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I'm the author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, to be published by Norton in February 2011. It's about how the Internet is changing storytelling, and it was inspired by much of the work I've done over the past decade as a contributing editor at Wired, where I've written about such fun topics as the making of Avatar, the Year Zero alternate reality game, Sony’s enormous gamble on the PlayStation 3, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. I began to realize something important was going on when I did the Year Zero story, about a game that, like the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name, 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.
Among my other books are West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, about the power struggle that resulted in Steve Jobs being expelled from the company, which is now available in an updated edition. A national best-seller when it first appeared in 1989, it was named one of the ten best business books of the year by BusinessWeek. It was followed by The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, about the oldest and for many years most powerful agency in Hollywood. 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 first major book was Into the Heart of the Mind: An American Quest for Artificial Intelligence, a national best-seller about the efforts of a group of researchers at Berkeley to give a computer common sense. Over the years I've participated in debates about the future of media at such places as South by Southwest, the Cannes Film Festival, and San Francisco's Churchill Club. 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 editor at Esquire, writing about pop culture and the rise of Silicon Valley; as a contributing writer at Premiere, covering the film industry; 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. Originally from 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 now in the East Village. On this site you'll find links to many of my major stories as well as expanded versions of some of the pieces I've done for Wired. For more on the future of narrative, please visit my Deep Media blog. |
