Wedia

“Look at this one,” said Apti’s friend Jill, from her coffee-shop armchair. Jill tilted her pad so Apti could see the video of skateboarders. “It’s trending up fast.” Apti squinted at it. “Why?” All she could see were a bunch of kids doing pretty standard stunts. “Look where they’re doing it.”

Apti took the pad from Jill and realized where these kids were: careening dangerously close to ice sculptures from Quebec’s Winter Carnival. It was the middle of January, but they were dressed in T-shirts and sneakers as though it were summer. “Nice. Do we have a handle on them?

Jill nodded. Apti handed back the pad and Jill made a gesture on it that squirted the video and related information to Apti’s own pad. “I’m going to get a refill and then we can call these guys.

She and Jill worked out of the coffee shop most days. Big as the old CBC building was, there wasn’t enough office space left there for Solo Advertising to bring in all its employees and freelancers at once. That was pretty typical, these days, when the former office towers of downtown were being rezoned to mixed residential/business, and everybody was connected 24/7 through the ultimate level playing field: a global, unthrottled high-speed net that had replaced broadcast and cable television, bookstores—and even the venerable CBC itself.

Hang on,” Jill said suddenly, just as Apti was waving her phone at the barista to confirm her purchase. “Oh, no, it’s nothing—I just wondered for a sec if this footage was made with a game engine, but there’re no artifacts in the signal from that.

Good thing to check, though,” said Apti as she sat down again. These days, it was hard to know which videos were real and which were being generated, on the fly, with perfect fidelity by somebody with a pad and too much time on their hands. “It’s not a mashup, either, I checked.” Whoever had made this could have picked and chosen actual footage from the vast libraries of media that had been made public domain in the past five years; but they had actually filmed it, probably using their phone.

There had been so much industry resistance to digitizing all public archives and extending fair-use to allow mashups of famous movies and TV shows. But the result was spectacular: a vast outpouring of public creativity that dwarfed anything the old companies had been capable of. There was no money in production anymore, but that hardly mattered when any teenage kid could make her own Pixar-quality movie in the rec room.

Who’s our market?” she asked Jill. Jill flicked a finger across her pad and the trending demographics slid onto Apti’s screen. “Huh. Definitely youth-oriented.” She’d had a vague notion of providing this clip to a government-funded safety NGO she knew was looking for things like this. But the audience trended a little too young for that.

She made a decision. “I’m calling.” Apti waited while the phone rang, then a very young-sounding voice said, “Hello?” “Hi, I’m trying to contact Samantha Brace? Yes, hi, I’m Apti Riel, I work for Solo Advertising. We’re just watching your skateboarding video and—yes, it really is trending hot right now. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. “I see nobody’s made you any offers to cross-grade your video yet. My company is prepared to pay you and your friends a thousand dollars to let us swap out your shoes in the video for the latest Metrics.

Apti held the phone away from her ear while she waited for the excited screaming on the other end to die down. It was a simple enough deal, and perfectly normal for fast-trending videos: Solo would alter the video images slightly and seamlessly to put Metric’s shoes on the feet of the skateboarders. If the video continued going viral, they would in effect have turned it into a Metric ad. This didn’t preclude other companies altering it in the same way, but there was a limit; most viewers were savvy enough to try clicking on parts of a viral video, and weren’t surprised when things like shoes and handbags turned out to be advertising links. But you couldn’t do it with the essential features of a shot or people tuned out.

Apti and Jill concluded their deal with the kids, and put the video into Solo’s pipeline. The alterations would be made within the hour, and the video would peak and burn out within a day.

Let’s see what else is out there,” Apti said, turning her attention to the next trending clip.

Wedia – Background Context

Rapid, Disruptive, and Socially-Driven Change

In 2020, the CBC no longer exists. This is hardly a surprise to anyone who’s watched the evolution of media in the past ten years; the days of the Big Three networks in the States are long gone, too. What exist today are not television networks, nor their cable alternatives, but independent production houses, individual shows, and the internet. Society at large controls the media that are produced and consumed; what curation exists happens at the individual level. People are used to customizing their feeds, which is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because your TV and other media are interesting all the time; a curse because pockets of bigotry and extremism can flourish and grow when you can tune out any image, news item or voice that challenges to your world-views.

Several key decision-points have led to this free-for-all of content and creativity:

First, the federal government made a massive investment in public bandwidth in 2012–14
Throttling of internet bandwidth was outlawed
Canadian copyright law narrowly avoided falling down the rabbit-hole of mandating anti-circumvention technologies to satisfy rights-owners
Canada joined the vast remix-library initiative that began in 2014, which effectively provided a gigantic database of video and music for public reuse.

There were many other events in the tumultuous decade that has just ended: the U.N. declaration of internet access as a basic human right, new crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding models becoming accepted by Canadian banks and major institutions; and of course the continually plummeting cost of computing, storage, and network access. All combined to irresistibly oppose the ‘walled garden’ model of the older media empires. Nationalism itself has evolved. While nation-states are still important, Canada is a brand as much as a place in the eyes of most people. Deployment and use of the brand are as much a part of governmental strategic thinking as diplomacy and economic relations.

Professionals who couldn’t adapt have watched in bewilderment as their professions dissolved before their eyes. Video editing can be done on any home computer or pad now, and all packages come with expert systems and training suites. All phones have HD video cameras in them, and you can buy sunglasses with built-in steady-cams and stereoscopic mikes. The art of machinima (using game engines to do animation) has fully flowered, since any home PC can generate simulated photorealistic HD scenes in real-time. Book publishers have become a boutique niche, since any author can publish their own ebook, and provide printed paperback editions through book-printed ‘jukeboxes’ that have cropped up in coffee houses across the country.

Society’s insatiable demand for novelty has created overnight sensations who burn out just as quickly, but walk away from their week’s fame with enough money to retire. And all those public domain images from the 20th century can be remixed and rebuilt and spat out again into the net: new Humphrey Bogart movies, new Mickey Mouse cartoons as the Mouse finally leaves copyright, and smart systems to analyze directorial styles so that your backyard Tonka-toy drama can have the same cuts and dramatic arc as a Francis Ford Coppola feature.

What is emerging, here at the dawn of the 21st century’s third decade, is a growing understanding that humanity now shares an epic imagination, a kind of creative space that outpaces the old notions of cyberspace or the Web. All the world’s music, literature, photography and visual arts hover literally at arms’-reach, all the time, and it is all available to everyone. Myriad systems exist to help you manipulate it for your own enjoyment or edification. Those people who made it their job in the past to do these things for people are rapidly going broke; anyone who has made it their business to facilitate this overwhelming explosion of un-owned creativity is thriving.

In a world where any message can be crafted to any degree of perfection, the scarce commodity is now authenticity. How people connect matters more than ever, and the vast storehouse of narrative, music and imagery is becoming a language in itself that young people in particular use to share their feelings and beliefs. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, educated people shared a rich meta-language of literary allusion, since most had read the same primary texts: Homer, Shakespeare, the great poets. Now, all that and more are available to all kids everywhere. The worst crime that these young people can imagine is restricting their access to this material, because it is literally part of their lives.

For media companies, the one ironclad rule of this era is now: facilitate, don’t control. Few companies exist anymore anyway, as the economic wealth of media production is divided among more and more stakeholders.

Only scarcity can be monetized; and in the world of Wedia, none of the traditional products of the media and arts sectors is scarce any longer.

Facilitated and written by Karl Schroeder
Illustration by Ryan Lake

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