A comedic commentary on the future of the internet, TeleportNet, was the very first play to be staged during “The 24 Hour Project” at the Gordon Best on Saturday November 19.
The future of the internet is a topic that has been on the minds of Canadians recently as the online petition to block Usage Based Billing reached over 500,000 signatures and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has responded to Parliamentary demands to overturn their previous decision on the matter.
The November 15 decision the CRTC released stated that “The CRTC does not regulate rates or set bandwidth caps for retail Internet customers.” While this statement may seem benign, it is a direct response to many Canadian’s worries surrounding Usage Based Billing.
The original decision allowed for large telecommunications companies, such as Bell or Rogers, to choose between a capacity-based wholesale billing model or a flat-rate wholesale billing model.
Now, they must use a capacity-based wholesale model. This means that independent ISPs will have to buy a certain amount of bandwidth from the larger ISPs in 100mbps increments. This shifts the decision surrounding whether to cap the bandwidth of individual internet users onto independent ISPs.
Based on the outcry of Canadians and their elected representatives on behalf independent ISPs, it seems that the internet is more than a site of consumption, but a site of contestation. Independents only provide the internet for 4% of the market, so the recent CRTC decision would only affect the rates of those 4% of Canadian internet users who are with an independent ISP. But the popularity of this petition goes beyond Usage Based Billing and is a public outcry for an entire reformation of the way we are billed for internet usage in Canada.
Back in May, a CRTC decision to not allow Wind Mobile to operate in Canada was overturned by Parliament to ensure competition in the telecommunications marketplace. The basis of the decision was that the company was based out of Egypt and only had Canadian investors.
Now again we see Tony Clement overturning a CRTC decision to diversify the options for Canadians. Unlike the wireless overturn though, there has been no talk of letting in foreign competition to allow for lower internet rates here in Canada. There is also no talk in Parliament of what the role of the CRTC should be in these matters since this is the second decision they have had overturned in a year.
From Committing Theatre by Alan Filewod: “Today at one end of a spectrum of power and resources, the pervaisiveness of digital technology enables the state and corporate capital to intrude into every aspect of human life.”
TeleportNet is a play about what the internet would be like if it were physically manifested. The characters use a touch-screen interface to access what they want to send or receive from the Teleporter in their living room. Video games are played by acting out the game’s scenarios, Thai food can be ordered and delivered via the Teleporter and Facebook is actually comprised of people, instead of just faces.
The bleak, pessimistic worldview represented is that the TeleportNet will make us better consumers, not better people, that it will make us lazier and more isolated, not make real connections with people.
For instance, one TeleportNet character, (played by Lindsey Unterlander,) is stalked via Facebook. She is able to use the Teleporter to show up to her stalker’s apartment in her bathing suit to hand-deliver a virus.The anti-virus software is actually a crew in hazmat suits that come to clean up the mess in the apartment.
Examples like these, where actions people take online actually exist in more tactile and tangible ways, illustrate the point that some people do not stop to reflect on how relationships are established and maintained metaphysically through various means of communication, including the internet. “It blurs the line between live and digitally reconstituted bodies”, Alan Filewod says, “digitalization is the enabling condition, then, of new theatricalities.”
While I do want to share this bleak view of what the internet will become, I feel like the protagonists of the play were purposefully made to be idiotic to show what the TeleportNet could become, where the play itself shows how the internet has just reframed tradition media.
TeleportNet did not touch on these recent legislative decisions directly, but writer Tim Etherington and director Mike Moring came up with a clever skewering of passive consumption and a unique conceptualizing of analog tactility brought back to a once purely digital medium, all in 24 hours.
The writing began at 9pm, then went on until the wee hours of the morning. After that the directors assembled, chose their scripts, casted actors, and rehearsed while costumes and props were gathered. Dress rehearsal at the Best with the theatre techs followed and by 7pm the following night, 5 plays were actualized. The “24 Hour Project” has gone on for years and there is no sign of stopping.
