The next filter bubble is a reality filter bubble.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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The internet has rewired us.
By which I mean: a connected world relentlessly fuels new human behaviours, habits, and expectations. And once they’ve been created, they spread. We bring those new habits and expectations to other aspects of our lives. Often, we bring them out of the online space and into the physical world around us.
A particularly powerful version of that phenomenon is now emerging. And I believe it will reshape the socio-economic system that you and I live inside: the consumer society.
This is a story about personalisation and where it’s heading next. Skip to the end and the answer is: to some pretty strange places.
But let's start at the beginning.
The Reality Filter Bubble
?? In a connected world personalisation is king. Historically, consumerism has been ruled by two opposing imperatives. Cheap but the same as everyone else, or unique to you but expensive. A revolution fuelled by the former imperative was the Big Story of 20th-century consumerism: mass production gave us cheap bookcases, cars, fridges. But today, consumption for millions revolves around non-material, higher-order needs: status, creativity, meaning. People often seek fulfilment of these needs not via physical objects, but online. The online world makes possible cheap and unique to you. That’s a revolution, centred around personalisation. So where is this revolution heading?
??? Data-fuelled personalisation will transform our experience of the physical world. Online personalisation is data-fuelled personalisation. In the coming decade, we’ll see this kind of personalisation shift into the physical world, too. That means personalised devices, foods, and cosmetics, and physical spaces that shapeshift around our identity and preferences. This is the next Big Story: a metamorphic physical environment able to change around our needs and wants.
?? The ultimate form of personal data is here. A quick side note. As new and deeper forms of personal data become available, new and more powerful forms of personalisation will emerge. Back in 2007 it cost over $1 million to sequence a human genome; today it costs a few hundred dollars. A new era of DNA-personalised consumerism is coming.
?? The next filter bubble is a reality filter bubble. What is the end game here? A new generation of AR technologies allow a large-scale, persistent, and shareable digital layer to be built on top of the physical environment. Crucially, these new realities will be personalised. Millions will be served AR worlds shaped around their individual tastes, preferences, and behaviours. The next filter bubble won’t be on content and news, but on the shared physical spaces in which we live much of our lives. Welcome to the reality filter bubble.
?? Old consumerism made everything the same for all; new consumerism makes everything different for each. The big criticism levelled at 20th-century consumerism was that everyone ended up wearing the same 501s, driving the same Ford, and eating the same Big Mac. The deeper and more persistent problem with an evolved consumerism is not the ways it makes everything the same for us all, but the ways it makes everything different for each of us. That is, the way it pushes us down personalised wormholes, from which our access to one another is diminished. This phenomenon is new, and poorly understood. But it is a part of the coming Big Story. We need to start writing it now, before it writes us.
Reality check
Thanks for reading this week.
If immersive AR worlds plunge us into new and personalised realities, the opportunities will be dizzying.
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I'll be back soon. Until then, be well,
David.