Year Zero: Our life timelines begin

Editors note: this post originally appeared on the authors blog, Solve for Interesting. This lightly edited version is reprinted here with permission.

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything weve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And well look back at the time before our feed started before Year Zero as a huge, unknowable black hole.

This timeline beginning for newborns at Year Zero will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers now, every interaction has a history.

This isnt just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isnt about financial data, like Mint. It isnt just your social graph or photo feed. It isnt about commuting data like Waze or Maps. Its about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it.

Every decade or so, something from military or enterprise technology finds its way, bent and twisted, into the mass market. The client-server computer gave us the PC; wide-area networks gave us the consumer web; pagers and cell phones gave us mobile devices. In the next decade, Year Zero will be how big data reaches everyone.

The battle for our digital lifelog is already well underway. You probably buy into Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or a handful of others for your calendar, your email, and your media. Media was a gateway drug to a walled garden: your content is locked in, and the barriers to entry are simply too huge to leave.

The reality is that once inside the walled gardens of GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon], consumers will see the walls begin to rise. My music is in the cloud, but soon enough, courtesy of the gateway drug of the quantified self movement, my medical records will be in the cloud, my home security will be managed from the cloud, my banking and my energy needs too.

If a consumer subscribes to one cloud service, then they are very likely to continue with all the extensions of that cloud service platform rather than mix and match. It becomes increasingly inconvenient to remain service agnostic. The dominant players nurture their walled-gardens of creative content and other services tethered to their digital formats and devices. Jeremy Silver, Digital Medieval.

Alistair Crolls Strata + Hadoop World keynote on Year Zero.

Read the original:
Year Zero: Our life timelines begin