Hanging from a Supply Chain at 33,000 Feet

In the next breath, after advising us against the transgression of usurping the first-class lavatory, the flight attendant on the NWA flight from Detroit to Toronto launched into a sales pitch for the tasteful consumer products available for purchase using our complimentary copies of the airline in-flight magazine. A special offer was available for items ordered in the duration of the flight, but we had to hand in our orders before de-planing. It worked kind of like a travel class Tupperware party at 33,000 feet.

Call it convergence. There was a direct, personal appeal from a respected opinion leader (at least for the duration of the flight). There were supporting print materials providing the necessary actionable details. And there was a captive consumer audience who couldn’t go anywhere else or change the channel.

As soon as we were permitted to use our personal electronic devices I switched on a podcast of a Berkman Center talk by communications law professor Susan Crawford. Lo and behold, she was talking about what I had just experienced – corporate-style media convergence and conflicting notions of the Internet as either an emergent complex system or a sales-driven supply chain.

Here’s the gist of what she said:

The incumbents, Crawford’s term for the telephone and cable companies, believe the Internet is a distribution system. Think of it like a railroad moving goods from place to place or a department store offering an assortment of interesting things to buy. The price of everything is premised on scarcity. The incumbents want telecom regulation that preserves scarcity. They believe the Internet is its infrastructure. They built it (conveniently forgetting the monopolies they were given to do so). They own it. They should get to control it and reap the profits.

From the net-head point of view, the Internet is not infrastructure but process – the process of communication itself. It isn’t a hierarchy controlled from above but an agreement to communicate, an emerging complex system formed by myriad autonomous agents mixing it up and creating an abundance of new ideas.

Crawford develops an economic argument for future communication law that promotes the creation of new ideas rather than new infrastructure. Along the way she cites a seminal article by economist Paul Romer to make her case.

“There are systems everywhere. There are these two mind views all the time about how the world works, whether it’s a hierarchy with somebody paying for that department store or it’s an emergent system with autonomous agents muddling along and creating nonlinear forms of value,: Crawford concludes. “We should be leary of scarcity and infrastructure assumptions. We have good economic and social reasons to choose the creation of new ideas as our direction. The Internet teaches us how to do this; it dislocates the connection between infrastructure and application.”

So much to think about, I forgot my peeve about class privilege and separate but unequal access to airline lavatories.

After I was safely back on the ground and connected to the emergent system, not the supply chain, I read two blog posts about Susan Crawford’s talk by Berkman fellows who had a ringside seat. David Weinberger blogged it in real time and produced an impressively thorough summary. Ethan Zuckerman took a day or two to reflect and gave the ideas his own developing-nation economic spin.