The joy of unintended consequences

Find the article on rabble.ca, VUE weekly, the Tyee, and Common Ground.

At Fresh Hot Type, the after-party for the Fresh Media Festival on October 24, local media arts group W2 provided a letterpress with which partygoers could experiment. The idea was that as the DJs spin in the background, participants could creatively express themselves by using the letterpress, ink and paper. Not satisfied with what seemed like the natural limits of the medium, participants soon began writing words and expressions on both their own and each other's bodies and acting out the words on the dance floor.

Big telecom companies like Telus like to scare policy makers by suggesting any open Internet requirements for Internet Service Providers will lead to "unintended consequences." I, however, have taken to arguing just the opposite: that letting ISPs become gatekeepers and regulators of Internet usage has both intended and unintended negative consequences for innovation, online choice and free expression. Clearly there are negative consequences to allowing an ISP to slow access to a radically democratic and innovative file-sharing service like bittorent, which is still very much in an embryonic stage of development. Most major ISPs are slowing access to bittorent and this limits our online choice of services and content, it limits individuals and companies that would innovate with this technology, and it stifles those who would have liked to express themselves through its applications.

But now I think I may have got it all wrong—what we want most from the Internet is actually just that: unintended consequences. The original architects of the Internet didn't expect, intend and couldn't have even have imagined an Internet that would include bittorrent, Twitter, Skype, Google, Yelp etc ... They simply produced a neutral network where users could freely innovate and connect with one another. The best part about the Internet—the user ingenuity, grassroots innovation, and open collaboration—came not from the Internet's architects or ISPs, but from what Jonahan Zittrain calls the "Generativity" of the Internet.

Read the rest of the article on Common Ground's website.

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He is a contributing author of Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times, Common Ground, Rabble.ca and Adbusters.

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