. Eventually, Alessandro, his friend and translator Claudio Fogu, and ....