 those words no longer apply. More directly related to skeuomorphism, perhaps going to the movies in VR will resemble going to a physical movie theater, while autonomous vehicles will resemble modern cars, even though we could theoretically rethink aspects of their design.
Over the weekend, I went with my family to the Museum of the City of New York. The museum (which I highly recommend) has an exhibit dedicated to New York’s relationship with technology, focusing on 20th century analog innovations that transformed the city.
I’d group the innovations into three broad buckets—technologies focused on the:
Production of Content & Information,
Organization of Content & Information, and
Access to Content & Information
This same framework can be applied to our current moment in technology and to where we might be going. Just as I viewed the museum exhibit and was stunned by how far we’ve come since the 1950s, I imagine someone in 2090 will be similarly stunned by how things looked in the 2020s.
In this week’s piece, I’ll look at some of the analog technologies that paved the path to modern day, and then how those same broad themes can be carried forward into future innovations.
Production of Content & Information
In the 1900s, New York became a global hub for media: the newspaper, radio, and magazine industries each had their hearts in the city.
In the early part of the century, producing a daily edition of the newspaper was a herculean task. Newspaper companies—led by The New York Times—relied on breakthrough innovations like the linotype machine. The name of the linotype—an enormous, hulking contraption—comes from the fact that it could produce an entire line of metal type at once. Line-o’-type = linotype. Before the linotype’s invention, newspapers had to manually typeset letter by letter using a composing stick. If you don’t know what a composing stick is, I don’t either—but it sounds very, very painful and slow.
The linotype accelerated newspaper production. By 1920, New York had 15 daily papers in English and dozens more in foreign languages (the city’s population was 41% foreign-born at the time).
In the 21st century, we’ve again seen innovations accelerate the production of content and information. It’s now been over two years since I made this graphic, but it still captures the arc toward democratized video creation tools:
It’s becoming easier to create quality content without specialized knowledge or expensive equipment. Standalone apps like the free editing app CapCut further push forward ease of production: CapCut, which powers hundreds of TikTok trends, was the 9th-most-downloaded app globally in 2021 with 255M downloads, wedged between #8 Messenger and #10 Spotify. (CapCut is also owned by Bytedance, after Bytedance bought CapCut’s predecessor, Viamaker, for $300M in 2018.)
This trend of democratized production is years in the making. Back in 2015, Steven Johnson wrote in The New York Times:
The cost of consuming culture may have declined, though not as much as we feared. But the cost of producing it has dropped far more drastically. Authors are writing and publishing novels to a global audience without ever requiring the service of a printing press or an international distributor. For indie filmmakers, a helicopter aerial shot that could cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be filmed with a GoPro and a drone for under $1,000; some directors are shooting entire HD-quality films on their iPhones. Apple’s editing software, Final Cut Pro X, costs $299 and has been used to edit Oscar-winning films. A musician running software from Native Instruments can recreate, with astonishing fidelity, the sound of a Steinway grand piano played in a Vienna concert hall, or hundreds of different guitar-amplifier sounds, or the Mellotron proto-synthesizer that the Beatles used on ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ These sounds could have cost millions to assemble 15 years ago; today, you can have all of them for a few thousand dollars.
This is pretty remarkable. And it continues to hold true: Parasite, the 2020 Bes