Anything can be generated now.
A room full of people can't be.

A book in progress

You Have to Be There

How AI Makes Presence the Last Scarce Resource

by Adam J. Simon

In spring 2020, when being together stopped being an option, I started asking the question of how culture would change. The first solution we reached for was the metaverse. That answer didn't stick. Instead, we started going out again, and started paying more to do it. Six years on, we haven't stopped. The book is the story of how something that used to be free became the most expensive option in every category, from a 70mm screening to a night at the Sphere, and why AI, of all things, is the reason.

About the book, with a chapter from it →

Occasional dispatches from the writing

Occasional notes while I’m writing You Have to Be There: what I'm reading, what I've gone to see, where the argument is heading. No schedule and no filler.

Selected Writing

Writing index
Outlook 2026: Adding Friction

The frictionless economy has a ceiling. Why the pendulum is swinging back toward the slow, the deliberate, and the in-person — and why a drugstore that keeps the mouthwash in jail has already lost.

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Outlook 2024: Downstream Effects

Generative AI brings the cost of making content to zero, and the rational response to infinite supply is the return of the monoculture: the events everyone shows up for. The book's argument, two years before the book.

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How COVID-19 Is Leading Us to the Metaverse, Part One

Written six weeks into lockdown, when the culture's first answer to "what happens when we can't be together" was Fortnite. The answer was wrong in the way everyone's was. The question is the book.

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I'm Adam J. Simon, and I write about culture and technology.

I went from making theater and games to running emerging technology strategy, which is the short version of a longer story →