You Have to Be There

How AI Makes Presence the Last Scarce Resource

by Adam J. Simon

In the summer of 2024, my partner and I paid €275 each to eat a meal from a Michelin-starred chef on a theme park ride at Eatrenalin in Germany. It was the must-do stop on our European road trip, because we knew that even if the food was mediocre or the ride was a novelty, it would be something we would never forget. That turned out to be true, but it was also the loneliest night of our trip. It started me thinking about how we all leave the house less these days, but when we do go out, we go big: planning entire vacations around concert and theater tickets, trading just-okay dining out every week for exceptional meals once a month, and insisting on the very best screens for the movies we’re anticipating. We go out of our way to ensure that everything we experience will be worth remembering. That’s the change You Have to Be There is chronicling.

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 expanding 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 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, and among all American broadcasts in recent years, it fell just behind three Super Bowls and one presidential debate. A live broadcast synchronizes an audience in time, creating a shared experience even when we’re not together. And in a world of infinite content, delivering something unique and timely is the best way to command attention.

I have fond memories of my favorite musicians and artists of the ‘90s railing against what we later called “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 an infinite supply of media turns out to be recreating the best parts of that monoculture: shared experiences and timely touchstones that we’re all aware of, at least tangentially. Our feeds have created a monoculture of bland content, but without anyone being synchronized in time. What we’re missing is events that create enough of a community culture that we have a reasonable chance of being able to talk about it with a stranger on the street. Those with the most to lose in our current landscape have seen the cultural gap we’ve created, and are already running to close it.

Netflix is as responsible as just about anyone for shattering the monoculture. They defined the shift to streaming as a shift towards abundance, insisting that the on-demand binge-drop model for television was what audiences wanted for most of a decade. But today, the future of the platform is at least partially tied to recreating scarcity through live content. You can see it in the numbers: 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.”

The recent Skyscraper Live, in which Alex Honnold free-soloed the Taipei 101 building live on Netflix, attracted 13 million total viewers. More than half of them watched after the live broadcast, but the live-ness verified the authenticity, generated a fear of missing out, and minted the value of the event. Those watching later aren’t just watching a documentary, but a recording of something that really happened: unedited, with life-or-death stakes, in front of millions of witnesses. It’s no accident that a live event designed by Netflix, rather than licensed, has this long-tail value built in. The stalwart of on-demand viewing is now paying a 5x premium for live programming, and innovating on how to extend that value.

But that feeling of synchronicity is only part of the equation. If presence is being in a specific place at a specific time with specific people, so far Hollywood has only rediscovered the element of time. They’re just starting to learn the value of the place and the people.

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. He currently leads emerging technology research at Disney Experiences, where tracking the trends in this book is his day job. 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.