The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organizing principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages.” Pages were not organized into folders, but were arranged into a networked web. The web was a billion hyperlinked pages which contained everything, both stored information and active knowledge. The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages. This web of links was flat.
Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams. We constantly monitor Twitter streams and the flows of posts on our Facebook wall. We stream photos, movies, and music. News banners stream across the bottom of TVs. We subscribe to YouTube streams, called channels. And RSS feeds from blogs. We are bathed in streams of notifications and updates. Our apps improve in a flow of upgrades. Tags have replaced links. We tag and “like” and “favorite” moments in the streams. Some streams, like Snapchat, WeChat, and WhatsApp, operate totally in the present, with no past or future. They just flow past. If you see something, fine. Then it is gone.
Flowing time has shifted as well. In the first era, tasks were accomplished in batch mode. You got your bills every month. Taxes were all paid on the same day of the year. Telephone service came only in units of 30 days. Items piled up and were dealt with in batches. Then, in the second age, along came the web, and very quickly we expected everything the same day. If we withdrew money from our bank, we expected the deduction to show up in our account that same day, not at the end of the month. If we sent an email, we expected a reply later in the day, not two weeks later, like regular mail. Our cycle time jumped from batch mode to daily mode. This was a big deal. The expectation shifted so fast, many institutions were caught off guard. People ran out of patience waiting to be sent a form they needed to fill out; if they couldn’t fill it out that day, they moved on.
Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly. If we spend money, we expect the balance in our account to adjust in real time. Why should medical diagnostics take days to return results instead of immediately? If we take a quiz in class, why shouldn’t the score be instant? For news, we demand to know what is happening this very second, not an hour ago. Unless it occurs in real time, it does not exist. The corollary—and this is important—is that in order to operate in real time, everything has to flow.
For instance, watching movies on demand means movies must flow. Like most families who subscribe to Netflix, our family became real-time snobs. Unless a movie was available on streaming, we ignored it. Netflix’s DVD catalog is about 10 times larger and higher quality than its streaming catalog, but we’d rather watch a lesser show in real time than wait two days for something better on a DVD. Simultaneity trumps quality.
Real-time books, ditto. In predigital days I bought printed books long before I intended to read them. If I spied an enticing book in a bookstore, I bought it. At first, the internet deepened my hefty backlog because I encountered more and more recommendations online. When the Kindle came along, I switched to primarily purchasing only digital books, but I kept the old habit of purchasing ebooks whenever I encountered a great recommendation. It was so easy! Click, got it. Then I had an epiphany that I am sure others have had as well. If I purchase a book ahead of time, it just sits in the same place that a book I have not bought sits (in the cloud) but in the paid bucket instead of the unpaid bucket. Why not just leave it in the unpaid bucket? So now I don’t purchase a book until I am ready to read it in the next 30 seconds. This sort of just-in-time purchasing is the natural consequence of real-time streaming.
In the industrial age, companies did their utmost to save themselves time by increasing their efficiency and productivity. That is not enough today. Now organizations need to save their customers and citizens time. They need to do their utmost to interact in real time. Real time is human time. An ATM gets you cash much faster than waiting for a bank teller—and more efficiently too—but what we really want is instant cash at our fingertips, something like the real-time money offered by the streaming companies of Square, PayPal, Alipay, or Apple Pay. So in order to run in real time, our technological infrastructure needed to liquefy. Nouns needed to be verbs. Fixed solid things became services. Data couldn’t remain still. Everything had to flow into the stream of now.
The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud. Software flows from the cloud to you as a stream of upgrades. The cloud is where your stream of texts go before they arrive on your friend’s screen. The cloud is where the parade of movies under your account rests until you call for them. The cloud is the reservoir that songs escape from. The cloud is the seat where the intelligence of Siri sits, even as she speaks to you. The cloud is the new organizing metaphor for computers. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.
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The first industry to be steamrolled by the switch to real time and the cloud of copies was music. Perhaps because music itself is so flowing—a stream of notes whose beauty lasts only as long as the stream continues—it was the first to undergo liquidity. As the music industry reluctantly transformed, it revealed a pattern of change that would repeat itself again and again in other media, of books, movies, games, news. Later, the same transformation from fixities to flows began to overturn shopping, transportation, and education. This inevitable shift toward fluidity is now transforming almost every other aspect of society. The saga of music’s upgrade to the realm of fluidity will reveal where we are headed.
Music has been altered by technology for more than a century. Early gramophone equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians abbreviated meandering works to fit to the phonograph, and today the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes. Cheap industrial reproduction of gramophone recordings 50 years ago unleashed mind-boggling quantities of inexpensive exact copies—and a sense that music was something one consumed.
The grand upset that music is now experiencing—the transformation that pioneers such as Napster and BitTorrent signaled a decade ago—is the shift from analog copies to digital copies. The industrial age was driven by analog copies—exact and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies—exact and free.
Free is hard to ignore. It propels duplication at a scale that would previously have been unbelievable. The top ten music videos have been watched (for free) over 10 billion times. Of course, it’s not just music that is being copied freely. It is text, pictures, video, games, entire websites, enterprise software, 3-D printer files. In this new online world, anything that can be copied will be copied for free.
A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury. In the industrial age, exact copies became more valuable than a handmade original. No one wants the inventor’s clunky “original” prototype refrigerator. Most people want a perfect working clone. The more common the clone, the more desirable it is, since it comes with a network of service and repair outlets.