I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

by Nick Bilton

  Granted, I’m a geek. I grew up playing the first video games ever made, and I still get excited by anything with buttons or a screen. I’m also hardwired for this wireless world. Call it ADD, impatience, or an overactive imagination, but I’ve always found it very tough to concentrate on just one topic.

  My career path reflects this. I started out in the movie industry designing film titles. Then I moved to packaging design, where I created the initial mock-up for the first ever Britney Spears doll. (Please don’t hold that against me—we all do things we’re not proud of!) From packaging, I moved into advertising, which quickly morphed into Web advertising and Web programming. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, I decided to become a documentary filmmaker. I entered a yearlong certificate program in journalism and documentary film at New York University and then switched careers again, working at smaller alternative weekly newspapers in New York, where I learned the ropes.

  My first job at the Times was as the art director of the Business and Circuits sections. Soon enough, my boss found out that I could both write stories and write computer code, and I was secretly assigned to a new digital reading collaboration project between Microsoft and the Times. (The project, called Times Reader, built a new kind of digital newspaper for tablet computers.) From there, I moved into two new research and technology-integration roles. For three years, I was the user interface specialist and researcher in the research and development department at the New York Times Company. The R&D Labs, as they are called, focused on a variety of projects, including building and prototyping mobile phone applications and working with device manufacturers to try to influence the boundaries of e-readers and the coming flexible screens. We also wrote short “white papers” for the company, exploring and explaining the implications of unlimited wireless Internet or doing informed speculative research on upcoming technologies and how they will affect the way we create, consume, and deliver content in the next few years. Our core mission in R&D was looking into the future to try to forecast how the technology and media worlds will work in the next two to ten years—what gadgets we’ll use, the media we will consume, and what advertising will accompany those channels.

  Simultaneously, I worked in the newsroom as design integration editor, charged with rethinking how the print narrative can morph and adapt to a digital form. More recently, I’ve joined the business section writing staff as the lead blogger for Bits, the paper’s technology blog.

  When I looked at all the different jobs I’ve been involved with over the last fifteen years—from advertising, writing, and photography to video, programming, and user interface design—I noticed one undeviating thread that ties it all together: storytelling.

  All the pieces of my work—the photos, the words, the packages, the design, the programming code—all work hand-in-glove to tell a story. In fact, many of you are storytellers too, using a variety of media and marketing to sell your products, your political candidates, or simply your best ideas. Everything we do, in one form or another, is storytelling.

  Just like me, the generation coming of age in this digital society doesn’t see or perceive much difference in types of media. Video? Words? Music? Computer code? It doesn’t matter. The actual tools used are irrelevant. It’s the end result—the storylines, the messages—that matters. This generation thinks in pictures, words, and still and moving images and is comfortable mixing them all in the same space.

  Even more, they don’t need professionals or professional equipment to make it happen or direct it. With a computer and an inexpensive camera, they can create and consume in short, medium, and long forms. And if a form doesn’t exist, they can create it. They are the new regime of storytellers.

  You, Too, Will Be in the Future Soon Enough

  It wasn’t so long ago that content of all kinds seemed to be packed into big heavy bundles. You didn’t buy a great story; you bought a magazine or a book. For the most part, you bought albums, cassettes, or CDs, not single songs. Movies were an evening’s entertainment. The only editing was done by professionals, and distribution was handled by large companies with skilled salespeople and deep marketing budgets. Everything was sold at a markup, though in some cases advertising subsidized the cost.

  Not anymore. Today, driven by a surge in technological innovation, that model is caving in on all sides. Look at computers as an example: As memory, storage capacity, and screens have become less expensive, the options have grown beyond the wildest dreams of a quarter century ago. The byte—the computer’s single unit of data—was grouped in mere thousands in the 1980s to create games so basic that they were simply dots, lines, and equations. Today, video games are so real that it’s hard to tell if you’re watching a movie or playing in a virtual world.

  The pricing of these technologies also tells a fascinating story: In 1984, the 10-megabyte hard drive was a wide-eyed wonder and considered a real deal at $4,495.3 By 2004, just twenty years later, such a drive was completely obsolete, too small to be used for modern computing tasks and not worth the effort to make. Today, $100 will easily buy you more than 500 gigabytes of storage—50,000 times as much storage space for a fraction of the price.

  These kinds of stunning advances are driving many of the changes that are upending just about every form of media we know. Gradually, as the costs decrease, smart screens will begin to replace everything else, becoming all-purpose displays for TV shows, newspapers, blogs, Facebook status updates, family photos, magazines, and books. Content companies won’t be confined to any one purpose, and they will be able to create and distribute virtually any kind of information or entertainment in all sizes and shapes. In such a world of unlimited storytellers, we will consume content in long and short forms, with words and with pictures and in what I call bytes, snacks, and meals.

  When this happens, what’s to stop CNN from creating an investigative report and selling it as an instant book with embedded video? Or Random House from selling a book with video interviews that are updated over time? Without the need for paper or disks, production and distribution costs will fall. Everything will become content that can be customized, combined, sliced, diced, pureed, and endlessly redistributed.

  Some of this convergence is already apparent. CNN used to be a twenty-four-hour news outlet shown only on TV. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were simply newspapers. But on the Internet today, they are surprisingly similar. CNN’s website has writers and editors, still photographs, extensive text, interactive graphics, and, of course, traditional videos. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, along with their traditional words, are offering embedded videos, interactive graphics, live interviews, and moving images. Online, the lines between television and newspapers have blurred—and soon the same will be said about books, movies, TV shows, and more. There is one more wrinkle: Amateur content and professional content are beginning to exist in unison, on the same devices with the same reach.

  If all this makes your stomach feel uncomfortably queasy, you have plenty of company. Change as wrenching and new as this digital revolution in words and pictures is unsettling at best, rattling your security and bringing deep anxieties to the surface. It’s true that business models and our traditional ways of thinking will have to change and that navigating that transition is difficult. But if it’s any comfort, the advent of the printing press, trains, and television was similarly wrenching, yet we’re much better off for having all of them.

  If your main fear is that our ability to think deeply or focus on a subject is going to be washed away by the torrent of new information, relax. Even with this shift, long-form content isn’t going to die. Kids may seem distracted, but they will play video games for an average of three hours a day—which sounds like long-form content to me. If they don’t read a whole book in two days or stay with a television show, it isn’t because they can’t concentrate. It’s because we haven’t adapted the storytelling to fit their changing interests. They are consumnivores—collectively rummaging, consuming, distr
ibuting, and regurgitating content in byte-size, snack-size, and full-meal packages.

  In this byte/snack/meal world, these consumnivores will drive the stories, deciding how much they want and what the format will be. If we want them to consume our stories, we’ll have to harness a range of technologies to tell them well. If we don’t, there are plenty of other options available for them to consume—or, more likely, they will create their next meal without us.

  This Story

  This book isn’t about a list of absolute formulas for bringing in more revenue in a digital world. But for those of you wrestling with that challenge (or simply wanting to understand it better), this book will give you a new framework for looking at these difficult issues and making sense of the radical trends that have emerged in the last few years. I will take you deep into the consumnivore’s new world, explaining how navigation, aggregation, and the narrative are changing.

  To get a feel for the future as it exists now, we will go on a swing through the California porn industry, which through history has kept a step ahead of traditional outlets in trying new ideas and experimenting with the latest innovations in media. Then, to reassure you and put today’s changes into perspective, we’ll take a walk through history to see how radical new developments time and again have prompted fear and upheaval before proving their immense worth to society—and why we’ll survive this sea change as well.

  From there, I will lead us off the cliff into the shifting rivers, starting with our changing communities. Social networks, the openness of the Internet, and handy new devices are more than new ways to share photos, offer opinions, or waste time. As we struggle to make sense of the flood of information, gossip, and data gushing from the World Wide Web, these developing networks are providing crucial anchors that help us find our way. They help us determine what news and information we will trust and what we will ignore. As these new communities evolve and develop, they are profoundly changing how media outlets reach readers, how companies find customers, and even how we find and nurture our friends.

  From there, I’ll address the notion that our brains can’t handle all this fast-paced stuff by diving into how these developing technologies are engaging our brains and how our brains are adapting to the volume of information flying at them from all directions. As part of that, I will take a closer look at one of the more successful of the current storytelling genres, video games, answering—once and for all, I hope—whether they’re really bad for the next generation. As we all start to seek more compelling narratives and more engaging experiences, research in this field helps illustrate what the future of storytelling might look like. I will explore the needs of the next generation of consumers and creators who are at once creating and seeking new forms of narrative and immersive storytelling.

  The next section can be summed up in one word: “me.” The old role of media was to act as an intermediary between people and their understanding of industry, politics, and science. The job of media was to cull and curate for a broad audience. But consumnivores come to news from a different perspective: New technology has put each of them squarely on his or her own map, and now they want news that is highly personalized, relevant, and meaningful specifically to them. They are keenly aware that they and their friends no longer watch the same television shows at the same time and no longer will read the same newspapers or devour books in the same way. We are demanding that the stories of tomorrow be tailored to an audience of one—me—requiring a new approach. From there, I’ll take you through the ever-growing debate about our compelling desire to multitask. We know we can’t safely text and drive at the same time. But can the next generation of thinkers and consumers really chat, text, and still get their work done too? (The answer isn’t as black-and-white as we’ve been led to believe.)

  Finally, I will show you how the whole experience of consuming news, magazines, books, music, and other media is changing, and how the best morsels of information will stand apart from the voluminous clutter. This is the part where the old meets the new: Great storytelling, incisive reporting, and thoughtful editing will still prevail—but they will need to be presented to you and me in a different form to go beyond mere information. The people we buy content from must create a unique and meaningful experience for both communities and individuals and accept the fact that they will coexist with the amateur and the hyperpersonalized. I’ll even look ahead ten years or more to see how today’s cyborgs and 3D printers can show where we might be in a decade and help us navigate the ever-exciting world of tomorrow.

  Speaking of tomorrow, you may wonder why I’m writing something as old-fashioned as a book to tell these stories about the future. Actually, this book is much more than the words you’re reading here. Online and on your Web-enabled mobile phone, you will be able to mine a treasure trove of additional content. Some chapters will contain links to videos, visually walking you through research and new technologies. Other sections will link to extra information, including research papers, related news articles, graphics, and images. Additionally, as the Web allows today, you can go online to nickbilton.com and add to the discussion of each chapter through your social networks or with traditional comments.

  As you will see, I eat my own dog food.

  1

  bunnies, markets, and the bottom line

  porn leads the way

  Oh, we’re not going to wait [for the technology to exist to create content]. We’re going to build it.

  –Ollie Joone, co-founder of The Digital Playground

  I Did It for My Work. I Had To. Really!

  Every second of every day, thirty thousand Americans type the word “sex” into an online search engine and hit enter. At least 50 million of our fellow citizens have done it. I’ve done it for a few minutes myself. Well, actually, for a number of hours.

  There was a very good reason, though. I was doing research. Truthfully.

  I did that research because the porn industry, unlike almost any other business, constantly has to try new approaches and new technologies to stay at least a couple of steps ahead of the morality sheriffs. It also must find fresh ways to satisfy the seemingly bottomless interests of its customers, who have been all too happy to move from well-lit arcades, to darkened movie theaters, to the privacy of televisions, to the very personal personal computer. As a result, the industry throughout history has been an innovator—and, over the last century, an early adopter of film, video, and the Internet.

  So, I reasoned, the folks in the porn business should have some unusual and valuable insights into this shifting world of new technology, social networks, and free and paid content. To see if that was true, I had to check it out.

  Of course, this would require vast amounts of research—hours upon hours of surfing the underbelly of the Web, looking at the best and worst of the porn websites. Honestly, I was trying to figure out who was making money online in this industry, though this intense exploration eliminated my ability to write or research from my local coffee shop, the New York Times offices, or any other public place. My wife, Danielle, was a little dubious too, to say the least. Eventually, she stopped asking what I was doing when stark nudity emanated from my computer screen and, at least for a time, tolerated my inquisitiveness.

  It’s a good thing she was patient. It took a little longer than expected to get to the heart of the industry. Although looking at pictures of naked people online is relatively easy, finding the real revenue in the industry that creates those pictures can be relatively difficult. Most adult companies are privately held, and though they revel in nudity, they keep their own financial matters well under wraps.

  Thanks to the help of Lux Alptraum, a journalist and the editor of the industry website Fleshbot.com (which, by the way, you should not investigate from your work cubicle), I was able to make contact with several players of various sizes in this under-the-covers industry. (Alptraum, who is spritely and in her late twenties, is always excited to talk about sex, porn, and the changing, blurring lan
dscape of both topics. She understands the adult industry better than most journalists who cover it since she has been on both sides of the camera. Before she started writing about sex, she founded and ran a website called That Strange Girl, which was the first AltPorn site. AltPorn, she explains, is a form of online porn that shows “unconventional” models. Rather than the blond-haired perfect beauties you expect to see in glossy magazines, these sites feature people who look more like someone you would see on the street.)

  As my quest continued, I made plans to head out to California, home of the film industry and most of the American pornography business. The industry has thrived in the Golden State for two reasons: First, there seems to be a lot of “talent,” partially because of the traditional movie industry. Second, California has a lax legal climate compared with other states, where people who videotape sex can be charged with any number of illegal acts, including pimping.

  California wasn’t always lenient. In 1988, the state accused Harold Freeman, a porn creator, of being a pimp as part of an effort to clean up and shut down the porn industry. In California v. Freeman, the state likened the act of taping and selling porn to that of prostitutes selling sex on the streets. The case lasted several years and made trips to both the state court and the U.S. Supreme Court before a ruling finally settled that creating and selling porn was different from selling actual sexual acts.

  As I set up interviews, one company spokeswoman asked who I would like to interview beyond the top executive. Would I like to meet and talk with the “talent”—that is, the film stars?

  “Maybe you would like to interview Jesse Jane, Stoya, or we could even try and get you an interview with Tera Patrick,” offered the spokeswoman.

  Oh, intriguing, I thought. I told her I’d get back to her.