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In the early 1970s, video was radical software. I mean this literally. In the 1970s, Radical Software was a video collective. Video was not only software, it was a generative system of the sort that Jonathan Zittrain defines today.  Let me put these two ideas together.

The first edition of Radical Software.

Around 1970, video collectives such as Raindance (a parody on the Rand Corporation's name), VideoFreex and People's Video Theater abounded in New York, thanks to arts funding that supported the emerging medium. They enjoyed a relationship to the Fluxus movement that preceded it, in particular to the work of Nam June Paik.  Raindance, founded in 1969, sought to serve as an "alternative media think tank," according to a history of the group by Davidson Giliotti [http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/history.html]. Its founders and leadership included Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Louis Jaffe and Marco Vassi and were later joined by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny. As they sought to create the Center for Decentralized Television, they wanted a new form of video.

It was the notion of software that saved Raindance. Specifically, the group founded a zine called Radical Software, in 1970 that celebrated video as a a generative medium. Their first print run of 2000 encouraged sharing and copying, creating a new copyright symbol of a circle with an X within that meant "please copy." Its members used the post to trade tapes with an international network. The concept of radical software solidified under the rubric of  the zine by the same name, published in 11 issues between 1970 and 1973, by founder and Raindance members Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny and Ira Schneider. Over the course of its issues, Radical Software offered information on pirate TV transmission, lobbying efforts, arts funding and video workshops and video theory, to name a few. The editorial in the first issue proclaimed:

"Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it... Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.

Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology - but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their own lives."

Radical Software shows that media like video in its early life were generative systems, ala Zittrain. What made them that way was the means with which they offered access to its creators -- and to the different directions creators could take when working with video. Radical software? Absolutely.