Play Smarter, Not Harder

Are Los Angeles and New York central anymore? That question looms large over the moguls of movies, television and publishing.

Magazine editors are wondering if the newsstand of the future will be largely digital, with readers buying single issues online. Movies are in a digitizing dither. The Internet makes every dude with a computer master of his data-plex. Can L.A. and New York, once the castles of creativity, remain central amid the onslaught of innately de-centering technologies?

Probably not. We now live not in an information economy, but in an attention-starved one. Increasingly, information is like the air, free. New York and Los Angeles now compete for our attentions with Internet self-publishers and game programmers in Tucson, Ariz.

Take one vision of the year 2020.

Let’s say you’re a writer--novels, scripts, Internet zines, it doesn’t matter. One afternoon you take a break from the pixel screen world and venture to a mall.

“Mr. Nogales,” an AdWall greets you as you come in from the parking lot. “Those shirts you liked last year are on sale at ShopAll. The new designs . . .”

“Nope, I’m headed for CompuYou.”

“They’ve been replaced by the so much better Chips’n’Discs, only steps away!” the AdWall says cheerfully, turning into a map showing the location. When you get there, the store knows you’re coming.

“Mr. Nogales!” A clerk smiles and fades, flickering ghostly transparent for a moment so you’ll know it’s a “smart” hologram. You can see the fringing fields, anyway. You ask to see the new rig that turns written text into a 3-D visual. It’s mated to a now-standard box that can take “The Big Sleep” and show you how Tom Hanks would have played Humphrey Bogart’s role. Not just a paste-on face, either--the Hanks software uses all his well-honed expressions.

“Look, I want to build my own,” you say, a little irked.

“Oh, you want ScriptOut.”

You try out the new device, which takes your script notes, some actors’ still photos and reaction shots and builds a rough cut of a film. “This one’s a beauty,” you say, noting that the trial actors have supple body movements, no jerky expressions, and smooth voices that mouth your words. “I’ll take it.”

Eagerly you haul it home, where you’ll make a movie in a month. Then you can pitch it electronically to Hollywood, or better, one of the new studio-shops in Sydney, Australia. And your home is in Fairhope, Ala.

*

Real estate prices in L.A. and New York have long since pushed most creative people away, an economic force driving development of distancing tech. Left behind in their midget apartments will be the hacks who can only exist as studio or network parasites: people who can only sell in person.

In this 2020 vision, media are lodged in our bodies. Inset wearable computers wed fashion to the techno-hip. Walk down the street answering your e-mail by whispering into a tiny throat mike. Or lounge in the park, a movie running on the inner surface of your glasses.

Not that most people read that way. No, any educated person owns a book. Just one, though, maybe with leather binding, sheets that feel like high-quality bond. But the text is in a single chip in the binding, the words projected into the pages in whatever type style you prefer.

Back at the mall you stop by BookNook to pick up a few, downloaded in a finger-snap from an inventory in New Jersey. No more entombing text in the bodies of dead trees that then jam your bookshelves.

*

Some people still like classical books, but most have moved over to interactive modes. Either way, they’re free of New York publishing thinking, because there are just as many major publishers on the Internet as on Sixth Avenue.

Now there’s no There to bow toward in a literary landscape--plenty of hills, but no mountains. Neither city will imagine that it rules American literature. (The rest of us know that they never did.)

This will emerge from a wholly “smart” future, where art and entertainment are dispersed because the culture is literally smarter. Everything from offices to clothes will be ever-aware of your presence, preferences, anxieties, even pulse rate.

Some see this future as an “ad-topia,” where objects importune you at every turn. Others think it may be an “e-topia,” once advertisers get the idea that consumers don’t like being rudely approached, as with the loudmouth Adwall.

This has already happened. Remember the talking ads in supermarkets that drove shoppers away? The talking cars that bellowed, “Stand back! You are too close”? Like those, bad human software tailoring will get ironed out by markets. To be effective, ads must be entertainment, tailor-made to the individual.

This comfy culture will give us endlessly solicitous environments, only too happy to entertain and divert. Commonplace machines will answer when spoken to, give assistance in their own operation, self-program to our repeated needs without being told to. They will be true “house servants” because houses--indeed, all the high-tech metropolis--will come to be servants.

In this world, your prescription medicine bottle will account for humidity and temperature to refresh its calculation of when the expiration date will arrive, and remind you with a beep to take it on schedule. Everywhere, objects and people will both work smarter, not harder.

Why should consumers expect anything less of their entertainment? It, too, will be self-customizing. Smart-tech gives consumers more control, not less. And they will demand not studio sameness, but the richness that comes from small scales.

Increasingly, New York and L.A. will filter, not create. The fastest way to de-center yourself in the digital future will be to imagine that you are central, essential. That’s when you’ll know you’re actually OOI--Out of It.

Networking means diffusion of talent and knowledge. And distributed processing equals distributed intelligence, as chips get cheaper. This means that thrifty software can replace elaborate hardware in presenting images, music, story lines. Such “software-saturated smart places” will be the hip analog of coffee houses, and their entertainment will come from diffused sources, not Los Angeles and New York.

*

Imagine the big event of 2020, the first manned Mars expedition. All humanity will go, riding on the shoulders of the actual crew through high-res digital TV, even 3-D. A cliffhanger (sometimes literally) lasting 2 1/2 years.

But Mars itself will be the center of events--no need for mediation by New York or Los Angeles-based news media. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will call the shots, along with NASA in Houston. But to manage this torrent of data, we’ll need the devices of infotainment. Remember the ‘70s series “The American Family,” when we followed the lives of real people for a year, sharing their flaws and joys? Or MTV’s “‘The Real World”?

So what angle do you want to follow? The crew’s personality clashes? Check today’s exciting events! The science? Here’s a compact summary, tarted up as a little playlet of discovery. You choose.

Mars as mega-event will resist management. In our arts and entertainments, so should we all.