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
I started asking the question in spring 2020, when being together stopped being an option and the first thing the culture reached for was the metaverse. That answer didn't take. What people did instead was go back out the door, and pay more to do it, and six years on they haven't stopped. So the book is about why: how something that used to be free became the most expensive item in every category, from a 70mm screening to a night at the Sphere, and why AI, of all things, is the reason. Fourteen chapters, three parts, one argument.
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
About
Adam J. Simon wrote Outlook, IPG Media Lab's annual forecast of where media and entertainment were headed, for eleven years, and co-created, produced, and hosted Floor 9, the Lab's podcast, which Adweek named the Best Thought Leadership Podcast of 2020. Since 2025 he has led emerging-technology research at Disney Experiences. He has spoken at CES ten years running, sits in the Television Academy's Emerging Media Peer Group, and has turned up in The New York Times, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. Before any of that he directed theater, which turns out to be the same job: get people into a room and give them a reason to stay.