The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

NOTES

1: BECOMING

average lifespan of a phone app: Erick Schonfeld, “Pinch Media Data Shows the Average Shelf Life of an iPhone App Is Less Than 30 Days,” TechCrunch, February 19, 2009.

sea pirates two centuries ago: Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

graphic Netscape browser: Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).

not designed for doing commerce: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Battle for the Soul of the Internet,” Time, July 25, 1994.

“The Internet? Bah!”: Clifford Stoll, “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995 (original title: “The Internet? Bah!”).

“CB radio of the ’90s”: William Webb, “The Internet: CB Radio of the 90s?,” Editor & Publisher, July 8, 1995.

Bush outlined the web’s core idea: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.

Nelson, who envisioned his own scheme: Theodor H. Nelson, “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” in ACM ’65: Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference (New York: ACM, 1965), 84–100.

“transclusion”: Theodor H. Nelson, Literary Machines (South Bend, IN: Mindful Press, 1980).

“intertwingularity”: Theodor H. Nelson, Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now (South Bend, IN: Nelson, 1974).

total number of web pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013, accessed April 26, 2015.

90 billion searches a month: Steven Levy, “How Google Search Dealt with Mobile,” Medium, Backchannel, January 15, 2015.

50 million blogs in the early 2000s: David Sifry, “State of the Blogosphere, August 2006,” Sifry’s Alerts, August 7, 2006.

65,000 per day are posted: “YouTube Serves Up 100 Million Videos a Day Online,” Reuters, July 16, 2006.

300 video hours every minute, in 2015: “Statistics,” YouTube, April 2015, https://goo.gl/RVb7oz.

women online first outnumbered men: Deborah Fallows, “How Women and Men Use the Internet: Part 2—Demographics,” Pew Research Center, December 28, 2005.

51 percent of netizens are female: Calculation based on “Internet User Demographics: Internet Users in 2014,” Pew Research Center, 2014; and “2013 Population Estimates,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2015.

bone-creaking 44 years old: Weighted average of internet users in 2014 based on “Internet User Demographics,” Pew Research Center, 2014; and “2014 Population Estimates,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2014.

mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed: Joshua Quittner, “Billions Registered,” Wired 2(10), October 1994.

2: COGNIFYING

several hundred “instances” of the AI: Personal visit to IBM Research, June 2014.

“world’s best diagnostician”: Personal correspondence with Alan Greene.

$18 billion in investments since 2009: Private analysis by Quid, Inc., 2014.

in-house AI research teams: Reed Albergotti, “Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014.

purchased AI companies since 2014: Derrick Harris, “Pinterest, Yahoo, Dropbox and the (Kind of) Quiet Content-as-Data Revolution,” Gigaom, January 6, 2014; Derrick Harris “Twitter Acquires Deep Learning Startup Madbits,” Gigaom, July 29, 2014; Ingrid Lunden, “Intel Has Acquired Natural Language Processing Startup Indisys, Price ‘North’ of $26M, to Build Its AI Muscle,” TechCrunch, September 13, 2013; and Cooper Smith, “Social Networks Are Investing Big in Artificial Intelligence,” Business Insider, March 17, 2014.

expanding 70 percent a year: Private analysis by Quid, Inc., 2014.

taught an AI to learn to play: Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, et al., “Human-Level Control Through Deep Reinforcement Learning,” Nature 518, no. 7540 (2015): 529–33.

Betterment or Wealthfront: Rob Berger, “7 Robo Advisors That Make Investing Effortless,” Forbes, February 5, 2015.

80 percent of its revenue: Rick Summer, “By Providing Products That Consumers Use Across the Internet, Google Can Dominate the Ad Market,” Morningstar, July 17, 2015.

3 billion queries that Google conducts: Danny Sullivan, “Google Still Doing at Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated: James Niccolai, “Google Reports Strong Profit, Says It’s ‘Rethinking Everything’ Around Machine Learning,” ITworld, October 22, 2015.

the AI winter: “AI Winter,” Wikipedia, accessed July 24, 2015.

Billions of neurons in our brain: Frederico A. C. Azevedo, Ludmila R. B. Carvalho, Lea T. Grinberg, et al., “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Non-Neuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513, no. 5 (2009): 532–41.

run neural networks in parallel: Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan, and Andrew Y. Ng, “Large-Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning Using Graphics Processors,” Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML ’09 (New York: ACM, 2009), 873–80.

neural nets running on GPUs: Klint Finley, “Netflix Is Building an Artificial Brain Using Amazon’s Cloud,” Wired, February 13, 2014.

dozen examples as a child before it can distinguish: Personal correspondence with Paul Quinn, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, August 6, 2014.

thousand games of chess: Personal correspondence with Daylen Yang (author of the Stockfish chess app), Stefan Meyer-Kahlen (developed the multiple award-winning computer chess program Shredder), and Danny Kopec (American chess International Master and cocreator of one of the standard computer chess testing systems), September 2014.

“akin to building a rocket ship”: Caleb Garling, “Andrew Ng: Why ‘Deep Learning’ Is a Mandate for Humans, Not Just Machines,” Wired, May 5, 2015.

In 2006, Geoff Hinton: Kate Allen, “How a Toronto Professor’s Research Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence,” Toronto Star, April 17, 2015.

he dubbed “deep learning”: Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, “Deep Learning,” Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 436–44.

the network effect: Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1998).

famous man-versus-machine match: “Deep Blue,” IBM 100: Icons of Progress, March 7, 2012.

rather than competes against them: Owen Williams, “Garry Kasparov—Biography,” KasparovAgent.com, 2010.

freestyle chess matches: Arno Nickel, Freestyle Chess, 2010.

centaurs won 53 games: Arno Nickel, “The Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015.

several different chess programs: Arno Nickel, “‘Intagrand’ Wins the Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015.

grand master rating of all time: “FIDE Chess Profile (Carlsen, Magnus),” World Chess Federation, 2015.

AI that can view a photo portrait of any person: Personal interview at Facebook, September 2014.

70 percent of American workers: U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Reports: Farm Population,” Persons in Farm Occupations: 1820 to 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), 4.

all but 1 percent of their jobs: “Employed Persons by Occupation, Sex, and Age,” Employment & Earnings Online, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015.

this is a big deal: Scott Santens, “Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck,” Huffington Post, May 18, 2015.

accurate caption for any photo: Tom Simonite, “Google Creates Software That Tells You What It Sees in Images,” MIT Technology Review, November 18, 2014.

Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015.

four times that amount over a lifespan: Martin Haegele, Thomas Skordas, Stefan Sagert, et al., “Industrial Robot Automation,” White Paper FP6-001917, European Robotics Research Network, 2005.

Priced at $25,000: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015.

all but seven minutes of a typical flight: John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015.

3: FLOWING

steady flow of household replenishables: “List of Online Grocers,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015.

new medium imitates the medium it replaces: Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

top ten music videos: “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015.

about $2.26 per download: “Did Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ Honesty Box Actually Damage the Music Industry?,” NME, October 15, 2012.

create a chorus from it: Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, “Lux Aurumque,” March 21, 2010.

containing 30 million tracks of music: “Information,” Spotify, accessed June 18, 2015.

its 250 million fans: Romain Dillet, “SoundCloud Now Reaches 250 Million Visitors in Its Quest to Become the Audio Platform of the Web,” TechCrunch, October 29, 2013.

27 percent of music sales: Joshua P. Friedlander, “News and Notes on 2014 RIAA Music Industry Shipment and Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, 2015, http://goo.gl/Ozgk8f.

Spotify pays 70 percent: “Spotify Explained,” Spotify Artists, 2015.

streaming takeover “is inevitable”: Joan E. Solsman, “Attention, Artists: Streaming Music Is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It,” CNET, November 14, 2014.

hours of music required: Personal estimation.

new podcasts launch every day: Personal correspondence with Todd Pringle, GM and VP of Product, Stitcher, April 26, 2015.

four ways books embody fixity: Nicholas Carr, “Words in Stone and on the Wind,” Rough Type, February 3, 2012.

4: SCREENING

50,000 words in Old English to a million: Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English, third revised ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); and Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 10 (Grolier, 1999).

romance novel was invented in 1740: Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

three quarters of the towns: Calculation based on approximately 1,700 public libraries and 2,269 places with a population of 2,500 or higher. Florence Anderson, Carnegie Corporation Library Program 1911–1961 (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1963); Durand R. Miller, Carnegie Grants for Library Buildings, 1890–1917 (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1943); and “1990 Census of Population and Housing,” U.S. Census Bureau, CPH21, 1990.

5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives: Extrapolation based on “Installed Base of Internet-Connected Video Devices to Exceed Global Population in 2017,” IHS, October 8, 2013.

3.8 billion new additional screens per year: 2014 Total Global Shipments, IHS Display Search; personal communication with Lee Graham, May 1, 2015.

reading scores trended down: “Average SAT Scores of College-Bound Seniors,” College Board, 2015, http://goo.gl/Rbmu0q.

tripled since 1980: Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, 2009.

60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.

80 million blog posts per day: Sum of 2 million on WordPress, 78 million on Tumblr: “A Live Look at Activity Across WordPress.com,” WordPress, April 2015; and “About (Posts Today),” Tumblr, accessed August 5, 2015.

500 million quips per day: “About (Tweets Sent Per Day),” Twitter, August 5, 2015.

Some scholars of literature: Sven Birkerts, “Reading in a Digital Age,” American Scholar, March 1, 2010.

Neurological studies show: Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009).

screen only one word wide: “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation,” Wikipedia, accessed June 24, 2015.

36 million Kindles and ebook readers: Helen Ku, “E-Ink Forecasts Loss as Ebook Device Demand Falls,” Taipei Times, March 29, 2014.

books that are projected wide and big: Stefan Marti, “TinyProjector,” MIT Media Lab, October 2000–May 2002.

concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia: “List of Wikipedias,” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed April 30, 2015.

great library at Alexandria: Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Library and Museum at Alexandria,” Greece and Rome 42 (1995).

backing up the entire internet: Personal correspondence with Brewster Kahle, 2006.

at least 310 million books: “WorldCat Local,” WorldCat, accessed August 18, 2015.

1.4 billion articles and essays: Ibid.

180 million songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015.

3.5 trillion images: “How Many Photos Have Ever Been Taken?,” 1,000 Memories blog, April 10, 2012, accessed via Internet Archive, May 2, 2015.

330,000 movies: “Database Statistics,” IMDb, May 2015.

1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films: Inferred from “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed August 18, 2015.

60 trillion public web pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.

50-petabyte hard disks: Private communication with Brewster Kahle, 2006.

25 million orphan works: Naomi Korn, In from the Cold: An Assessment of the Scope of ‘Orphan Works’ and Its Impact on the Delivery of Services to the Public, JISC Content, Collections Trust, Cambridge, UK, April 2009.

“stories, not of atoms”: Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness: Poems (New York: Random House, 1968).

what we are paying attention to: Phillip Moore, “Eye Tracking: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Going,” User Testing, June 4, 2015.

read our emotions as we read the screen: Mariusz Szwoch and Wioleta Szwoch, “Emotion Recognition for Affect Aware Video Games,” in Image Processing & Communications Challenges 6, ed. Ryszard S. Choraś, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 313, Springer International, 2015, 227–36.

informational layer to reality: Jessi Hempel, “Project Hololens: Our Exclusive Hands-On with Microsoft’s Holographic Goggles,” Wired, January 21, 2015; and Sean Hollister, “How Magic Leap Is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality,” Gizmodo, November 9, 2014.

5: ACCESSING

TechCrunch recently observed: Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface,” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015.

800,000-volume library: “Kindle Unlimited,” Amazon, accessed June 24, 2015.

tin-coated steel and it weighed: Chaz Miller, “Steel Cans,” Waste 360, March 1, 2008.

one fifth of its original weight: “Study Finds Aluminum Cans the Sustainable Package of Choice,” Can Manufacturers Institute, May 20, 2015.

weight of the average automobile has fallen: Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001.

In 1930 it took only one kilogram: Sylvia Gierlinger and Fridolin Krausmann, “The Physical Economy of the United States of America,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 16, no. 3 (2012): 365–77, Figure 4a.

from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001.

“Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.

Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer”: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984).

subscribe to Photoshop: “Subscription Products Boost Adobe Fiscal 2Q Results,” Associated Press, June 16, 2015.

Uber for laundry: Jessica Pressler, “‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry,’” New York, May 21, 2014.

Uber for doctor house calls: Jennifer Jolly, “An Uber for Doctor House Calls,” New York Times, May 5, 2015.

sizable bag rental business: Emily Hamlin Smith, “Where to Rent Designer Handbags, Clothes, Accessories and More,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 12, 2012.

phone app, such as M-Pesa: Murithi Mutiga, “Kenya’s Banking Revolution Lights a Fire,” New York Times, January 20, 2014.

has $3 billion in circulation: “Bitcoin Network,” Bitcoin Charts, accessed June 24, 2015.

100,000 vendors accepting the coins: Wouter Vonk, “Bitcoin and BitPay in 2014,” BitPay blog, February 4, 2015.

Six times an hour: Colin Dean, “How Many Bitcoin Are Mined Per Day?,” Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 28, 2013.

Knowledge-Based Trust: Hal Hodson, “Google Wants to Rank Websites Based on Facts Not Links,” New Scientist, February 28, 2015.

tools are extensions of our selves: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

down only 14 minutes in 2014: Brandon Butler, “Which Cloud Providers Had the Best Uptime Last Year?,” Network World, January 12, 2015.

app onto their phones called FireChat: Noam Cohen, “Hong Kong Protests Propel FireChat Phone-to-Phone App,” New York Times, October 5, 2014.

6: SHARING

“new modern-day sort of communists”: Michael Kanellos, “Gates Taking a Seat in Your Den,” CNET, January 5, 2005.

first collaborative web page in 1994: Ward Cunningham, “Wiki History,” March 25, 1995, http://goo.gl/2qAjTO.

tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today: “Wiki Engines,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://goo.gl/5auMv6.

billion instances of Creative Commons: “State of the Commons,” Creative Commons, accessed May 2, 2015.

“dot-communism”: Theta Pavis, “The Rise of Dot-Communism,” Wired, October 25, 1999.

“composed entirely of free agents”: Roshni Jayakar, “Interview: John Perry Barlow, Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” Business Today, December 6, 2000, accessed July 30, 2015, via Internet Archive, April 24, 2006.

ranked by the increasing degree of coordination: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

1.8 billion per day: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.

billions of videos served by YouTube: “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed June 24, 2015.

millions of fan-created stories: Piotr Kowalczyk, “15 Most Popular Fanfiction Websites,” Ebook Friendly, January 13, 2015.

the socialist promise: “From Each According to His Ability, to Each According to His Need,” Wikipedia, accessed June 24, 2015.

Half of all web pages in the world today: “July 2015 Web Server Survey,” Netcraft, July 22, 2015.

more than 35 million servers: Jean S. Bozman and Randy Perry, “Server Transition Alternatives: A Business Value View Focusing on Operating Costs,” White Paper 231528R1, IDC, 2012.

running free Apache software: “July 2015 Web Server Survey,” Netcraft, July 22, 2015.

3D Warehouse offers several million: “Materialise Previews Upcoming Printables Feature for Trimble’s 3D Warehouse,” Materialise, April 24, 2015.

community-designed Arduinos: “Arduino FAQ—With David Cuartielles,” Medea, April 5, 2013.

Raspberry Pi computers: “About 6 Million Raspberry Pis Have Been Sold,” Adafruit, June 8, 2015.

“alternative to both state-based”: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

650,000 people: “Account Holders,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015.

more than half a million projects: “Projects,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015.

size of the General Motors workforce: “Annual Report 2014,” General Motors, 2015, http://goo.gl/DhXIxp.

several hundred contributors: “Current Apache HTTP Server Project Members,” Apache HTTP Server Project, accessed June 25, 2015.

60,000 person-years of work: Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt, and Ron Hale-Evans, “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution,” Linux Foundation, 2008.

10,000 daily active communities: “About Reddit,” Reddit, accessed June 25, 2015.

1 billion monthly users: “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed June 25, 2015.

have contributed to Wikipedia: “Wikipedia: Wikipedians,” Wikipedia, accessed June 25, 2015.

posted on Instagram: “Stats,” Instagram, accessed May 2, 2015.

700 million groups participate in Facebook: “Facebook Just Released Their Monthly Stats and the Numbers Are Staggering,” TwistedSifter, April 23, 2015.

1.4 billion citizens of Facebook: Ibid.

survey of 2,784 open source developers: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, et al., “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study,” International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht, Netherlands, 2002, Figure 35: “Reasons to Join and to Stay in OS/FS Community.”

“improve my own damn software”: Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 507–19.

it had only 30 employees: Gary Wolf, “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess,” Wired 17(9), August 24, 2009.

“as smart as everyone”: Larry Keeley, “Ten Commandments for Success on the Net,” Fast Company, June 30, 1996.

as Clay Shirky puts it: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

“Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “Declaring Independence,” Wired 4(6), June 1996.

$24 billion in 2015: Steven Perlberg, “Social Media Ad Spending to Hit $24 Billion This Year,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2015.

tried to harness readers’ reports: Rachel McAthy, “Lessons from the Guardian’s Open Newslist Trial,” Journalism.co.uk, July 9, 2012.

OhMyNews in South Korea: “OhMyNews,” Wikipedia, accessed July 30, 2015.

Fast Company signed up 2,000: Ed Sussman, “Why Michael Wolff Is Wrong,” Observer, March 20, 2014.

smaller number of editors: Aaron Swartz, “Who Writes Wikipedia?,” Raw Thought, September 4, 2006.

“an old-boy network”: Kapor first said this about the internet pre-web in the late 1980s. Personal communication.

not exactly a bastion of equality: “Wikipedia: WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias,” Wikipedia, accessed July 31, 2015.

9,000 startups in 2015: Mesh, accessed August 18, 2015, http://meshing.it.

Babylonian chants: Stef Conner, “The Lyre Ensemble,” StefConner.com, accessed July 31, 2015.

TV commercial using smartphones: Amy Keyishian and Dawn Chmielewski, “Apple Unveils TV Commercials Featuring Video Shot with iPhone 6,” Re/code, June 1, 2015; and V. Renée, “This New Ad for Bentley Was Shot on the iPhone 5S and Edited on an iPad Air Right Inside the Car,” No Film School, May 17, 2014.

paintings using an iPad: Claire Cain Miller, “IPad Is an Artist’s Canvas for David Hockney,” Bits Blog, New York Times, January 10, 2014.

Korean pop dance video “Gangnam Style”: Officialpsy, “Psy—Gangnam Style M/V,” YouTube, July 15, 2012, accessed August 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/LoetL.

9 million fans to fund 88,000 projects: “Stats,” Kickstarter, accessed June 25, 2015.

raise more than $34 billion each year: “Global Crowdfunding Market to Reach $34.4B in 2015, Predicts Massolution’s 2015 CF Industry Report,” Crowdsourcing.org, April 7, 2015.

about 20,000 people who raised: “The Year in Kickstarter 2013,” Kickstarter, January 9, 2014.

unless the total amount is raised: “Creator Handbook: Funding,” Kickstarter, accessed July 31, 2015.

highest grossing Kickstarter campaign: Pebble Time is currently the most funded Kickstarter, with $20,338,986 to date. “Most Funded,” Kickstarter, accessed August 18, 2015.

40 percent of all projects succeed: “Stats: Projects and Dollars Success Rate,” Kickstarter, accessed July 31, 2015.

SeedInvest and FundersClub: Marianne Hudson, “Understanding Crowdfunding and Emerging Trends,” Forbes, April 9, 2015.

ordinary citizens in early 2016: Steve Nicastro, “Regulation A+ Lets Small Businesses Woo More Investors,” NerdWallet Credit Card blog, June 25, 2015.

more than $725 million: “About Us: Latest Statistics,” Kiva, accessed June 25, 2015.

loans worth more than $10 billion: Simon Cunningham, “Default Rates at Lending Club & Prosper: When Loans Go Bad,” LendingMemo, October 17, 2014; and Davey Alba, “Banks Are Betting Big on a Startup That Bypasses Banks,” Wired, April 8, 2015.

GE has launched over 400 new products: Steve Lohr, “The Invention Mob, Brought to You by Quirky,” New York Times, February 14, 2015.

Netflix announced an award: Preethi Dumpala, “Netflix Reveals Million-Dollar Contest Winner,” Business Insider, September 21, 2009.

Forty thousand groups submitted: “Leaderboard,” Netflix Prize, 2009.

150,000 car fanatics: Gary Gastelu, “Local Motors 3-D-Printed Car Could Lead an American Manufacturing Revolution,” Fox News, July 3, 2014.

3-D-printed electric car: Paul A. Eisenstein, “Startup Plans to Begin Selling First 3-D-Printed Cars Next Year,” NBC News, July 8, 2015.

7: FILTERING

8 million new songs: Private correspondence with Richard Gooch, CTO, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, April 15, 2015. This is a low estimate, with a higher estimate being 12 million, according to Paul Jessop and David Hughes, “In the Matter of: Technological Upgrades to Registration and Recordation Functions,” Docket No. 2013-2, U.S. Copyright Office, 2013, Comments in response to the March 22, 2013, Notice of Inquiry.

2 million new books: “Annual Report,” International Publishers Association, Geneva, 2014, http://goo.gl/UNfZLP.

16,000 new films: “Most Popular TV Series/Feature Films Released in 2014 (Titles by Country),” IMDb, 2015, accessed August 5, 2015.

30 billion blog posts: Extrapolations based on the following: “About (Posts Today),” Tumblr, accessed August 5, 2015; and “A Live Look at Activity Across WordPress.com,” WordPress, accessed August 5, 2015.

182 billion tweets: “Company,” Twitter, accessed August 5, 2015.

400,000 new products: “Global New Products Database,” Mintel, accessed June 25, 2015.

total number of songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015.

2,000 hours to completely read: Based on an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, average for U.S. eighth graders. Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?,” Forbes, June 4, 2012.

29 million words: “Great Books of the Western World,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Australia, 2015.

a third of Amazon sales: James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, et al., “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, 2011. This is a conservative estimate. An outside analyst estimates it could be closer to two thirds.

about $30 billion in 2014: Extrapolated from 2014 sales/revenue of $88.9 billion. “Amazon.com Inc. (Financials),” Market Watch, accessed August 5, 2015.

300 people working: Janko Roettgers, “Netflix Spends $150 Million on Content Recommendations Every Year,” Gigaom, October 9, 2014.

automatically map one’s position: Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, and Daniele Quercia, “Data Portraits: Connecting People of Opposing Views,” arXiv Preprint, November 19, 2013.

Studies show that going to the next circle: Eytan Bakshy, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, et al., “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion,” arXiv, January 2012, 1201.4145 [physics].

200 average friends: Aaron Smith, “6 New Facts About Facebook,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2014.

all the posts your friends make: Victor Luckerson, “Here’s How Your Facebook News Feed Actually Works,” Time, July 9, 2015.

35 billion emails a day: My calculation based on figures from the following: “Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018,” Radicati Group, April 2014; and “Email Client Market Share,” Litmus, April, 2015.

filters the content of 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.

about 2 million times every minute: Danny Sullivan, “Google Still Doing at Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015.

“3 billion questions a day”: Ibid.

“a poverty of attention”: Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

TV still captures most of our attention: Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.

average CPM of various media platforms: “The Media Monthly,” Peter J. Solomon Company, 2014.

half a trillion hours: Calculation based on the following: “Census Bureau Projects U.S. and World Populations on New Year’s Day,” U.S. Census Bureau Newsroom, December 29, 2014; and Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.

average $3.60 per hour of attention: Michael Johnston, “What Are Average CPM Rates in 2014?,” MonetizePros, July 21, 2014.

4.3 hours to read: Calculation based on Gabe Habash, “The Average Book Has 64,500 Words,” Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2012; and Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?” Forbes, June 4, 2012.

$23 to buy: Private communication with Kempton Mooney, Nielsen, April 16, 2015.

every one of the 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.

guided by the context: “How Ads Are Targeted to Your Site,” AdSense Help, accessed August 6, 2015.

interest of the reader visiting: Jon Mitchell, “What Do Google Ads Know About You?,” ReadWrite, November 10, 2011.

21 percent of Google’s total revenue: “2014 Financial Tables,” Google Investor Relations, accessed August 7, 2015.

5,000 user-made submissions: Michael Castillo, “Doritos Reveals 10 ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ Ad Finalists,” Adweek, January 5, 2015.

awards $1 million to the winner: Gabe Rosenberg, “How Doritos Turned User-Generated Content into the Biggest Super Bowl Campaign of the Year,” Content Strategist, Contently, January 12, 2015.

4,000 were negative ads: Greg Sandoval, “GM Slow to React to Nasty Ads,” CNET, April 3, 2006.

asymmetry of attention in email: Esther Dyson, “Caveat Sender!,” Project Syndicate, February 20, 2013.

total lifetime spending of a customer: Brad Sugars, “How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of a Customer,” Entrepreneur, August 8, 2012.

$168,000 worth of merchandise: Morgan Quinn, “The 2015 Oscar Swag Bag Is Worth $168,000 but Comes with a Catch,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 22, 2015.

“downward trend in real commodity prices”: Paul Cashin and C. John McDermott, “The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability,” IMF Staff Papers 49, no. 2 (2002).

dropping cost of copper: Indur M. Goklany, “Have Increases in Population, Affluence and Technology Worsened Human and Environmental Well-Being?,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009).

Luxury entertainment is increasing 6.5 percent: Liyan Chen, “The Forbes 400 Shopping List: Living the 1% Life Is More Expensive Than Ever,” Forbes, September 30, 2014.

Spending at restaurants and bars: Hiroko Tabuchi, “Stores Suffer from a Shift of Behavior in Buyers,” New York Times, August 13, 2015.

price of the average concert ticket: Alan B. Krueger, “Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” remarks given at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, White House Council of Economic Advisers, June 12, 2013.

rose 400 percent from 1982 to 2014: “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Medical Care [CPIMEDSL],” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed June 25, 2015.

rate for babysitting: “2014 National Childcare Survey: Babysitting Rates & Nanny Pay,” Urban Sitter, 2014; and Ed Halteman, “2013 INA Salary and Benefits Survey,” International Nanny Association, 2012.

cost of home visits: Brant Morefield, Michael Plotzke, Anjana Patel, et al., “Hospice Cost Reports: Benchmarks and Trends, 2004–2011,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011.

8: REMIXING

existing resources that are rearranged: Paul M. Romer, “Economic Growth,” Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Library of Economics and Liberty, 2008.

combination of existing technologies: W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009).

fan-created works to date: Archive of Our Own, accessed July 29, 2015.

12 million Vine clips: Jenna Wortham, “Vine, Twitter’s New Video Tool, Hits 13 Million Users,” Bits blog, New York Times, June 3, 2013.

1.5 billion daily loops: Carmel DeAmicis, “Vine Rings in Its Second Year by Hitting 1.5 Billion Daily Loops,” Gigaom, January 26, 2015.

million person-hours to produce: Personal calculation. Very few materials are consumed making a movie; 95 percent of the cost goes to labor and people’s time, including subcontractors. Assuming that the average wage is less than $100 per hour, a $100 million movie entails at least one million hours of work.

about 600 feature films are released: “Theatrical Market Statistics 2014,” Motion Picture Association of America, 2015.

12 billion times in a single month: “ComScore Releases January 2014 U.S. Online Video Rankings,” comScore, February 21, 2014.

more than any blockbuster movie: The top-selling movie, Gone with the Wind, has sold an estimated 202,044,600 tickets. “All Time Box Office,” Box Office Mojo, accessed August 7, 2015.

100 million short video clips: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.

Iron Editor challenge: “Sakura-Con 2015 Results (and Info),” Iron Editor, April 7, 2015; and Neda Ulaby, “‘Iron Editors’ Test Anime Music-Video Skills,” NPR, August 2, 2007.

than with traditional cinematography: Michael Rubin, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution (Gainesville, FL: Triad Publishing, 2005).

1.5 trillion photos posted: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.

“database cinema”: Lev Manovich, “Database as a Symbolic Form,” Millennium Film Journal 34 (1999); and Cristiano Poian, “Investigating Film Algorithm: Transtextuality in the Age of Database Cinema,” presented at the Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts II, V Magis Gradisca International Film Studies Spring School, 2015, accessed August 19, 2015.

in the 13th century: Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–27.

Footnotes, invented in about: Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97.

bibliographic citations: Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilation on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds. J.J.G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–27.

gaining visual intelligence rapidly: John Markoff, “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software,” New York Times, November 17, 2014.

“one can only reread it”: Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

“He who receives an idea from me”: Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813,” in Founders’ Constitution, eds. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1986).

multibillion-dollar industry: “Music Industry Revenue in the U.S. 2014,” Statista, 2015, accessed August 11, 2015.

uncertainty about Google’s reuse: Margaret Kane, “Google Pauses Library Project,” CNET, October 10, 2005.

70 years after the death of the creator: “Duration of Copyright,” Section 302(a), Circular 92, Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, U.S. Copyright Office, accessed August 11, 2015.

9: INTERACTING

dim room in the research labs of Stanford: In-person VR demonstration by Jeremy Bailenson, director, Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, June 2015.

empty head-mounted display unit: Menchie Mendoza, “Google Cardboard vs. Samsung Gear VR: Which Low-Cost VR Headset Is Best for Gaming?,” Tech Times, July 21, 2015.

“light field” projection: Douglas Lanman, “Light Field Displays at AWE2014 (Video),” presented at the Augmented World Expo, June 2, 2014.

first commercial light field units: Jessi Hempel, “Project HoloLens: Our Exclusive Hands-On with Microsoft’s Holographic Goggles,” Wired, January 21, 2015.

50,000 avatars are simultaneously roaming: Luppicini Rocci, Moral, Ethical, and Social Dilemmas in the Age of Technology: Theories and Practice (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013); and Mei Douthitt, “Why Did Second Life Fail? (Mei’s Answer),” Quora, March 18, 2015.

Half of them are there for virtual sex: Frank Rose, “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life,” Wired, July 24, 2007.

urinal in the men’s restroom: Nicholas Negroponte, “Sensor Deprived,” Wired 2(10), October 1, 1994.

“not enough Africa in them”: Kevin Kelly, “Gossip Is Philosophy,” Wired 3(5), May 1995.

Project Jacquard: Virginial Postre, “Google’s Project Jacquard Gets It Right,” BloombergView, May 31, 2015.

prototype from Northeastern University: Brian Heater, “Northeastern University Squid Shirt Torso-On,” Engadget, June 12, 2012.

Sensory Substitution Vest: Shirley Li, “The Wearable Device That Could Unlock a New Human Sense,” Atlantic, April 14, 2015.

she could drink from it: Leigh R. Hochberg, Daniel Bacher, Beata Jarosiewicz, et al., “Reach and Grasp by People with Tetraplegia Using a Neurally Controlled Robotic Arm,” Nature 485, no. 7398 (2012): 372–75.

“skin him afterward”: Scott Sharkey, “Red Dead Redemption Review,” 1Up.com, May 17, 2010.

40 to 50 hours to complete: “Red Dead Redemption,” How Long to Beat, accessed August 11, 2015.

10: TRACKING

200 Quantified Self Meetup groups: “Quantified Self Meetups,” Meetup, accessed August 11, 2015.

he generates an annual report: Nicholas Felton, “2013 Annual Report,” Feltron.com, 2013.

as if he could feel a map: Sunny Bains, “Mixed Feelings,” Wired 15(4), 2007.

“calendar items, to-do lists”: Eric Thomas Freeman, “The Lifestreams Software Architecture” [dissertation], Yale University, May 1997.

“Your entire cyberlife is right there”: Nicholas Carreiro, Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman, and David Gelernter, “Lifestreams: Bigger Than Elvis,” Yale University, March 25, 1996.

Steve Mann in the 1990s: Steve Mann, personal web page, accessed July 29, 2015.

Bell documented every aspect: “MyLifeBits—Microsoft Research,” Microsoft Research, accessed July 29, 2015.

34 billion internet-enabled devices: “The Internet of Things Will Drive Wireless Connected Devices to 40.9 Billion in 2020,” ABI Research, August 20, 2014.

600 percent increase in iPods: “Apple’s Profit Soars Thanks to iPod’s Popularity,” Associated Press, April 14, 2005.

production tanked in 2009: “Infographic: The Decline of iPod,” Infogram, accessed May 3, 2015.

benefits we humans covet: Sean Madden, “Tech That Tracks Your Every Move Can Be Convenient, Not Creepy,” Wired, March 10, 2014.

54 billion sensors every year by 2020: “Connections Counter: The Internet of Everything in Motion,” The Network, Cisco, July 29, 2013.

11: QUESTIONING

35 million articles in 288 languages: “List of Wikipedias,” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed April 30, 2015.

“how to make people click ads”: Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Business, April 14, 2014.

4 billion screens lit today: Calculation based on the following: Charles Arthur, “Future Tablet Market Will Outstrip PCs—and Reach 900m People, Forrester Says,” Guardian, August 7, 2013; Michael O’Grady, “Forrester Research World Tablet Adoption Forecast, 2013 to 2018 (Global), Q4 2014 Update,” Forrester, December 19, 2014; and “Smartphones to Drive Double-Digit Growth of Smart Connected Devices in 2014 and Beyond, According to IDC,” IDC, June 17, 2014.

50 billion devices on the internet by 2020: “Connections Counter,” Cisco, 2013.

another 13 billion appliances: “Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2015,” Gartner, November 11, 2014.

built into connected cars: Ibid.

6 billion times per year: “$4.11: A NARUC Telecommunications Staff Subcommittee Report on Directory Assistance,” National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, 2003, 68.

two lookups per week in the 1990s: Peter Krasilovsky, “Usage Study: 22% Quit Yellow Pages for Net,” Local Onliner, October 11, 2005.

1 billion library visits per year: Adrienne Chute, Elaine Kroe, Patricia Garner, et al., “Public Libraries in the United States: Fiscal Year 1999,” NCES 200230, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2002.

$82 billion business: Don Reisinger, “For Google and Search Ad Revenue, It’s a Glass Half Full,” CNET, March 31, 2015.

four questions per day online: Danny Sullivan, “Internet Top Information Resource, Study Finds,” Search Engine Watch, February 5, 2001.

ordinary people might pay for search: Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo, and Jeon Yong-Mi Kim, “A Day Without a Search Engine: An Experimental Study of Online and Offline Search,” University of Michigan, 2010.

average value of answering a question: Hal Varian, “The Economic Impact of Google,” video, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2011.