The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”

The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.