Lords of the Cloud

Apti awoke gently to her light-activated alarm. It was her favorite travel item. She was surprised at how rested she was, given that she’d had only four hours' sleep. As she indulged in her morning espresso, she checked a nearby tablet to see if there were any new messages. She was on international time, being responsive to several time zones at once. Nothing alarming. Good.

She was in Toronto and debating relocation to their new offices there. It was an acquisition and a contentious one: the venerable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC was now majority owned by Mediaphor LLC, a conglomerate with mostly Canadian and Scottish leadership, following the latter's break from the UK. Though her home offices were in Dubai, she wasn’t a local there either — just one of the many migrant knowledge workers that bolstered that economy. Mediaphor had properties around the world.

However, she didn’t actually travel very often. No one did, really. Carbon taxes saw to that. Relocations happened but travel was extravagantly, prohibitively expensive. Telepresence technologies filled in. As a lawyer, she relied on remote signature technologies that could produce defensible digital signatures. Law had changed. She was a specialist in International Intellectual Property (IIP) and worked within media production teams, ensuring that they encoded all the proper MakerMarks and had agreements in place as needed. The landscape was particularly challenging: broadcast models had changed, integrating narrowcast platforms and working within a network of content creators – often international in nature.

Canada could no longer justify the extent of its investments in the CBC as public appetites for extra-territorial, transmedia and prosumer content only grew more gluttonous. Certainly the nation's broadcaster had reinvented itself, and done a fine job according to diehard supporters, but it simply could not keep up with the surrounding maelstrom of creative destruction. The government still had a stake in the entity but had sold portions off, hoping that it would kick-start a new and necessary model of working and creating. Looking back, Apti realized that the real death knell had been the collapse of the BBC. This was the world of full-body telephony, where intelligent MakerMarks encoded into fanvids could identify who was consuming what and where and how often — a technology that would have enabled more infringement suits than ever, had the laws not changed to protect the fringers.

So today was the day that leadership was beginning its first day of sessions with the new team, model and partners. She debated her dress – was the black suit too mournful? Would too much colour look overly optimistic? Canadians dressed very casually, she noted. They seemed casual in everything – perhaps this was part of the charm and the challenge. People loved working with Canadians – “an affable and creative culture.” Protecting IP wasn’t a strength, back then. Now it had to be. That was her challenge.

As she walked to the offices, she wondered if the Water War had made the country more disposed to the steps she was about to implement. Or had it made them more protectionist and resistant to her arrival? Regardless, “the corporation” was now privatized, with strong government investments in R&D – largely for new platforms and technologies that served a new way of working and a marketplace that was still trying to stabilize.

Ambition ruled the day, internationally, and the Canadian production houses were hot items for content. Granted, the business processes, co-productions and distribution mechanisms all needed a reboot. But the Canadian foothold would be a benefit in the mid- to long-run strategy of her conglomerate, as water shortages elsewhere meant a big boon for the Canadian Data Server Farms where cool, green IT was assured, at least for the next ten years. She made a note to look into the Candata IPO when she got back.

For now, though, she had a meeting. Opening the door, she noticed two different telepresences: one robotic, the other projected. She smiled. Just like home, she thought.

Lords of the Cloud – Context

A commercially driven world of rapid technological innovation and adoption, affording new configurations of media partnerships, platforms and processes

In 2020 the media landscape in Canada had shifted dramatically. Conservative governments here had divested themselves of funding a culture industry for Canadians. They had invested in the technology sector for commercial reasons. Canada was poised to become a place of Research and Development for many companies – national or otherwise. It had created a technological infrastructure for securing, managing and distributing data. The media companies were pulled into the mix, as Canadian content production had been revered for a long time as being world-class.

No longer relying on government funding structures, many professionals in the Creative Class had no work. And many of the creative hot houses, such as residencies and small collectives simply folded. But some of the entrenched professionals and organizations found themselves in the new technology space, monetizing their assets by data flow and international mechanisms of distribution through international partners and owners. The media and arts scene was not dead – it was just tougher to break in. There were plenty of conferences and trade shows. Canada was particularly good at creating educational content for an international audience and their main competitor was the BBC, now a private-public partnership.

The digital divide in Canada was growing at the same time that access to technology was becoming essential to almost every aspect of civic, social, and professional life. Although Internet access was considered a human right, the problem was far from resolved. Some sectors were very prosperous – and those players within a technological innovation sphere were of the well off. Wealth generation was on the rise but the social infrastructure was suffering, as it wasn’t distributed through services or other mechanisms of support – for the individual or the company.

Incentives for R&D drew large companies in, and helped some national companies grow. Investments were largely international in nature coming from the USA, BRIC, and the Middle East. There was a lot of horizontal and vertical integration, producing a landscape of many large, dominant players that used ownership and control to innovate and sell. The ecology was diversified by start-ups or spin-offs, most of whom had seed funding. The companies welcomed this mix, helped create this mix to spur on agile innovation – a known tactic. If successful, these smaller players would often times be (re)absorbed into a larger organization, or their IP would be purchased outright for particular assets and they might be funded to create new ones. The landscape was dynamic, energized and harsh. Social innovation required ROI to get noticed and many efforts were only supported through philanthropic foundations, not venture capital.

Birth-rates have continued to fall and much of the population in Canada are migrant workers – skilled and “unskilled.” Water shortages internationally have made Canada a destination for migrants and companies. The cost of living has gone up, including the cost of education. The society is made up of have’s and have-nots in a more dramatic fashion than today. Education and medical infrastructure, as well as the Internet are all running on two-tiered systems. Canada excels in all of these realms – education, medical and some technology sector industries as profitable, world-class players, largely due to its excellent content creation and data warehousing.

There are many game-changing technologies, devices and formats. Canada has invested in significant technologies that evolved into commercial success – such as new user interfaces, and new platforms for representation, such as 3D technologies and ambient, virtual display systems.

Facilitated and written by Suzanne Stein
Illustration by Ryan Lake

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