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Creating a Canadian future of digital consumers not creators

While we were away, this year’s Canada3.0 conference took place, the grand summit of entertainment & digital executives, educators, and government leaders. Again this conference took place in the bustling digital cluster of Stratford Ontario also renown for it’s thespian population, verdant local agriculture and vague geographical proximity to Waterloo.

Fortunately for the rest of us, our friend David Eaves (who btw is on fire with prescient commentary these days) was on the scene. His thoughts here are absolutely essential reading:

But these moments aside, the more I reflect on the conference the more troubled I feel. I can’t claim to have attended every session but I did attend a number and my main conclusion is striking: Canada 3.0 was not a conference primarilu about Canada’s digital future. Canada 3.0 was a conference about Canada’s digital commercial future. Worse, this meant the conference failed on two levels. Firstly, it failed because people weren’t trying to imagine a digital future that would serve Canadians as creators, citizens and contributors to the internet and what this would mean to commerce, democracy and technology. Instead, my sense was that the digital future largely being contemplated was one where Canadians consumed services over the internet. This, frankly, is the least important and interesting part of the internet. Designing a digital strategy for companies is very different than designing one for Canadians.

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Indeed, case in point was listening to managers of the Government of Canada’s multimedia fund share how, to get funding a creator would need to partner with a traditional broadcaster. To be clear, if you want to kill content, give it to a broadcaster, they’ll play it once or twice, then put it in a vault and one will ever see it again. Furthermore, a broadcaster has all the infrastructure, processes and overhead that makes them unworkable and unprofitable in the online era. Why saddle someone new with all this? Ultimately this is a program designed to create failures and worse, pollute the minds of emerging multimedia artists with all sorts of broadcast baggage. All in the belief that it will help bridge the transition. It won’t.

The ugly truth is that just like the big horse buggy makers didn’t survive the transition to the automobile, or that many of the creators of large complex mainframe computers didn’t survive the arrival of the personal computer, our traditional media environment is loaded with the walking dead. Letting them control the conversation, influence policy and shape the agenda is akin to asking horse drawn carriage makers write the rules for the automobile era. But this is exactly what we are doing. The copyright law, the pillar of this next economy, is being written not by the PMO, but by the losers of the last economy. Expect it to slow our development down dramatically.

Amen. The whole post is essential reading: Canada 3.0 & The Collapse of Complex Business Models

What Canada needs most of all is digital policy that actually drives disruption. Policy that maximizes the creative and innovative potential of any Canadian not just legacy Big Content. Let’s make Canada a nation of creators, not a nation of consumers. Let’s make digital policy and copyright policy that maximizes the distribution potential of the internets rather than blocking, throttling or criminalizing the tubes at the behest of walking-dead distribution models.