EPIC 2014
How did we do?
In the year 2014, people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way. Everyone participates to create a living, breathing mediascape. However, the press as you know it as ceased to exist. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. Twentieth century news organizations are an afterthought — a lonely remnant of a not too distant past.
In 2004, a fictional video called EPIC 2014 (also known as Googlezon) was produced for the also-fictional Museum of Media History. It tells a story, looking “back” from the year 2014, about the dystopian future of media, corrupted by monopolies, lack of privacy, and missing journalistic standards and ethics.
The video tells some factual history, up to 2004, then seamlessly begins predicting an ultimately-dystopian future. Many of the “predicted” details were wrong, but with 2014 only a few days away it occurred to me that EPIC was actually remarkably accurate.
Google goes public. Awash in new capital, the company makes a major acquisition; Google buys TiVo.
— EPIC prediction, 2004
Google didn’t buy TiVo, but they did buy YouTube. In many ways, YouTube delivered on TiVo’s original promise, which TiVo never could itself. YouTube unshackled media from time (as well as medium and copyright), and under Google became a much larger, more legitimate, profitable business than it ever was alone.
In response to Google recent moves, Microsoft buys Friendster.
— EPIC prediction, 2005
Microsoft didn’t buy Friendster — nobody did, sorry Friendster — but in 2007 they did invest $240 million in Facebook at a then-unbelievable valuable of $15 billion. It was later rumored that the investment came after a failed attempt to acquire Facebook.
Google combines all of its services into the Google GRID, a universal platform that provides a functionally-limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth. Always online, accessibly from anywhere. It has never been easier for anyone — everyone — to create as well as consume media.
— EPIC prediction, 2006
This is a seemingly prescient description of what would eventually be Google Apps and Google Drive.
Microsoft responds to Google’s mounting challenge with Newsbotster, a social news network and participatory journalism platform. Newsbotster ranks and sorts news based on what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading and viewing, and it allows everyone to comment on what they see.
— EPIC prediction, 2007
Replace “Microsoft” with “Facebook” and “Newsbotster” with “News Feed,” and this is spot on.
Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon. Google supplies the Google Grid and unparalleled search technology. Amazon supplies a social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure. Together they use their detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, demographics, consumption habits and interests to provide total customization of content and advertising.
— EPIC prediction, 2008
Google and Amazon haven’t merged, and for a variety of technological, philosophical, and legal reasons they almost certainly never will. That said, if the consumer internet has had anything resembling a theme, it’s been the use of detailed user data to customize content and advertising. This is core to both Google and Amazon, as well as many other mainstream internet businesses.
The news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part. Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with a feature the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon’s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.
— EPIC prediction, 2010
I think this has played out along two fronts. First, programatically generated news has been attempted (though not necessarily as aggressively as writing custom stories) by dozens of companies — Twitter, Flipboard, Google, and many smaller, often acquired startups.
Second, traditional news organizations’ rolls in shaping cultural conversations have been replaced by social media and blogs. One of the biggest stories of 2013, the Boston Marathon bombing, was reported 24 hours per day on many national news shows, but who controlled and ultimately botched the story? Reddit and its sea of anonymous users.
In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate awakes to make its first and final stand. The New York Times Company sues Googlezon, claiming that the company’s fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, which, on August 4th 2011, decides in favor of Googlezon.
— EPIC prediction, 2011
To its credit, I’m not aware of the New York Times suing any new media companies (though I could be wrong). But this does sound a lot like Viacom’s suit against YouTube, which YouTube has now won three times — twice in District Court and once in Appellate Court, though not (yet?) in the Supreme Court.
Though it seems to have slowed, there was certainly a time when old media’s competition with new media seemed to be litigious more often than it was strategic, and without much success.
That brings us to “today,” the year 2014 and the title-scene.
Googlezon unleashes EPIC. Welcome to our world, the Evolved Personalized Information Construct is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered, and delivered. Everyone contributes now, from blog entries to phone cam entries to video reports to full investigations. Many people get paid, too, a tiny cut of Google’s immense advertising revenue proportional to the popularity of their contributions. EPIC produces a custom content package for each user, using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network to shape the product.
The parallels are too many to mention. Almost every major, mainstream consumer web product of the last 10 years shares some of this. It describes, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit. The financial model is Adsense, which was released about one year before this video.
A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, people who sell their ability to connect, filter and prioritize the contents of EPIC. We all subscribe to many editors, EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices however we like.
It’s easy to see the hint of companies like Huffington Post or Buzzfeed in here, along with social media. It’s obvious today, but mainstream media being driven by often-amateur curators was hard to see coming 10 years ago.
At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But EPIC is what we wanted, it’s what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy, or journalistic ethics.
People love to complain about the laziness of the media. I believe that, at least as a society, we probably get the media that we want and certainly the media that we earn. Media is failing society, but it’s because society is failing itself.
Today, in 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. In feeble protest to Googlezon’s hegemony, the Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly. But perhaps there was another way…
I hope so.
