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    My Next Book: THE AGE OF IMMERSION

    I’m writing a book. It's about the future of narrative in the Internet age, and how that affects entertainment, marketing, our brains, and myriad other stuff. Let me explain.

    In January 2008, I published an article in Wired about Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero—not the album but the alternate reality game, which Trent Reznor had developed the year before with a company called 42 Entertainment. Together, the game and the album told the story of a future America ravaged by climate change, racked by terrorism, and ruled by a Christian military dictatorship. But where the album told this story in song, the game—a cascading sequence of riddles and puzzles that played out over several months, both online and in the real world—actually sought to give people a taste of what life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state might be like.

    After the article came out, I began to see such games as the leading edge of a much larger trend: a radical transformation in storytelling that’s sweeping not just entertainment but many other aspects of our lives, from marketing to commerce to education to the face we present to the public. This is what the book will explore.

    Titled The Age of Immersion: Entertainment in a Connected World, the book will be published in early 2011 by W.W. Norton. The idea is to document and explain the attempt to forge a new type of storytelling that’s native to the Internet. After centuries of linear storytelling, the Internet is encouraging the emergence of a new type of narrative—one that’s told through many media at once in a way that is nonlinear, participatory, and gamelike in nature. This is "deep media": stories that are not just entertaining but immersive, that take you deeper into the story that an hour of TV or two hours at a movie theater will permit, that break from conventional narrative form to become gamelike, that encourage you not merely to watch but to participate.

    For details on the book, please visit the Age of Immersion Web site. And please stop by my blog, Deep Media, to explore these ideas in depth and to join the discussion.



    Back in Print: WEST OF EDEN


    In 1989—exactly two decades ago, as it happens—I published a book about the power struggle at Apple that culminated with Steve Jobs being expelled from the company. Apple, as iconic then as it is today, had just gone through a period of intense upheaval that began in 1983 with Jobs’s successful wooing of John Sculley, the president of Pepsi-Cola, to run the place. I’d been writing about pop culture and the burgeoning tech industry for Esquire, and with West of Eden I set out to create a narrative nonfiction account of what had just happened, based on extensive interviews with the people involved—including Jobs, Sculley, and most of Apple's senior staff. I found a company trying to rescue itself from chaos: Its last two computer introductions had gone badly awry, and when Macintosh, Jobs’s revolutionary little machine, was slow to gain traction as well, the seemingly erratic young entrepreneur made a convenient and all-too-believable scapegoat.

    What a difference 20 years makes. Today, a dozen years after his return from exile, the prospect of Apple without Jobs is all but unthinkable. With his unwavering focus on the user experience, his remarkable sense of style, his mania for perfection, and his eagerness to challenge orthodoxy, Jobs has transformed Apple from the lost cause it seemed in the ’90s to the very definition of cool. So I decided to update the book for a new generation, adding an introduction to explain what happened after he was forced out and how he—or was it the rest of us?—had changed in the years since. You can order the new trade paperback edition from Amazon, or the Kindle edition instead.



    As a contributing editor at Wired, I've spent the past decade writing about such topics as the Year Zero alternate reality game, Sony’s gamble on the PlayStation 3, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. I've also led debates about the future of media at such venues as the Cannes Film Festival and San Francisco's Churchill Club. On this site you'll find links to many of my major stories as well as expanded versions of some of the more recent pieces.

    I'm currently writing a book for W.W. Norton about the future of narrative in the Internet age and posting on the same subject on my Deep Media blog. In addition, my 1989 best-seller West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, about the power struggle that resulted in Steve Jobs being expelled from the company, was recently republished in an updated edition.

    Before joining Wired, I was a contributing writer at Fortune, where I wrote about Hollywood and the global media conglomerates that dominate it. In the past I've worked as a contributing writer at Premiere, covering the film industry; as a contributing editor at Esquire, writing about pop culture and the rise of Silicon Valley; and as a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. I've also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, New York, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.

    My most recent book is The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, a detailed look at the oldest and for many years most powerful agency in Hollywood. Published in 1995 by HarperCollins, The Agency is an alternate history of show business—a multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal that stretches from the vaudeville era to Morris’s near-demise at the hands of Michael Ovitz. My previous book, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (Viking, 1989), was named one of the year’s ten best by Business Week. I'm also the author of Into the Heart of the Mind: An American Quest for Artificial Intelligence (Harper & Row, 1984), a national best-seller about the efforts of a group of researchers at Berkeley to give a computer common sense.

    A native of Virginia, I moved to New York shortly after receiving a B.A. in journalism from Washington & Lee. I started out covering the Lower Manhattan punk scene of the '70s for The Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads. I live in the East Village, a neighborhood that still retains echoes of Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, and Peter Stuyvesant.