This is a law/legal profession/law schools and legal education post, prompted by my conversation yesterday with a group of incoming law students who are going through my law school’s orientation week.  Every single one of them asked some version of “what’s happening with AI and law?,” always with a spark of optimism and enthusiasm.

The short version of my response:

Every lawyer in America, regardless of type of practice, is dealing with AI systems in one respect or another, even if (in a handful of cases that I know of), “dealing with” means “keeping AI affirmatively at arms’ length for one good reason or another.”  When I was a law student, “Westlaw” and “Lexis/Nexis” were the exotic interlopers into law study and practice.  By the end of the 1980s, they were part of the furniture both in law offices (where the cost curve took some time to come down) and in law schools.  AI has become a default setting in professional practice worlds far more rapidly than that.

In law schools today, we are still, collectively, far from comfortable with AI.  At most, AI is accepted as “a tool” of the contemporary lawyer. That’s an early stage adaptation; the phrase “it’s just a tool” simplifies and domesticates a complex and rapidly changing technology whose directions, functions, and impacts are only very gradually coming into focus.  Eventually, the profession (in whatever size and shape it continues to exist) will see AI/human combinations in law the way that researchers in socio-technical studies have understood machine/human combinations for a couple of generations: as systems with overlapping domains of autonomy and dependence.  That’s a broad description; the specifics are to be determined.  But I am certain that in time, AI in practice will be accepted as much more than a tool.

The longer version, which I had no reason to share over lunch:

As AI swallows whole big chunks of law (along with professional services and expertise of many sorts), again we hear calls for law schools to innovate and reform at more or less warp speed in order to produce law graduates who are prepared to succeed – and to meet both client and community expectations – in the AI era.  Reform, die, or fade into irrelevance.  And again we hear responses from inside the walls and halls of academia: not so fast.  System-level innovation faces system-level headwinds. We’re innovating as fast as we can. Let’s not forget the values and ethics that built systems of law and that (we believe) clients depend on.

Is there a right way to reconcile the two, seemingly contradictory views?

No.  But I have notes from my seat, as I start year 28 of full-time teaching:

System-level change in legal education really is difficult largely because law schools, like the universities of which most of them are parts, are built not to change. Metaphorically, they are like the brick house made by the third little pig.  The Big Bad Wolf can’t blow it down, meaning that performance expectations for all constituencies are clear and consistent, internally and externally, across the decades (yay).  But it is stiff and brittle and very, very difficult and expensive to renovate (boo).

That’s not to ignore the fact that accreditation requirements are unnecessarily onerous (hello, the ABA Section on Legal Ed), nor the fact that as a group, law schools have learned to tune their faculty recruitment and curricula to the demands of “the bar exam” (hello, state Supreme Courts), nor the fact that essentially all US law schools operate as minor curricular variations on a single model (they do, hello both of the above, path dependence, and a supreme lack of imagination).  But turn law schools today loose to do whatever they might like to do, and odds are high that we would still have a three-year JD, a suite of mandatory, uniform first-year courses, a bundle of electives in the upper level, and clinical and legal writing attachments.

The fixation with, well, fixation, implies that as with a lot of buildings built of brick and of concrete, the (unformed but sure to arise) needs of the future are often sacrificed to favor the (known) demands of the present.  Deans typically are recruited and rewarded for short-term performance (fundraising metrics, bar exam performance, and “looking good, Billy Ray!; “Feeling good, Louis!” (cue Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in the film “Trading Places,” which is a fair if entirely different sort of parable for the fate of established, corrupted incumbents confronted with nimble upstarts who know where the system is flawed); faculty usually are recruited and rewarded for plugging into the curricular and field-specific system as it has been, rather than “the law” as it is becoming.  Throwing around labels like “Langdell” and “the Socratic method” as diagnostics has only limited value, because those terms are so broadly accurate that they mean lots of different things among different audiences. What matters is that the Provost usually wants to see bar passage numbers, and the faculty wants to hire someone who will cover Torts while publishing whatever the collective faculty expects in student-edited law reviews.

There is no single solution to all of that, no single way to “unstick” a “stuck” system, but the starting point for (somehow) aligning “the law” and “AI” in education, without simply building metaphorical houses of straw and sticks, has to be looking at the extensive literature on system-level and organization-level change management.

In one nutshell:

Every organization, including every law school, has people on the team who are already innovating, often (but not always) in productive and forward-looking ways.  Hello, positive deviants; hello to the work of John Kotter.  A good Dean will find and support those people.  Celebrate them, support them, amplify what they’re doing, and shield them from resistance and resentment from colleagues who are comfortable in the existing system, and from influential alumni who venerate the grand old days.  All of this is easier said than done, both on the ground and in the Dean’s suite, but some law professors and their Deans have been doing that, in some cases for years.  Hello, Suffolk University Law School and its Dean Andrew Perlman Dennis Kennedy Cat Moon Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and various Deans, including Daniel B. Rodriguez. Hello Daniel W. Linna Jr. Outside the US, hello Dan Hunter at King’s College London.  I see many others in and next to US legal education, sort of like Miss Mary Ann on Romper Room.  I’m sorry to omit some great people!

Notably, an enormous number of new and potentially useful and powerful things are being done in law schools today by energetic and imaginative people, things that are often consolidated into durable systems, despite (the ABA Section on Legal Ed) (state Supreme Courts) and (institutionalized inertia). Give it time, one might say. It is easy to get and to be impatient, especially if you are on the outside of the educational system, looking in. (It is also easy to be impatient on the inside, but insiders should have different expectations.) I yield to Denzel Washington, in the film “Remember the Titans”: “I run six plays, split veer, like Novocaine. Just give it time. It always works.”

In a different nutshell:

If you don’t like dealing with the house of bricks, then go around it. “To change the rules, change the tools,” as the computer pioneer Lee Felstenstein once said. The change management literature helps in a different way.

In my opinion there is no good reason to expect that “the law school” in the US, as the profession and academia have refined the model since 1870, will or should continue to be the singular, dominant training mode for “law,” let alone for “lawyers.”  Hello to the work of Clayton Christensen and the Clayton Christensen Institute. I am not a fan of the rhetoric of “disruptive innovation”; I focus instead on the insight that incumbent organizations tend to innovate (if at all) by incremental adaptation, creating space for upstarts to meet social needs (sometimes market needs) by operating outside the bounds dictated by pre-existing bureaucratic imperatives.

In that spirit, what might it look like to build “law training” from the ground up, independent of ABA and AALS histories, rules, and expectations?  The “why?” – the social need – is relatively easy; look at the one legal services sector that is actually thriving right now and explore the numbers of people without JDs running and working in those companies. Would more JDs turn these into better companies? I am skeptical. Would more legal training turn them into better companies? I am optimistic.

I don’t know what the end product of a “build a new training system” exploration looks like; this is entirely speculative, although I wrote up an “invitation” to this conversation back in 2018, before “AI” became the prompt of the moment.  Some recent law schools have tried this approach, or claimed to (hello, University of California, Irvine School of Law), but have abandoned it and abandoned it rather quickly.  I would love to explore the topic with anyone who sees the legal world through that set of goggles.  I would especially enjoy exploring it with anyone who is willing to step away from the assumption that ABA compliance is a foundational prerequisite for building institutional pathways to legal expertise, away from the assumption that qualifying graduates for bar membership is a foundational prerequisite, and away from the assumption that one-to-one client service (whether the client “one” is an individual or an organization) is the default be-all-and-end-all of delivering legal expertise to society.

In short, if this is your nutshell, then let us start over, as “society” collectively did between 1870 (the founding of the modern Harvard Law program) and the early years of the 20th century, more or less.  That’s when we got full-time law professors, “law” as a systematized body of knowledge and analytic techniques in their modern senses, and the kernel of the client-centric model of the lawyer. There is a baby in that bathwater, but let us not assume that “training people to be lawyers in the AI era” is the contemporary goal. Instead, assume that experts are needed to build and operate systems of law in complex and divided social settings defined significantly by systems of information production and circulation. That means data and algorithms and AI, but not only data and algorithms and AI, and it means blends of material and immaterial wealth, power, community, and opportunity that only dimly resemble their 20th century forebears. What institution(s) will produce that expertise? What does “law” have to do with that expertise? Where will those institutions be built? Who will found them? Lead them? Staff them? Pay for them? What do “systems of law” look like? I mentioned values and ethics a while back; they do not go away.

No one knows what the end point of any of this might be, “this” being “AI and law and training the next generations of professionals.”   AI is moving too fast, and higher education moves too slowly.  We do need the willingness to try things, to build things, watch them succeed – and not – and to iterate to make them better.

Last but by no means anyone’s final word:

Like a lot of law professors I know, I have been trying things for a long time, tweaking and iterating mostly on my own. In multiple respects, in my professional life at my university though only indirectly at my law school, I spend a ton of time thinking about AI and collaborating with colleagues on AI-themed projects. The conceptual and practice divorce between “my effort at my law school” and “my effort at my university” has gotten pronounced in recent years. At my law school, I am mostly still teaching “conventional” legal subjects, in part, though I have long since abandoned the classic, “Langdellian” single end-of-semester exam (or exams of any sort) as a measure of student learning or performance.

But the most fun I have as a law teacher, the thing that I do that is now most consistently in demand among my students, and my primary effort to maximize the effect of my teaching on the future careers of our graduates, is offering a course in “Leadership.”  I introduce students to a collection of skills that – I hope – will prepare them to thrive as professionals and as people, come what may. The syllabus and readings are here. Almost everything there is open and free to all; no Canvas or LMS for me.

It turns out that highlighting AI and technological change in law has provoked me into emphasizing the humanity of my future colleagues most of all. If there is a key to AI, law, and education (“one ring to rule them all,” as Tolkien might have written), in my view, that is it.

Have at it.

The post Brief Thoughts on AI, Law, and Education appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

This new LinkedIn article by Ajmail Matin – Pittsburgh suffers from too much extractive landlordism and not enough feedback-driven Pittsburgh-specific investment – hits a lot of good points. In the spirit of my old Pittsblog home (2004-2013; critical takes on Pittsburgh by someone who literally grew up and then worked in a real tech-first economy), here are three more:

(i) The “ecosystem” metaphor is limiting and should be abandoned. The tech economy is not an “ecosystem” (that is: every agent and actor has its niche; the niches are co-dependent; the co-dependence is systemic and evolves slowly in complex patterns). The tech economy is not an agglomerated place-based economy the way that “steel” was an agglomerated place-based economy. Pittsburgh needs better infrastructures, not a more “dynamic” ecosystem. Infrastructures mean physical, economic, social, cultural, and political systems that bring lots of people, groups, organizations, and firms to the proverbial table, fueled by investment from wherever and propelled by ambition from wherever, without pre-judging targets or winners.

(ii) There are landlords and rent-extractors out there, for sure, but they are walking among us, here in Pittsburgh. They are not in Menlo Park. Pittsburgh was built on landlordism. Carnegie and Frick were, above all, landlords par excellence. Pittsburgh was an extractive economy. It is still an extractive economy. All of that talk about promoting “physical AI”? That’s extractive landlord-speak. The AI-ish left hand of Pittsburgh is extracting value from the non-AI-ish right hand of Pittsburgh. The region needs a better mirror; it needs to account for all hands.

(iii) The real problem in tech and Pittsburgh full stop is not money (too little, wrong kinds). More and smarter money is always better, but more and smarter money in the wrong hands is a recipe for continued disappointment. The real problem is people. The leaders that Pittsburgh is relying on, and that Pittsburgh has relied on for decades, use imaginations that keep them and the broader region locked into an old school hierarchy-with-a-hard-cap view of Pittsburgh’s possible futures (plural). They clap and cheer loudly; nothing happens other than their becoming minor local business celebrities. At the other end of the pipeline, meet-ups among early career tech folk are energizing for them but, without the right infrastructures to plug into, amount to little more than added clapping and cheering. In short, Pittsburgh does not have the talent right now – leadership talent, professional services talent – to make Pittsburgh more than the small- to mid-size service city that it already is. If the talent were here and were invested here, Pittsburgh would be brighter and more energetic than it is right now. Most of the most creative and ambitious professionals I know in Pittsburgh today are people who live here but spread their professional wings around the world rather than digging primarily into the local economy. Or digging here at all.

This is a first half of a critique. The second half – what to do differently, how to do it better, and who should do it – comes later. The seeds of that second half, I’m sorry to say, are at Pittsblog (sorry because I ended that blog more than a decade ago, and here I am saying the same things; nothing I’ve written above will come as a surprise to people who read me back in the day). Stay tuned.

The post Three Things About AI and Pittsburgh appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

Certain corners of Pittsburgh jumped for joy, proverbially speaking, reacting to news that Phat Bagel has opened a storefront in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood.  Huzzah!  “Baked Phresh. Served Phat.”  Clever.  I made a note myself:  add Phat Bagel to my itinerary the next time I am in that neighborhood.

But the jumping seemed to have to do with more than the fact that Pittsburgh has another source of good, fresh bagels.  Hard working entrepreneurs!  Thriving neighborhood business district!  Positive flywheel!  More, please.

And I thought to myself:  we’ve seen this story before, Pittsburgh has.  This is the Cupcake Class redux.

Before I go on:

To be clear, I will buy and eat these bagels, and I really hope that they are as good as promised in the PR hype. I don’t need the merch, but I hope that lots of it moves out the door and the website.  I hope that the store stays and thrives and that all of the proprietors and employees and customers and neighbors have whatever long and prosperous experiences that they desire, and that more of the same and similar comes through whatever pipeline produced this business.  Really.

But to me, this is much more a story of market demand than market supply, and it is more a story of normalcy rather than a tale of the extraordinary.  This is neighborhood capitalism, which is something that Pittsburgh wants and needs, over and over again, and that I am happy to say is in much greater supply than it was, say, 20 years ago.  Neighborhood capitalism has a subspecies that is in some respects part of the Phat Bagel experience, which is food tourism.  I don’t live in or near Bloomfield, so I’m not a neighborhood backer or buyer.  If I go to Bloomfield to seek out a specific food vendor, I’m a food tourist.  We’ve seen food tourism in Pittsburgh before, and while food tourism won’t save a town or a neighborhood, it’s an adventure that I appreciate.

Again:  I re-introduce the Cupcake Class.

The Cupcake Class is a bit of primitive economic semi-silliness that I foisted on the Pittsburgh media scene not quite 20 years ago, abetted by a good friend behind the scenes and by partners at the Post-Gazette and the Tribune-Review.  The serious story was and is this:

Once upon a time, and building on the success of Magnolia Bakery in New York (celebrated in the original “Sex in the City” TV show), a couple of high-end cupcake bakeries appeared in Pittsburgh’s East End.  There was Dozen, and there was CoCo.  In a city that seemed to take pride in home-baked cupcakes from mixes and cheap cupcakes from grocery stores and little local bakeries, $4 and $5 cupcakes seemed – to me, amateur Pittsburgh sociologist that I was – a bit much.

What was going on?  I had recently had the experience of being talked down to by the women staffing my own little local bakery, who informed me that “custard” (as in “custard-filled donuts”) came only in one flavor.  Custard. When I asked, “what flavor is the custard?,” I learned that I was bringing a certain snobbery to the counter. Thus was born, via my bloggish wit, “the Custard Class,” an homage to Richard Florida’s “Creative Class,” of which I was already a member.

“Creative Class,” you ask?  Remember that not long before my unfortunate bakery encounter, Richard Florida – then a professor at Carnegie Mellon University – published a celebrated book titled “The Rise of the Creative Class … and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life.”  Florida, a sociologist by training, examined the changing patterns of late 20th century urban life and prescribed public policies aimed at attracting and reinforcing communities of “creatives,” a broad category of people, mostly young, who would bring life, dynamism, and above all money to places.  Want to renew Pittsburgh, for example?  Make Pittsburgh friendly to “the Creative Class.”

I made a quirky imaginative leap from the Creative Class to the Custard Class, then, and once Dozen and CoCo opened their doors, to the Cupcake Class.

I wrote a series of blog posts about the Cupcake Class, some more serious than others. Not everyone understood or cared about the lineage of the phrase. Some readers laughed or smiled. Some took offense.

At the risk of re-offending but in the interest of contemporary clarity, the following was, and remains, the serious core of the Cupcake Class meme:

A business that can keep its doors open selling $4 and $5 cupcakes has found an addressable market, meaning a population of people willing to spend that much money on baked delicacies, for one reason or another.  To borrow the legendary quotation from “Arrested Development,” there is always money in the banana stand.  In Pittsburgh, there was money in the East End. There has long been money in the East End, but that money has not always been directed to overpriced pastries.

But (the meme continues) retailing cupcakes is a business with low barriers to entry. Margins may be small, but profit is profit. If there really was money to be made selling fancy cupcakes, or if there appears to be, then other fancy cupcake entrepreneurs will appear.  That’s capitalism 101: competition is the way.  And in Pittsburgh, competition did follow.  Dozen had CoCo; CoCo had Dozen.  Not to mention the legacy little neighborhood bakeries, and bakeries in grocery stores, and Duncan Hines.

And (the meme concludes) if Pittsburgh – full stop – imagines bigger or better or wealthier or more equitable or all of those things and more, then competition brings risk, and loss, as well as growth and opportunity. Competition is stressful. Competition is uncomfortable. Especially for the competitors. Often for incumbents.  Success is never secure; the founders and the community may celebrate the launch but not think too hard, soon enough about how to keep the doors open six months or a year down the line. Long-established businesses may get disrupted. Maybe a first-mover advantage would keep the high-end cupcakeries, or one of them, in business.  Maybe community and family legacy would protect the little neighborhood bakeries from novelty higher-end bakers. Maybe there would be enough money in the East End to sustain more than one cupcakery.  Or maybe the demand for high-end cupcakes would turn out to be a fad, and the cupcake craze would fade away.  Cupcakes come and cupcakes go, as they say.  The Cupcake Class would remain, but they would spend their money elsewhere.

And that last piece is largely what happened.   Most entrepreneurial ventures fail.  Dozen and CoCo are long gone.

(A quick note to acknowledge that while I never met the proprietors of either store, I did buy and try their cupcakes – they were delicious – and I know that baking and selling cupcakes was not the be-all-and-end-all of their businesses.  I’m telling a parable here, not creating a case for an MBA course.)

Closing the stores was and is too bad for those who founded, worked at, and loved Dozen, CoCo, and other high-end cupcake ventures.

But this is normalcy.  That’s the point.  The rise of incomes in the East End that gave rise to the Cupcake Class?  Normalcy, to a degree.  The fact that the Cupcake Class is not at all representative of some stereotypical model of what Pittsburgh “is” as a place?  Normalcy, to a degree.  The fact that preferences and spending patterns among the Cupcake Class change, and sometimes quickly?  Normalcy, to a degree.

“Normalcy” needs some context, of course.  I mean “normal” in the sense these are phenomena typical or common for a city or region with medium to high levels of population density, demographic change, income distribution and growth, job and status mobility, and political and cultural ambition – the sort of city or place that Pittsburgh sometimes collectively aspires to be but that all too often it is not.  “Normal” in the sense that these are phenomena of market capitalism at work, on a small scale.  There are small “w” winners and small “l” losers from an economics point of view, and in a responsible political environment, there are systems in place to ensure that there is money and other resources available that enable everyone, “w” and “l” alike, to participate in the community and direct their own lives.  (But I digress.)

If the phrase “the Cupcake Class” is taken seriously, and if it offends, then I suspect that it generates (generated) those reactions because I stereotyped a population (bad), and I stereotyped a population using qualitative metrics that grate against Pittsburgh’s popular self-image as a gritty, worker-based, community-grounded, stable place (worse).  Not everyone in Pittsburgh shares a vision of the future of the place that leads to “more,” or “better,” let alone to “different.”  And even those people who do share that vision have learned, often the hard way, to keep their public shouting about it to a respectful minimum.

And now: bagels in Bloomfield, not from a package, not in a grocery store.  Lovingly made, personal bagels.

In a phrase, upscale bagels are to Pittsburgh in 2025 as cupcakes were to Pittsburgh in 2007.  They are evidence of capitalism at work, with all of the good and the bad that capitalism implies.  The Cupcake Class is still at work in Pittsburgh, now expanded beyond the East End.  Its members have bagels in their sights.  (And data centers. I digress, again.)

Will Bloomfield’s bagels survive and thrive?  Who knows, although I hope so. But one bagel shop may lead to two.  Or more. To competition.  To success?

We’ve seen this before. Pittsburgh once had high-quality bagels. When I first moved to the area, there was Bageland (Bagel Land?) in Squirrel Hill, a well-loved store (with a branch in the South Hills, as I recall) that expired not long after I moved to the area. Bageland was gone, and all we had were Bruegger’s and Lender’s and the like.  And in recent years bagels have come back.  There is Pigeon Bagels in Squirrel Hill, which makes excellent bagels.  More recently, there is Balena Bagels in Castle Shannon.  Also: excellent bagels.  In a word: competition!)  Moreover, the baking “scene” in Pittsburgh has more or less exploded in recent years.  If Dozen and CoCo have a legacy, it is less “cupcakes” and more “there really is a market in Pittsburgh for high-end baked goods.”  Maybe.

Pittsburgh’s broader restaurant scene has exploded, too, over the two decades since Dozen and CoCo were established.  But capitalism.  Restaurants come, and Superior Motors goes.  I come to praise the entrepreneurs.  But the market often buries them.  Competition.

What do I take away from all of this?

A great deal of Pittsburgh’s collective economic development effort focuses on “supply side” investments rather than on demand side investments.  Perhaps too much.  Phat Bagel came out of a neighborhood context, the Bloomfield Saturday Market, that was and, presumably, remains generative.  Long may that context thrive, and if law, public policy, and individual effort can sustain it, then so much the better.  But that farmers’ market and others like it, and more resources for entrepreneurs generally, are no panacea for Pittsburgh’s many economic challenges. There is a new mayor coming to town, and he has hired a top-notch, veteran economic development team leader, someone with genuine big city experience and also with personal Pittsburgh chops.  We’ll see where the administration puts its time and effort.

I take the other side of the proverbial bet.  Just about everything that I have written here, and just about everything that I wrote about the Cupcake Class 20 years ago, has a “demand side” bias.  There is a reason for that.  I love the movie “Field of Dreams,” but “if you build it, they will come” is a mythic and mostly false business strategy.  Experienced business people know that businesses thrive when they meet a market. Without customers willing to pay for the product or service, the business will fail.  It is sometimes possible to find a market, or even to create a market, but a market there must be. Did Pittsburgh have a market for specialty cupcakes?  Does it have a market for specialty bagels?  Markets aren’t always local or even regional, even for bagels. Maybe Bloomfield’s bagels will meet a market need someplace … else.

Pittsburgh once had a dearth of chain donut shops.  Then Krispy Kreme came to town, to much celebration.  Krispy Kreme went away (though here and there, it may be coming back). Pittsburgh is now awash in Dunkin, until relatively recently a non-player in Western Pennsylvania.  As Chris Briem once wrote, Pittsburgh’s potential for exploiting baking innovation may yet be not fully tapped.  But history teaches that Pittsburgh’s baked goods eyes, including the eyes of the Cupcake Class, are sometimes bigger than its stomach.

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What’s new?  What’s news?

Let me say at the outset that I do not have the answer.  I only have a question.  This essay is my Jeopardy!-ish contribution to the second-most important conversation happening in Pittsburgh right now.  Maybe that’s appropriate; 25 years ago, I appeared on Jeopardy!  I made a foolish bet in Final Jeopardy!, and I lost.  I’ll try again.  The question is: Who’s in?

What does that mean?

The first and most important conversation in Pittsburgh today is, of course, some version of “how are the Steelers going to right the ship?” The second, which drives my theme, is “what should happen to the news if the Post-Gazette stops publishing, as it seems poised to do?”

Curiously, or perhaps not, the conversations are related.  I’ll walk through the argument that, like a good rug, ties them together.

First of all, the conversation about the Post-Gazette cannot and should not be framed or driven by journalists themselves.  That’s right: the people with the expertise and career commitment, the people who know the news, the people who earned their places in journalistic leadership, are not the people to figure out what should happen to the news in Pittsburgh after the Post-Gazette is gone.

I understand, I think, why they think that they might take the lead (or lede).  They’ve been in the trenches.  They’ve seen mighty journalistic institutions get built (and helped to build them, themselves), then slip, and in some cases – too many cases – fail.  They want to be parts of the next building project.  The news is, in some understandable way, their legacy.

But the news, whatever it is, isn’t really about them. It’s about us – the people who live and work here in Western Pennsylvania.  It’s about our neighborhoods and our neighbors, about the companies and other organizations that employ us, entertain us, feed us, and more.  It’s about the governments that we elect and try to hold accountable.  It’s about our present, and it’s about our future.

And the news is not only about us.  It’s about money and power.  Our money. Our power.  Where and how we receive it, earn it, spend it, share it, build with it, give it away.    “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” remains the one true maxim of all flavors of economics, and “it’s the economy, stupid” applies to newsgatherers as well as to politicians.  The news is about what we value and how we value it.  Currency matters, pun intended.

Why me?

On and off over the last 20-plus years, since I started my social media “career,” I’ve lobbed journalism-themed posts into the Burgh-o-sphere and beyond.  I can’t help it.  Sometimes, things need to be said.  Sometimes, people need to be called on, and called in. My relative naivete was my liability, in a way, at least to start, but I learned to turn it into a strength. I’m here to ask questions rather than take things for granted.  I may be in no better position to do this than anyone else. But I am in no worse position, either.

All hands on deck.

I grew up in a journalistic household. I was surrounded by family and friends who were in different parts of the business. I wrote. I had a bunch of local by-lined stories in nearby weeklies and dailies long before I graduated from high school. Not long after I came to Pittsburgh and started poking around via my blog, I met and talked with John Craig about this stuff, back when John Craig was still alive and serving as the wise elder of Pittsburgh journos. I met a fair number of other writers and editors at the Post-Gazette, and the Tribune-Review, and the City Paper.  I got to know people in TV and radio, too.

With Chad Hermann, then “Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman” (an early, sharp-eyed Pittsburgh blog), I once led a lunch-and-learn at the PG on the subject of social media … before it was social media.  I had lunch with David Shribman to talk about what the PG might do as it became obvious that digital would largely kill print.  Lean into local coverage and lean into sports, I recommended, and leave most national and international coverage to other, national outlets.  David Shribman seemed unimpressed. He won a Pulitzer Prize, after all, for national reporting with the Boston Globe.

Recently, here on LinkedIn, I revisited and reworked notes from some of my earlier blog entries, in the wake of the announcement that the Post-Gazette would close. My most recent “summation,” about Pittsburgh and other big-city dailies, was posted in 2016. That’s at least how long “what’s next?” has been the question.

If the news isn’t really (only) the news, then: so what? A first thought

A friend sent me an invitation to a “Future of Pittsburgh Journalism” panel being presented at the Heinz History Center.  It’s scheduled for January 29.  It’s hosted by Doug Heuck and his Pittsburgh Tomorrow team.  Doug was a stellar journalist years ago for the Post-Gazette. Find and read his work from back in the day on the homeless population of Pittsburgh.  It’s impressive.   And the panelists at this upcoming event are pretty much everyone you’d expect to turn up if you sent out a call for today’s Pittsburgh newsgathering leaders, at least if you focused mostly on print, or the legacy of print.

I’m certain that the panel will be lively and entertaining.  I love listening to journalists talk; I’ve been around professional journalists my entire life.  Literally: my entire life.  They are curious people, meaning curious about the world (sometimes they are curious in other ways).  That curiosity gives them their wit and intelligence and their stories.  They are raconteurs par excellence.  They are often funny, and fun. Stereotypically, they drink as hard as they work.  Someday, I’ll share an anecdote about my giving a ride home to a certain celebrated PG columnist after an evening of carousing.  The carousing never got out of hand, and no amount of carousing could dislodge his nose for news.  There was a time when Pittsburgh really was the home of one of the country’s great newspapers.

But that panel is not who I want to hear from right now.  That panel is the currently constituted group of people presiding over Pittsburgh’s version of an industry that has been sinking slowly into the digital mire for at least 20 years.  The Post-Gazette wasn’t thriving up until the moment recently that the Blocks decided to pull the plug.  The Post-Gazette was one sick puppy, and it had been one sick puppy for a very long time.  Along with the Tribune-Review and every other general purpose news outlet in Western Pennsylvania.

And the news people will talk about the news business, which is not, to me, the conversation that needs to be had.

If not the news people, then who, and what? A second thought

If, now, I don’t want to hear from a chorus of newspaper editors, who do I want to hear from?

The other day, the Pittsburgh Business Times published its annual list of Pittsburgh’s “Power 100.” As the PBT puts it, this is a list of “the region’s most influential business leaders.”  But the list covers not just the for-profit world; higher ed, philanthropy, and other non-profit organizations are well-represented.  As the PBT wrote:

“To develop our list, we asked ourselves a series of questions: Who has the power to move the market? Whose clout reaches beyond their company or industry? Who in the business community does the governor or local leaders call for help? Who do you need to know to do business in this town? Who is likely to shape our futures?” I added the italics.

Maybe the PBT missed the mark a little bit; maybe it included some folks who don’t belong there and omitted some who do. That’s likely true for any list of that sort. But I need a reference point, and the PBT list is as good as it probably gets for my purposes. So:

That’s my go-to pool of talent. That’s who I want to hear from right now.  What does the future of the news look like in Pittsburgh?  I want to know: which of these people are going to step up?

Why look to the power elite?

Once upon a time, and in mostly a good way, this – a working group of the region’s power elite – was how things got done in Pittsburgh  If I’m known around town, I’m known among other things for laying down a marker in public about 20 years ago that said: the Allegheny Conference on Community Development is, today, mostly a waste of everyone’s time and money.  (The piece was published in the Sunday Post-Gazette.)  But that’s the Conference today, not the Conference’s original model.  The early form of the Conference, going back to the 1940s, involved corporate presidents and CEOs personally in the room with the Mayor.  Companies didn’t send in dues and delegates and get institutional representation in return; that was not a time of “community engagement” teams, corporate partnerships, and donations to local nonprofits in exchange for Board seats.

There was a lot not to like in that model, and a lot not to like in what the Conference did and how it did it, but underneath the layers of the Conference’s noblesse oblige and bias was a valuable and virtuous attitude about civic life and civic responsibility.  To be a high profile company in Pittsburgh – then – was to take an active and visible role in the life of the region and to express that commitment via investing the time and expertise of the company’s leader.

The PG’s departure calls for a renewal of precisely that attitude.  Modern corporate law and corporate governance say: investors, customers, and employees first; “the community” wins if the company profits; a “community engagement” team will take the baton of figuring out what the company owes the neighborhood. Anything more detracts from the bottom line.   As the line from Ghostbusters goes, “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”  I’m familiar with all of that. Before I became a law professor in Pittsburgh, I was a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley.  I know how venture capitalists and investment bankers think.  In Menlo Park, I know where they meet for coffee.

But what might be good for Pittsburgh’s industry today is not necessarily good for Pittsburgh.

Today, there are wanna-be Pittsburgh giants striding about the region, particularly in East Liberty, the Strip District, and Bakery Square.  There are “unicorns” among Pittsburgh’s tech companies, and an “AI Strike Team” that is enthusiastically championing the idea that robotics and AI are central pillars of Pittsburgh’s prosperous future.  Some of those companies are represented on the PBT’s Power 100 list (Aurora Innovation, Gecko, Lovelace AI, Abridge, Stack AV, Astrobotic, Duolingo) alongside long-time Pittsburgh businesses (including MSA Safety, Wabtec, Wesco, PNC, US Steel, K&L Gates, Reed Smith). Why not name names?

My question:  which of those organizations will step up?  Who’s in?  Which of the CEOs of those companies will take their own time to sit down with their peers, in person, over time, and build a pool of money, leadership, and talent that staffs and sustains an institutional successor not simply to “the news hole” left by the vacating Post-Gazette but to the kind of central, broadly accessible cultural resource that a daily urban newspaper, at its best, provides?

The Allegheny Conference might even help this process move forward. Someone needs to coordinate and steer. Someone needs to provide a conference room and pastries.

I do not suppose that a tech CEO or a real estate developer or a hospital system executive knows anything about journalism.  I do not want any of them running a key news operation. I do not necessarily want them to kick in their own money.  I do want some of their time and attention.  Their ambition.  Their vision.  Their strategic and operations knowledge.  Their reach across sectors and across geographies.  I do want their focus on a key civic priority, something that matters to their companies’ thriving and to their employees’ well-being because it matters to the region’s thriving, and vice versa.

Do I have suggestions and proposals for precisely what that time and attention should turn into, on the ground?  Of course.  But not here.  Here, I’m sending up a flare.  SOS.  Pittsburgh needs you.

Can we rebuild it? Make it better than it was?  Better, stronger, faster?

Having spent years in Pittsburgh talking with people here who run public sector organizations, private sector organizations, higher education systems, foundations – and also with people who run and work in small businesses, churches, and all sorts of other enterprises – I am asked occasionally:  what is the paradigmatic example of sustained Pittsburgh ambition and excellence on a broad, global scale?  The one institution in the region that consistently aims to be not simply the best here, or the best for here, but the best anywhere, period, full stop, and that gets criticized, sometimes mercilessly, when it falls short?

My answer: the Steelers.

Because that organization knows that its accountability is not simply to investors, employees, and (in this case) fans but instead to the community at large.  I know a fair number of people who live in Pittsburgh and who are (surprisingly, to me) actively indifferent to whether the Steelers even exist, let alone whether they are playing or winning or losing.  My point is both that the Steelers are there for them, too, and also that the Steelers as an organization seem to know that:  the Steelers know that they provide a community resource, a unifying cultural force that binds Pittsburghers to one another even while we are divided in so many ways.

There was a time when daily journalism provided that sense of community identity, too. “The news,” to repeat myself, isn’t only about “what happens out there”; it’s what is happening with us. What a daily newspaper provides, whether in print or digital, whether via text or video or podcast or other, is more than “the news.”  It is more than “accountability for politicians,” or restaurant reviews, or celebration of the arts, or brilliant cynics writing about sports.  You need journalists to do those things. You need civic visionaries to bring the community together to build the institution. The end of the Post Gazette need not mean the end of Pittsburgh’s “civic sphere” or whatever we want to call the community of shared interest and identity that we call “Pittsburgh.”

Who’s in?

– 30 –

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By Michael Madison

If your household plumbing is connected to a public sewer system, then once you flush, the water and its contents pass quickly from your dominion to someone else’s control.

So what? The answer, surprisingly, is that a close look at contemporary wastewater treatment shows us something critical to Postindustrial Cities: how our governance systems aren’t keeping up with modern technology.

Scientists have asked “who owns your poop?” out of ethical fears. They conclude: Get informed consent. Don’t exploit people.

All true. But those principles may miss a big community forest by focusing on individual trees. What many people learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is that community levels of infectious disease can be monitored by studying wastewater. Starting in 2020 wastewater analysis expanded dramatically all over the world as governments and public health experts studied our pee and poop. Those systems aren’t going away. The products of our most intimate, private activities have been turned into digital data, shared widely among public utilities, giant private companies, public officials, and scientific experts.

My law professor colleague Teresa Scassa, together with two co-authors, calls this an example of the “datafication” of civic life.

Is everyone OK with this? Did everyone agree? Is it right or fair that this is going on?

The last question is the most important one. Right now, we’re talking about analyzing wastewater in its “pooled” form. What was a solo item is now part of a combined resource, a valuable input into tools and diagnostics used for the common good. It’s pretty easy to judge that hypothetical ownership of “your” poop should give way to the superior public interest in community health. There is lots of collective benefit and little to no harm to anyone individually.

What if technology gets smarter? It’s not difficult to imagine wastewater analysis moving upstream, literally, and broadening in scope to test for things in addition to the COVID virus. What if we’re not doing wastewater analysis at the main plant operated by ALCOSAN, Pittsburgh’s wastewater treatment arm, but we’re doing it at the point where the drainpipe from your house, apartment, or dorm room connects to the sewer system?

The potential for overreach into personal or private affairs seems striking. The public benefit of upstream testing isn’t so clear cut; the potential for private harm goes way up. What’s the right response when ALCOSAN or its technical partners are asked to share home-specific data about, say, drug use, with local law enforcement?

On the one hand, legally speaking, in that hypothetical ALCOSAN might be on safe ground.

In the Kyllo case from 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement may violate the Fourth Amendment when it uses thermal imaging equipment to see inside a person’s home. But a home-specific wastewater filter doesn’t reach inside the home like a heat sensor seems to. And legal experts generally agree that homeowners have no privacy interests in the contents of their garbage, once the garbage has been put outside for collection.

On the other hand, there is the powerful intuition that something is “off” in all of this, because modern technologies of surveillance and data collection have crept – again – into territories that we may feel should be off-limits not only to the police but also to corporations, friends, neighbors – even spouses, parents, and children. The actual substance itself doesn’t matter. What matters is the story about you that can be painted by data analysis. As with so much of modern life, the intangible information in the poop is the pivot point around which key public policy and private policy choices turn.

***

This foray into wastewater is a starting point for thinking about related intrusions into our private worlds by Big Tech, often in partnership with governments, law enforcement, universities, and others – even philanthropies.

In a hundred different ways, both public and private institutions in and around Pittsburgh are collaborating to collect data about you, your families, and your friends on sidewalks, on roadways, at traffic lights, using both public services (schools, housing, and transportation most of all) and private ones (doorbell cameras). Pittsburgh today is like a public sector Santa Claus. It knows when you’ve been naughty, and it knows when you’ve been nice.

Nervous, much?

Don’t worry; not all of those intrusions are bad things, either for individuals or for communities.

But who’s to say, and how are we to know? Most of this activity is happening off-stage, where you barely notice it, managed by people you’ve never heard of. If you wonder whether you gave the OK, the answer either is you weren’t asked (maybe you were in a public place anyway), or you were – and somewhere along the line you clicked “I Agree” or “OK,” just like you do all the time when you’re surfing the Web and some site wants to know if it can put cookies on your computer.

Doing that is so trivial to most people that it may seem easy to solve datafication problems by making the “I Agree” button a universal practice. What if your toilet came equipped with a digital “flush click,” so that every time you flipped the handle, you sent a message to ALCOSAN “consenting” to data about you being extracted?

That’s where we seem to be headed. And that’s ridiculous. It’s meaningless formalism, for starters, and what’s much worse, doing that discards the whole idea of a shared commitment to a community. The possibility that we might care about our shared humanity goes down that drain.

Instead, the better route is to ask whether you participate meaningfully in a community-grounded judgment about the wisdom of collecting and using data about you. Do you do that now? Of course not. Could we imagine doing that? Yes.

What holds us back from following through on that idea is not simply the notion that technology always outpaces the speed of regulation. That’s a 20th century worry.

What we have to confront in the postindustrial 21st century is the fact that our governance institutions – what we currently idealize as “democracy” – are out of date. Datafication is taking the tools of meaningful oversight of the public sector, of elected officials, and well-trained experts, out of the community’s hands. The new era calls for different forms of community engagement, participation, and accountability than the ones that we invented 100 years ago.

Today, we’re using old-fashioned governance to try to deal with contemporary social, technology, and economic problems. Looking forward, we need to find new ways to meaningfully integrate community interests with political leadership and expertise of multiple sorts.

I have a new book about this: “Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons.” I love to talk about the book and my research. But the key message is a simple one: “Trust us” won’t cut it any longer.

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By Michael Madison

Food culture offers an emblem and embodiment of postindustrial transformation. Pittsburgh’s tastes have never been fixed, but the pace of change has picked up in its modern rendering. This isn’t “your father’s Pittsburgh” any longer, let alone your grandpa’s, where neighborhood identities and family-run restaurants were imported from Pittsburghers’ European homelands and remained largely constant over generations. The winds — and aromas — of change are blowing with greater velocity.

Pittsburgh still has more than its share of beloved old-time food traditions and venues. Pierogies. City chicken. Cookie tables. Some traditions have anchored themselves in bigger neighborhood and community rituals, such as Lenten fish frys and Greek food festivals. Others are strongly linked to specific places, such as Primanti’s sandwiches, Prantl’s burnt almond torte, and macaroons at the Duquesne Club.

Many Pittsburghers still fondly remember now-closed food shops and restaurants: Isaly’s; George Aiken’s Shoppes; Del’s; the Original Hot Dog Shop; Gullifty’s; Top of the Triangle; the Crawford Grill; Poli’s; the Sir Loin Inn. Remaining classic locales represent an ever-shrinking share of Pittsburgh’s present palate. For now, it’s possible (still) to eat at Ritter’s Diner, The Dor-Stop, Tessaro’s, Big Jim’s “in the Run,” Nadine’s, the Starlite Lounge, Alla Famiglia, La Tavola, and Le Mont, and to pick up seafood at Wholey’s Fish Market.

Today, with the steel industry all but gone, neighborhood food still matters, but in a different register. Via choices of schools, shopping, and working, residents — increasingly, Pittsburgh newcomers — produce (and reproduce) neighborhoods that once automatically defined the identities of the people who lived there. That new dynamic adds tasty layers to Pittsburgh, connecting it more explicitly to national and international sources and effects and less directly to neighborhood histories and interests.

Here’s a brief accounting of those developments:

Neighborhood hangouts. Despite the pandemic, these may be thriving as never before, from the local chain known as Pamela’s to Pittsburgh’s burgeoning upscale coffee scene. Coffee connoisseurs can opt for classics that include Prestogeorge and La Prima in the Strip District and dozens of upscale coffee purveyors and bean suppliers.

Anchors for renewal. Restaurants aren’t merely ways to socialize or satisfy one’s hunger. They’re often expected to be anchors for community development. In both respects, their track record is mixed. The promise of renewal is sometimes oversold, as with Kevin Sousa’s efforts to build whole economies out of new restaurants. But the wins seem to exceed the losses. Among the more promising stories so far are Nancy’s Revival in Wilkinsburg (don’t miss its list of local food suppliers) and Grandma B’s Café in the Hill District; and restaurants on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, Potomac Avenue in Dormont, Butler Street in Lawrenceville, Penn Avenue in Garfield and Lawrenceville, Main Street in Carnegie, and the intersection of Highland and Centre Avenues in East Liberty.

Risk, markets, and community prosperity. I once caused a minor media stir as the purveyor of what I called the “Cupcake Class” in Pittsburgh. The idea was that upscale cupcake shops appeared in Pittsburgh as local incomes were growing to the point that some people could afford to splurge on overpriced pastries. More money is usually a good thing for the region, but there is a downside: prosperity — what risk-takers are after — often comes with turnover. Cupcakes come, and cupcakes go.

The local craft brewing and craft spirits sectors have had more stability and success, because barriers to entry are significantly higher. The original Galley Group opened Smallman Galley by trading on a spirit of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and Pittsburgh’s food truck scene is thriving after regulatory barriers were cleared, offering abundant opportunities for new entrants and varied cuisines. But risk brings not only occasional reward and frequent failure but also the possibility that investors, employees, and communities may be exploited and left holding the (doggie) bag.

Globalization. Pittsburgh’s older cosmopolitan food culture had (and still has) a specific geographic affect, rooted in European communities. Pittsburgh has never been a food island, but until recently Pittsburghers haven’t looked broadly for their food inspirations.

Today, however, we see food from all over. Thanks to PennMac, APTEKA, and even the contestants in the Pirates’ Great Pierogy Race, both new and traditional versions of older Pittsburgh cuisine are still on offer. But don’t miss Salim’s in the Strip District or Panaderia Jazmin in Mt. Lebanon, whose success is evidence of the growing diversity of Pittsburgh’s people.

Simply excellent modern restaurants. Sometimes, an excellent plate of food is just an excellent plate of food, evidence of a chef’s imagination and a restaurant’s execution. Food for food’s sake is the heart of foodie culture, and Pittsburgh now has its own culinary cutting edge, thanks to local supply chains, a talent pool to support both the front of the house and the kitchen (stretched thin during the pandemic), and a restaurant cost structure that compares favorably to higher-profile locations in bigger cities.

My favorite of these, by a mile, was Legume, while it lasted. Today, Morcilla is magnificent. I hear complaints, largely from Pittsburgh old-timers, that the new restaurants are noisy and “edgy” in ways that fail to offer a comfortable meal. To which I say: Choose to eat somewhere else.  Diversity can be a great thing.

Food production and distribution. Heinz and its pickle production may have left Pittsburgh for good, despite Pittsburgh’s Picklesburgh nostalgia-fest. But legacy family farms carry on (Trax, Soergels, Janoskis, Simmons), along with urban farming (Garfield Community Farm, Shiloh Farm, Oasis Farm and Fishery, Braddock Farms) and farm-to-table operations (Churchview Farm). Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), farmers markets, and the East End Food Co-op have grown and thrived by blending community-based food idealism with both food snobbery and quality.

At the industrial end, the Giant Eagle empire grows and grows, anchored in its North Hills family origin story and numerous small-town markets, alongside the reinvented Eat ’n Park Hospitality Group. Pittsburgh outsiders, such as Whole Foods, Walmart, and Target, have found their places in Pittsburgh’s food ecology over the last two decades.

Pittsburgh’s shared interests, identities, tastes, and goals were once recognizably descended from Pittsburgh of the 20th century but have become slowly, visibly, and broadly postindustrial. Food tells a significant part of that story. In some ways, it’s the story of urban sameness. Like Americans almost anywhere, Pittsburghers can enjoy the pleasures of Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and Panera Bread. Those clean, affordable, standardized restaurants fill an important social need. The more interesting development is the region’s postindustrial embrace of the world at large, blended with some Pittsburgh flair.

Pittsburgh’s food culture today isn’t simply a Western Pennsylvania version of San Francisco, New York, or London — cities with incredible food that sometimes seem to have little connection to communities on the ground.

Is everyone coming out ahead? Clearly not. Pittsburgh’s next food challenge is supporting and including people and communities who aren’t represented here. Food insecurity is a big problem. Thanks go out to all who are working to solve it, most of all the amazing teams at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and at additional Pittsburgh postindustrial innovations that include Community Kitchen Pittsburgh, 412 Food Rescue, and Food21 of Pittsburgh.

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By Michael Madison

So much postindustrial attention gets lavished on economic rebounds, neighborhood revitalization, and yes, sports, that we risk missing out on what captures and sparks our collective community imagination: Art, and the arts. Cities should inspire, not simply serve. At its best, that’s the purpose of public art and art in public.

In May, Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum announced a plan to spend $60 million over 10 years to transform its corner of the North Side into a “Pop District”: an expanded museum and performance space; arts education and training programs for the community; abundant art on public display; and a blocks-wide district of arts organizations, galleries, and associated development.

Nearby, as I wrote last time, the Pittsburgh Steelers have rebranded their stadium with the “Acrisure” name as a signal that technology should rule Pittsburgh’s roost. The folks behind the Pop District say: Not so fast.

It’s not a competition. Pittsburgh is plenty big enough for both visions to flourish. And while Steelers Nation may be cautious about Acrisure, fans have every reason to cheer what the Warhol Museum is up to.

Here’s why — and none of this requires that anyone like Andy Warhol’s art as much as I do. Back in 2002, then-Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida published a book titled “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida, now based at the University of Toronto and a successful consultant as well as academic, collected data that (he argued) showed that economic growth in U.S. cities was associated with phenomena including a percentage of residents who belong to “the Creative Class” — mostly artists and entrepreneurs. The Creative Class thesis was born (“ambitious cities should attract and retain creatives”) and it has lived a long and influential life.

Was the Creative Class thesis correct? The data are mixed. Maybe a vibrant sector of “creatives” follows, rather than produces, a vibrant city.

That’s not to say that “creatives” and “creativity” aren’t important to all cities. They are. Professional artists and arts communities energize communities in ways different than our other neighbors do. They reassure us in who we are; they push us to be more, or better. Done right, art, especially public art, captures and expresses the diverse souls of a city. And no city can survive for long without it, or wants to.

But trying to identify and recruit “creatives” puts the cart before the horse. Here’s my Pop District-inspired amendment to the Creative Class thesis. The Pop District plan is evidence of a better strategy: When we’re talking about creative sectors and creative industries, a Postindustrial city should focus on supplying infrastructure, not on recruiting or retaining people. Infrastructure means physical spaces — public space, private spaces, and blended spaces — and educational, cultural, financial, and even transportation resources that welcome and encourage art and the arts and people who can see them, hear them, experience them, and even participate in them.

Some of those infrastructures come from the public sector, which can supply money, but more importantly, can supply leadership and coordination. A couple of excellent public projects are in the works right now. A new Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh’s East End is on track to be completed by the end of 2022, replacing the structure that collapsed early this year. Thanks to thoughtful planning and procurement supported by the Pittsburgh Art Commission, the completed bridge will include commissioned art, both as part of the bridge’s design and as part of its site, spanning Frick Creek. In August, Allegheny County announced a plan to decorate the Rachel Carson, Andy Warhol, and Roberto Clemente bridges with 600,000 programmable LED lights.

Some of those infrastructures come from nonprofit organizations, like the Warhol Museum itself; from private philanthropy, like the R.K. Mellon and Hillman Foundations, which are footing most of the bill for the Pop District; and even from private companies. Pittsburgh’s Office for Public Art is a beacon and resource coordinating many of their efforts.

Putting “private” anything into the process of producing publicly-accessible art raises potential red flags about the “privatization” of public, collective experience. I’m a cheerleader for the Pop District today, but I’ll be disappointed if it evolves over time into a playground for elite “art world” descendants of Warhol’s vision. The Pop District can count itself a success only if it pushes against the pull of contemporary arts snobbery.

What’s more, true public art — commissioned, installed, and maintained under the supervision of public authorities — is far from bias-free. How Pittsburgh funds public art, via a tax on development of public structures, inevitably pushes more public art into neighborhoods that already have most of it. The full diversity of Pittsburgh artistry rarely has been expressed in the city’s public artworks. And only during the administration of Mayor Bill Peduto (and before the COVID-19 pandemic) did Pittsburgh’s Art Commission abandon its practice of holding public meetings at times and in places that were functionally inaccessible to residents of most Pittsburgh neighborhoods.

In short, making and maintaining infrastructures is a complicated job. But someone has to do it, and it’s the right thing to do. That’s because public art isn’t just about economic development. Public art is an indispensable part of getting all people to pay attention — to each other, to their communities, and to their shared futures.

Pittsburgh has a history of being built and led by small numbers of powerful people. If that’s going to change, we need to find ways to build connection and identity across a broader community, even if those things emerge from debate, rather than from Super Bowl wins or the history of the steel industry.

The post #Pittsburgh’s Futures 11/x – Public Art for Postindustrial Cities appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

By Michael Madison

In mid-July 2022, the Pittsburgh Steelers announced that their stadium, christened “Heinz Field” in a naming rights deal with hometown condiment kings H.J. Heinz & Co. in 2001, would henceforth be named “Acrisure Stadium.” Nostalgia-soaked Pittsburghers erupted in displeasure. To them, Heinz — now “KraftHeinz,” a global food behemoth based in Chicago — recalls ketchup, pickles, and a certain mid-century agricultural localism. What’s Acrisure?

The answer to that question matters much less to Postindustrial Pittsburgh than the answer to this one: Why Acrisure?

The answer: artificial intelligence.

For much of its history, Pittsburgh’s money and power came from a few wealthy white businessmen. Some of their names live on in local legend: Carnegie, Mellon, Heinz, Hillman. Some have faded from view: Kaufman, Hunt. They all shared one thing: Their top-rank roles were expressed in impressive industrial landmarks: mills, factories, and office towers. The people of Pittsburgh looked on and, with few options, they despaired. And then they went to work.

Pittsburgh’s 20th century industry is gone and never returning. But the Ozymandian influence of its leaders thrives. It thrives in the enormity of Pittsburgh’s largest and most powerful institutions, UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University, giving their leadership automatic seats at the regional strategy table. It thrives in the institutional legacy of Pittsburgh’s mid-century CEOs, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. It thrives in the cultural norm that dictates top-down “planning” of Pittsburgh’s economic development landscape, even including innovation and entrepreneurship.

It thrived in the name “Heinz Field,” which was, among other things, an active expression of Heinz’s continuing Pittsburgh presence. But the name was a misdirection. Around the time the stadium opened in 2001, Heinz stopped making ketchup in Pittsburgh. 

Enter Acrisure. Acrisure is the new name of the stadium partly because when the Heinz deal expired, no one in the current KraftHeinz organization likely cared enough about the company’s Pittsburgh history to revive it.

But Acrisure is the new name also because one of the minority owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Thomas Tull, is a key Acrisure shareholder and chair of its board. He made his fortune initially in Hollywood; today he leads Tulco, an investment vehicle aimed squarely at “data science” companies. Acrisure owns a piece of Tulco. Acrisure sells itself as the “best of human and artificial intelligence.” And Thomas Tull lives in Pittsburgh.

To make a complex topic (data science and artificial intelligence) simple: AI means ultra-powerful, often mission-critical, useful, and sometimes extraordinarily risky computer software. Building and working with AI, not food, steel, coal, gas, or even health care, is the future of Pittsburgh. For better or worse.

Tull may not be Carnegie, Mellon, or Hunt, or even Heinz. As far as I know, he hasn’t claimed a spot in regional public policy or strategic decision making. But he is nevertheless emerging as the 21st century extension of the CEO-driven culture that built Pittsburgh. The leader and the sector are inextricably joined as embodiments of regional significance. That’s Tull, data science, and AI. “Acrisure Stadium” is the 21st century version of Carnegie’s coke works and steel mills and of the towers that housed Mellon’s banks and oil companies. It’s Ozymandias before the fall (long before the fall, we hope), an expression of Pittsburgh money and power, now expressed as artificial intelligence rather than as ketchup — or steel.

That leads me back to the question that I asked above — “Why Acrisure?” The question tells us that we should stop lamenting the end of “Heinz Field” and start thinking critically about AI and the future of Pittsburgh.

To start, this is what stands out:

“Artificial intelligence,” as a catch-all phrase that includes data science and its cousins in robotics, supply chain, education, sustainability, and even medical research and health care (UPMC, too, is not so quietly building impressive data science and AI infrastructures), doesn’t have big, fixed, physical “works” like the Pittsburgh industries of old. (Even “UPMC” as a brand, lighting up Pittsburgh’s skyline atop the former US Steel Tower, still points to actual hospitals. For now.)  Acrisure doesn’t make anything, and what it does sell isn’t the kind of material product that Pittsburgh has long been associated with. “Acrisure” on the stadium is a brand for the brand’s sake, declaring its significance.

The capital-intensive works of the 20th century were easy to see and difficult to get rid of.  The “works” of the AI-driven 21st century are largely invisible; their limited physical presence is scattered. That applies, too, to Pitt’s speculative BioForge project, if it ever comes to fruition; in its most optimistic version, the physical footprint of the facility will dwarf the global reach of the information and IT networks that it will draw on. Manufacturing (if there is manufacturing) and massive server farms live in out-of-the-way places where power is cheap(er), like rural Venango County, home of Stronghold Mining’s Bitcoin-mining operation.  

Contemporary AI operations are staffed mostly by technologists working in small teams, in front of screens, often at home and distributed all over the world. When the organization pivots, it can pivot quickly, reconstituting teams and redirecting data and code. What connects them to Pittsburgh? The weak ties of convenience and sociability, not industrial necessity.

In short, the emerging economic engines that we call AI may be the sources of the money that will drive Pittsburgh into the future, if anything does, but they are mostly virtual, always fluid, and sometimes evanescent.  

People have to live somewhere, and a major AI player, Tull, lives in Pittsburgh.  “Acrisure Stadium” is an easy and obvious way to stamp the AI sector with some localized branding, materializing “AI” for the benefit of the public at large.

In the classic baseball movie “Bull Durham,” the fictional pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh wanted to throw fastballs all the time, because (in his words) he wanted to “announce his presence with authority.” That’s what Thomas Tull is doing with “Acrisure Stadium.” He’s announcing AI’s presence with authority.

What happens next? Wedded to the past, Pittsburghers may drop the new name and carry on with the old. But they can’t turn back time on tech. Resistance is mostly futile. Stay tuned.

The post #Pittsburgh’s Futures 10/x – On Stadium Names, AI, and Pittsburgh Poetry appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

By Michael Madison

Pittsburgh, like a lot of Postindustrial places, is banking on growth. It needs growth to fuel opportunity; it needs growth to pay for equity; and it needs growth to support the rising cost of public services, education, and health care. Pittsburgh needs population growth. Pittsburgh needs income growth. Pittsburgh needs job growth.

But Pittsburgh is not growing. Pittsburgh is shrinking — shrinking much more slowly than before, but shrinking nonetheless. The city’s 2020 population declined modestly relative to 2010 and is perilously close to falling below a key threshold of 300,000 people. Gross domestic product for the Pittsburgh region grew by a paltry 2.1 percent in 2018-19; Allegheny County’s GDP grew by only 1.8  percent.

Fully one-third of everyone employed in Allegheny County works in education or in health care. Those are critical sectors both to the region’s quality of life and to whatever national or global celebrity Pittsburgh enjoys. But their continued prominence shows that the much-heralded “tech solution” to the region’s economic sluggishness not only has yet to arrive, it has yet to appear on the horizon.

Since Pittsburgh doesn’t appear to be ready to give up on growth, is there a viable growth strategy or two to offer?

My answer is: Look to the suburbs, but not in the way that Pittsburgh has looked to the suburbs before.

Going back decades, the City of Pittsburgh has expanded simply by acquiring neighboring communities. Is that a growth option for Pittsburgh today? The last major acquisition, the annexation of Allegheny City in 1907, was so politically controversial that it still rankles some residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side.

Annexation is still a hot potato.

Pittsburgh City Council recently voted down a proposal to annex the adjacent Borough of Wilkinsburg, although a possible future merger is still on the table. Many in Wilkinsburg value the borough’s independence and disparage the city of Pittsburgh’s purported noblesse oblige.

From the department of “If you can’t join them, beat them,” proposals to bulk up Pittsburgh’s finances by instituting a “commuter tax” on suburban residents who work in the city of Pittsburgh have surfaced from time to time. They have never come to meaningful fruition, and nothing in that equation looks likely to change. The financial picture is more complicated than either supporters or opponents suppose. The only sure thing in this debate is that the stakes have been jumbled by the growth of remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Good old-fashioned political collaboration, not to mention outright political integration, seems as unlikely as ever. Both in the city and across the region, Pittsburgh is notoriously fragmented when it comes to municipal authorities and government authorities of all sorts.

In interesting ways, that fragmentation has gotten worse in recent decades, rather than better. The identities of Pittsburgh’s famous 90 neighborhoods are largely fixed in place as a result of well-intended community organizing efforts from the 1970s.

Instead, Pittsburgh’s suburbs matter to growth in the same way that the old joke wonders about the number of psychiatrists that it takes to change a light bulb. It only takes one to do it, but the light bulb has to want to change. The residents of Pittsburgh’s suburbs have to choose to care about the region’s interests as much as they care about their own township, borough, or municipality — and maybe more.

That’s a tall order. Why? Some history is important.

Pittsburgh’s suburbs fall into one of two broad categories.

One is towns that were founded during the 1800s and grew to maturity and success before World War II, based initially on rail access and later via the automobile. Wilkinsburg is one of these. Each of these places was distinctive in its own way, but they generally had their own business districts, police and fire companies, and community identities. Some of them are still thriving today (Sewickley, Mt. Lebanon); some have fallen on hard times (Wilkinsburg). The key to this history, though, is that no matter its specific economic trajectory, each of these suburbs retains a meaningful local identity as a place, almost entirely independent of its geographical  proximity to Pittsburgh.

Two is post-World War II towns, mostly built by real estate developers plopping down rows of houses and central shopping malls amid former farmland, to take advantage of cheap credit for homebuyers and an abundance of automobiles. These places generally didn’t have business districts or community identities in any meaningful respect, aside from residents’ shared  interests in the successes of their schools — and their high school football teams. The key to this history is that without a planned physical hub anchoring their centers, each of these places lacks the core place-specific identities of their older neighbors. They’re addresses, tax rates, and shared schools.

That classification skips over some important details, but for now, it leads to this simple hypothesis: The first group of suburbs and the second group of suburbs resist growth-oriented regional collaboration for entirely different reasons. Residents of the first group retain some residual (and sometimes not so residual) independence that banks on their not being Pittsburghers, at least not fully. Residents of the second group may be deeply committed to neighborhoods, families, and high schools, but not to places of any sort, least of all a town. They may not identify as Pittsburghers at all.

Since that paints a bleak picture for the future of growth-oriented regionalism, I’ll close with a note of optimism. There is one trans-regional institution in Western Pennsylvania that does more than any other to bring people together under a collective banner of Pittsburgh-related interest and ambition. How dare I say that anyone in southwestern Pennsylvania isn’t a Pittsburgher? Not Pittsburghers?! Not coincidentally, perhaps, it is the one institution in Pittsburgh that, for nearly five decades, has striven consistently to be the absolute best in its industry, nationally.

The Pittsburgh Steelers.

I don’t know exactly how or why the Steelers have been able to attract and retain such a broad swath of community enthusiasm since the early 1970s. (There’s a theory that it originated in the rise of the team during the fall of the steel industry, but that’s wrong; the timeline is off.) It’s not the link to the black-and- gold color scheme; it’s not the attachment to the steel industry. It’s not just football; it’s not just sports fans.

Maybe modern Steelers fandom is a peculiar kind of nostalgia. But I’m betting otherwise. If I were inclined to figure out how to get Pittsburgh suburbanites to put aside a little of their localism and sign on to a larger regional agenda for Pittsburgh growth, I’d hire an anthropologist or two and figure out what makes Steelers Nation tick. Because the team is marginal in the scheme of Pittsburgh’s economy, but it’s huge in Pittsburgh’s collective psyche, no matter where any Pittsburgher lives and no matter even whether current residents were born in Pittsburgh.

That fan base has something to teach the people trying to get local governments to cooperate.

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