The Street Cleaning Gods of Filthadelphia
Philly's waste management failures have left its citizens waist-deep in trash, with little hope for top-down help. Can they shovel their own way out?
A quick preface. This piece takes ideas developed by Pirate Wires author Mike Solana — in The Sovereign Influencer and The Shitposting Gods of Silicon Valley — and applies them to Philadelphia’s trash crisis. If you’re already familiar with those essays, by all means, skip this preface. But if not, since they’re behind a paywall, here’s a key passage from the first piece (emphasis mine):
On platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and most recently TikTok, a relatively tiny handful of users create most of the content and drive most of the traffic. From the earliest days of social media, we’ve called these people many things: power users, creators, stars. The phenomenon, newly amplified by the scale of a mobile, social internet, is as old as time. More familiarly, we call it popularity, and in an age of mass media popularity became celebrity. But in a world of social media, celebrity accrues real power, and the most popular people alive have yet to reach their final form. While little has been done by the dominant social media platforms to meaningfully help — which is to say meaningfully pay — the most generative people on their platforms, startups have been building seriously in this part of the ecosystem for years. Now, with tools for monetization, reach, and cancel-proofing, in a world where the most popular people alive could conceivably not need the dominant social media platforms for much longer, we’re approaching a world of something new: the sovereign influencer.
And in the second piece, Solana saw, in Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s leadership on the supply chain crisis, his concept of the Sovereign Influencer in the flesh:
The image was sensational: a full-time CEO of a multi-billion-dollar freight forwarding company chartering a boat, investigating a disaster, and soberly walking the public through a detailed plan to solve the problem. In what increasingly feels like an age of American stewardship, here was suddenly some leader shit. A CEO not only shaping, but really seizing a major story about his own work would alone have been significant. But then, almost immediately, business bled from media to politics, and we saw some glimmer of our world to come.
…both Governor Gavin Newsom and Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach, contacted Ryan to learn more. Garcia then partly-implemented Ryan’s first proposal…
Ryan is a CEO in the new mold, operating in a new media landscape. He isn’t only running a freight company, he’s a freight influencer — a CEO as well as a media personality.
I see, on a much smaller scale, a similar incarnation of this concept in the figures of Terrill Haigler (Ya Fav Trashman) and Morgan Berman (Glitter app developer), and their leadership on Philadelphia’s trash crisis. I see a still-more-nascent version of it in the figures of David Bershad and Todd Kelley, and their leadership on graffiti removal, which I wrote about here.
One unifying theme here is citizens growing tired of institutional failures, taking matters into their own hands, and circumventing old machines to solve public sector problems directly. Another is the circumvention of traditional media. By leveraging social media, crowdfunding tools, and content-creation platforms like Patreon and Substack, ordinary citizens are increasingly able to accomplish meaningful change themselves, instead of hoping, all-too-often in vain, for a decadent elite to do it for them.
For loyal Philly Clearing readers (a vibrant and wholesome community that newcomers should be eager to join!) the content of this article will be familiar, but bear with me, I’ve tried to make the presentation fresh.
And with that, the piece:
Go to one of Philadelphia’s great centers of culture — that is, a dive bar — on the night of a local comedy showcase. It’s likely you’ll discover some hidden gems and it’s unlikely you’ll be put off by preachy political comedy. As for why that is, lifelong Philadelphia resident and rising standup comedian Na’im Ali has a theory: “in Philly, we got 20 other things to be mad about before we figure out if you’re Democrat or Republican.” Some of those things are run of the mill — variations on the same old themes of decadence afflicting many of America’s big cities in the third decade of the 21st century: rampant addiction and homelessness, rising murder rates, corrupt and incompetent leadership. But Philadelphia seems to suffer from a particularly acute case of corrupt and incompetent leadership, which, perhaps, helps to explain the things that aren’t so run of the mill.
Case in point: about a month ago, Philly Twitter was furious at the city because, after many months of (what was supposed to be) participatory planning, it rejected the safest and most popular plan for narrowing Washington Avenue in favor of a plan that would force children to continue crossing a heavily traveled four lane street on their way to school every day. No one knows for sure what drove the last-minute decision, but plugged-in locals are speculating that a single councilmember is responsible, and the irony hasn’t been lost on them that he was only able to exert his unilateral influence because the court date in his ongoing corruption case was pushed back.
Yep, in Philadelphia, leaders can’t even piss their citizens off efficiently. You want to scream at us because we can’t manage to repave a street properly? Give us ample time to string you along, make you feel included, and ignite a modicum of hope in your heart that we’ll finally get something right. Only then will we vindicate your initial sense of hopelessness in a grand display of just how corrupt and incompetent we really are.
In any other city, Larry Platt’s recent advice to Mayor Jim Kenney might be unthinkable. But not here. In the face of “the worst murder epidemic in city history, crushing poverty and rampant municipal corruption,” Platt argues that Kenney should (1) concede that these problems “are beyond his power to solve” and (2) rebrand himself as a basic quality-of-life mayor. If every Philadelphian has 20 things to be mad about before partisan politics even enter the equation, then the things at the top of that list might be out of reach, but surely Kenney could capture some of the low hanging fruit.
Take the city’s trash problem, for example. In our more neglected neighborhoods, blocks like this are a common sight:
In fact, so many of our streets look like this that Philadelphia has earned the top spot on the list of America’s dirtiest big cities and the embarrassing nickname “Filthadelphia” along with it. Like the man in the video says, kids shouldn’t have to walk in the street to avoid piles of trash on the sidewalk. And in most cities, kids don’t have to — because keeping trash off the streets is a basic municipal service, one that, as Platt observes, “isn’t actually that complicated.” Accordingly, Platt’s advice to Kenney is to lower his sights: if the war on gun violence is out of reach, “declare war on litter” instead.
The thing is, keeping our streets clean seems to be just as difficult for Kenney as is making them safe for schoolchildren to cross. The city already effectively declared war on litter before the pandemic. Kenney had a well-funded Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet with a talented young director, Nic Esposito, who was dubbed the city’s garbage czar. They had plans to relaunch the city’s street sweeping program, which has been MIA since 2009. Then covid hit: Kenney dissolved the cabinet as an austerity measure and delayed the street sweeping plans; meanwhile, a sanitation worker labor shortage slowed trash collection citywide. A litter task force is still in the pipeline, but local activists have called bullshit:
I don’t really see the need for a new task force for this because we know what to do, they’re solved problems. The taskforce move is always sort of like city government’s way of punting things that they don’t want to do anything about.
Fortunately for Kenney, if it’s true that he doesn’t want to do anything about the city’s litter problem, he doesn’t really have to. He could take credit for solving it simply by letting other people solve it for him.
Rewind the clock to January 1, 2019. Philadelphia was a bit cleaner than it is today. Its residents were blissfully ignorant of the coronavirus lurking just around the corner, and they couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much filthier it would make their city. But Morgan Berman, founder and CEO of MilkCrate, had already had enough:
Two-and-a-half years ago, I was stumbling over trash on New Year's Day and thought to myself, you know, I help organizations motivate behavior change with mobile apps, why can't I figure out how to change this behavior with a mobile app?
And so she started figuring it out. By July of 2021, Berman was ready to launch the pilot version of Glitter, an app that she says could keep as many as 10,000 of the city’s dirtiest blocks clean with as little as $16 million in funding. It would do so by:
assign[ing] paid cleaners within their respective neighborhoods to collect and bag any reported litter and log it in the Glitter system; they receive a paycheck at the end of the week. The bags are marked with Glitter-branded stickers and left curbside for Haigler to collect using a private collection truck purchased with a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The paid cleaners would be low-income Philadelphians and the pay rate would be in the neighborhood of $25/hour. And “Haigler” is Terrill Haigler, aka Ya Fav Trashman, the man who took that video of schoolchildren stumbling over mounds of garbage. Haigler is a former sanitation worker turned social media influencer. Since leaving his job and devoting himself full-time to sanitation activism during the pandemic, he’s amassed 30,000 followers on Instagram, started a nonprofit called Trash 2 Treasure, and begun organizing cleanups. The cleanups are partially crowd-funded, partially corporate-sponsored, and entirely fueled by volunteer labor. Here’s what Haigler was able to make happen on the street featured in that video:
A hundred volunteers — surgeons, politicians, blue collar folks, parents with their children, CEOs, journalists — assembled under a SEPTA overpass in North Philly on a cold, damp holiday, getting their hands dirty, jamming to music courtesy of DJ Bounce Gawd, enjoying complementary snacks and coffee. Less than three hours later, two full dump truck loads of garbage — over ten tons of trash — had been hauled away from this single block:
Pretty inspiring stuff. And it all happened because Haigler has acquired a platform on social media — which in today’s world is to say he’s acquired power — and has used it for good. As with any good thing, there are those who see what Haigler is doing and say, yeah, sure, that’s nice and all, BUT:
Unsolicited as Ellison’s two cents were, his point is well-taken. That so many streets in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods are suffocating beneath mounds of garbage is a municipal failure. Accountability is important. Coordination with local officials would be nice. But one need only peruse the replies to Ellison’s tweets to get the sense that people have been trying in vain for a while to hold elected officials accountable on this issue:
And what’s worse is that, as noted above, Haigler is already part of a solution — Berman’s Glitter app — that could go a long way toward absolving Philly’s elected officials from responsibility altogether. Berman and Haigler are begging for the city to let them take the wheel on this issue. But as Platt has pointed out:
Rather than enthusiastically and, yes, financially support the innovation, the Streets Department has shown itself to be a risk-averse bureaucracy by taking a wait and see approach: “If the app is piloted and successful, the City will consider an RFP, but the pilot must be objectively proven to reduce litter citywide,” a Streets Department spokesperson told The Citizen last year.
By a perverse twist of bureaucratic logic, the city has trapped itself in the loop of a self-fulfilling prophecy: we have no litter reduction programs that are objectively proven to reduce litter citywide, and we can’t fund programs that lack objective proof; we do have this one unpiloted program that needs our funding to generate objective proof of its efficacy, but we can’t fund it because it lacks proof, so instead we’ll just do nothing, which, we assure you, is the safest option. Nice as it might be for Haigler to align his efforts with those of elected officials, it seems more likely that the furthest they’ll be willing to go is to stop by his cleanups for PR photoshoots and symbolic award ceremonies:
Even if the city won’t fund Glitter or otherwise give Haigler substantive institutional support, it’s clear that his efforts are making an impact. Perhaps you noticed him say, towards the end of the video previewing his MLK Day cleanup site, that he would release its address in a few days. Why wait? Well, Haigler’s jumped the gun before, and then, come cleanup day, the garbage was magically gone. Ellison has written that:
City leaders should be embarrassed by the optics of a one-man private citizen anti-trash crusade doing exactly what their multi-million dollar budgeted Streets Department is supposed to do.
But if they’ve been poaching his cleanup sites on the sly, then it seems they’re already feeling that embarrassment. Maybe, if nothing else, Haigler’s heroics will shame the city into revitalizing its waste management machine. Latent in this possibility is a familiar dynamic. Pirate Wires readers will remember Ryan Petersen’s port-crisis heroics. With leaders effectively abdicating responsibility for the crisis, Petersen said screw it, if you won’t, I will — I’m “chartering a boat, investigating a disaster, and soberly walking the public through a detailed plan to solve the problem.” And it kind of worked — the Mayor of Long Beach partially implemented Petersen’s policy proposal — but more importantly, it pointed in the direction of new problem-solving possibilities. Petersen, at least for a moment, was Solana’s Sovereign Influencer in the flesh.
Haigler is no Ryan Petersen, Philly’s trash problem is no international supply chain crisis, and Glitter isn’t exactly a detailed plan for solving it. But the universe of sovereign influencers isn’t limited to industry titans and global crises. Smaller people can help solve smaller problems by tapping into the same power source. Haigler has galvanized public energy around Philly’s filthy streets. For now, that energy is still largely untapped. But he’s only just begun to build a supplement to the city’s rusty, creaking waste management machine.
So, yes, Philadelphia has 20 things to be mad about and seemingly no official leaders to look to for relief. But it also has men like Haigler. “I got the Philly blood in me,” he told Abby Cruz of Good Morning America, “and it was like: If someone can't do for you, you do for yourself.” Don’t be surprised if others like him start to crop up, because:
Our swag men won’t be cropping up within the walls of risk-averse bureaucracies. They’ll be cropping up in the places where the effects of the fucked times are felt most acutely – whether it’s the Port of Long Beach or the litter-strewn streets of Philadelphia – and they’ll be doing for themselves what our dripless establishment has failed to do. The old machine can take cues from them, or it can be left behind. In any case, the street cleaning gods of Philadelphia are done waiting around for someone else to shovel them out of the shit.