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

by Nick Bilton

  As we’ve seen, the power to be in control expanded to other content areas. Putting the viewer at the center forced porn to move beyond the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty to address all kinds of tastes and offer content tailored to an individual’s personal interests. First-person video games allow you to navigate on your own terms, land the plane yourself, or become the warrior or the alien. It’s the difference between playing a car-racing game in which you’re watching from the sidelines and playing one where you are sitting in the driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel. You are part of the story, not just an observer who watches and cheers.

  The twenty-first-century creation of elaborate social networks even more emphatically puts consumers in the center of their own complex web of connections and anchoring communities, those crucial networks that help make sense of the vastness of the Internet. If I go online today, I’m better connected with people from other countries than with people who live in the same city. I actually don’t know where half the people I interact with online live, and it doesn’t really matter. My only concern is their relevance to me, and vice versa.

  This same relocation, this same centering of each of you in the middle of your own map, is also changing the concept of media. The word “media” has its roots in the word “medium,” the middle man, and that’s the role the media played, providing art lovers access to artists, readers access to writers, and citizens access to news.

  But nowadays, if you’re a media company, you might as well break the “dia” from the end of the word. As far as the modern young consumer is concerned, when it comes to content, there is only “me.” Today. Right now.

  I got my own hard lesson in this new Me! Now! world when some friends stopped by our house with their teenage cousin Lauren. As I started making coffee for our guests, Lauren asked if she could use my laptop to “check the news.” I handed it over.

  I was curious about which news sites she was going to, so I asked her, expecting to hear something like CNN or NYTimes, or maybe TMZ, the Hollywood gossip site. With a sincere face she looked up at me and said, “Facebook.” Then she turned back to the computer and continued reading.

  “I thought you were going to read the news,” I said.

  “This is my news,” she replied.

  To Lauren and many in her age group, news is not defined by newspapers, or broadcast television stations, or even bloggers or renegades. Instead, news is what is relevant to the individual—in her case, what Facebook calls its “News Feed.” The feed “highlights what’s happening in your social circles” and produces “the latest headline generated by the activity of your friends and social groups,” the company explained when it introduced the novel service in September 2006. And although users initially recoiled at the notion of so much personal detail being shared, the news feed has become a crucial part of Facebook’s service and was, in some ways, a precursor of today’s Twitter. Lauren and others like her are still consumnivores, gobbling up many kinds of content—but they’re very particular and demanding about what they will eat.

  When Lauren and her friends sit down at their computers and go to Facebook.com in a Web browser, they truly believe they are reading the news—their news. Though she may see “news” differently than I do, I am doing much the same thing when I go through my Twitter feed at night and in the morning and use that as my own highly personalized “newspaper.”

  In all the hand-wringing over the revolution roiling traditional media, this shift has largely been ignored. But it’s central to understanding what has changed and what the future might look like. In the aftermath of the gory and devastating World War I, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote,

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  A couple of generations later, the writer Joan Didion surveyed the social revolution of the 1960s and wrote, “The center was not holding.” In the middle of a painful technology and information revolution, the publishers, producers, and purveyors of traditional media may well feel the same way, that the center has dropped out altogether and a kind of digital anarchy reigns. It’s an understandable response. The digital anarchy we’re experiencing today has torn apart markets as they have been known for hundreds of years, replacing them with something still taking shape and yet to be determined.

  From my perspective, though, the center of the media world isn’t gone. It has drastically shifted in an earthquake-like moment. The birth of the Internet was the beginning, but we will feel the aftershocks and tremors for years as we move from a broad audience of readers or viewers to a very narrow audience of me and you, each a target market and each always in the center of the map.

  A Greedy Audience of One

  As core as this concept of a new center is, I am struck by how difficult it has been for traditional media companies to recognize it and address it head on—though their struggle is completely understandable. Their business models for generations were built around the idea of delivering a specially selected mix of content to a broad audience. The sales pitch of the music industry wasn’t “Here’s a good song you might like.” It was “Here are a couple of good songs you might like and ten or eleven others you probably won’t like—but we need to fill a CD so we can justify selling it to you for $15!” But for the past several years, sales of CDs have fallen as much as 25 percent a year and dollars sales of digital tunes haven’t grown nearly enough to make up for the decline, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

  For magazines and newspapers, the equation worked almost the same way. A thick stew of general content drew subscribers and readers, which drew advertising. But paid circulation has been sliding, and in recent years newspaper print advertising revenue has dropped sharply. What has happened is no secret. You’d have to have been living on the ocean floor over the last decade not to know that more and more content has been available for free, some of it offered by the companies themselves, such as online newspapers and blogs, and some pirated by enterprising consumers eager for the latest music, movies, and headlines. Yet even as one content industry after another has been hammered by new media stealing eyeballs from old media, some executives have resisted offering consumers a choice of how they would like to consume their content.

  The music industry, for instance, took a walloping in the early 1990s but finally got back on its feet by agreeing to sell songs for 99 cents in the iTunes store. Yet recently, the record labels decided to start charging $1.29 per track for “hit new songs” because there is more demand for them. To many consumers, this comes across as greedy and unnecessary. When Sony announced its new digital Reader in 2009, the company said it had struck a deal to distribute software that acts like a library, where individuals can rent digital books on their eReaders. But there was a catch: Publishers provide a limited number of “licenses” for each book, so if someone else has “checked out” a digital version of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, you have to wait until that person “returns it” before you can download a copy. Consumers who can easily share a photo, song, or article with thousands of people and aren’t tied to the limitations of a physical object have a hard time understanding this—and none of these transitional solutions make sense or adapt to a me-filled world.

  Take the missing “me” in the movie industry. Although I still love the long format and immersive storytelling of movies, I am increasingly weary of watching them at movie theaters. I don’t want to have to be at a theater on somebody else’s schedule, chow down on their overpriced popcorn, or risk having a Chatty Cathy behind me. Instead, I’d much rather watch a movie at home, starting whenever I feel like it, with a bag of microwave popcorn, free tap water, and a handy little pause button for those inevitable restroom breaks.

  A lot of people won’t agree with me. The 3-D experience and digital technology helped bring in record box-office revenue in 2009. But why not give us a choice? The industry insists on holding back digital downloads and DVDs for so
me months after a film is released rather than giving consumers a variety of options for viewing the latest films. Yet even with that strategy, sales of DVDs fell sharply in 2009 as viewers found more affordable—or free—alternatives for watching movies from their favorite chairs.

  Although the strategy seems to be working in favor of box-office sales at the moment, it may be just a momentary victory before things fall apart. We’ve seen this happen with just about every other industry, starting with music. People will find a way to get the content in the format, shape, and size that fit their desires.

  A site called Pirate Bay that offers links to download movies, music, and books has 4.5 million visitors every single day. These visitors click on more than 26 million pages on the site, downloading whatever meets their fancy: Iron Man 2, an episode of Family Guy, Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits. And this is just one site. A site called Torrentz.com, a similar file-sharing home page, brings in 2.6 million visitors a day and delivers nearly 14 million page views in the same twenty-four-hour period. On top of this, there are literally hundreds of these sites all over the world serving tens of millions of users who want their movies and want them now.

  Now, it’s true that some people steal movies, TV shows, e-books, and other digital paraphernalia just because they’re there, but many people steal them because they’re not there, at least not offered by the people who create and sell them.

  I have to admit that I’m guilty of this behavior myself. In November 2007, two weeks before American Gangster was set to open in movie theaters, a copy of the film leaked to the Internet. Digital content can proliferate online faster than any virus on earth, and I decided to download a copy. It wasn’t that I wanted to save $10; had I been able to buy an online version, I would have done so without blinking an eye. I simply wanted the experience of watching it at home.

  Ironically, a few months later, I met one of the executive producers of American Gangster. Sheepishly, I shared my sin of “illegally” downloading his movie. I even tried to give him $10 for the cost of seeing the movie, which he graciously declined to accept (although I think he really wanted to take it).

  When I asked why he wouldn’t offer the movie as a pay-per-download or something similar right from the start, he had two responses. First, he said, his industry “can stop the pirates and halt illegal downloads.”

  My response: “You’re never going to stop an eighteen-year-old kid in his bedroom in Sweden with too much time on his hands and a zeal to do something he’s been told he can’t do from finding a way to put your movie online.” I tried to remind him about the music industry and its failed attempt to stop music sharing as individuals created their own personalized and specialized mixes, but he only scoffed and told me that his industry is “smarter and has deeper pockets.”

  OK, enjoy emptying those deep pockets, I thought.

  Then he explained that people prefer the movie theater because it represents a campfire type of storytelling that humans have shared for thousands of years. That is, we like to get together to have shared experiences, to listen to a compelling narrative. Perhaps, I thought, but my campfire is now digital and easily shared. We don’t necessarily need a communal theater when we can sit around our own television screens and exchange comments with our friends in a digital context.

  Just like every transition taking place, this isn’t a black or white answer, and I don’t mean to sound like the wags from the New York Times way back in the 1880s who worried that having phonographs would mean that people would never attend a concert again. There are times when a movie theater is the right fit for me and my friends. In some instances, it’s nice to get out of the house and drop into a large theater to laugh with friends at a comedy or experience an intense action-filled movie on the big screen. But more often, I prefer my home theater with a personalized start time and that important pause button.

  As for the “campfire mentality,” I agree that humans love to sit around a real or figurative campfire. But a campfire can happen in bits, too. I often message friends asking what they thought of a movie before or after I see it or keep an eye out on other social sites to see what the campfire sitters are saying. And I also add my views.

  A movie’s digital campfire was demonstrated in March 2010 when Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, two researchers from Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Lab, used Twitter to predict movie box-office sales by monitoring the commentary and opinions of strangers on the site.2 Asur and Huberman monitored almost 3 million tweets to predict if people thought a film was good, bad, or indifferent. From that, they predicted the success of a new movie in the theater.

  How did they do? They found that people sharing their views of a new movie on Twitter could foretell with 97.3 percent accuracy how well, or poorly, a movie would perform in an opening weekend at the box office.

  What the researchers didn’t know was how many people were actually watching the movie at home, probably illegally, or around a “campfire” at a theater. That’s where the website torrentfreak.com comes in. TorrentFreak is a blog devoted solely to the goings-on of the file-sharing communities on the Web, including a well-known protocol called BitTorrent that monitors and reports download numbers and news related to policy and law around person-to-person file sharing. Every year around the Oscars, TorrentFreak’s editors release the top ten downloaded movies of the year, a tradition appropriately called the BitTorrent’s Oscar. The number one downloaded movie for 2009 was District 9 with 12.6 million downloads. Second on the list was Avatar with 11.3 million downloads. This doesn’t include pass-along rates, where people share the files with their friends. These movies aren’t just being downloaded by a few kids in their bedrooms; they are being downloaded by tens of millions of people all over the globe.

  The availability of music, words, and movies in a variety of different formats means I can personalize and customize my use of them. Impatient and demanding consumers increasingly won’t want to wait for digital formats, and I believe movie distributors and others are missing an opportunity (and perhaps encouraging piracy) by declining to make varied formats available much more quickly and at a fair price.

  Consider what’s going on in the book industry. In early 2010, some publishers, including Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group, said they would delay making e-reader versions of many books available because they were afraid that electronic copies of the books would cannibalize sales of more expensive hardcover editions.

  Carolyn Reidy, chief executive officer of Simon & Schuster, told the Associated Press in an interview, “We believe that a large portion of the people who have bought e-readers are from the most devoted reading population.3 And if they like the e-readers, they are naturally going to convert because the e-books are so significantly less expensive.”

  Well, part of that is true: Devoted readers bought e-readers because they want to read books on them. But to assume they are being cheap seems misguided. I own an Amazon Kindle, a Sony Reader, and an Apple iPad, but I didn’t buy them to save money, nor did the avid bookworms I know who also bought one or more of these devices. How can e-books save money when a person spends up to $500 on a device and pays $10 or more for each book?

  These are book lovers, right? They want to bring their collections with them without the physical weight. They enjoy extra functions such as being able to look up words in a built-in dictionary, sharing content with others, and taking notes on what they’re reading. Most important, e-reader users want instant access to books in the airport, the subway, or a coffee shop. Once they are intrigued by a new book, they can start reading it a couple of minutes later. In fact, it seems to me that e-readers could increase book sales by making books more accessible than ever. (A 2010 survey by L.E.K. Consulting, a business and strategy consulting agency, found that 48 percent of e-reader owners said they were reading more books than ever, compared with 7 percent who said they were reading fewer.)4

  Understandably, publishers are worried about changing business models an
d what will happen if they charge less for electronic books. And the $10 price that consumers expect, originally set by Amazon.com to build market share for the Kindle, may well be forcing them to sell below cost, never a winning formula in any business. But do they really believe they will boost their bottom lines by simply trying to keep devoted readers away from digital books? No. The digital torrent sites I referred to earlier don’t just share movies and music—they share e-books, too.

  I wrote about this for the Times, saying, “Let’s say you unwrap your birthday present and see the latest Kindle, Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook. Just what you’ve always wanted! You turn on your new device, navigate to a wireless bookstore and search for Don DeLillo’s new novel. Instead of a simple click and download right from your armchair, you’re told it’s available only in hardcover for the next four months. Are you really going to get in your car, drive to the store and buy the hardcover?” Instead, you’re likely to buy something else from the digital bookstore.

  (Can you imagine if the digital camera you just purchased gave you this warning: “We’re sorry. You won’t be able to e-mail this photo to your friend for another four months. Instead, why don’t you print a copy and mail it through our on-demand printing service”? It’s hard to imagine that any buyer would be happy with that.)

  These publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customers. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it simple for those customers to hand over their money instantly from any location in the world.

  That said, only a few publishers are joining this process. Most of the other publishers I spoke with when reporting the story for the Times said they would continue to release books in print and in digital at the same time, and that’s a smart move, given how quickly e-books are gaining ground. Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, said in 2010 that if Amazon has a Kindle option available to readers, it will sell forty-eight Kindle versions for every hundred copies of the physical book. “It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books,” he predicted.