You Have to Be There
How AI Will Turn Presence into Our Last Scarce Resource
Presence is the last scarce resource.
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. It can't be copied, compressed, or shipped overnight. And so, in the span of about a decade, it went from seeming quaint to being the most premium option in every category.
You can see it once you start looking. Concerts that outgross the films they were supposed to be promoting. Immersive theater that sells out for years while multiplexes struggle. Restaurants, run clubs, revival houses, pickleball courts, all packed with people who could have stayed home for less money and chose not to. The forecasters 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.
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About the Author
Adam Simon is a writer and analyst covering the collision of culture, technology, and physical space. For a decade he wrote the IPG Media Lab Outlook report, an annual reading of where consumer behavior was heading next, distributed across the Interpublic network and read inside companies including Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo, American Express, and Sony Pictures. He's now Innovation Research Lead for Emerging Technology 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 co-hosts the Floor 9 podcast, speaks regularly at CES and industry events, and is a member of the Television Academy's Interactive Media Peer Group and the Themed Entertainment Association. And along the way he's produced interactive films, designed board games, and built software for theme parks.