Final Boss

Here is a prediction, offered with money behind it. In some years — fewer than feels reasonable — there will be no apps. No games, no movies, no series, no TV, no radio, no podcasts, no feed. Not because people stopped wanting entertainment, but because every one of those things was a container, and containers exist only when the thing inside them is expensive to make. Once it isn't, the container goes the way of the album, the cassette, and the phone book, each of which was also, at one time, the obvious shape of the future.

What replaces them is simpler than it sounds. You look at a screen — phone, tablet, television, the dashboard of the car — and it looks back, and what it shows you is a stream of reality generated for you, in real time, from everything it knows you find interesting. Not a recommendation from a catalog. There is no catalog. A movie that did not exist a second ago is unfolding, with a plot bent toward exactly the thing you have been thinking about all week. You get bored; it notices before you do. You say "make him the villain" and he is. You say "let me drive" and the movie is a game. You say "my partner's home" and the story quietly widens to hold two sets of interests at once, and neither of you can quite tell whose it is. Watch, change, play — the three verbs collapse into one, because they were only ever three because the technology forced them apart.

Now ask the obvious question: why would anyone make a movie? A movie is two years, two hundred people, and a hundred million dollars spent producing one fixed sequence of frames in the hope that it matches what strangers want. The stream produces a sequence that matches what one specific person wants, right now, for the cost of electricity. The entire discipline of guessing at an audience — screenwriting, game design, programming a TV schedule, A/B testing a thumbnail — exists because the audience could not be asked directly. It can now be asked continuously. There will still be movies the way there are still vinyl records: as a hobby, for a crowd who like the crackle.

And it will be, to be clear about this, the most addictive thing a human has ever been offered. Every prior medium had friction. The show ended. The level was designed by someone who didn't know you. The algorithm served you, at best, something that someone else had liked. This serves the thing no one has made yet, tuned to your pulse, and it never ends because there was never an end to run out of. The slot machine was engineered by people guessing at what lights up your brain; this is the slot machine wired directly to the answer. It is the final boss of attention — the one every prior medium was the tutorial for — and the honest prediction is that most people will lose, happily, with the lights on. A trip you fully control, which is what everyone wanted, until they notice what it did to wanting.

Which brings us to the people still building the past. The developer polishing the onboarding flow of his app. The studio greenlighting the sequel for 2029. The product team shipping tabs, menus, settings panes, a sidebar — fixed sequences of buttons, lovingly arranged in advance, for a user whose intent they will never be allowed to know. They are restoring a 1953 dashboard. Chrome toggles, a push-button radio, a choke knob — beautiful, genuinely, and about to be as relevant as the choke knob. You can still imagine an app, with the stream; you say "show me what Instagram was" and it renders one for you, for a laugh, with the buttons, and you move on. Theirs is not a product category. It is an exhibit.

They do not believe this, and the reason they do not believe it is the same reason they are building it: they were trained on the shape of the last container and have confused the shape for the thing. A menu feels like the natural form of software because a steering wheel feels like the natural form of driving — to people who learned to drive in a car. The unbelievers are not stupid. They are simply the last cohort fluent in a dead interface, which is, historically, a very comfortable place to stand right up until the morning it isn't.

And, for completeness, the part in the parentheses: the stream is also the most capable instrument of persuasion ever constructed, which governments and corporations will notice at roughly the same time you do. A reality generated for you can be generated for you by someone, with something in it. But that is a different essay. This one is only about the buttons, and the people still pressing them, confident that the future will have a menu.

It won't. It will just have you.