The value of experience is rising. Luxury entertainment is increasing 6.5 percent annually. Spending at restaurants and bars increased 9 percent in 2015 alone. The price of the average concert ticket has increased by nearly 400 percent from 1981 to 2012. Ditto for the price of health care in the United States. It rose 400 percent from 1982 to 2014. The average U.S. rate for babysitting is $15 per hour, twice the minimum wage. In big U.S. cities it is not unusual for parents to spend $100 for child care during an evening out. Personal coaches dispensing intensely personal attention for a very bodily experience are among the fastest growing occupations. In hospice care, the cost of drugs and treatments is in decline, but the cost of home visits—experiential—is rising. The cost of weddings has no limit. These are not commodities. They are experiences. We give them our precious, scarce, fully unalloyed attention. To the creators of these experiences, our attention is worth a lot. Not coincidentally, humans excel at creating and consuming experiences. This is no place for robots. If you want a glimpse of what we humans do when the robots take our current jobs, look at experiences. That’s where we’ll spend our money (because they won’t be free) and that’s where we’ll make our money. We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.
The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are. We will soon dwell smack in the middle of the Library of Everything, surrounded by the liquid presence of all existing works of humankind, just within reach of our fingertips, for free. The great filters will be standing by, quietly guiding us, ready to serve us our wishes. “What do you want?” the filters ask. “You can choose anything; what do you choose?” The filters have been watching us for years; they anticipate what we will ask. They can almost autocomplete it right now. Thing is, we don’t know what we want. We don’t know ourselves very well. To some degree we will rely on the filters to tell us what we want. Not as slave masters, but as a mirror. We’ll listen to the suggestions and recommendations that are generated by our own behavior in order to hear, to see who we are. The hundred million lines of code running on the million servers of the intercloud are filtering, filtering, filtering, helping us to distill ourselves to a unique point, to optimize our personality. The fears that technology makes us more uniform, more commoditized are incorrect. The more we are personalized, the easier it is for the filters because we become distinct, an actualized distinction they can reckon with. At its heart, the modern economy runs on distinction and the power of differences—which can be accentuated by filters and technology. We can use the mass filtering that is coming to sharpen who we are, for the personalization of our own person.
More filtering is inevitable because we can’t stop making new things. Chief among the new things we will make are new ways to filter and personalize, to make us more like ourselves.
8 REMIXING
Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable. Growth comes from remixing. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute who specializes in the dynamics of technological growth, says that all new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies. Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed. Since one can combine hundreds of simpler technologies with hundreds of thousands of more complex technologies, there is an unlimited number of possible new technologies—but they are all remixes. What is true for economic and technological growth is also true for digital growth. We are in a period of productive remixing. Innovators recombine simple earlier media genres with later complex genres to produce an unlimited number of new media genres. The more new genres, the more possible newer ones can be remixed from them. The rate of possible combinations grows exponentially, expanding the culture and the economy.
We live in a golden age of new mediums. In the last several decades hundreds of media genres have been born, remixed out of old genres. Former mediums such as a newspaper article, or a 30-minute TV sitcom, or a 4-minute pop song still persist and enjoy immense popularity. But digital technology unbundles those forms into their elements so they can be recombined in new ways. Recent newborn forms include a web list article (a listicle) or a 140-character tweet storm. Some of these recombined forms are now so robust that they serve as a new genre. These new genres themselves will be remixed, unbundled, and recombined into hundreds of other new genres in the coming decades. Some are already mainstream—they encompass at least a million creators, and hundreds of millions in their audience.
For instance, behind every bestselling book are legions of fans who write their own sequels using their favorite author’s characters in slightly altered worlds. These extremely imaginative extended narratives are called fan fiction, or fanfic. They are unofficial—without the original authors’ cooperation or approval—and may mix elements from more than one book or author. Their chief audience is other avid fans. One fanfic archive lists 1.5 million fan-created works to date.
Extremely short snips (six seconds or less) of video quickly recorded on a phone can easily be shared and reshared with an app called Vine. Six seconds is enough for a joke or a disaster to spread virally. These brief recorded snips may be highly edited for maximum effect. Compilations of a sequence of six-second vines are a popular viewing mode. In 2013, 12 million Vine clips were posted to Twitter every day, and in 2015 viewers racked up 1.5 billion daily loops. There are stars on Vine with a million followers. But there is another kind of video that is even shorter. An animated gif is a seemingly still graphic that loops through its small motion again and again and again. The cycle lasts only a second or two, so it could be thought of as a one-second video. Any gesture can be looped. A gif might be a quirky expression on a face that is repeated, or a famous scene from a movie put on a loop, or it could be a repeating pattern. The endless repetition encourages it to be studied closely until it transcends into something bigger. Of course, there are entire websites devoted to promoting gifs.
These examples can only hint at the outburst and sheer frenzy of new forms appearing in the coming decades. Take any one of these genres and multiply it. Then marry and crossbreed them. We can see the nascent outlines of the new ones that might emerge. With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and remix them into our own photos. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history in words, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge. With the coming new tools we’ll be able to create our visions on demand. It will take only a few seconds to generate a believable image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim golden vase—perhaps even faster than we could write these words. And that is just the opening scene.
The supreme fungibility of digital bits allows forms to morph easily, to mutate and hybridize. The quick flow of bits permits one program to emulate another. To simulate another form is a native function of digital media. There’s no retreat from this multiplicity. The number of media choices will only increase. The variety of genres and subgenres will continue to explode. Sure, some will rise in popularity while others wane, but few will disappear entirely. There will still be opera lovers a century from now. But there will be a billion video game fans and a hundred million virtual reality worlds.