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

  Copyright © 2010 by Nick Bilton

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bilton, Nick.

  I live in the future and here’s how it works / Nick Bilton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Technological forecasting. 2. Technology—Social aspects. 3. Computers and civilization. 4. Ubiquitous computing. I. Title.

  T174.B53 2010

  303.48′34—dc22 2010026870

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59113-5

  v3.1_r1

  for danielle

  i <3 u

  contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  author’s note

  introduction

  cancel my subscription

  Chapter 1.

  bunnies, markets, and the bottom line

  porn leads the way

  Chapter 2.

  scribbling monks and comic books

  it’s ok—you’ve survived this before

  Chapter 3.

  your cognitive road map

  anchoring communities

  Chapter 4.

  suggestions and swarms

  trusting computers and humans

  Chapter 5.

  when surgeons play video games

  our changing brains

  Chapter 6.

  me in the middle

  the rise of me economics

  Chapter 7.

  warning: danger zone ahead

  multiple multitasking multitaskers

  Chapter 8.

  what the future will look like

  a prescription for change

  epilogue

  why they’re not coming back

  acknowledgments

  notes and sources

  author’s note

  Dear Reader,

  This is not just a book but a unique reading experience.

  Online, through a computer or smart phone, you can access additional content for each chapter: videos, links to articles and research, and interactive experiences that enable you to delve deeper into the topics covered in that chapter, taking you beyond the printed page.

  At the beginning of each chapter you will see an image called a QR Code, just like the one above. Using a free application you can download from nickbilton.com you will be able to snap an image of these codes that will then take you to the additional content directly on your mobile phone.

  Become part of the I Live in the Future community by commenting on chapters of interest and joining a continuing discussion with me and your fellow readers online at nickbilton.com and with the free I Live in the Future app for iPhone and iPad.

  introduction

  cancel my subscription

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

  I used to love reading print newspapers. In 2004, when I started working at the New York Times, I was excited beyond words to discover that much of the Sunday Times was printed ahead of time and a stack of those early-run papers arrived at the Times building every Saturday. Not only did I work at one of the most respected newspapers in the world, but along with a paycheck, I also got the magazine, the Week in Review, the Metro section, and Sunday Business several hours before the rest of the world!

  A new favorite ritual took root: I’d head to the office early every Saturday afternoon, and when the first delivery trucks arrived, I’d grab a few smudged copies and run home to immerse myself in tomorrow’s newspaper. Before long, friends began calling me to ask for advance copies of the real estate section or the Sunday magazine.

  Then, a couple of years later, I stopped my Saturday routine. The calls stopped too. One by one, my friends were switching to new reading rituals, replacing the smell and feel of the printed page with a quicker, personally edited, digital reading experience. Even when the paper was free, they didn’t want a copy anymore!

  The same thing was happening to me. I had started reading newspapers in high school and for years had stumbled every morning to the doorstep, blurry-eyed and half asleep, to fetch the morning paper. But now I was checking the headlines in the morning on my computer, reading articles on my mobile phone on the way to the office, and surfing news sites all day long. Aided by social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that helped pull together the best content at a vastly quicker pace, I now could see news more quickly online. I also had a much easier and more succinct way to share the articles I found interesting while adding my own commentary, helping to cull the best morsels of content for my friends, family, and coworkers. In retrospect, I was going through a personal “digital metamorphosis”—something many of you will experience, if you haven’t already. For some, it will happen over time as you move one paper task after another to the computer, phone, or digital reader. For others, it will happen quickly with the purchase of a fancy new phone or new reader that suddenly opens up a whole new world of electronic possibilities.

  In my case, unread newspapers at home began to climb to furniture-sized proportions by the front door, with the bottom layer turning a sickening shade of khaki yellow. My wife and I simply referred to the growing tower as the Pile.

  Eventually, as the yellowing newspapers continued to collect, I decided it was time to take the plunge. I waited until lunchtime to make the call, checking the sea of cubicles around me to make sure nobody could hear me. I felt like a philandering spouse, and the idea of being a cheater didn’t feel good.

  I picked up the phone and called the Times circulation department. I even tried to disguise my voice in case someone recognized me, adding a tinge of an accent and speaking a little more slowly.

  “Yes, I’m sure I want to cancel the delivery,” I told the rep. “I’m sorry, I just don’t read it anymore.”

  Of course, I love the New York Times. The stories are still top notch, as good as they’ve ever been: perceptive, exploratory, thoughtful, and informative. The problem is that the approach just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. I understand the concept—the printed paper is a neat package with a hundred or so news articles, displayed by subject and order of importance, culled by Times editors, my colleagues. Top stories are here, business articles are there, sports is in the back of the business section on most weekdays.

  But that’s the problem: It’s only a collection of what editors think is appropriate. And it doesn’t swirl in my preferences. My likes and dislikes; it’s just not designed for me. More important, by the time those carefully chosen words on paper arrive at my house, printed permanently on the page and selected for a vast audience of readers, a lot of the content isn’t current.

  A few years passed while I contentedly consumed the news in my own way. I continued to do my work at the New York Times Research Labs, helping the Old Gray Lady find her place in mobile phones, on the computer screen, and in video, and my workplace infidelity remained my own private business. Then, in spring 2009, I appeared on a roster of speakers for the geeky O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Jose, California, aimed at cutting-edge technology developers. A Wired magazine reporter attending the conference asked for an inter
view.

  Like a good corporate citizen, I checked with the Times public relations folks to make sure the interview was OK. Once they gave the go-ahead, I sat down with reporter Ryan Singel.

  For over an hour, I showed Singel some of the prototypes from the Times research labs, such as the inner workings of our digital living room, where content can move seamlessly from my computer to a phone and back to a big-screen television. I showed him how videos on my computer of cookbook author and “Minimalist” columnist Mark Bittman whipping up a dish can appear instantly on my television while the recipe pops up on my phone. Every device could be connected to the others, and the stories I read on the computer could be illustrated with maps or video interviews on the TV, computer, or phone. Some day, I explained, sensors in the couch might alert the television or the computer to turn to my favorite shows or sites, or sensors in my phone might detect when I’m in the car and prompt information to be read aloud instead of displayed. For those who still want to read on paper, newspaper boxes might print out a personalized version—with customized advertising and even the ability to notify a nearby Starbucks that I was headed in for coffee.

  I talked excitedly about some of our prototype mobile applications in which the news could change on the basis of various scenarios. Imagine walking down a city block at lunchtime while reading the Times on a smart phone; since the phone knows it’s lunchtime, articles related to food and local restaurants could appear. I showed him prototypes and concepts of flexible displays in which a bendable screen is constantly updating the news and can be folded away like a piece of paper.

  At the very end of the interview, as Singel was getting ready to leave, he asked if I read the print paper. I was briefly unsure how to answer. Should I lie? The decision had been made so long ago that I hadn’t recently considered the consequences of canceling my subscription.1 But it was now 2009, the age of netbooks, iPhones, and Kindles. I decided to be honest: I told him I mostly enjoyed reading the New York Times on my computer, mobile phone, and e-reader.

  A few hours later I gave my presentation, chatted with a few interested attendees, and went back to my hotel room to discover my e-mail inbox crammed with messages. Some friends and coworkers in the newsroom were congratulatory. “Hey, Nick, great article on wired.com!” they wrote. “It’s really great to see the NYTimes get so much digital credit.”

  But others, from coworkers on the business side of the company, had an ominous tone: “Holy shit, people here are pissed!”

  “The grown-ups are talking,” one said simply.

  I was mystified about what I possibly could have said to get the grown-ups talking, so I went to wired.com. Under the headline “Times Techie Envisions the Future of News,” with a nerdy picture of me smiling with my laptop, ran this:

  “Nick Bilton, an editor in the New York Times research and development lab, doesn’t think much of newspaper[s]. In fact, he doesn’t even get the Sunday paper delivered to his house.

  “Thankfully for Bilton and his employer, he’s bullish on news.” Continuing, Singel added, referring to my feeling about paper, not about the Times, “It’s just the paper he hates.”

  After this opener, Singel gave a concise and overwhelmingly positive overview of the work I showed him from our lab. The article was supportive of our work and should have been great coverage for a company aiming to show its shareholders that it is truly a forward-thinking digital organization. Some of my colleagues were thrilled that the story demonstrated how the paper was focusing on the future.

  But some of my coworkers and bosses were incensed that I had publicly confessed to shunning the core product of the Times. Some even believed that I might persuade other readers to cancel their subscriptions as well.

  When I returned to the New York office the next day, I was immediately informed that I shouldn’t be telling the world that I don’t read the print version. To quell some of the trauma, I apologized for my remarks.

  In all honesty, however, I was completely confused. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who had stopped reading the print edition. In fact, what has happened nationwide in the last few years is truly shocking: In 2008, paid newspaper circulation in the United States fell to 49.1 million, the lowest number since the late 1960s and well below the peak of 60 million reached in the 1990s, when the Internet was just starting to come into its own. The Times has suffered as well, with circulation sliding in the 1990s, leveling off in the early part of the century, and then sliding some more. Daily circulation, which had been close to 1.2 million in the early 1990s, was close to 1 million at the time of my speech and would slip below the seven-figure mark later in 2009.

  Print circulation told only part of the story. With a deep and painful recession accompanying a technological shift, advertisers have abandoned print papers even faster than subscribers have. Industrywide, revenue from print advertising has fallen off a cliff, plunging to $24.8 billion in 2009 from $47.4 billion in 2005, according to the Newspaper Association of America.2 That’s a decline of nearly half in five years.

  Newspapers are far from the only medium to face such agonizing declines. The digital revolution is roiling just about every form of media we know: Book sales in 2009 slipped to the lowest level since 2004, according to the Association of American Publishers. The Publishers Information Bureau reported that although magazine subscriptions have grown slightly, advertising pages sold dropped more than 25 percent in 2009. Despite the growing popularity of Blu-ray discs and a healthy box office, DVD sales fell 8 percent in 2008. The music industry has been hit hardest of all. Worldwide dollar sales have fallen every year for a decade—and the bottom is nowhere to be found. In 2009, CD sales fell more than 20 percent in both dollars and units. Although digital downloads are up and now account for about 40 percent of music sold, the revenue they bring in doesn’t begin to make up for the disappearing disk sales.

  Given this revolutionary shift in how we read, listen, and enjoy entertainment, shouldn’t the Times be asking why I prefer digital to print and exploring how I consume my news? Shouldn’t we be moving forward and not backward?

  Imagine that you owned a restaurant and offered your employees free food, but they instead brought their own lunch and dinner from home. Would you look the other way if plates of freshly cooked pasta and garlic bread sat untouched on the table? Hopefully not. If it were my restaurant, I’d want to know why they weren’t enjoying my product, and I would do everything I could to try to change that.

  At Google they call this “dogfooding.” That is, if you make dog food and the dogs won’t eat it, you might have a bit of a problem. The people who built Gmail have to use it for their e-mail service, and if something doesn’t work, they have to fix it. Collectively, if Google engineers don’t like a service’s feature, they are supposed to change it accordingly—whether it’s Google Search, Google Mobile, or any other Google product. Along the same lines, if I wasn’t reading the print newspaper, there was a reason.

  Still, my published comments didn’t end with that slap on the wrist. I heard from numerous people from numerous departments numerous times. But at each turn I continued to push at the issue. The conversation shouldn’t be about my remarks in public, I insisted, but about my actions. I wanted to point out that with regard to the new delivery methods and the next generation’s consumer habits, the writing was on the wall—or the screen, if you will.

  I tried to explain that I—like many in my generation—preferred the instantaneous digital experience because I could share my favorite articles with others, adding comments and joining a collective discussion while also viewing other readers’ opinions. The print paper is static, and so is its narrative; in comparison, a digital narrative can include invigorating interactive multimedia such as videos and slide shows. I also explained that people in my social networks and those I trusted shared relevant content with me, and their remarks and news gathering had become a critical filter for the stories I consumed. It wasn’t about print versus digital; it was
about immediacy, details, links, interactive graphics, videos, and, most important, hyperpersonalization. The majority of news I consumed was still from the Times. I just consumed it in a different way.

  Although I didn’t want to be insolent, they needed to accept that and respond to it. My peers aren’t going to wake up one day and crave newsprint. The world is shifting; ignoring it won’t make it go away.

  The whole experience was the least enjoyable—and most anxious—of my six years at the Times. Thankfully, most of the pressure subsided after a few weeks—although I’m pretty sure there were some corporate suits who would have been happy to see my exodus from the company with a box of my belongings in hand. Luckily for me, and for the Times, this group is in the minority, and the paper of record continues to push at the forefront of the digital reshaping of news, aptly illustrated by the fact that I worked in a research lab and am visible to the public by the extraordinary journalism, innovation, and cutting-edge digital content the Times puts out on a daily basis.

  I should add here that if you still read the news on paper, that’s perfectly OK. Paper is still gadget number one for reading content; it’s disposable, relatively inexpensive, and relatively simple to create in small or large quantities, and it doesn’t need batteries or a power outlet. Admittedly, the online experience still isn’t better than that of paper, and it has a long way to go until it is.

  But paper alternatives are coming, and in some situations they are already here. Technology companies are working to make every aspect of our lives sync up with the digital world. Global positioning systems are replacing maps, grocery coupons appear on your phone, and the online phone directory is far more efficient than your local phone book. Eventually, a paper replacement for your daily news will come along too. This book will help you understand what this all means and how you can respond.

  I Live in the Future