by Kevin Kelly
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.
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.