You Have to Be There

How AI Makes Presence the Last Scarce Resource

by Adam J. Simon

Physical goods used to be expensive and local, before modern manufacturing and logistics made nearly everything cheap and available everywhere. The internet did the same thing to media, replacing the video store and the record shelf with an endless scroll, and AI is about to expand that scroll infinitely. But there's one thing none of this abundance can touch: the experience of being in a specific place, at a specific time, with specific people.

You can see it once you start looking. Fans booking flights for a movie, because only a few dozen screens on the planet can show it the way it was shot. A free Saturday run club with more registered members than Sweden has people. Candlelight concerts, revival houses, trivia nights, pickleball courts, all packed with people who could have stayed home for less money and chose not to.

The analysts keep calling this revenge spending, a temporary splurge that will fade when the credit cards max out (they've been predicting that fade for years now, and it keeps not arriving). What's actually happening is a permanent reordering of what people value, showing up across every generation, and it's already reshaping our cities, our fandoms, our social lives, and the industries built on top of them.

You Have to Be There is a book about that shift. It traces how presence became scarce in the first place, why the technologies that were supposed to replace the physical world keep making it more valuable instead, and what happens to a culture that suddenly remembers it has a body. Because the strangest part of this story is the role AI plays in it. The machine that can generate infinite content is the best thing that ever happened to the experiences no machine can generate. The more synthetic our feeds become, the more we'll pay for the one thing that can't be faked.

So while VR headsets and theme parks both make appearances, the real subject is bigger than either: what becomes valuable when everything else becomes abundant. And the argument starts from a simple test you already know how to run. Think of the moments from the last year you'd actually want to relive. Odds are, you had to be there for every one of them.

Chapter 5, "The AI Accelerant," is where the book earns its subtitle. A passage from it:

Irish essayist Mark O'Connell, writing in the New York Times, has spent six weeks glued to his couch. But he isn't isolated. Far from it — he's watching the 2026 World Cup, and he's watching it live. In a world of hyper-personalized feeds, the global live broadcast is "a rare moment of shared attention," he says. "All of us, everywhere, have been watching exactly the same things at exactly the same time." The final was the largest US soccer telecast ever, trailing only three Super Bowls and one presidential debate among American broadcasts of the past few years, by The Hollywood Reporter's count. And despite not being together, like the fans in the stadiums, those viewers at home are still having a shared experience. Presence is the combination of place plus time plus people, but the synchronized attention of a live broadcast only delivers on one of those requirements. And in a world of infinite content, delivering something unique and timely is the best way to demand attention.

As a teen in the '90s, I have fond memories of my favorite anti-establishment musicians and artists railing against "the monoculture." Decades of broadcast media, paid for and distributed by large corporate gatekeepers made it feel like everyone was watching, reading, and listening to the same things, and that culture was doomed to be a bland, commercial slurry forever. We all hated it. The April 1992 cover of Rolling Stone featured Kurt Cobain in a homemade t-shirt reading "corporate magazines still suck," literally wearing the popular sentiment of the time while protesting from inside the system. Now, of course, that seems like a quaint concern. The rational response to infinite supply of media is rediscovering – and recreating – the best parts of the monoculture: shared experiences, timely touchstones that we're all aware of, at least tangentially. Events that create enough of a community culture that you have a reasonable chance of being able to talk about it with even the most divergent-from-you stranger on the street. And we're beginning to realize that we need this back. Those with the most to lose are already shifting towards it.

Netflix is as responsible as just about anyone for shattering the monoculture. By spending two decades delivering all their content on-demand, they defined the shift to streaming as a shift towards abundance, an optimistic "screw the man, we'll give you what you want, whenever you want it!" attitude. But today, the future of the platform is tied to recreating scarcity. You can see it in the numbers. By The Ankler's count, live content is only about 1% of the total time spent watching Netflix, but they dedicated 5% of their 2026 content budget to it (about $1 billion). The rationale is clear: live events drove six of the ten biggest days for new subscribers over the previous five years. As O'Connell says, "We have, all of us, in our own various and yet weirdly identical ways, been at the World Cup," and Netflix knows that the next phase of culture demands that feeling.

Melanie Fletcher, the North America CEO of live specialists Done+Dusted, attributes the audience interest in live content directly to AI: "We don't know what's real anymore…Yet we know that if it's live in the moment and there's a big crowd, there's a sense of community and that, 'This is real, this is happening right now and I'm a part of it.'" You can see the human touch at every point in the production process, with Netflix partner Whisper TV hiring native speakers to dub the international feeds of a recent boxing match, something that they could have outsourced to AI, but chose not to.

That verifiable reality is actually the key. The recent Skyscraper Live, in which Alex Honnold free-climbed the Taipei 101 building live on Netflix, attracted 13 million total viewers, but more than half (about 7 million) watched after the live broadcast. The live-ness verified the authenticity, generated a fear of missing out, and minted the value of the event. Those watching later aren't watching a documentary, but a recording of something that really happened, with life-or-death stakes, in front of millions of witnesses. It's no accident that the live event that Netflix designed themselves, rather than licensing, has this long-tail value built in. The arbiter of on-demand viewing is now paying a 5x premium for programming that has a distinctly limited shelf life, because the value is in the expiration. And where Netflix goes, the rest of Hollywood often follows.

From You Have to Be There, a book in progress. © 2026 Adam J. Simon.

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.

About the Author

Adam J. Simon writes about culture, technology, and what happens when the two collide in physical space. For eleven years he wrote IPG Media Lab's annual Outlook report, a forecast of where media and consumer behavior were heading next, distributed across the Interpublic network and read inside companies including Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo, American Express, and Sony Pictures. He co-created, produced, and hosted Floor 9, the Lab's emerging-technology podcast, which won Adweek's Best Thought Leadership Podcast in 2020. Since 2025 he has led emerging-technology research at Disney Experiences, which puts him inside the largest experience business on the planet while he writes about the forces remaking all the others. He's a member of the Television Academy's Emerging Media Peer Group and the Themed Entertainment Association, has spoken at CES every year for a decade, and along the way has produced an interactive film, designed a word game that Penguin Random House published, and built games you had to walk around a city to play.