Digital Ephemera: the rebellion against on-demand

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If I were Mark Zuckerberg (which I’m not) or Rupert Murdoch (which I’m not) I would invest some of my enormous capital in setting up a special department called the Reverse Engineering Squad. This crack team would do exact what you’d expect: take everything that happens and work out why it happened.

There’s an aphorism frequently trotted out in behavioural science circles, which says that “the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour”. Which makes sense, and is probably true (“best” representing, here, an imperfect supremacy). So why, from 2004, did Facebook become the dominant social media player for more than a decade, turning it into one of the biggest companies in the world? What itch did it scratch? And why did Netflix, when it pivoted to streaming video in 2007, catch fire? What was the genesis of the societal movement that ended up with Netflix having far more than 200,000,000 subscribers?

These are questions that have simple answers (They were good ideas! New technologies facilitated them! They were first in a market that rewards the early!) and more complex ones…