Anthill

Not many policy designers made their way from the parklands of Ottawa to the cloisters between Hamilton and Toronto. Unlike Apti, not many of them had nieces like Swapna devoted to slow media, and not many of them had the New Communications Act to report on.

For the past ten years, the pace of Canada’s media innovations had slowed to a crawl. Sometimes it felt like the country itself were throttled, choked more tightly than a RogersMedia pipeline, its creativity sapped dry as the discarded oil sands. Sometimes Apti dreamed that The Great Northern Shutdown had lasted a little longer than two days, and had extended beyond Nunavut. Maybe then, some real change would have taken place. But a protest about water sovereignty was just that, a protest, not a galvanizing moment in the history of Canadian technology and civil disobedience. Not the kind of moment that could have dug her niece out of the cloisters.

Her niece had wanted to be a performer. Her BPI score – the Bieber-Phan Index number, the sum total of her Kinect yogarhumba performance stats, her Tube views, and comments made versus comments earned – was astronomically high. In the States, she’d have a manager already. In India, she’d have starred in her first commercial, perhaps even danced as an extra in her first production. But in Canada, she had no chance. Her school didn’t even have money for holiday pageants. If she wanted to make it she’d have to immigrate, or join one of those “slow media” collectives: street performers by day, Tube stars by night, eschewing any and all works by major studios as culturally unethical, refusing what little money still trickled from the old channels. She’d be like a Dickens or a Poe, struggling far too much for far too little. At least, this is what the family had told her. Then her niece cloistered herself.

The cloisters were different from the old artist collectives that had once thrived in Toronto and Boston and New York. Collectives were single-household enterprises – the Cloud Club, the old Artscape towers, the former domain of Cosi Fani Tutti and their ilk, Cloisters were whole city blocks wide. Their denizens renounced mass media, and refused to hook up to any major pipeline or pay any recognizable telco. Live performance was their ethic. Live, and only live. Apti had watched online video of a man getting a beatdown for even shooting the video. To view any performances, you had to venture beyond the city limits.

To watch her niece dance, Apti had to visit the Hammer. The Hammer was what remained of the industrial wastes between Toronto and Hamilton. When Hamilton hovered at the edge of bankruptcy, it pulled a Detroit maneuver and scraped off all but the core from its city limits. What businesses still clung there soon left. Then, the artists came. They took over the decrepit warehouses and abandoned machine shops. They slept in the empty shelves of the big box stores. It was all very illegal, but it was also hard to pin down. The OPP had bigger fish to fry than squatters, and after dark no one really wanted to be in those twisting, turning streets, all of which seemed named after a species of rodent.

But Apti had news to report: after far too many years, she and her team had re-designed the latest iteration of the Communications Act. It had risen slowly but steadily through the tiers of Parliament. It was a pale shadow of the Doctorow-Geist Bill of 2014, the one Apti’s niece had marched in support of. Sure, throttling was still possible. And sure, the killswitch could still be activated. But privacy regulations would now be more stringent than they had ever been, and you could sue if a DRM-enabled file did a rootkit on your system, or if any file from a corporate entity violated its website’s privacy seal. The telcos would forward more money from their access fees to new media funds. Heritage and the other ministries would finally start recognizing things like games and remote-embodied performance as art, and projects related to these disciplines would find more funding.

Apti found her niece teaching a body confidence course in the weed-choked remains of a parking lot. Swapna must have thought she was another one of the cloistered, at first, because she made the universal gesture for “come on in, the water’s fine!” as a troop of young girls – some of them primary school age – contorted themselves on the asphalt.

“This is all about showing the whole world what you can do,” Swapna said, as Apti came closer. “That’s why we’re outside where any old drone could see us.”

“Won’t they record us?” one of the girls asked. “Probably,” Swapna said. “Consider it an act of charity, girls. This is probably the most interesting performance those government types will see all year. The rest of the time, they’re stuck with the Pablum the commercial entertainment complex feeds them.”

“What’s Pablum?”

Swapna caught sight of her aunt and beamed. “It’s a Canadian invention.”

Anthill – Background Context

A Canadian media context characterized by slow-paced adoption of innovations, and a miniscule amount of funding for media arts development. Some welcome the inertia, embracing the “slow media” movement and eschewing “Big Content,” while others remain frustrated with the lack of opportunities for more traditional success.

2020 marks the year that Canada finally legislates the New Communications Act, a feat of policy design whose features many in Canada’s media, legal and innovation sectors argue was long overdue. Until 2016, Canada pursued an aggressive copyright policy that limited both technological development and (to a far lesser degree) the sharing of media texts. This policy, coupled with the trend among Canadian telecomm firms to throttle their pipelines in exchange for tiered fees, resulted in small but vocal (and viral) protests among digital natives and those with frequent access to international data networks.

However, the issues of net neutrality, copyright reform and stable privacy regulations remained a niche issue to all until the triumph of the youth-oriented, Internet-friendly NDP in 2011. This led to the writing of the Doctorow-Geist Bill of 2016. The Bill was so beloved among its supporters that they organized rallies in major cities across Canada. These rallies were frequently attended by fringe organizations like Anonymous and the Black Brigade, which led to police involvement and arrests. The tasering death of a young girl named Mandy Jackson following one such arrest further boosted discussion of both the rallies and the Bill.

The one area that Canada made certain to innovate technologically is in an Internet killswitch, similar to the one used in Egypt in the winter protests of 2011. It can shut down Internet access within a limited area, and was used during a multi-day protest in Nunavut for native water access rights. This event is now referred to colloquially as the “Great Northern Shutdown.” It received comparatively less attention than the arrest and death of Mandy Jackson, although community organizers in Nunavut argued that the Shutdown signified a greater shift in Canadian policy.

Although the Bill failed in Parliament, the issues it involved became part of the mainstream public discourse in a new and important way as a result of the Bill’s audacity and the rallies organized around it. As a result, the Canadian understanding of copyright and related issues deepened. This discourse paved the way for future discussion when another Act proposed more stringent levies on Internet service providers with the intent to provide funding for Canadian content via a central federal pool. This Bill would have established an entirely new fund available to all Canadians, with a broader definition of “media” to be developed. Like the Doctorow-Geist Bill, this move also failed to survive Parliament when prominent ISP’s promised to continue self-regulating in this area and vowed to make annual “cost of production” increases to provincial new media funds across the country.

Perhaps as a result of this promise, provincial funding for new media production is relatively higher than that available from federal bodies. This hyper-local availability of funding has spawned smaller media ecosystems centred on provincial production. Coupled with the “slow media” movement spreading across much of the industrialized world in reaction to the alleged tyranny of “Big Content” (embodied by major Hollywood studios and other well-known, big-budget cultural producers in India and China), provincial productions have enjoyed a slow but steadily increasing success. These bottom-up producers are celebrated in their communities as local heroes, and often see no need to expand their reach beyond the boundaries proscribed by limited bandwidth and resources. Innovations in microfinance have further enabled these producers to fundraise among their audiences, rather than looking toward more traditional channels for assistance. In extreme cases, these local heroes isolated themselves to art districts at the fringes of major cities.

The availability and commonality of microfinance also led policy makers to finally measure the opinions and leanings of certain demographics within Canada in a new way. Specifically, it allowed them to learn more about the opinions of younger constituents who often did not vote or otherwise participate in traditional democracy, but who chose instead to “vote with their dollars” and abandon telecomm giants (and Parliament Hill favourites) in favour of smaller, more local ISP’s. The most important of these observations was the understanding that Canadians no longer had any desire to pay for cable television or other cable-borne services, aside from the Internet. Perhaps more than any other demonstration of the common will, this illustration of where Canadian customers wanted to spend their money made current realities plain for policy makers in Ottawa. This inspired the creation of the New Communications Act in 2018. It required years of data mining and knowledge gathering, and still it just barely passed.

Facilitated and written by Madeline Ashby
Illustration by Ryan Lake

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