The Shift from Consumption to Co-Creation is Reshaping the Entertainment Industry
Fifty Shades started as Twilight fan fiction and a fan-made Bridgerton musical won a Grammy. The audience is already writing; the only open question is whether the studios host it or keep pretending it isn't happening. I argued co-creation would end up bigger than any headset. Still think so.
Why Web3 Isn't Inevitable
Written at the top of the NFT market. The metaverse had a generation raised in 3D spaces behind it; the blockchain had a database decision behind it, AWS versus Azure, and nobody lines up around the block for a database. Held up.
The Shift from Local to Global Distribution is Reshaping the Entertainment Industry
Squid Game became a hit because it was already a hit: Netflix put a Top 10 on a homepage a hundred million people open every day and told them what they were missing. Manufactured monoculture, two years before I understood it was the whole story.
How COVID-19 Is Leading Us to the Metaverse, Part Two
Four things standing between Fortnite and an actual metaverse: permanence, an interface a non-gamer could survive, a way to half-pay-attention, and no single owner. Facebook had none of them and bet everything on VR headsets anyway. It's the list I'd still hand someone building this today.
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.
From Mass Media to Micro-Culture
A history of television in a thousand words, ending on a prediction: the internet was swinging us back to the local cultures of the 1800s, minus the geography. That was the first half of the argument. The second half — people heading back out the door to find each other — is the book.