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

by Nick Bilton

  When I first met Mann at a conference a few years ago, he was wearing a huge pair of goggles that looked more like a Halloween costume than a computer and seemed to shield his vision completely. The goggles had a series of wires that were connected to his scalp and also connected to a computer attached to his waist, which monitored information about him and his surroundings and made the information visible on a computer display embedded in the goggles over his eyes. Mann called this setup “mediated reality.”

  For conference attendees, Mann plugged the system into an external projector so we could see what he sees. At the time he was eating lunch, and the screen filled up with a picture of some peas and other greens, all surrounded by a series of charts and numbers. Mann’s heart rate and other vital information were displayed. His wearable computer was also recording all the sounds and images in the room and uploading them to the Web.

  At first I was enthralled with the idea. How amazing would it be to augment your reality with a device like this? You would never forget where you left your car keys or how to say “hello” in another language.

  Then I met Gordon Bell, a seventy-five-year-old researcher at the Microsoft research labs in Seattle, who several years ago created a device called the SenseCam, which sits around his neck like a large necklace and records every aspect of his life, taking up to a thousand photos a day. He also records audio of every interaction, just like Mann. Everything he sees is wirelessly sent back to his computer and available for retrieval at a later date.

  Mann, Bell, and other cyborgs who capture their lives continuously not only push the limits of what someone wants to know about you but also generate sincere worries about whether there are life events better left out of the record. True, it’s possible that having so much information inscribed somewhere else may free up our heads for more creative and productive thinking, as one expert told the writer Clive Thompson when he profiled Bell in Fast Company in 2006. But Frank Nack, a German computer scientist, noted that he was a big fan of forgetting, which is crucial to forgiveness, moving on from setbacks, and even appreciating nostalgia.

  “It’s how we make sense of life, how we interpret things,” Nack told Thompson in the Fast Company article. “Everybody is building a life story; we all need to forget certain stages. I don’t want to be reminded of everything I said.”

  My excitement about Mann and Bell’s retrieval systems hasn’t completely disappeared. There’s still a part of me that would love to walk around with an augmented vision of reality, but I recognize that there needs to be a balance in the information we collect. There needs to be a way to opt out of the constant retrieval of images, audio, and information. When I met Mann, my image was automatically recorded for later use. The only way to avoid being under his surveillance was to run away. What do we do when the Internet or computers refuse to forget? How will we cope in the future with political candidates who left stupid photos on their high school Facebook pages or sent a drunken college tweet that any thirty-year-old would regret?

  I recognize how important this would be from my own colorful past. Although I grew up on the Web, thankfully, there were no social networks and digital cameras when I was in my early teens. Instant messenger exchanges, happily, weren’t saved the way Gmail chats are today. That’s a good thing for me, because when I wasn’t on the Web, I was out with my friends, getting into trouble.

  Thankfully, those exploits weren’t on Google when my career was gearing up, although they will be once this book is published. When I was thirteen, I was arrested for stealing a pack of cigarettes, but since I was a minor, it doesn’t show up on my record. When I was fourteen, I got in trouble with the police for graffiti. That’s nowhere to be found, either. At fifteen, I was suspended from school for fighting. (I lost, of course.) That’s not on Facebook or Twitter.

  If Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, or other social networks existed when I was twelve, you can bet I would have bragged about my experiences to my online friends—as I did in real life back then. And those details would still be around on the Web for anyone to find. If those records existed online when I joined the workforce, it’s possible I would never have been hired by the New York Times.

  All this is a cautionary tale for the future. The Web and technology need to leave a place for people to make mistakes. They need to allow for youth to make mistakes. While holding people accountable for genuine wrongdoing, they also need to have some room for anonymity and for forgetting so that young people—and even some older ones—have room to grow and change.

  That perspective is shared by Christopher Poole, founder of the message board 4chan, where people can anonymously post responses to just about anything, often using the entire range of four-letter words and pornographic images as well. Though he acknowledges that some posters say vile and disgusting things, he believes the people who come to his site have a right to do so anonymously without sharing any personal information. They have a right to make mistakes. Poole doesn’t keep any personal information about his users, and after a certain period, all the posts on 4chan disappear like products on a conveyor belt.

  When I talked to Poole for a profile interview, he told me about a recent technology conference he attended at which someone else defended anonymity, saying, “Part of the magic of youth is that people are able to forgive and forget.” On the Web, Poole said, there’s a chance that kids will never have that opportunity to make mistakes, to forgive and forget, unless some parts of it remain anonymous and short-term. “As kids, we say stupid things, and because there’s not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at thirty years old about something you said or did when you were eight years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we’re sacrificing the ability to be youthful,” he said. “In ten years, everything you say and do will be visible online, and I think it’s really unfortunate.”

  Currently, there is no statute of limitations for stupidity or immaturity. Today’s young people will have a harder time dismissing their misbehavior as President Bush did, saying, “When I was young and reckless, I was young and reckless.” But our future will be much harsher without some understanding that what happens in the online world shouldn’t always stay there forever.

  You can be sure that Mann, Bell, and today’s cyborgs offer a glimpse of the future for a distant generation. Our mobile phones and digital cameras already record millions of photos each day. Just as it’s important that websites such as 4chan exist, even though most of society won’t agree with their content, it’s going to be equally important that certain aspects of the future allow us to forget pieces of the past.

  What the Future Will Look Like: More Personalized, More Possibilities

  If we don’t all self-destruct, what will be next for us on the technological front?

  Well, everything, actually.

  The “Me!” concept isn’t just about your news being personalized. It’s about everything being personalized, from the bytes from your computer and mobile phone to the full meals of your home and life. Imagine that you could get a personalized flexible digital newspaper and each time you turn it on, it delivers only the news that’s relevant to you, based on what your friends have read, where you live, and other individual interests. That’s not too far off.

  Now imagine that the same thing applies to objects. Maybe you’re having a large dinner party and need two extra Asian-themed plates and cups to match the set you already have. You could just print them out. Or perhaps you want a collar that can tell you where your cat is and send a message to your phone if he gets lost.

  This sort of object and hardware revolution is now under way, mostly in the garages and workshops of hobbyists, just as computers were the dreams of tinkerers in the 1970s and early 1980s. A few years ago, I began to tinker with building my own electronics and started meeting people online who were also interested in understanding how a transistor or microchip works. I started to meet with
other electronics hobbyists once a week to share projects and help one another solve problems. As word got out, the meetings grew. Eventually, we rented a workspace and became an organization called NYC Resistor.

  The entire purpose of NYC Resistor is to make things. We are hardware hackers—no, not the kind of hackers that break into bank accounts and shut off power grids but the kind that turn one kind of hardware into another. You can think of it as a fight club for nerds, but we try not to punch each other.

  Just like the home-brew computer clubs of a generation ago, there are other nerdlike fight clubs cropping up all over the world in which people build all kinds of crazy contraptions. At NYC Resistor, the group worked together to create a robot called BarBot that can pour and mix alcoholic drinks. Another member of the group takes old iPods and turns them into drum kits and other miniature music-making machines. Another group member, Diana Eng, makes clothing with built-in electronics that make her outfits sing with glowing LED lights and futuristic materials. Her outfits blur the line between fashion and functional clothing.

  I recently built a “smart” lamp, a four-inch opaque cube that sits on my desk and can glow in different colors, depending on news alerts that I’ve set up. If Barack Obama proposes a new bill and it’s picked up in the news, the lamp glows blue; if there’s news in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the lamp will glow orange. It’s not a very practical application, but it’s a product I wanted, so I decided to build it. In the future you will be able to build your own personalized products too. Two other cofounders of NYC Resistor might be able to help. Zach Hoeken and Bre Pettis, whom I would characterize as nerds times ten, started a company called MakerBot where they build and sell “open-source 3D printing robots.” Imagine a printer sitting on your desk at home that can actually “print” objects in plastic.

  MakerBot is a kit that can be purchased and assembled for around $500. Once it’s together, you can download schematics from the Internet of anything from a mousetrap to a cup and actually print them out in plastic. By contrast, a low-end 3-D printer today costs about $20,000.

  There are other companies being built out of this personalized hardware concept too. Bug Labs, a small computer hardware company in New York City, sells a device called a BUG that comes with a variety of “modules” that plug into one another. The main base of the BUG is a little computer about the size of a deck of cards, and the various modules are half that size, a couple of inches square. Say you want a device to monitor your children at the playground while they are with the baby-sitter. One way to do this would be to make a gadget that takes a picture every ten minutes, checks its location, and then e-mails you the photo and a map. Bug Labs’s idea is to let you make it by taking a BUG computer and adding a camera module, a GPS module, and then an SMS module to give your new contraption access to the Internet. Using your computer, you program it to take the steps you want. When you’re done, you have your own personal long-distance kid monitor.

  Although most of this is some years away and the home hardware hackers are largely a group of nerds like me, some day we may all have 3-D printers and other plug-and-play technologies that allow us to create objects personalized for each of us. It’s an exciting proposition.

  For some people it might also be a scary one. We don’t know exactly what these things may look like, whose jobs they may replace, or what the impact of instant manufacturing may have. Just as the emergence of a connected digital world has come with bumps and bruises as well as revelations and surprises, the additional advances that bring us new capabilities will come with problems and hiccups as well as unexpected developments that rattle our world.

  epilogue

  why they’re not coming back

  Dear CEO, Publisher, Producer, Editor, Author, Journalist, Advertising Director, Filmmaker …

  They’re not coming back.

  Traditional consumers aren’t coming back. Print advertising isn’t coming back. Media, brands, and the established narratives aren’t coming back. And almost everyone will eventually make this transition.

  I’m not going to wake up one day and say, “Hey, the Web isn’t for me, I’m going to start buying CDs, print books, and newspapers again.” I’m among the new era of consumers and contributors, and we’re looking for new forms of content and storytelling. Where it doesn’t exist, we’re going to find it elsewhere, make it ourselves, or, in some instances, just take it.

  I’m not alone in this thinking. I know part of you hopes that these changes are going to stop or at least plateau. But they’re not. This isn’t just a temporary bump in the road. This is society changing before your very eyes. Just as the printing press helped cement and form imagined communities that became nations, the Internet is doing the same thing, changing our concept of location, trust, space, time, and connections.

  Sure, the irrational economy has affected the speed with which this has all happened, it’s forced us to push fast forward on the demise of the DVD player, newspapers, cable television, and most things analog. But I can assure you, they’re not coming back.

  Before you panic any further, be assured that first and foremost we’re all driving off this cliff together. The entire business of storytelling—music, movies, television, newspapers, books, public relations, advertising, teaching—every business will be affected. We are all going through the same involuntary mutation. Some of us have already left solid ground, and others are heading toward the impending ledge. But one thing is for sure: We’re all going over that cliff. What happens at the bottom of the ravine is what we get to decide, and for some of the luckier ones the lessons of others will help us prepare.

  You see, when you take it down to its core, we’re all just storytellers. Whether you’re writing a book or a news article, selling an outfit or a car, writing a blog post about your weekend or a press release about a new product, you’re telling a story. Whether it’s 140 characters long, the length of this book, a video, interactive, 3-D, or an in-person narrative, it’s a story.

  In the past stories cost money and were told by people with access to a printing press or television studio, but now everyone has the ability to spread and share information equally. With inexpensive tools at our disposal, with our mobile phones, digital cameras, and laptops, we all have an equal voice. A short mobile video clip of a riot in Chicago, uploaded to YouTube by a passerby, sits alongside a video from a multimillion-dollar television network like CNN. A tweet sent by a student in Iran can reach the same number of people as a message sent out by the New York Times.

  In addition, the anchoring communities all of us are creating—our social networks—help ensure that each message is filtered and shared with equal importance and fairness and reaches each of us in an individual way.

  The consumers who aren’t coming back are scurrying like ants in every direction possible, and you’re probably wondering where they’re going. They’re searching. Searching for new forms of storytelling that we haven’t offered yet. The bottom of the ravine, the new medium, affords a new narrative—just like in the early days of television, when the producers didn’t know what to do with cameras and motion and started filming radio shows. The business of storytelling is doing the same thing with the Internet. We’re taking our existing content and simply aggregating it to the Web; we’re filming radio shows.

  As unsettling as it may sound, we need to accept that we are not simply selling content. We’re not selling the words on the page or the images on the screen; instead we’re selling an entire experience. The content we create and sell is just one segment of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  As we move to the next iteration of storytelling, as a great flattening is taking place between consumer and creator, the medium will no longer be the message. The medium will be pervasive. The message will be amateur, professional, and infinite. And it will all exist as a mutual collection of bytes, snacks, and meals.

  Society has entered an interregnum, and what appears on the other side is not being decided by cor
porations and media giants. Consumers will have equal sway in the discussion. We need to harness this learning and help explore the future together. And as the opportunities arise to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off—as they will—we need to understand how to evolve, how to communicate and tell stories again.

  As distribution channels become extinct and irrelevant and the ubiquity of new devices gives way to truly amalgamated communications, the new commodities will be length, aggregation, immediacy, and niche.

  It’s not enough to sit idly by, ignoring and quieting the employee inside your company who doesn’t buy CDs anymore, or canceled her cable television, or started playing video games instead of reading a book, or stopped buying the print edition of the newspaper. These people are trying to tell you about the future and how it works. It’s up to you to listen.

  It’s time to reorganize, rethink, and get back to the business of storytelling.

  Sincerely,

  Nick Bilton

  acknowledgments

  First, I’d like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to purchase and read this book. I hope it was informative, fun, and engaging. (If you stole this book, please think of the children, consider buying a copy, and see Chapter 6 on Me Economics.) Although hundreds of people have been involved, in one way or another, in the research, support, and creation of this book, the following are people to whom I wanted to offer an extra shout-out. (The names are intentionally jumbled; I love and appreciate everyone equally.)