A theme really starts building up when you study this much more closely in sort of an investigative way.

And Alphabet was telling things to its parent company that were different than what it was telling to Waterfront.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Josh O'Kane.

Josh is the author of Sideways, the city Google couldn't buy, and he's an award-winning

technology reporter at the Globe and Mail, a major newspaper up here in Canada, for those of you

who aren't aware. I was really excited to have Josh on the show because his new book, if it's not

clear from the title, deals with Sidewalk Labs and their attempt to build a smart city or a smart

neighborhood from the internet up, as they used to say, in Toronto. For anyone who doesn't

remember, that was an incredibly controversial process. You know, there was a lot of kind of positive

media on what Google could build there, what a smart city could look like,

how it could help people, you know, the usual kind of techno-optimistic narratives.

But from the early days of this project, there was pushback against that there was concern

about what this would mean for the people of the city as these technologies were rolled out,

as these sensors and surveillance devices were rolled out through the city as these technologies were rolled out as these sensors and surveillance

devices were rolled out through the city to collect a ton of data for a company that was owned by

Google and Google is obviously a company that we know has not always used data in an appropriate

or responsible way in a way that we would want them to use data. Obviously, it's very core to their business

model. And so in his book, Josh really goes through various aspects of this project, how it came to

be, you know, the whole kind of series of events throughout its existence, and then how it

ultimately died in 2020 during the pandemic in the early months of lockdown and

things like that as we were still kind of coming to terms with what the pandemic was going to mean for us.

So I had a ton of questions for Josh. I think it was a really fascinating conversation. I certainly

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